In September, 2007, Forum One hosted one of its Web Executive Seminars: "Six Steps to a Successful Online Strategy". Following that event, I began writing in more detail about each of the six steps, aiming for one a week. That worked out well until the holiday season hit. I was recently able to complete the series, however, and, for those looking for a quicker synopsis, I wanted to offer this overview (with links to the detail). As always, we would be happy to talk in more detail about any points of interest.

• Step 1 - know your goals - I hope I began the series by drilling home the point that your online strategy must be fundamentally grounded in your organizational mission and goals. Remember the Forum One mantra: "mission-focused, audience-centric." If the online strategy does not truly support these organizational imperatives, then its chance of success rests on just that: chance.
  
• Step 2 - know your audiences - If goals are the foundation for an online strategy, then audiences are the major structural supports. In my post on this step, I laid out process for defining who the most valuable audiences are for a given effort and learning more about them. The long and short of it? Target audiences are those types of people who have a strong ability to take actions that bring about organizational goals and who can be reached well online.
  
• Step 3 - know yourself - I argue that this is a critical - and often forgotten - step. You need to understand yourself as an organization - what you do well, what you do less well, what assets you have, and what you lack. These capabilities and deficits play a key role in determining what online services are and are not a good fit. The right services for one group may not be right for another, even if the two groups are trying to reach the same audiences to achieve the same goals, because they may have entirely different organizational dynamics.
  
• Step 4 - select the right services - I walk through, in this post, nothing more than a cost-benefit analysis. What are the benefits of possible services in terms of both the ability to attract target audiences and help them do what you want and in terms of helping navigate organizational dynamics? What are the costs in terms of technical development, content development, and resource time? Priority services are those that best achieve desired ends while having an acceptable cost.
  
• Step 5 - sell and effect change - New online services will entail new kinds of content, new processes, new staff skills, new management needs, etc. All this means that there will be significant organizational change required in order to make the services actually work. You need to be prepared to sell this change as part of the process and then help manage the change moving forward.
  
• Step 6 - monitor & manage - Strategies are frameworks and they need to live and adapt. You need to manage the services on an ongoing basis, reviewing performance against pre-set metrics and making changes after review of this performance. In most cases, you will find yourself maintaining essentially the same services, but tweaking them to fit unexpected uses and preferences. In some cases, the best-thought plans will prove untenable and you will need to move on. The strategy is, in short, and ongoing exercise and won't just happen on its own.
  
• Some additional thoughts - I end with some final thoughts about baseline analysis and competitive / comparative analysis, two additional activities which can be valuable.