In preparation for our upcoming event "Social Sites for Social Change", my colleague Kurt Voelker put together a great introduction to a social media strategy. "What?!" you say, "you just told me I needed an online strategy - now I need one of these social media things too!?" Ah yes, those consultants at it again, cooking up more shticks to sell work. Well, relax, friends, there is nothing fundamentally new here, just some changes in focus.

The social media strategy is nothing more than a nuance within your broader online strategy. Social media tools represent some emerging new angles you can consider as you consider your broader set of online services as part of your internet strategy development. As Kurt suggests, the [look out! consultant-speak!] paradigm of the internet is shifting. It used to be that the goal was to get people to come to your site and stay there as long as you could get them to stay. What you really care about, though, is people finding your content and services - that is what you are using to connect with target audiences. If you can get target audiences to find your content and services, regardless, of where, you have succeeded. Social media sites provide a means to put your content elsewhere, in addition to your own site, and enhance the chance target audience members will find it.

As you are consider the online services you will offer, therefore, have social media properties in the mix of options. a greats online service may not be one you build, but someone else's that you leverage well.

Recent overheard conversations in the office got me thinking again about members-only site sections, something that I have yet to see a cause-based organization do well. My informal survey of members-only areas suggests the typical such section is a small, somewhat-less-than-captivating collection of outdated publications knocking around with some tumbleweeds. It gets little attention, from members or from administrators.

At the same time, cause-based organizations are needing to identify new ways to offer value to their members in order to meet revenue goals. An online members-only area seems a compelling option - offer people an easy way to access privileged content and they will feel special and re-up year-after-year. So can it work?

A look at major for-profit online publishing houses suggests the approach most groups are thinking about - selecting certain content and placing it behind a login - poses challenges at best. A recent article in the Washington Post detailed the Wall Street Journal's decision to abandon its online subscription service, one of the first online subscription services to succeed that wasn't, well, you know. It wasn't that the services wasn't working; in this case and others, publishers believe there is much more to be gained from advertising to larger readership than there is from subscriptions. Writers - especially columnists - also prefer being much more widely read than subscription models allow.

For cause-based organizations, the problem with walling off content is even more acute. Most organizations would be loath to offer advertising on their sites (and many simply couldn't), not that traffic levels would compare to those of a WSJ. Furthermore, while the same issue of experts feeling under-exposed exists, walling off content is generally completely contrary to organizations' missions. Imagine if an organization's most critical publications suddenly received only a fraction readers they had previously seen - the chance for impact would be significantly damaged. Walling off the crown jewels would be counter-productive.

So the matter is dead, then? Add additional tschotskes to the bags at the annual conference and hope that cements the membership value? Happily, no, there are approaches that seem more promising, though they are mostly, as yet, unproven.

• True members-only content - The good news is that many organizations have content that really is members-only: training materials, dedicated research, etc. This can, of course, go in a members-only section. Make sure, however, that you pay attention to this content and keep it fresh. You should also use tools like SlideShare that bring presentations alive as opposed to just posting PPTs and PDFs.
  
• Access to experts - The Post article cites one of my favorite examples, ESPN.com. ESPN gives away all its stories, but requires a subscription to access high-value interactions with its experts (chat transcripts, blogs, some rankings, etc.). Its clearly takes time to do this, but granting privileged access to experts, but not their publications, might provide value without limiting the spread of the message (this also enhances the stature of the expert).
  
• Enhanced networking - Many members find the offline conferences groups put on to be most valuable for the networking the offer. Some organizations seem timid about allowing true member-to-member interaction. Within a closed space, though, and with some careful management (mostly rules, norms, and community policing), the ability to interact with other members and build a profile within the community might be a value-add to the membership.
  
• Enhanced event access - So much energy typically gets devoted to a few days of an offline event that there tends to be a boom-and-bust cycle of attention for the organization. It might be valuable to allow members to help participate in the event online before and after. Allow members to shape the event (surveys to design sessions, submission of questions in advance, etc.) and participate in the take-aways (figure out projects members could take on collaboratively that add value to all members and increase their own stature.
  

In short, offer new services that build the depth of the membership relationship, while letting the content flow freely. This approach certainly has costs, but the benefits may justify rethinking your work and what you offer.

I recently came across more ammunition for my cause of organizational dynamics being the key to success in information technology projects. The evidence came in the form of 2005 Harvard Business School online piece on web services: "Confronting the Reality of Web Services". The piece is an interview with HBS professor Andrew McAfee and, in spite of being long-in-the-tooth in internet years, its fundamental point then holds perfectly today: web services can only help systems collaborate if people collaborate first.

At issue is data standards. McAfee says:

The organizational challenge comes as all stakeholders get together and hammer out common definitions. This might not seem like the kind of work that leads to disputes, but it is. In most companies, questions like the following would lead to heated discussions:

* Who's got the real customer contact information? Who gets to access it? Who gets to update it?
* What's the last day for bookings in each quarter? Is it the same all around the world?
* Do we have to do a credit check before scheduling every order for production?
* Who gets to certify approved vendors? What's the process for adding a vendor to the list?

Answering these requires a combination of diligence and tough-mindedness.

Thus an issue of passing data gets into much thornier issues of defining data and allow use of it. It is clear at this point that there are huge benefits to easier data sharing, but the costs of solving the hard questions still prevent many benefit from actually being realized. Appreciating the organizational dynamics at play is the first - and ultimately most critical - step.

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.

Over the past several weeks, I have detailed six steps that go into creating a successful online strategy, and outgrowth of our Web Executive Seminar "Six Steps to a Successful Online Strategy". As I developed the list of six steps, I consciously left out some activities that are not as critical. This is not, however, to say they aren't valuable. To round out the story, then, I want to highlight two other useful inputs to an online strategy effort.

Baselines - So we know where we are going... but from where are we starting?
We commonly include a baseline assessment as part of our strategy work and it can sometimes be unclear how this task fits or if it is even necessary. The fact is that, at the end of the day, it is pretty hard to prescribe a direction for a journey without understanding fairly well what the starting point is. In my six steps, I assume some measure of this is part of a true evaluation of organizational assets. A more extensive exercise can be valuable, though, in some cases:

• You need to make a business case that a large investment is necessary and need evidence of significant issues
  
• You really don't know what you have for online assets (e.g., the web team has all left and there is little institutional knowledge left)
  
• You want to make sure you focus on the biggest issues first (i.e., you need to stage the investment in a smart way)
  

We commonly recommend a range of assessments, including reviews of:

• Site traffic statistics, with a focus on trends, not absolute numbers
  
• Site prominence, in other words, how likely it is that someone interested in your topic will find your materials
  
• Usability - a general assessment of usability issues based on best practices (or, ideally, true user testing)
  
• Content, looking at volume, types, trends in types and volume of content, etc.
  

Do not expect a great many earth-shattering / eureka! conclusions to come from this, but you can expect to have a clearer understanding of "points of pain" and available assets.

Competitors - Just because you aren't paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't out to get you
We sometimes recommend a comparator analysis. This term has always bugged me a bit because I have spent a lot of time in the for-profit world and there the notion of comparators would be absurd - those like you are competitors (unless they are partners, but that's another story...). Too often in the world of cause-based organizations there is an assumption that there aren't competitors. Of course there are! Other organizations are competing for financial support, mindshare, policy direction, and so on. It can be valuable to make sure you know what else is going on.

The rant above being said, the biggest reason is to see what others are doing that appears successful. Basically, you should see if there are good ideas other organizations have implemented that you can, ahem, swipe. For this exercise, cast the net widely - even into for-profit sectors - to identify interesting online services that would have applicability. In some cases, the right solution may be to partner with one of these organizations rather than build something yourself. Don't discount this option!

In many cases, though, you really ought to make a list of organizations that are true competitors at some level and look hard at what they are doing. As you develop your list of services, then, roll competitive considerations into the mix. Think about how you can better control the debate, push your research or methodology, or attract funders. Online services can play a part in your competitive positioning, and others may well be winning battles you haven't even joined.

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...

Last week, in my series of follow-up posts to our Web Executive Seminar "Six Steps to a Successful Online Strategy", I finished outlining how one develops their online strategy. I also said that, in doing so, one was not done. This week, I want to talk a bit about what I meant by saying this. Yes, there is the actual detailed design work - information architecture, technical architecture, functional design, and graphic design - and technical development work still to go, but that is not where I was going. My point today, in fact, is that creating a strategy is useless without a plan to actually bring it about.


Of shelfware and "Wayne's World"
In the software industry, there is a term of derision - "vaporware" - used to describe applications that don't actually work and are nothing but design documents. In the consulting industry our term is "shelfware" - strategies and designs that never became reality. Strategies with no attached implementation plans are all but destined to end up as shelfware, though in the worst cases, they do so only after piles have money has been poured into a failed implementation. Why does this happen?

Once again, we get back to the organizational dynamics sphere. Any good strategy will, to some extent, require the organization to change in some respect. Even an unlikely strategy that says "do everything we are doing now, only better!" assumes changes in processes and practices to make the required improvements. Most good online strategies envision new services, new content, and new relationships. All require that the organization do different kinds of work, sometimes at the expense of things done in the past. In short, good strategies require lots of change. And peoples' general reaction to lots of change? Let me quote Wayne and Garth: "We fear change!!!"

Selling the plan
Design and development aspects aside, the key aspects to implementing an online strategy are managing the required change. This involves first selling the changes to the plan's major stakeholders; the second involves making the changes stick. No matter the bosses in question, the first is going to be easier.

Selling the strategy typically amounts to preparing an expected design and development budget and going through an RFP process in which key people participate. Getting this budget may be struggle enough - won't it be a DOA if you also lay out the organizational changes that need to accompany the technical stuff? Maybe, but the reality is that not including it is delusional, and if you sell one piece and not the other you are creating a day of reckoning down the line. It is better that everyone understand the entire picture, even if that means more work to push the ideas through.

The good news is, if you followed the process I have laid out over the last few weeks, you have a great deal of good information to use. Some guidelines for selling are:

• Know the players - Make sure you know all possible stakeholders, especially those who have no interest in the online world but rely on people the plan supposes will have different roles.
  
• Get face time - Meet with all key players and explain the process, the assumptions, the logic, and the conclusions. Ideally, they were involved all along, but let's be realistic...
  
• Show them the data - Now is when you will be glad you did surveys, interviews, focus groups, and/or other kinds of audience research. This data should validate conclusions - show it off.
  
• Paint the picture of standing still - You are making educated guesses here, but based on other findings, suggest what might happen by doing nothing (or not much).
  
• Paint the their place in the vision - Ultimately their concerns will be with having less power / influence in the "new world." Show how their role after the changes holds new exciting opportunities as the organization nails its goals.
  

Effecting the change
So you did a great job and sold everyone on the full plan. Now you need to actually bring about all the implied changes. This is the arena of change management, and this is a much much richer topic than I can get into here. The basic idea is that even if all decision-makers sign off and say "make it so," the individuals who are the ones that actually need to change can derail the whole plan by simply not changing. You need to see that everyone buys in and does their part. Some elements:

• Make sure the leaders have your back - The folks you sold the plan to have to do their part and unequivocally, vocally, and frequently back the project.
  
• Repeat the road-show - Meet with all colleagues, but particularly effected ones and explain the plan, the reason it is important, the changes required, and the opportunities it creates.
  
• Co-opt the detractors - Figure out who is going to try to block the changes and get them on board. If you can't do that, then try to address their their concerns directly. You do not want to have to fight them; try to diffuse them.
  
• Build allies - Figure out who you can bring onto your side to help evangelize for the plan. Seek out people who have much to gain and are influential among their peers.
  
• Repeat the above - often.
  

As I said, this is only a snap-shot of this effort. The idea is clear, though. The change may be important, but it will be key to making the technology actually work. It is a huge effort, but if your assumptions are correct that you can make large advances toward achieving organizational goals, they will be worth it.

Up next, the strategy as a living thing...

A recent e-newsletter from uber-consultancy McKinsey & Co. reported on a fascinating study connecting types of IT investments to business performance. Their introduction states:

Many companies design their approach to IT around what they do—not what they could be doing. McKinsey assessed the IT strategies of ten leading global corporations to understand how they invest in innovation while running their core IT operations efficiently. We found that they treat IT investments like financial ones—as low risk (“stay in the race” projects to improve basic services), medium risk (“win the race” efforts to raise the efficiency and cut the cost of current business activities), and high risk (“change the rules” innovations to enter new or transform existing markets).

Interesting point #1 is that IT investments do come in multiple flavors, and recognizing them as such helps you understand them in the right light. My suspicion is that too often IT is one big block of funds for management decision-making (or it is not coordinated at all, which creates different problems). Breaking out categories of spending and effort helps you better understand where you are making your bets in the first place.

The even more interesting point #2 is what McKinsey found in correlating types of investments with business performance. Among companies with lower aspirations for growth, the ones with the highest performance put 60% into medium risk "win the race" investments and 30% into low-risk "stay in the race" investments. Lower performing companies had the opposite ratio, favoring low-risk investments. Among companies that are trying to grow rapidly, there were also stark differences in IT investment selection. High performing companies devoted 40% of their IT investments to high-risk "change the rules" initiatives, 20% to medium risk "win the race" investments, and 40% to ow-risk "stay in the race" investments. Lower performing companies did put 30% of budget into high-risk investments, but still kept a full 60% in low-risk initiatives.

While this study focused on the corporate world, the core message applies to the policy- / cause-focused organizations as well. The highest performing organizations allocate a greater proportion of IT investment to higher-risk initiatives, seeking disproportionately to "win the race" or even "change the rules." What's more they manage the different types of investments differently, not holding the high-risk bets to the same standards - or even using the same metrics - as they do the lower-risk ones. Good wisdom here for those planning technology strategies.