Strategy Blog: Post

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist : If you listen, people in and around the web refer to "community building" on a regular basis. This makes it seem like a community is like a house: you start with a foundation, and every piece of wood you buy gets you closer to achieving your goal. Toss enough money, and you'll end up with something that at least passively resembles a house.

Hopefully, most have learned better by now. A successful community effort is, first of all, grown, not built. This isn't Field of Dreams. Instead, you need to lay the groundwork and then spend the time, effort, and attention necessary to help things catch on. Kevin Vigneault and I have talked about this a few times, and we've settled on the analogy that growing a community is like starting a fire in the wilderness. It's the middle of nowhere, you don't have a flint or a lighter, and you need to get a fire going.

Continue reading "Growing a Community is like Surviving in the Wilderness"

Laura Dec - Project Manager :

Facebook and the Facebook Application Platform are receiving more and more buzz everyday.  So, should you join in on the craze if you’re an existing “Web 2.0” site or still in the planning phases of a start-up?

The answer, of course, depends on what your business objectives and goals are, but there is no doubt that becoming part of the Facebook community holds tremendous potential.

If you’re a Facebook newbie, here are a few stats:

• Facebook has more than 67 million active members, with an average weekly growth of 3 percent since January 2007.
• More than half of Facebook’s members are beyond college; the fastest growing demographic is 25 years old and older.
• More than half of Facebook’s active members return daily to spend, on average, 20 minutes on the site.
• More than 18,000 applications have been built on the Facebook platform, with 40 new applications being added every day.
• An astounding rate of more than 95 percent of Facebook members have used at least one application built on the Facebook platform.
• (For more information and up-to-date statistics, please see http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)

Aside from the readily available large network of users, other benefits of building a Facebook application for your business include:

Continue reading "Should I Build a Facebook Application?"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

January 9th must have been a scary day for the Mobile Web. Steve Jobs stood on a stage at MacWorld and told the entire mobile industry not only that it would be competing with its much-rumored iPhone, but that it finally lets users browse the “real web,” and not just those plain, boring “mobile” sites. Every company, consultant, and developer who had spent time or money working on a great mobile site to give their users a better mobile experience must have felt like they’d wasted their time. And here we are, just over a month after the coveted iPhone hit the hands of consumers, and they are all quickly coming to find their reliance on none other than the Mobile Web.

Just days after the launch, and even before the launch, scores of iPhone-centric sites were popping up, including the iPhone version of Digg and the slick suite of Leaflets from the guys at Blue Flavor. Now, a month later, there seems to be an iPhone site for almost everything, from reading various newspapers to tracking your fuel mileage.

Why would iPhone users, with a mobile web browser that can parse and cleanly display full-size web pages, gravitate toward these special sites, which often have a more limited feature set and a more ordinary appearance?

The answer is context. Content is still important, but context is king on a mobile device. If you have a device, like the iPhone, with a small screen, a limited ability to enter lots of text, and a slow or latent connection, the last thing you want is to have to zoom around different parts of a page, type in a load of text, or wait while twenty-odd connections finish loading your one page.

Instead, you typically want to complete a specific task, and don’t want extraneous “features” or “information” to get in the way of making it happen. Let’s pretend you live in the DC area, even if you don’t, and you want to take the Metro. On an iPhone, you have to wade past news headlines, advertisements, and links to information about the Board of Directors before finding the route planner. Then, you have to type in your origin and destination with the on-screen keyboard. Once you submit, assuming you typed correctly, you wade past that other info again to find the next train.

Compare this with their mobile site (which doesn’t work on the iPhone, since it’s old-school WAP, but should work on other mobile phones) or the iPhone-centric Meenster. Within three finger- or key-presses, and no input or scrolling, you can find the same information. These sites recognize the limitations of the mobile platform—even the iPhone—and provide a user experience that helps you do what you came to the site to do as easily as possible.

Rather than make the Mobile Web irrelevant, the iPhone has instead done just the opposite: mobile applications are more relevant than ever, and iPhone users are quickly choosing to use services that have chosen to offer sites that provide them with a better user experience.

When considering whether or not the investment in a mobile-centric site is worth it for your company or project, consider two quick questions:

• Would someone using a mobile device have a reason to need your service immediately?
• Does the information needed require a form to access, or is it found more than one click into the site?

If so, you probably have a significant audience that would be better served by a site tailored to mobile, and when you serve users’ needs quickly and effectively, they’re not only going to come back, but they’ll do your evangelizing for you.

The Mobile Web isn’t dead: it’s just getting started.

Ken Yarmosh - Former Staffer :

Whether you know it or not, you have a web strategy. Newsflash: If you have a web site and you do not know what your web strategy is, that’s not a good thing.

So, what is “web strategy” and why should you have one? Those are great questions, thanks for asking. Here’s how I think about web strategy:

An organization’s web strategy is an actionable plan devised to achieve measurable results on the web. “Measurable results” require a web proprietor to have a specific goal (or set of goals) in mind for their web presence. The actionable plan provides recommendations based on these goals by analyzing web presence and web data in relation to effectiveness with all web stakeholders.

Let me boil it down a bit more simply: web strategy is your plan to achieve what you consider success on the web.

I think it is important to note that web strategy is not the end game. It is not the goal, but rather the means to it. Typical organizational goals include selling more widgets, increasing membership/donations, or achieving greater awareness of brand and messaging.

There is a silver lining. It is possible to turn the corner on a poorly executed or non-existent web strategy. A great place to start is to determine what’s currently happening on your site by analyzing your web data. Check out our series surrounding this exact subject.