4 Steps To Surviving Digital Transformation

There's no doubt that we are in the middle of a revolution in technology (and therefore the businesses that knowingly or unknowingly rely on technology). As nearly everything becomes software and change happens quicker & quicker, businesses are being asked to transform themselves or be changed

So how does an organisation survive in a world where digital transformation is now the norm?

Embrace technology
It is no longer important for just your company COO or CTO to have all the senior level technical knowledge (although even some of these don't!). Instead other Exec roles such as Commercial Directors and CEOs now need more than just an awareness of what IT can deliver.

Hire the best people

This is very easy to say and often one of the hardest things to achieve. Hiring talented and motivated staff with a personality & approach that matches your company is incredibly difficult. Do you care if they don't wear business attire? Do you mind if they sometimes work from home or outside of the core 9 - 5 hours?  Do you want to pay them what the market (e.g. your competitors) pays?

Hint: If you don't have a huge network of digital contacts, make sure you know and use a very closely aligned recruiter.

Stay fast and agile

Don't just ask your staff to work faster and faster, there is a limit to the amount of output an individual or team can deliver - despite the 'lean' and 'growth' or hack' approaches that seem so popular now. Instead agile delivery needs support from all levels of the business (and it has to be encouraged from the top of an organisation, not just the bottom or the middle layers!).

Have a plan & communicate it
"Failing to plan is planning to fail" is the old maxim. And this is especially try when you are trying to carry out a potential change to your customer experience, back-end business processes and goodness knows what else.  There's also no point trying to carry out a digital transformation in a communication vacuum, it just doesn't work. And I don't mean just communicate with your peers or immediate boss either. Communicate with your board, your minor stakeholders and perhaps even shareholders (and consider communication to your customers too).
Hint: Adopt some of the newer communication, collaboration & project tools. If you don't know what Slack, Trello or even Yammer is.... find out!

The Importance of Keywords in Digital Marketing

Keywords have a huge influence across many areas of online marketing. They help to drive the correct traffic from organic positions in search engines, which in-turn need to be optimised through SEO efforts (white hat only of course). Keywords also form the fundamentals of any pay-per-click activity done across Google, Yahoo/Bing, etc.

Keywords therefore have a big impact wherever they are used online and you should make sure your keyword strategy is:

1. Planned in advance of any major digital work, taking care to analyse and understand the terms and phases your target audience is really using (not just those your client thinks they should use)

2. Incorporated in your onsite efforts, such as: Page titles, Meta Description and body copy (including semantic headings & structure)

3. Communicated to other parties, such as your PR company and external copy writing / translation agencies.

4. Reviewed and updated on a regular basis, to ensure you are still getting the required traffic and conversions. This is an evolving situation after all, where new sites and efforts are always changing.

Digital leadership - be more than an online expert

Being a digital leader means you need to be more than just an absolute expert in one area of online technology or marketing. You may know all about PPC, display & remarketing, SEO, email , display, affiliates and social media, but this isn't enough. To truly be at (and stay at) the forefront of digital, you really need to have the following qualities or experience:

1.  A leader of people
It's not just enough to have line managed the odd eCommerce staff member or digital agency, you need to be a mentor & coach, a motivator and a decision maker who can support and build a high performing team members to do great things.

2. An all-rounder
To understand how to get the best from that team, you ideally need an understanding of all aspects of online business. From being able to produce a focused digital business case to justify further investment, through to engaging with your opposite number in the technology department... you are going to have to have a broad spread of expertise.

3. An innovator
What have you done in your career that wasn't just "me too" but truly ground breaking? Have you been creative in your delivery of a new digital platform or applied a new method or approach to a building a difficult user interface? Have you been the first in your industry to trial a new device or an advanced technology that was subsequently adopted by the rest?

4. A strategic brain
Are you able to consider the bigger picture and link your team's work to the business drivers of the wider company? The creation and ownership of your organisations digital strategy should sit with you, it's yours to manage shape and develop as the company grows in its adoption of new online technologies and practices.

5. A customer advocate
Do you know who your customers are and what their digital needs really are? Do you know why your online presence or your eCRM initiatives work well (and why sometimes they don't strike a core)? It's not just a case of hiring a user experience (UX) person to do your thinking for you... you also need to get under the skin of your users and know what drives both their loyalty & resistance.

6. A scientist
Getting data from your analytics package is a basic necessity for any online practitioner these days, but being able to dive into the dashboards and analyse the insight that the information is giving you needs more than just a little diligence. You should also have experience of carrying out multiple experiments to improve your goals, ideally from a programme of on-going AB and Multi-Variate tests.

7. A communicator
It's fine to have strong views on those topics that you are passionate about, but you also need to be able to get your ideas across in a structured and eloquent manner.... especially to senior stakeholders.

Don't blame social media for unrest

I live in Ealing in West London, where some of the riots took place the other night. I spent a lot of time listening to police sirens & helicopters overhead and throughout the disturbances I followed the news online (via the BBC) and on Twitter & Facebook.

In the last few days a lot of things have been cited as the cause of these riots, however one constant theme mentioned by Newspapers, TV & Radio channels is that "Social Media is allowing people to riot".


Quite frankly, this topic is a pathetic attempt to create headlines that are nonsense. Riots have existed before social media, and before TV and other channels. Note: I've yet to check if there was 'technically' a riot before the invention of the printing press... but you get my drift.


Social Media, just like the telephone and every other method of communication we have is not the cause of social unrest.... it is merely a facilitator, the channel via which people now interact with each other. Blaming it is like blaming the air for transmitting an influenza virus.

And just like air, Social Media has become just another thing we now take for granted in our modern lives. However there have been calls by some political leaders to shut down various social media (most popularly Blackberry Messenger / BBM because it is far less traceable). But as several overthrown rulers of several North African countries will testify.... trying to shut these sources down really didn't help matters....

The PR digital sweet spot

In my post recently, I blogged about the intersection of Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation. This is a place I called the "PR digital sweet spot" and it’s the place where the modern PR practitioner needs to work and think.

As I've previously explained, there are a number of digital tools available to the modern PR agency.  The more I talk with clients and prospects, more I believe that the two essential tools of the modern PR trade are
Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation.

However it is the combination of these two that creates an extremely potent mix that has a two-fold benefit...

1. Search Engines are the place where people look for instant answers, or at least for clues to to the questions they have.
2. Social Media is the online place where they engage with their friends, colleagues and confidants

And what's more.... both rely on the skills that PR people have built up through their careers.... the ability to listen to a conversation and the ability to create great original content. Its just a shame that so many PR practitioners still pay lip-service to both.

Why PR needs to understand search and social media

Communications Convergence, a big term used by a few knowledgeable people to describe the gradual merging of the different roles done by communications professionals. As you will have seem from previous postings, I believe that the old roles of marketing and public relations are now so closely intertwined that they have become indistinguishable from each other. Awareness, interest, desire and action via digital channels are all now all part of a continuing path of online customer acquisition that defies traditional communication job roles.

Typically it has been the marketer (or marketeer, if you wish) that has been the more aggressive/assertive in online promotion areas… possibly fuelled by hard sales targets or other drivers. They were also the early adopters of social media... but as soon as consumers started asking questions back it became a problem for them.

But with existing of expertise of bringing together messages and audience (as well as being used to answering those difficult questions) PR and communications professionals are in just the right place to understand and utilise the new tools & methods of customer engagement and brand messaging…. that of online search and the social web

Ok, it is not a particularly revolutionary thing to say, but its fairly obvious that an understanding is needed of how search engines use content (notice I didn’t say “how search engines work”) and how to leverage the way that people connect with each other as well as brands & organisations. What is perhaps more challenging to those who have already got their heads around the previous two online tools, is the fact that search and social aren’t actually distinct functions, but two sides of the same arch that meet over the head of the PR pro sat underneath.

In my view the intersection of where Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation meet is the PR digital sweet spot. It’s this point that’s the true online communication convergence point. It is here that news meets searcher and where potential customer meets a shared audience with the same voice. It is therefore this point that the PR person must understand, adopt and learn to wield with all the effort and rigour that they have previously applied to their traditional role.

Social Media becoming more and more of a campaign and business weapon

Is Social Media becoming more and more of a campaign and business weapon?

Here's my video interview on the subject.



I love the write-up:

Hayden Sutherland of digital and internet agency ideal Interface http://www.idealinterface.co.uk/ says social media is becoming more and more of a communications and campaign weapon, able to slip through the nets and defences set up by brands, business and the authorities alike.

Multi-channel dialogue - is your organisation ready?

I've already mentioned how the increased complexity caused by a number of communication channels can create disjointed or even contradictory messaging.

Nevertheless customers still want to trust companies they buy from, despite an erosion of that trust (particularly financial institutions) over the last few years. And (surprisingly) many would still like to build a lasting relationship with those companies.

But this can no longer be done just using one channel of communication (such as the phone or email), there's the need for a more innovative & creative approach to gaining customer trust and enhancing the customer experience at the same time.

A dialogue with the customer has always been a very successful method of building customer loyalty and now newer digital methods such as Social Media are available to engage customers in consistent and continuous dialogues across a number of channels.

But not all organizations are ready for this level of constant communication, despite its obvious way of creating differentiation in today’s market. Is yours?

How communication needs have changed

We live in a world where everyone can be always connected, everywhere.

1.8 billion individuals all with Internet access and nearly all of them with the ability to read, do and collaborate online as they want (I say nearly, as some countries such as China block access to certain sites).

Media consumption has been 24 hours for the last two decades, mainly thanks to the proliferation of cable TV (In my opinion: CNN was the real victor in the first Gulf War). We had news updates pushed to us every minute of the day, as TV channels recycled the same stuff minute after minute… and that was just the beginning. This was also the start of the proliferation of devices such as The Blackberry, the business phone that is more popular as a tool for receiving emails pushed to the user 27 x 7.

With the proliferation of the Internet in the last decade, our information needs changed from being pushed to us to being pulled by us. People wanted to be up to date with everything all the time irrespective of the device or channel they were using. This isn’t so much information overload, but information on demand.

Now we have a further evolved state, where one way information consumption has changed into two way communication, connections and collaborations. People of all ages (but especially the younger millennial 'digital natives') expect to not only consume information, but also to respond and contribute to what they are reading, seeing and hearing.

This has, in my opinion, significantly contributed to the mass migration of readership from traditional newspapers to online sources, especially those that not only allow dialogue but make a point of encouraging it.

In a crisis, remember your customers

I can't really let the financial events of the last few days pass without saying something. But rather than tell you what bank I'm not going to invest in or what mattress my money is hidden under, I'll focus on customer communications happening with Online Bank Icesave (http://www.icesave.co.uk/)

I guess there's a tendancy to forget about customers when you're working for a bank that has not only been nationalised, but when the entire country is teetering on bankruptcy. Or should there be?

Is it really enough to place a message up on your homepage for over 24 hours that merely says:

We are not currently processing any deposits or any withdrawal requests through our Icesave internet accounts. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our customers

Mor recently (today) they have placed a link through tothe UK Govenment's treasury website that explains further the plans to protect UK citizen's savings, but where's the:

1. Regular updates from senior people in Landsbanki (its parent bank - nationalised)
2. Informative statement's from Icelandic Financial Services about the situation
3. Link through to other useful information

Although this bank's fate may be sealed, you wonder what the lack of messaging on other loss-making financial services sites may be doing to easy their customer worries... and therefore what it may be doing to their longer-term reputation.

IBM corporate newsletter goes social

IBM are making a big thing recently about their Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Social Network credentials. Its therefore only fitting that they highlight how this has been of benefit internally for them.

The document below shows how they are leveraging social networks to improve the communications between their staff, current and past, creating an Alumni site which as of July 2008 had 45,000 members.

However, as well as highlighting how IBM is using modern social technology... I can't help but think that they are also using it to cut down on the fragmentation of communication caused by various employees (past and present) setting up networks on: Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Orkut or other publically available social networks.

Social media IBM study - Upload a Document to Scribd

You can also read this document on Scribd: Social media IBM study

Successful brands listen

I've reccently read the posting: The New Economics of Brands by Umair Haque, who is Director of the Havas Media Lab and contributor to many notable publications on digital technologies.

One of his quotes about company communications really resonated with me:

"The future of communications as advantage lies in talking less and listening
more."

Note: However, I do think that he has not made the clear differentiation between brands and advertising. It is possible to advertise a product or servcie, without necessarily creating a brand (and vice-versa).

Now listening in humans is either a learnt or natural skill that many people do not have. The the same is also true of companies. Learning to listen correctly, to hear not just what you want to hear, is especially hard, hard, hard!

So, is listening correctly part of your company DNA?

Edgeworks

Communications were more simple in the old days. You kept information central and owning it was power. Now the distribution of company information (good and bad) is fragmented and increasing in its distribution & velocity.
Its not all about a simplified message via offical channels now a lot of conversation with customers and influencers takes place on the edge of the company. The walled garden is disolving gradually for some companies and

Brian Oberkirch has tackled this subject is some depth in his posting last Spring about 'edgeworks' and it makes for interesing reading:
http://www.brianoberkirch.com/2007/04/30/branding-v-edgework/

People can't hear you...

I have been very impressed with Kurt Voelker's presentation here:
http://www.slideshare.net/forumone/online-trends-in-communications-impact/
His presentation shows the how things are moving on and the impact of modern digital communications. I gather this was shown to an audience of PR and marketing types recently.
One of his slides that resonated with me particularly, was an image of 3 boys whispering, with the title:
"People can't hear you. They are too busy listening to their friends"
Poignant I feel!