Picking what NOT to do is an IT Strategy

Technology change and progress never stops. There is always a newer version, a better alternative piece of software or another way of supporting an evolved business process or two.

For internal technology departments and especially those within larger organisations, this rate of change means there's never an end in sight. In a world of infinite need and finite resources... there's usually a long list of things to do once the current projects & programmes have been delivered.

With all this demand and the expected pace of implementation (that can come from all angles including: business stakeholders, vendor sales people and consultants) it can feel like everyone wants to change everything at once:
New finance system? Yes
New HR software? Sure
New B2C website? Of course
New B2B website? No problem
New sales portal? Yeah
New customer data platform? Naturally

Faced with a these requests, perhaps along with a potential new-found investment in technology to fuel a "digital transformation", senior IT people will want to say yes. Who wouldn't want more resources, increased budgets, the chance for some new "toys" or the opportunity to stick a big 'look what I've done' post on their LinkedIn profile?

But like the proverbial plate spinner, who (theoretically at least) should know how many plates they can spin at once... those in a position to take on technical work need to understand how much change they can take implement before they hear the sound of virtual crockery smashing. Experience needs to inform them (and so do their managers, subordinates and peers) just how much change their organisation can take on in parallel.

But when the demand for so much change outpaces the organisation's ability to deal with that change, someone has make the important decision as to what to do and therefore what NOT to do. 

Nobody, least of all IT people (prehistorically noted for saying "the answer is no, now what's the question?") want to tell a business stakeholder that their project is less important than another... but sometimes there is only so much change you can do at once.

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!

Think Like A Start-Up

In my recent session at the Marketing Society I talked about the need to think like a start-up.

I'd therefore like to clarify further what I mean by this:

1. Support a test & learn culture
I was once told "The biggest issue with failing in not failing.... it is failing to pick yourself up again afterwards", but this is only part of the approach you need. You must also foster a culture that supports failure when it inevitably does happen, by encouraging innovation and testing to find out what works (and learning from those things that don't).

2. Be prepared to pivot
Accepting you are wrong is a humiliating experience and it is also a viable business strategy if your proposition or market isn't working. Lots of start-ups have changed their business model or product to suit a better customer need.

3. Learn from everyone you can
Big businesses tend to know a lot about their current situation (e.g. their products and typical customer attitudes & other insight). However start-ups learn quickly... they have to. But in my opinion it is their approach to fast learning that interests me.
They ask everyone, from people who have used their website or app just once... through to mentors and others who have done similar things many times before.
They ask about their product or service: what people liked, what they didn't like and more importantly how it could be improved.

Does your company do these things?

Change is the only constant @haydens30 #digitalday2015 think nimbly, think like a start up pic.twitter.com/f3JEhm9zDG

— Tiffany St James (@tiffanystjames) October 1, 2015

5 reasons your Digital Change initiative will fail

Nearly every business I now speak to is going through some form of digital change. From smaller organisations assessing the capabilities and skills of their online marketing teams & agencies, through to major multi-nationals looking to transform their IT systems, business processes and customer engagement models around electronic services... the mantra is clear “change or be changed in this new digital world” and I bet yours is very similar.

But transforming your company into a digital leader isn't easy and “becoming the next Amazon” is neither realistic nor practical for most organisations.

To give some ideas of the challenges faced, from my experience here are some areas where organisations fail to get a grip on their digital change:

1. Your delivery model is wrong:
Are you still creating lengthy waterfall project plans more suited to industrial age delivery expectations? The age of agile development and iterative delivery has not only been around for decades now, it has evolved into different flavours and techniques. However, just diving into a fully-blown scrum delivery method without fully understanding the implications this will have on the wider business (and setting these up correctly) is also a recipe for failure.

2. You don’t have the right skills in place

Just giving people new digital job titles doesn't cut it. There’s a talent war out in the wider marketplace right now, where businesses are struggling to hire and keep the right people with the necessary online skills to take big steps forward in technology, marketing and other commercial areas.  Assess what makes your company different and how you could attract and retain the right talent to realise your digital ambitions.

3. You don’t have digital business leadership

Ask yourself who in your company is actually responsible for the ownership and stewardship of your digital strategy? Where are the priorities, road-map and alignment of this digital strategy to the rest of the business set? If this role is not represented at your boardroom table, then you’re probably not taking it seriously enough.

4. You haven’t defined your technical vision and solution

It’s one thing to make bold claims about where your company will be in the future, it’s another entirely to assume it will get there without a technical vision of what the end solution looks like. I don’t think I have ever been on a successful change programme that failed to have the solution architecture for the main features or components defined in advance.

5. Your culture doesn't accept failure

Sure, every company likes to say it gets everything “right first time” but in reality this never happens… there is always room for improvement and things always go wrong. Or in other words “fail forward” by: accepting it, getting on with it, learning from it and move forwards quickly. One client I worked for in the past had a company policy of actually rewarding when a member of staff accepted they had made a failure (and quickly wrote up what went wrong and what they would do better next time). 

Has anyone got any others?

Is your Digital Strategy actually Strategic?

Does your Digital Strategy really deliver a vision and road map that takes your organisation forward?
Or does it simply to just wallpaper over the cracks and problems?

This is a question I've been wresting with lately and one that's let me to reconsider the work I do and scope of what Ideal Interface is actually involved in.

Or to put it another way, let me share with you a few key parts of a digital strategy outline and one that companies could use as the basic of their own.

Strive to be 'digital first':
Whether this be in the way you communicate to prospects, the way you design your core services or the way you integrate with business partners, 'digital first' is both a philosophy and a key requirement.

Accept change as a constant:
Understand that there is a continual change in customer & user preferences, channel shift patterns and technology trends. 

Be inclusive and user-centred:
Providing self-service functionality via digital touch-points isn't enough. You need to do this regardless of a user's: ability, connection, device and location.

Be optimised:
Whether this be by providing relevant, timely & targeted information or by maximising revenue using sophisticated conversion optimisation techniques, nothing stands still and everything needs to be tested, modified, measured and tested again (and quickly).

Be great:
I'll leave this one up to you.....

Have a redirection strategy when changing your site

Lots of companies I speak with are changing and updating their websites, it’s the natural evolution of things (and also keeps us digital agencies in business). Some of them are carrying out complete overhauls of their online presence, including:

• Re-platforming (e.g. moving to a more enterprise content management system)
• Changing the design of the user interface and navigation
• Applying a new site structure 

When doing all or some of the above, one very important thing usually gets forgotten… the redirection of old page locations to their corresponding new URLs.

Why is this important?
Well, for a start, you hopefully have previous visitors who have bookmarked specific pages with the aim of returning to them at a future date. You would not want them to get the ubiquitous ‘404 error’ that tells them the page is not found on the server.
Secondly, you want to preserve as much of the SEO value of each page as possible. Current thinking (and input from search engine optimisation authorities such as Google’s Matt Cutts) says that the majority of PageRank Juice’ is transferred to the target page when you do site re-directions correctly. And the correct way of providing redirect is via a 301 redirect, which tells the incoming page request that this is a permanent redirection.

There are some important things to note here:

1. The amount of Google PageRank that you lose through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a normal link.
2. A 302 (temporary redirect) passes 0% juice through to the target page, so should be avoided when optimising your site for search.

Therefore for any sites realistically bigger than a few pages, it is important to plan your redirection strategy. But not just as you are cutting over from one site to another, but as much in advance as possible. In other words, ideally as soon as the new site map and page content have been agreed.

You then have the job of mapping old URLs to new URLs. This can be quite simple if both versions are similar. However it can be far more complex when pages are split across different subjects or when you have an entirely new approach to your site content. So plan your redirection strategy in detail and make sure you are sending users and search engines to the most relevant new location.

Is digital optimisation the only strategy?

In a recent post, I blogged about how modern organisations have increasingly moved their digital strategies beyond the simple (“let's just understand”) to the more mature (“let’s optimise”). But although optimisation may be a worthy online aim in general, it is not necessarily the end game for all companies.

In short… digital operational optimisation is only one side of the story.

Back in 2012 I mentioned that to be a truly effective digital business you not only need to do things better, you need to do better things. This was something I called the Sir Terry Leahy approach, after hearing him speak on the subject:
http://press20.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/multi-channel-competency-and-innovation.html

But how many companies actually include innovation as part of their digital strategy? How many try to bake into their culture and products the ability to create better things?
In my opinion, not many. Most are only concerned with playing catch-up with their peers, with some trying to emulate the trailblazers. Very few major companies seem to want to innovate in the digital space beyond the boundaries of what they've seen others do. This isn't innovation, its playing it safe.

And that's a shame.

A data-driven digital strategy

Having a digital strategy for your organisation is a stepping stone to taking advantage of online channels to: make money, save money, maintain & improve service and deliver your brand promise.

Easy eh?

Well... no.

Having a digital strategy is better than not having one, but having the wrong one (or half of one) can be detrimental. And typically the wrong digital strategy is one that doesn't focus on the right things. For example just basing a digital plan on the deployment, use and support of online applications is giving yourself too narrow a scope.

If I could therefore give everyone just one  piece of advice, it is to create a data driven digital strategy; an approach that is:

1. Powered by information from your digital analytics

2. Informed by insight from analysts, who use different data sources to give your organisation a true picture of what your customers are doing and also want from you.

3. Continually updated based upon the most recent understanding of users, trends, their goals and the value this creates for your business.

4. Full of facts, rather than assumptions and guesses

Why optimisation should be your digital strategy

The online market is growing in its maturity each day. More and more people I talk these days about digital technologies, communications and commerce have far more awareness and understanding, have more professional processes for their implementation and are actual users & consumers of online services.  So as a digital strategist, my role is not so much to build awareness and educate clients, but to work with them to develop and enhance an already existing digital strategy.

Let’s be honest, by now most senior execs are only too aware of some of the opportunities that are possible in the connected world. They might not be fully up to speed with the latest techniques and processes… but they have some idea of the potential benefits, such as: cost savings, enhanced engagement and increased market share for those that get it right.

In short, the digital strategy of any major organisation has moved from one of ‘experimenting' or ‘finding our feet’ to one of increasing capability and eventually optimisation of all relevant online touch-points and connections.

The straw man digital strategy

If you've been in a business meeting with me lately, its highly likely that you've heard me use the term "straw man" when speaking about the way to create a digital strategy. It's a popular term for me right now, with several clients and colleagues mentioning it.

So what do I mean by the use of the term. "Straw man digital strategy"? Here's several points to explain my approach:

1. With the rate of change in the technology world being so fast, any digital strategy you put in place now will be quickly out of date. By the time you've had a chance to write a document of any length, let alone get an internal review & approval... Things will have moved on. Think how quickly the app economy took hold and became a 'must have' for some organisations... creating and destroying business practices at the same time. That's just the beginning.

2. As the overall online market is still so new in places (especially in the minds of some corporate dinosaurs), the exact ways of doing something new that is specific to your business might not be established. Sure there will be overall best practice, but every organisation is different and therefore the plans to protect or grow it needs to be as relevant as possible.

3. As people move roles and take on different responsibilities in the evolving workplace, skills within the online industry are in constant flux. Consequently many people trying to make sense of their digital way forward might not have all the experience necessary to "dot the I's and cross the T's".

4. Being agile in the delivery of online has created many new and different sites, services and products. These are things that an older 'industrial' era might not have come up with, if the exact specification had been fixed at the beginning. This flexibility in building things can also be applied to the creation of the strategy that runs over the top of each work stream.

5. Putting a straw man concept up before it is complete helps stakeholders understand and contribute to the strategy. In much the same way as a UX prototype helps senior people in your company visualise your ideas, so this approach should not only help you get the input from other clever and experienced people around you, it will also help you get buy-in at the senior level.

The overuse of the word strategy

The other day I was asked what online jargon ticks me off (to give it a polite title).

My first thought immediately went to the complete overuse of the word 'strategy' amongst a lot of people in the online industry. Here's my reasons why I think the word has become so popular:

1. Agencies and online consultants can charge more if they use the word strategy
(yup, for some reason, using the word automatically means you understand it and how to apply it to a client's business)

2. It has become incorrectly interchangeable with the word 'plan'.
(All too often I hear things like "we need an implementation strategy" when what is really meant it "we need a plan to put this website live correctly")

3. Clients feel reassured by the use of 'strategy' to define their aims.
(Admit it, no client wants to label their approach as anything but strategic. It would be counter to a lot of anyone's ambitions to say something like "here's a presentation of our content marketing tactics")

4. There are too many digital strategies
Yup, that's right.... The equation to calculate the number of digital strategies within any organisation is:
(Number of people who think they 'get' the Internet + 1).

Perhaps we need a strategy for digital strategies?

7 steps for creating a content marketing strategy

In my previous post, I mentioned that content marketing is easy. Well here's my thoughts on how to create and run a successful content marketing strategy:

1. Have a strategy

Yes, I know this I'd obvious. But if you set-off without knowing what you're doing, you stand a chance of going nowhere quickly (See my posts on agile digital strategy for my approach on doing this)

2. Have a strategy that can be measured

Yes... I've purposely made this a separate point and I think you need to be clear exactly what your KPI's are and what success looks like. These figures should also be stated within your business justification (e.g. for further resource to assist you or to explain why additional effort must be put in).

3. Create an editorial calender

Your content plan should not be a hand-to-mouth process of a weekly meeting to just plan the next few days of content production. Products are seasonal, demand is seasonal, budgets are seasonal and therefore content needs to be seasonal... or at least adapt to the changes needed over time.

4. Build an editorial team

Ok, not every organisation can have a full-time team of one, two or more people doing their content marketing. However this doesn't mean you don;t need to have the input of (offline) Marketing, Comms/PR, Product/Proposition and your own digital marketers (and/or agencies).

5. Don't just create content, share content!

It's simple enough to forget, but you're not just encouraging visitors to enter and read your content, you're hoping they share it via more traditional (email) as well as social channels. Therefore do what you can to encourage this via the use of social sharing functionality (usually via the typical array of social buttons) on your site.

6. Make it usable and beautiful

Ok, maybe not beautiful, but at least consider that your content isn't just for the search engines..... it has to be read by a human too!

You however notice that I've really not focused on Search Engine Optimisation in a post about content marketing. "Surely that was a slip?" you're thinking "SEO is key here, why not cover it?".... Well to tell you the absolute truth, we all should know that content marketing IS about SEO anyway and a lot of the points mentioned above should consider this all the time. I'm also keen not to promote a specific formula for search engine spamming within a content strategy.... or maybe I'm saving that for a later post?

Content Marketing is easy!

Or that's what those who don't understand the subject say anyhow.

However the recent wholesale adoption of the use of the term seems to imply that nobody was doing content marketing beforehand.... when in fact content has been at the heart of marketing for decades (if you don't believe me, just remember that the terms 'advertorial' and 'soap opera' were created by marketers to explain certain types of content created to promote their wares).

Having done, run and eventually made a success of content marketing, I can safely say it can be a complex beast. Not only because it involves different skills (not just copy writing), but also because in large organisations it typically involves several people or even departments. It is also an ever-changing discipline, that now has far more technical considerations than it used to.

In a recent eConsultancy survey,

90% of respondents felt that content marketing would become more important in the next 12 months and 93% said their companies either had a defined strategy in place or were planning on having one within the next year.

I therefore assume that if you're reading this you're planning on creating or improving your content plans into 2013. I therefore guess that for you content marketing is easy.... if it wasn't for the content and the marketing bits :-)

Agile digital strategy - an overview

Over two years back I created a set of slides about how digital strategy should be agile and not like the industrial age of strategic planning (e.g. not responsive to changes, etc.)

Well, I recently had to point people to this information, only to find out I'd not actually uploaded the entire presentation. So rather than have to sort through all the slides individually, here's the whole thing uploaded to Slideshare:

Agile Digital Strategy from Hayden Sutherland

BTW: The individual posts, along with an explanation of each slide are still available here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 & Part 6

What it means to be Head of Digital

I've had senior online roles for way over a decade now and have met some of the best people in the UK digital industry along the way. This also includes individuals who have been given or earned the title of Head of Digital (as well as having done the role myself).

I therefore thought I would explain what I think the Head of Digital's role encompasses and perhaps give some food for thought on the subject:
Note: it should go without saying that this also refers to a significant extent to other similar titles such as head of online, vp of ecommerce or director of digital and multi-channel.

1. Leadership
First and foremost, any Digital head must possess leadership. Just because online is a relatively new route up the corporate ladder, it doesn't mean we have to ignore one of the key characteristics needed. I will also go as far as saying that they also need to have two specific leadership qualities:
a) To lead change wherever and whenever they can
b) To provide thought leadership (and not just by repeating and re-processing the ideas of others, I mean by having new and original ideas that are innovative and still add business value - and you though this stuff was easy?)

2. Strategic vision
Clarity of what online success looks like and how to get there is key. You don't necessary need an MBA from one of the top business schools, but you need to have the ability to understand where digital is going within your market and what the latest trends are. Also being able to communicate this vision is also really important (as there's no point having a vision if you don't share it).

3. User Experience insight
Its imperative to have an understanding of the key ways to optimise the online customer journey. From minimising bounce rates on the homepage, through to sharpening up the conversion processes across your site. Note: I'm not saying you need to be a leading information architect (and very few Head of Digital people I have met have actually come directly from this route), but an appreciation of the main concepts and having an understanding of when to focus on this is essential.

4. Advanced Digital Marketing skills
Yes, an understanding of the main digital marketing channels is vitally important for this role. However more and more I'm seeing the combination of data and marketing to optimise the customer contact opportunity (and therefore the revenue).

5. A passion for numbers
Sure, there's all the great innovative stuff to look at, but the data you can now pull from your web analytics and associated packages is immense, not including the challenge that comes from 'big data'. If you're a Head of Digital and you're not prepared to stick your nose into a cross-tabulated spreadsheet now and then.... you're probably in the wrong job.

6. Technical expertise
How to split your readership in one easy way..... by insisting that the most senior digitally-orientated person in an organisation has to have some technical nous. But its true!
Note: I'm not stating that the VP of Internet needs to have the same level of technical competence as your Development Manager, but I'm definitely suggesting they should at least be able to confer on a lot of technical issues.

Have I missed anything?

What is your digital vision?

I hear a lot about corporate online strategy and the need to outline 'roadmaps' for: functional website & mobile development, integrated digital marketing and even business-orientated data approaches.

These are all great things (which sometime even co-exist and work together for some organisations).

However, what is sometimes missing is the even bigger picture. For example "engage existing customers via social media" is not an over-arching digital vision. In fact, that's not even a mature & considered social media strategy! However, I hear lines such as this regularly uttered (or was that muttered) my senior teams in strategic planning sessions about their online presence.

So here's a thought.....

Before trying to document your lengthy digital strategy and outlining the different deliverables you think are necessary for online success, take some time to paint the overall vision of what success actually looks like.

For example, I'm sure Jeff Bezos didn't initially say "I'm going to build automatic product recommendations and a handy one-click ordering system". I think he said something like "I'm going to be the number online bookseller, with fantastic features to help people find & buy what they want as easy as possible".

Have you therefore considered your vision of what success looks like first?

The 5 steps to creating a successful Digital Strategy

Here’s my 5 steps to creating a successful Digital Strategy

1. Understand …

…. not only the commercial goals, but the stakeholders & team involved. Take time to then walk through the current digital requirements (priorities & dependencies) and all the relevant internal processes that you have to work within  (there will be some, even on a ‘green field’ project – or as I recently said to one senior marketer, who said there were no restrictions: “every green field has borders eventually”. 

2. Review …..

all existing projects, including any project interdependencies with the work done by other departments (e.g. IT),  current suppliers of online services (e.g. Digital Agencies) and make sure you know what KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) are reported against across the business. 

Note: You should also take the time to identify the immediate wins (e.g. is there something so obvious and easy that is can be done now?)

3. Document…

Key Deliverables. This means writing up what has to be done and when it is expected. Focus both on commercial optimisation (operational efficiency) and innovation to gain competitive advantage. Consider all digital touch-points, where possible adopting a user-centred approach and cover all lines of business, such as: B2C, B2B, Back office (e.g. purchasing).

4. Plan….

for success by creating a rolling 30 day plan that keeps delivering wins and fixes over the short and medium term. From this build up a longer-term roadmap that integrates functionality with marketing activity (content, campaigns, etc.). Where necessary develop robust justifications (business cases) for large pieces of work.

5. Future-proofing…

means considering all changes likely to occur over the roadmap timescales. I use the “STEP” acronym as a handy way to classify the different innovation drivers:

a.       Social (what will individuals and groups do differently?)

b.      Technological (what new software or devices are expected?)

c.       Economic (how will and increase/decrease in household income affect you plans?)

d.      Political (why legislation is due that could cause an impact to the organisation?)

 

Turbo-charging your digital marketing strategy workshop

This week I flew off to participate in a day of meetings and discussions about the digital marketing plans for a well know IT equipment manufacturer.

The whole day went really well (in my opinion) and as well as meeting people I'd only spoken to on the phone before, I got to do what I really enjoy.... Standing up at a whiteboard with a marker pen & post-it notes and working in a collaborative way to map out "what the short and medium term will look like".

Doing this sort of workshop can at-times be a little daunting, however I've done enough of them in the past to be able to cover most problems that are likely to occur. But this session was actually made a lot easier by two important factors that I wanted to share:

Firstly, by having an agency team around me who are not just smart (even though we all got up before 4:30am that morning to catch our flight), but able to think in a commercial and practical way.

Secondly, having a couple of clients participate in the workshop who are not only digitally-savvy, but driven, passionate and fun at the same time.

This all meant we were able to not only get the plan of work for the short & medium term mapped out, but we got to understand far more about the supporting factors, systems and processes necessary to deliver the business objectives. In essence, getting twice the work done in the same amount of time.

If only every workshop could be like that!

Show me the Social Media money!

My, I must be getting sensitive after all these years in the digital industry. I've just got a bit annoyed after reading a single tweet.
No, it wasn't a rant by one of the angry accounts I follow, nor a bigoted response to a pressing social matter... It was this one:
"The number one objective for social media strategists is to evangelise a new initiative"
(I've withheld the name of the person who tweeted this, but if you have the skills.... You can find out who it is yourself).
No!
In my honest opinion this is NOT the first objective of anyone in social media, let alone someone responsible for the strategy.
Let me explain...
I believe that the most important role of anyone in any company is to support the organisation in its business objectives and responsibilities. These typically are to make money and reduce costs.
Sure, it is also the role of most employees to: take responsibility for their work, think innovatively (although perhaps more those in a more supervisory / management position) and question traditional business practices. But for a social media strategist to consider the evangelising of a new initiative as their principle role..... Is surely missing the point?
Are they not there to: asses, measure, understand and come up with strategic initiatives that make a difference to revenue, operational efficiencies, brand value, etc.?
I would very strongly reconsider the position of someone employed at a senior strategic level who does not understand this economic fundamental.

Clarification:
I'll keep my original posting above, but provide clarification after some subsequent information has come to light (thanks Gabrielle). The Tweet I referenced was not actually the thoughts of the person (Jeremy) who tweeted it: https://twitter.com/#!/jeremywaite/status/179667787705364481
but a quote from someone else at SXSW who made this statement.

An online fashion content strategy

If you're in the online world of fashion (and these days if you're not online you're not very fashionable) then you may be struggling for ideas to generate content for your website and off-site SEO & Social Media campaigns.

This handy presentation from http://twitter.com/tamarstar should give you a few pointers on where to start

9 Ways to Create an Engaging, Easy, and Affordable Content Strategy

View more presentations from Fashion's Collective