Oooof - the pre-holiday rush put a bit of a crimp in my plans for a weekly blog series... When I last left you in this series of follow-up posts to our Web Executive Seminar "Six Steps to a Successful Online Strategy", I talked about the hard truth of the need for selling and effecting change in order to make the strategy stick. As I indicated then, this is an ongoing process. The good news is that doing what you need to be doing anyway to manage online services will help this task. We turn, therefore, to the final step: monitoring and managing the services comprising the strategy.


A little rewind
Hopefully you aren't doing your strategy in real time as you read my posts, because I am going to starte by pointing backwards in time. By "monitoring," I mean selecting a set of metrics that will indicate success or failure for the initiatives in question, and the right time to do that is when you are thinking about what the services in question need to accomplish for you. As you come up with a service that will bring about your goals, think then about how you will know it is working. Suffice it to say "hits" is not enough. I need not go further here - my colleague Andrew Cohen covered this topic eloquently a few months ago. A quick distillation:

But these standard traffic numbers provide a superficial view of your site's activities. Just because something can be easily measured doesn't mean it's instructive. For instance, how does one value total daily visits in which half of those represent single page visits? That makes about as much sense as tying success to an increasing volume of phone calls placed to its main phone number. It makes even less sense if a large number of those are wrong numbers.

Other measures that may be more useful — particularly to the executive team include the number of registrants, community logins, comments posted, online event participants, actions taken, donations made, online purchases made, etc. Most of these are not in standard web reports.

The key point I want to make in addition is the timing - you need to decide what you will measure as you are developing the strategy, not as an add-on later.

Graphs and charts and numbers - oh my!
So now, following the advice above, you have selected the right metrics at the right time and have even developed some clear reports with charts and such. Now you really need to manage the services based on what these indicators are telling you. This means, among other things:

• Deliver the message, not the report - Don't drop each month's report on the appropriate desk and call it done. If everything is going as you hoped, these numbers are key evidence to support the change you are trying to effect. Make sure key players really see that. Try to set up regular meetings with key stakeholders (especially those who might oppose the required changes) to show how the services are contributing to organizational goals.
  
• Focus - Some summary are constant trends are important, but use your metrics check-ins to focus on particular questions and dive deep into those. This means investigating some area of metrics more extensively and highlighting that area as a feature in a single reporting cycle.
  
• Adapt to what the information tells you - At a high level a strategy needs to be fairly rigid over a long period, but under that, it will thrive because it can be adaptive. It may be, for example, that service XYZ is proving attractive to key audiences, but they are using it in a different way than expected. As you analysis tells you this, allow the service to bend to this new use (ensuring it continues to provide what you need of it). This may mean tuning content itself, content management, or collaboration policies. Obviously, don't react too quickly - wait for a trend to emerge rather than jumping at the first unexpected result. Ideally you metrics include ongoing user interaction - be sure to investigate these unexpected results with users (heck, just give a couple a call!) so you understand exactly why audiences are doing what they are doing.
  
• Remember sunk costs - So it happened - despite everyone's best efforts, you developed a service that just isn't working. You have tweaked it, talked with audiences, tweaked it again, given it time, and it just isn't flying. If it isn't costing anything going forward, you can just let it be (perhaps just lowering its prominence in the information architecture) in case it becomes useful in the future. If it is costing you something, though, don't be afraid to accept that the investment is sunk and should be written off by deactivating the service.
  

The key point is that bringing your strategy about requires careful ongoing management of the services. You can't just expect that you put the services up and let them go.

Up next, some final thoughts...