If you’re on the marketing or planning side, and are wondering how this at all applies to you, you should read the first part of this two-part series on how digital strategy translates into digital execution. In the short term, this is about building things, something marketing traditionally isn’t concerned with. But in the long term, this is really about money and making smart business decisions. Building strategically means that you’re building competitive advantage by creating better digital experiences that last longer and are more adaptive to changing consumer needs and market conditions.

Because of our vantage point as digital strategy consultants, we get to see a lot of companies right at this crossroads – facing seemingly small decisions whose full context and consequences are not entirely defined, and at a risk of cornering themselves down the road because of it. Our hope is that that this list will help to shed some light on a few of these treacherous decision points.

It is by no means an exhaustive or definite list – attempting to pen a comprehensive collection of generally applicable, yet sufficiently directional, guidelines for applying strategy to the implementation of digital systems would be a Sisyphean task. In fact, we welcome any and all suggestions for edits and additions. 

A MANIFESTO FOR SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION

DESIGN FOR FUTURE NEEDS AND TECHNOLOGY

1. Build for current and future web standards

• It’ll keep your solution sustainable. Platforms and technologies that don’t fall under common web guidelines and standards (like the HTML5 predecessor Adobe Flash) are at a risk of being phased out and abandoned by the design and development communities as their popularity wanes. They are met with less support and maintenance and incur higher costs as developers and agencies charge more for longer and more complex production cycles. We’re not absolutist here; there are times when older and less buzzed-about technologies are the appropriate tool for the job. Their application however relies on attributing little dependence to them, in accordance with sound system design principles.

• It’ll make your solution recombinant and adaptive. Building with standards in mind will leave you with something that plays nicely with other Internet things, such as API:s, the communication interfaces of other Internet platforms and services). More importantly, products designed for web standards can also be used by the most number of people in the long run as consumers upgrade to modern, standard compliant, digital devices and web browsers.

2. Build for tomorrow

• Your business might have changed by the time you’re done. Implementation can easily take up to six months or a year – you’ll be better off planning ahead (just make sure you’re being reasonable) and designing for the needs you anticipate at that point in time. Does it seem like mobile will account for a significant share in traffic by the end of the year? Strongly consider designing your digital execution to be accessible via mobile devices – even though no one else is doing this (yet).

Building strategically means that you’re building competitive advantage by creating better digital experiences that last longer and are more adaptive to changing consumer needs and market conditions.

3. Design for scaleability

• It’ll enable you to minimize growing pains. Make sure you’re not constraining future growth by anticipating what is required to scale your product and its associated operations. Prepare a parallel path of production to ease a future switch between platforms or technologies. If you’re a small brand who is only getting started with eCommerce, you’ll do just fine investing in a light and externally hosted turnkey storefront. If your new initiative proves successful, you can start planning for an upgrade to an enterprise solution and know that the transition will be relatively easy. Cloud computing services and cloud-based products are great for this, because they generally charge only for what you need and consume.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO START FROM SCRATCH

1. Don’t compromise your future because of previous investments

• Avoid sunk cost fallacy. This is one of the most treacherous aspects of investing in digital tools and services, because it is so difficult to realize and acknowledge. Defending previous investments is a natural instinct; when we remember the effort and emotion we put into creating something, we’re hesitant to throw it to the side, even though it might have outlived its usefulness. In fact, as psychologists Kahneman and Tversky proved, the more of ourselves we invest into something, the harder it becomes to abandon; loss has a more powerful effect on our minds than potential gain. But poor, previous, investments can hamper progress, leaving the field open for competitors to speed ahead.

• …But beware of incurring Technical Debt. This is a fairly advanced concept which we won’t explore further in this piece. In short, technical debt describes the impeding consequences of rushing into new investments before completing necessary preceding work. It’s an idea that is crucial for any organization maintaining its own codebase to be familiar with.

2. Adapt solutions for your needs; don’t adapt your needs around available solutions

• What works for others may not work for you. Every business is unique. Your starting point should be your very own set of needs and capabilities. Evaluate prospective solutions against that.

• Avoid swiss army knives. They’re the most dazzling alternative – all of those cool features! – but do you really need all of that stuff? Do you have the knowledge and resources to maintain a more complex solution than what your actual needs call for? 360-degree solutions are the equivalent of doorman buildings; they come with common areas, lobbies and a lobby attendants, gyms, live-in supers, and the doorman, of course. A non-trivial amount of your rent is going towards covering all of these fancy things – but how often will you really use them? Figure out what you need your investment to accomplish, then find someone to help you either build or give you advice on what to buy that is exactly that and nothing more.

3. Open Source FTW

• The sky is the limit. With the explosion of open source technologies, platforms and services, there’s no longer any excuse to default to buying licensed out-of-the-box solutions anymore. WordPress for instance is an incredibly versatile web platform that is free. By compromising to handle custom development and dedicated support yourself (or hiring a partner to help you), you’re getting all of that versatility for free, without crowding your platform with features you don’t need. WordPress, and open solutions like it, are like Mr. Potato heads: they provide a well-defined, functional core solution that can be enhanced by innumerable add-ons, provided by a huge and vibrant online community of designers and developers.

4. Don’t outsource control

• Think twice about licensing solutions. Licensing a product or service might sound like a good idea, but you could find yourself in a situation down the road where the vendor’s maintenance isn’t on track with your business needs or with your category standard. You’ll be effectively tied to the grace and capability of your vendor for the remainder of your contract. You might also become blindsided to problems that your vendor is having, because you’re in a relationship with them and have already invested a significant amount of money (see “1. Don’t compromise your future because of previous investments”).

PARTNERS, NOT VENDORS

Digital Production is Collaborative.

• Avoid “Shiny Object Fallacy”. Our last piece of advice is perhaps our most important: Do your best to find a trustworthy, capable partner to help you realize your vision. Undercurrent Production Director Matthew Carlin addresses this topic expertly in a separate blog post.

This post was written by strategists Joanna Beltowska (@jbeltowska) and Vladimir Pick (@vladimirpick) who both come from a background of software and web development. 

Fewer Feedback Loops

We didn’t ask for any input during the first iteration of this project. Few people in the office knew it was being created, unless they happen to peer over our desks. Working alone allowed us to build momentum, move fast, and stay focussed and excited on the initial vision we crafted. We were working on creating a minimum viable project; had we invited feedback early on, a ton of solid ideas would have came our way, but with them, a ton of meetings to toil over what feedback we’d accept and what the timelines were for implementing them. We had already decided to launch first, iterate, and accept feedback later. The lesson here is don’t try to build v2 when v1 will do, especially in low-risk environments.

Small Victories

By keeping the entire operation lean and only making small, incremental changes to the tool, everything started to feel like a small victory. Added a new line of CSS? Win. Informal, but frequent meetings no longer than a couple minutes? Win. Revised the structure of a multi-dimensional array? Win. With only small pockets of time to work on this project, we were forced to be focussed on clear outputs. This made small achievements appear as clear victories, meaning every incremental change increased our momentum and drove the project forward.

Define Boundaries You’re Comfortable Working In

Identifying a specific problem to solve for and finding the right people to solve for it is key to a quick success. We never explicitly outlined boundaries when it came to our roles on the project, but given our familiarity with each other, and pre-existing working relationships, we didn’t have to. We knew what our strong suits were and played to our strengths without needing to discuss it. That might sound obvious, but as team size grows and varying degrees of expertise start to overlap, selecting the right person to champion a specific role gets tricky.

Beyond roles, the boundaries of the project were defined by the data provided by Tumblr’s API and the narrative we were trying to craft. Having used the platform for a few years, and having poked around the API once or twice beforehand, it took little time to decide which metrics we could accurately depict, which ones we couldn’t, and how sophisticated we could make our visualization of them for a v1 launch.

Use The Right Existing Assets

Existing assets can help you move fast, but they’re only helpful if you understand them well enough. We used Twitter’s Bootstrap framework, for example, because it’s well documented and we had previous experience with it when we built M.E.C.E. Maker, another Undercurrent project. The same wasn’t true for the charts we wanted to make, though. Despite the dozens of charting libraries out there, we could’t find one that we could quickly learn the ins and outs of, so we built ours from scratch. As a result, making changes to them is easy-peasy.

This project was only born because of the mission and freedom we’re given at Undercurrent to explore the internet and create new knowledge. Without it, we wouldn’t know as much as we do, nor have the time to dedicate to a project like this. Come check out Numblr and give us your feedback. It’s buggy, but who gives a shit.

Even a cursory glance at many of the most popular tools –such as Radian6, Sysomos, Lithium– show a focus on volume and activity as metrics for success. If your page, wall, or feed is seeing a flurry of activity, you’re winning. If you have more followers than the other dude, you’re winning. It’s no wonder so many brands focus on volume as a valuable metric for success.

These tools hope to help brands monitor their performance, but they all struggle to account for the objectives a brand is trying to solve for. None provide a range of metrics that are capable of assessing performance in truly meaningful ways – measuring where and how digital executions are succeeding or failing and providing insight into the appropriate next steps.

Imagine if you were VP of Customer Experience for a large hotel. It is hardly a stretch to realize that tailored metrics detailing the average time it took to reply to customer inquiries would be useful in explaining, in part, your performance across digital platforms and the value that brings to the business. To help understand how you stack up against your competitors, this (and other) metrics could then be indexed and benchmarked against data points accessible to anyone who knows where to look for them. To top it off, you’d probably want a notification pushed to your community manager’s iPhone if the response rate dropped below a set performance threshold, so they can respond appropriately. Tailoring and matching the metrics to your business objectives and measurement strategy provides much more actionable insights than measuring for volume alone.

At scale, requests for insight like this become increasingly difficult for general-purpose social media monitoring tools to deliver upon. While great for research, general-purpose measurement tools are focussed on high-level reporting, rather than deep analysis. As a result, most who rely on them alone end up with a muddied analysis of their performance, chock-full of false positives.

Recognizing that social media monitoring tools aren’t delivering the right kind of value often leads to a discussion about rolling out your own tools – not something everyone is equipped to do. It can be challenging enough to design your own data mining tools, let alone retain someone who can do something useful with the data, but doing so can pay dividends. Even if you’re not ready to consider building something from the ground up, here are three questions to help you assess whether you’re set up to successfully measure your online performance.

1. Is your measurement framework connected to meaningful data sets, where the output is a cogent, action-oriented analysis that helps inform the decisions you’re making?
2. Does the social media monitoring tool you’ve chosen allow you to plug in your own data sets (static or dynamic) for a richer, complete picture of your performance?
3. Does your level of analysis extend beyond the reports generated by these monitoring tools? They are a great start, but leave out a level of insight that’s only obtainable through a customized approach accompanied by a quality data set.

What has your business been doing to measure its performance online? Could you clearly articulate the pieces of your strategy?

Read more here – http://www.mdaniels.com/tools-vs-content/