10 Commandments of UX Strategy

via UXmatters http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/01/10-commandments-of-ux-strategy.php

By Ronnie Battista

Published: January 13, 2014

“I set out to frame what I have been observing in the UX strategy industry and hearing in conversations with others in the field. My hope was to capture the core, essential elements of UX strategy….”

When considering my topic for the presentation that I gave at the UX STRAT conference in Atlanta, in October 2013—knowing that I would be speaking to an audience of respected peers and industry leaders in the emerging field of UX strategy—it was challenging to add something new or novel to the conversation. So I set out to frame what I have been observing in the UX strategy industry and hearing in conversations with others in the field. My hope was to capture the core, essential elements of UX strategy while, at the same time, not missing anything important. This article is based on that presentation.

My interest in this topic came from a few places, including the following:

• The failed effort to create a UXPA International Certification program, which I undertook during my three years as Director of Certification for the UXPA. That was quite an eye-opening experience, given the strong and vocal opinions both for and against certification.
• Emerging professional trends, both within and outside of user experience, that emphasize speed to market—for example Lean, agile, and “fail forward fast.”
• The competitive challenges that we face teaching user experience at Rutgers—for example MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), programs like General Assembly, and the increasing number of 1- to 3-day UX intensive workshops. Is it me or are they multiplying like rabbits?
• The continuing confusion over what user experience is and isn’t versus other UX-related disciplines that are not called user experience, such as customer experience (CX), information architecture (IA), service design (SD), and experience design (XD).
• Getting a bit existential about what UX strategy means for us—and selfishly, for my next 20 plus working years—and for our future UX leaders.

I purloined the idea to frame this as 10 Commandments from another list of 10 that I coauthored a few years ago at my previous company—where, to better market what we did to external audiences, we created the “10 Immutable Truths of Experience Design.”

Here are some questions that I asked myself and the UX STRAT audience, which I’d like you to consider before we get to the Commandments.

• Do you believe that UX strategy is inherently different from other UX/CX/IA/SD/XD research, design, and evaluation work? Or is it a combination of all of these? Or perhaps an umbrella that covers all of them?
• What about service design (SD) and experience design (XD)? Are they identical to UX strategy?
• Beyond our self-styled professional titles, do you believe there is—or should be—some criteria that qualify someone as a UX Strategist?
• Have you worked on a UX-strategy project that did not involve a digital interface?
• Are there deliverables that UX Strategists should employ rather than people in other roles—for example, customer journey mapping?
• And, if this field is indeed emerging, for those at the start of their careers looking for the color of their parachute, what type of people are better suited for UX strategy? Right-brainers or left-brainers? Whole-minders?

“The 10 Commandments of UX Strategy are key areas of our profession that I think all UX Strategists must strive toward and, to the best extent possible, should try to infuse in their professional practice.”

Ultimately, the two questions that I’m constantly asking myself are:

• How can I be the best in an emerging field that is still defining itself?
• How can we help build this profession to grow and support those who come after us?

Three final points about the title of this article lest anyone think that I’ve used the word Commandments to mean anything prophetic or irrefutably conclusive:

• Similar to the biblical 10 Commandments, which are a mix of the practical and the emotional—don’t kill people—and those that are a bit more cerebral in nature—don’t covet your neighbor’s ass, my UX-strategy commandments cover a broad scope.
• Religious affiliations aside, I’d submit that, like the biblical 10 Commandments that Moses received, some of these UX strategy commandments are a bit easier to follow than others. Considering the same examples from the previous bullet point, few would dispute that “Thou shalt not kill” is not an easy commandment to check off. But not coveting your neighbor’s stuff is not so easy. (You should see the massive home-brew setup my boss has in his basement, I covet the hell out of it!) The 10 Commandments of UX Strategy are key areas of our profession that I think all UX Strategists must strive toward and, to the best extent possible, should try to infuse in their professional practice.
• I like the definition of a Commandment: “noun—a statement of what to do that must be obeyed by those concerned.” The 10 Commandments of UX Strategy is far a catchier title than “10 Things We Must Obey,” right?
• Commandments are nuanced. Arguably, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” should notapply to a soldier fighting in defense of his or her country.
• And finally, as I said to the UX STRAT audience, which comprised folks who could speak to any of these commandments better than I can, I know I’m preaching to the choir. I don’t expect these commandments to strike many of you as eye-opening revelations. So, in reading this article, please consider this as my attempt at trend analysis or aggregation rather than as anything resembling thought leadership.

The 10 Commandments of UX Strategy

• THOU SHALT FOCUS ON THE BIG PICTURE
• HONOR YOUR COMPANY AND CUSTOMER, BUT COVET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S ASS
• THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THY EMPLOYEE’S HUMANITY
• REMEMBER TO KEEP HOLY THE CONTEXT
• THOU SHALT NOT KILL THY CAREER
• THOU SHALT NOT BEAR SPECULATIVE WITNESS
• THOU SHALT STAY FAITHFUL TO UX GOVERNANCE
• THOU SHALT NOT SPEAK UX IN TONGUES
• THOU SHALT NOT WORSHIP DIGITAL ONLY
• THOU SHALT PRACTICE UX WITH HUMAN-CENTRIC INTEGRITY

I. THOU SHALT FOCUS ON THE BIG PICTURE

“UX strategy requires a solid understanding of business goals, vision, and drivers. There willalways be strategic UX initiatives and projects, but those with the greatest chance of providing long-term sustainable business value are UX solutions that stay framed in the big picture.”

UX strategy requires a solid understanding of business goals, vision, and drivers. There will always be strategic UX initiatives and projects, but those with the greatest chance of providing long-term sustainable business value are UX solutions that stay framed in the big picture. As the title of Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine’s excellent book Outside Insuggests, we need to help our companies look outside in. Seek the UX strategy behind even the most tactical engagement. There will always be tactical engagements, and chances are that you’ll be doing a lot more of them in your career than the game-changing, C-level enterprise transformations. But you must ensure that you do everything that you do, no matter how small it may seem, with an eye toward and a focus on the bigger picture—creating the holistic experiences that we all should seek to create.

Within this big picture is an implicit understanding of value. UX Strategists have a great understanding of the human impact of business decisions, and it’s important to recognize and be prepared to articulate that human impact, as well as the value that businesses are trying to create for themselves, customers, and shareholders.

II. HONOR YOUR COMPANY AND CUSTOMER, BUT COVET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S ASS

What are the specific business levers that enable your company to win over competitors, and how can the user experience that you create directly impact them? You should not speak the name of UX strategyunless you can articulate the competition, the company, and the customer. So, in contrast to the Biblical commandment, you should covet your neighbor’s ass if he’s making money on it. Find out why, and continually look ahead and behind you. I give the full copyright to this commandment to Paul Bryan and his UXmatters column “3 Keys to Aligning UX with Business Strategy.” He nails it.

III. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THY EMPLOYEE’S HUMANITY

“For the up-and-coming generations, especially Generation C, the brightest … will take their skills to companies that create the work experience and environment that they have come to expect.”

There are at least two sides to every interaction, and often, both are human. You must pay attention to the mutual success of these interactions. There are optimal paths for both to be successful. As Frederick Reichheld wrote in The Loyalty Effect, “If you wonder what getting and keeping the right employees has to do with getting and keeping the right customers, the answer is everything.” This is fast becoming a need-to-have for the up-and-coming generations, especiallyGeneration C, the brightest of which will take their skills to companies that create the work experience and environment that they have come to expect.

IV. REMEMBER TO KEEP HOLY THE CONTEXT

Unfortunately, our global supply of true ‘genius design’ potential—for example, Steve Jobs—is inversely proportional to that for well-intended senior executives, Product Owners, and creative designers who get gut feelings that are unencumbered by facts. Of course, we need to know the context of interactions before we can hope to create an optimal product or service. However, I have yet to meet anyone in this field who, for even a few years, hasn’t had to compromise doing needed context-based research to meet a budget, deadline, or executive demand. And we make these decisions fully aware of the potential negative—or, if we’re lucky, just less-positive—impacts on the audience who ultimately inherits our design solutions? It is incumbent upon the UX Strategist to advocate strongly that UX research be part of any attempt to create or redefine a user experience. But pick your battles because you likely won’t win all of them. Still, fight hard to get research included in your projects.

V. THOU SHALT NOT KILL THY CAREER

“For every tried-and-true technique, tool, methodology, or belief system that we employ in user experience, there seems to be an exponential number of new and exciting ways to advance our shared cause.”

For every tried-and-true technique, tool, methodology, or belief system that we employ in user experience, there seems to be an exponential number of new and exciting ways to advance our shared cause. This is to be expected as more and more people enter the field of user experience from different industries, cultures, and educational backgrounds. As with many other professions, there are new products, tools, and methods to help UX professionals do their jobs better. Although, there are some who believe that it’s all the same stuff, just with different packaging or more efficient delivery systems.

We must resist the dogma of UX philosophy and practice that some in our field espouse. Some UX professionals are unwilling to embrace the evolution of UX design and strategy practice, which has changed and continues to change the way we conceive and deliver UX design solutions. While one need not accept every newfangled advance as gospel, UX Strategists must keep their minds open to understanding current software user experiences, processes, and services. According to NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Friedman, we must always be learning. And our field has no shortage of opportunities to better ourselves and our business results.

VI. THOU SHALT NOT BEAR SPECULATIVE WITNESS

“Big data will always require UX strategy, because we askwhy something happened, interpret the data to glean valuable insights, and turn big data into big-impact solutions.”

Relying solely on either anecdotal, observed behavior or set, targeted metrics is better than having no evidence, but a true UX strategy understands, embraces, and employs both.

For those who are qualitatively minded: There are scant few in our field who would forsake direct, interactive research with people. We need our companies to understand that they need to connect with real human beings, even if we think—or they think—we already know the answers. AsWill Evans so perfectly captured the need: “If you don’t talk to your customers, how will you know how to talk to your customers?”

For the quantitatively minded: Companies like Amazon and Netflix have created game-changing customer experiences with their strong focus on analyzing user behavior through big data. The use of Web analytics will only increase in the coming years. The growing deluge of data provides infinite ways to assess, predict, and report on key insights into consumer behavior. But big data will always require UX strategy, because we askwhy something happened, interpret the data to glean valuable insights, and turn big data into big-impact solutions.

VII. THOU SHALT STAY FAITHFUL TO UX GOVERNANCE

“An ongoing UX governance program that measures and optimizes the user experience is vital to the long-term viability of a UX strategy.”

I believe governance remains one of the most talked about yet underserved and undelivered elements of UX strategy. Experience is fluid, with periods of evolution and revolution. An ongoing UX governance program that measures and optimizes the user experience is vital to the long-term viability of a UX strategy. Regrettably, companies are littered with great UX strategy work that ended with a shiny deliverable, a slap on the back, and UX projects that died on the vine. Too often, business conditions—which are too numerous to list—cause great ideas to wither or be abandoned altogether as soon as a project gets deployed in production.

One of the most popular and fastest emerging UX strategy tools is the customer experience journey map; but this tool can take you only so far. As I’ve personally experienced, intricate customer journey maps can offer tremendous business value. They can track conversion metrics, decipher strengths and weakness in acquisition and retention, provide core insights to business investment in systems, people, and processes—the list goes on. But our use of this tool is powerful only to the extent that our work is actually integrated into business execution. Without an ongoing UX governance program to measure and optimize the user experience, a journey map is likely just a cool-looking diagram that someone has put up in his cube.

Whenever possible, avoid embarking on strategic UX efforts until you can get clarity and commitment on how your team will iterate, maintain, report, and prioritize the work. We need to infuse this approach into the company’s program or portfolio management infrastructure. That’s where business leaders manage their investment. When businesses give the same respect and authority to an Experience Management Office as to the Project Management Office (PMO), UX strategy will have reached an important evolutionary milestone.

VIII. THOU SHALT NOT SPEAK UX IN TONGUES

“The business intent gets lost in translation because executives who weren’t involved in the generation of journey maps have neither the time nor the inclination to figure out what they’re supposed to do with them.”

At heart, a UX Strategist understands that user experience and the practice of user experience are ultimately matters of communication. This communication can take a few different forms:

• advocacy for the human audience by an empathetic translator or proxy
• communication of the utility and inherent value of products and services through our design work
• and last but not least, the ability to convey to business leaders the experience implications of why to choose or not choose a particular path—and the value of ongoing investment and growth in user experience

Ironically, we continue to struggle on this last one. It’s certainly been a work in progress for a while now.

For example, consider the communication challenges of the aforementioned journey map. Oftentimes, UX teams create elegant, intricately detailed maps that do a great job of convincing those who view them that a lot of thought and research went into their creation. But the business intent gets lost in translation because executives who weren’t involved in the generation of journey maps have neither the time nor the inclination to figure out what they’re supposed to do with them. A journey map—which might perhaps be better named a business destination map—that you intend to speak for itself can quickly become a dead-end if you’re not conveying its value in a way that businesses can digest and act on.

IX. THOU SHALT NOT WORSHIP ALL THINGS DIGITAL

“Keep real people in mind when designing digital products and services. However, as UX Strategists, our work should and must extend far beyond what, for some, is slavish, fetishized devotion to all things digital.”

UX professionals have played a significant role in making digital user interfaces and technology easy to use, accessible, and for some, seemingly irreplaceable. We can and should continue to keep real people in mind when designing digital products and services. However, as UX Strategists, our work should and must extend far beyond what, for some, is slavish, fetishized devotion to all things digital.

The majority of UX professionals make their living doing work specifically for digital user interfaces and devices, so I’m not suggesting that anyone stop doing anything they’re doing or that digital is in any way bad. However, in conversations with colleagues and peers, I’m not alone in thinking that the human element of interaction—absent devices and technology—is an area that, ironically, is underserved. We must remain mindful of the lives and interactions that we experience offline in the services our companies and clients deliver—not to mention cities, museums, non-profits, and a host of other entities that could use our help. The emergent Service Design is a welcome profession that we should look to for guidance and techniques in approaching our work.

Venturing into somewhat murkier moral waters, this isn’t simply about looking at physical connections and services through a wider lens. As UX Strategists, we should try to take on the voice of a human advocate when considering the impacts and consequences of the digital world that we’ve helped to create, as well as how we can help shepherd the inevitable move toward a more digital existence. If you haven’t read Nic Carr’s The Shallows or Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, read them. Both present quite detailed and fascinating studies on the seismic impacts technology is having on our brain’s structure, our ability to process information, and our basic emotional connections and relationships.

X. THOU SHALT PRACTICE UX WITH HUMAN-CENTRIC INTEGRITY

“As a UX Strategist, I believe that we have a moral and ethical imperative to ensure that what we create, both within and outside our profession, should ideally improve the lives of others—and at the very least, do no harm”

This last commandment is perhaps an extension of the previous one. (In fairness, coveting stuff got stretched out to two commandments in the Bible.) What I’m talking about here is something akin to taking the Hippocratic Oath. As a UX Strategist, I believe that we have a moral and ethical imperative to ensure that what we create, both within and outside our profession, should ideally improve the lives of others—and at the very least, do no harm. Here’s the point: as strategic UX advisors, we are in the vanguard of the technological revolution that has already irrevocably changed human interactions over the last two decades. Possessing the tools and skills to capitalize on human behavior in particular contexts is a powerful thing. We translate business and technology for the human condition, and this noble charge begets great responsibility. The emergence of methods and tools to support these ideals are numerous and growing. For example, the promise of big data is a force multiplier that we’ve only just begun to crack. Targeted neuromarketing is as exciting a concept as it is frightening.

I strongly believe that the field of user experience continues to be a beacon of integrity. We’ve helped provide countless examples of positive human advancement—especially in areas like accessibility and third-world product solutions. But I’m also aware that, as UX professionals, we need to make a living, and when it comes to business, things get more complicated.
In commerce, there’s nothing morally wrong with up-selling or cross-selling products, featuring your product over a better one on an end-cap in a supermarket, and so on.

But things like the institutionalization of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) as business strategy concern me. For example, a colleague and friend of mine quit her job at a firm in part because she was asked to create cartoon storyboards to convince teen-aged young women who wore glasses that they were not pretty, and that popularity was reserved for those who wore contact lenses. That’s just wrong. We must adhere to our core principles of helping others as best we can and have the courage and moral integrity to push back on businesses when there is clear intent to cause harm, in any form, to elicit a purchase or transaction.

Conclusion

“How can we build this profession to ensure that it grows to support those who come after us?”

So, what do you think? Did I get these commandments right? What shouldn’t be here? What did I miss? And back to my original point, help me to answer these questions:

• How can I be the best in an emerging field that’s still defining itself?
• How can we build this profession to ensure that it grows to support those who come after us?
• Do we, as UX professionals, think we should provide more concrete criteria for success in living up to these commandments?
• Agile has its “Manifesto.” Is there or should there be one for UX strategy?

I’ll end with a quote from Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together that has stuck with me. I used it as a touchstone when considering these 10 Commandments of UX Strategy:

“Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead? … What are the responsibilities here? … What do we have, now that we have what we say we want—now that we have what technology makes easy. This is the time to begin these conversations, together. It is too late to leave the future to the futurists.”

Sherry Turkle’s prescience in delivering this challenge makes it seem that she was speaking to UX Strategists. We are well-positioned to tackle this challenge. I’d love to be part of the conversation about how we can do this together—for both ourselves and the next generation who will take this profession forward.

- See more at: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/01/10-commandments-of-ux-strategy.php#sthash.1r082bbN.dpuf

Karen McGrane on Content: Responsive Design Won’t Fix Your Content Problem

I spoke to a digital team at a large corporation a while back, and outlined some of the many challenges they were likely to face in creating, revising, and publishing their content so it would work well on smartphone, tablet, and desktop interfaces.

These included:

• Evaluating whether content is useful, valuable, actually worthy of being on mobile (or the desktop, for that matter)


• Assessing the amount of content that can appear on a “page” on different devices, and striking a balance for different form factors


• Creating multiple forms of headlines, teasers, or body text, so valuable information doesn’t get truncated randomly


• Planning to develop alternate versions of some assets—such as different image sizes and crops, alternatives to large infographics or tables, new demo videos showing both desktop and mobile versions of the interface


• Separating content from presentation in the CMS, so content and markup aren’t all dumped into the same blob of a field

An attendee raised her hand and said “I’ve been wondering when you would mention responsive web design. We’re going to use responsive design.” I responded “Well, responsive design won’t fix your content problem.”

Who thinks that, anyway?

I recently posted a link to an article that called responsive design a “poor man’s content strategy.” Then my Twitter feed exploded with people heavily sighing and rolling their eyes, insisting no one would ever conflate the two. Why, everyone knows that the container and what you put in the container aren’t the same thing. Everyone knows that just rearranging modules from the desktop to make them squishy is not a content strategy for mobile. Everyone knows if organizations discover problems that go beyond the specific layout solutions offered by responsive design, that’s not the fault of the technique.

Except not everyone knows that. These are just a few of the anecdotes I’ve heard recently from people working on mobile websites for major corporations—projects with large budgets, committed teams, and executive buy-in:

• We recently finished a massive CMS replatforming which necessitated a redesign of the desktop website. There is zero enthusiasm for going back through the content structuring, editing, and approval process with our business stakeholders and our legal review team. Whatever we wind up doing on mobile, we must use the exact same content we have on our brand-new desktop site.


• We just spent [insert unfathomably large number here] trying to take our existing desktop website and make it responsive. We genuinely believed this process would be faster and easier if we based it on what we already have. It’s not going well, and we’ll probably need to throw it all out and start over. We would have been better off if we’d started from scratch six months ago.


• I was hired as a developer to build a new responsive website, but I’m being asked to make all kinds of decisions about how to edit and restructure the content—decisions I don’t feel entirely qualified to make. I keep telling my client they need to bring someone in to deal with the content questions, but they think responsive design is just a front-end design and development problem.


• Our executives assume that since they made the decision to go responsive, every other decision would just be tactical details. In fact, implementing responsive web design raises issues that strike right at the heart of our business and the way we work. We need to fix our review and approval processes, our content management system, our asset management system, our design standards and governance. We need to clean up our outdated, useless content. But it’s hard to get people to step up to solve these bigger problems, because they don’t think they’re part of “responsive design.”

Seems like a lot of people are laboring under the mistaken impression that using responsive design means they can make a mobile website without dealing with their content problem.

Where’d they get that dumb idea?

We told them so. And, okay, yes, they’re using some magical thinking. But straight up, we told them that the mobile website should be the same as the desktop, and that’s why they should use responsive web design. We sold them on the value of responsive design by promising that they could manage and maintain one set of content and it would work across all devices.

We also insisted there’s no good reason to serve different content by platform. We got twitchy whenever anyone started talking about sending different content or less content to mobile devices (rightly so). We pointed out that you can’t discern user context or intent just from knowing screen size or device type. We told them content parity was the first and most important goal when developing a responsive website.

Is it any wonder they assume (hope?) they can just take what they already have, wave a responsive magic wand over it, and have their existing content automagically work on mobile? Why should it be different? We said it shouldn’t be.

Even companies that want to take a “mobile first” approach can’t just throw off the shackles of their desktop content. For some, suggesting the organization “start fresh” with new content would be organizational suicide, touching the political third rail of stakeholders and competing interests. Others acknowledge it’s time for a new approach, but need processes that will enable them to clean up and restructure existing content to make it appropriate for a responsive design. Responsive design won’t fix their content problem—but content strategy will.

Responsive design + content strategy = BFF 4 EVAH

It’s time we acknowledged that every responsive web design project is also a content strategy project. For designers and developers who might not know what to emphasize, here are a few talking points:

Your content must be revised

Even though the long-term goal is to serve the same content to every platform, organizations can’t just use what they already have. Smart companies will seize this opportunity to do what they should have done years ago: clean up and pare down their desktop content. You’ll never get a better chance to fix your content and publishing processes.

You may need to deal with legacy systems

The tantalizing prospect of responsive web design is being able to solve the problem of “mobile” completely on the front end. The front end is so much more malleable than the back end, so of course we want to start there. But many responsive projects require changes to the way content and data are structured and published from the CMS or other legacy systems. For some, an approach to APIs will be needed; for many others, it will be an overhaul of content management and asset management systems.

Design your editorial workflow first

The chicken-and-egg problem of content informing design (and vice versa) just got bigger—call it an ostrich-and-egg problem. While smart people have talked about the responsive design workflow and how design deliverables and processes must change, the editorial workflow also needs attention. Planning for how and when the content team will migrate, edit, and restructure content will help everyone ensure that the content and the design work together. Design deliverables like wireframes and comps are evolving—content teams must also evolve away from reliance on Excel spreadsheets and Word documents to manage this process.

You won’t have time to edit everything

Even the most dedicated and ambitious teams won’t have the capacity to revise and restructure every page of their existing desktop website. Making informed and realistic decisions about what to focus on (and what to punt on) will help with overall planning, migration processes, and design decisions. Acknowledging this early will help get teams and stakeholders on board with the fact that not everything will be perfect.

Plan for long-term governance

Responsive design also won’t fix your design standards and governance model, but we still need to include long-term maintenance in our objectives. I heard a story from one group who said they convinced their company that it wasn’t possible to do responsive design properly unless they also created and enforced a design system. The same argument could be made for developing and encouraging adherence to content standards.

Responsive design itself won’t fix your content—no one ever said it would. But the opportunity to implement a responsive redesign is also the opportunity to fix your content and its underlying strategy. It may seem more complicated to edit your content and fix your processes and systems at the same time you’re designing a new site—but in fact, pretending you don’t have to solve these problems just makes the job harder. Smart organizations will see this as a benefit, not a drawback, and will use this chance to make a better website, not just a squishy one.





via A List Apart: The Full Feed http://alistapart.com/column/responsive-design-wont-fix-your-content-problem

Six Visual Solutions To Complex Digital Marketing/Analytics Challenges

Two things I love a lot:

1. Frameworks, because if I can teach someone a new mental model, a different way of thinking, they can be incredibly successful.

2. Visuals, because if I can paint a simple picture about something complex it means I understand it and in turn I can explain it to others.

This post is at the intersection of those two lovely things.

Each of the six visuals re-frames a unique facet of the digital opportunity/challenge, and shares how to optimally take advantage of the opportunity/challenge.

We'll start with digital at the highest strategic level, which leads us into content marketing, from there it is a quick hop over to the challenge of metrics and silos, followed by a recommendation to optimize for the global maxima, and we end with the last two visuals that cover social investment and social content strategy.

A vast expanse of our current existence.

All of the visuals are in the form of a venn diagram, though, as you'll see, I do take enormous liberties with the format. [As Orlando correctly points out in his comment, in taking liberties I've mostly created Euler diagrams. Venn diagrams are a subset of Euler diagrams, checkout the difference.]

Ready to learn, smile and cry (just a little)?

Let's do this!

#1: How to Win, Really Win, at Digital: One-Time PLUS Many-Time Relationships.

The most intense amount of effort companies put into their site happens at site launch or the yearly new product launch. Everyone gets excited, agencies are hired, content is scraped from product box-shots, prettiness is sprinkled everywhere and much happiness, represented by a gigantic sigh of relief, occurs.

All of that is good.

The challenge is that this annual, or semi-annual, update of the content or the website design, is a terrible way to win at digital.

All the stuff you've launched is great for showcasing your company and its products. It delivers conversions when I visit your site once and buy something. But beyond that engagement, that one-time relationship if you will, there is no reason for me to ever come back. Because you don't have anything updated on your website. If I remember everything you sell, I might come back the next time I need something from that everything. Or due to some incredible co-incidence if I bump into your brand when I'm thinking of buying something from your everything.

A secondary, under-appreciated, challenge is that search engines value freshness of content. Once you launch your site, it becomes stale in due course (from a organic search signal perspective). It impacts your organic rankings (even if there are tons and tons of factors that influence SEO results).

A final tertiary challenge is that in a world dominated by conversations and social, your static content rarely entices any new conversations. It is great that you've added a silly string of buttons to all your product pages, but there is hardly a reason for anyone to click on them. (Most of the time all they are is an ad for addthis or some other "free" provider of those buttons.)

If you want to truly rock digital, this is what your digital strategy should look like…

So do your periodic product launches/site refreshes. But almost all your content energy should be poured into fueling the creation of dynamic content! You should have an incredibly amazing blog for your company (more on this below). You should have a robust strategy to earn compelling product reviews. You should have a well defined strategy to create videos and how-to content (constantly updated with solutions to new pain points of customers). You should talk about how innovation works in your company. Your employees should tell their stories. And so on and so forth.

This constantly updated content provides me more reasons to visit your website and stay in touch with your brand. It is also immensely beneficial for search engine optimization (great content, delivered fresh, every day!). Finally it generates a constant stream of social amplification and social conversations!

So do you have a static AND dynamic strategy for your digital existence?

Patagonia is amazing at this. They have a fantastic website where I can buy fantastic stuff that I fantastically love. In addition to that they have amazing content like what you'll see at Patagonia Surfing, and they have a regularly updated awesome blog The Cleanest Line and so much more. As a result I have a one-time and a many-time relationship with the Patagonia brand.

Ditto for one of my favorite hotels in New York, The Standard. Great website for booking rooms and all that. But they also have a great blog/culture guide/all things cool and amazing sub-site called The Standard Culture. I have a time-to-time relationship with their brand (whenever I have to visit New York). I also have a many-time relationship with them because of all this amazing dynamic content – which ensures that I love the brand and that in turn always makes my hands type their url when I have to visit NYC! That is what you want.

I'll be remiss if I did not provide you with two examples of what magnificent product reviews look like.

I love the ones on Williams Sonoma, they are detailed and include a title, a rating, specification on cooking ability and length of ownership sections are my fave and an overall recommendation. They also have, for each review, social amplification buttons! I also love the reviews on Rent The Runway. Can't you just imagine how much value those 102 photos and huge number of reviews add? Not to mention how helpful they are to current or prospective customers!!

So what is your balance of static vs. dynamic? Is it as outsized as the second picture above? It should be.

It is the only way to win big.

#2: The Secret to Content Marketing Success.

Content marketing is all the rage these days. Everyone is contenting a lot of content about content marketing. There is even an institute about it.

On the surface it is hard to argue about the value of content. On paper, what could possibly go wrong with creating or curating content with an eye to driving sales or influencing current or future customers?

Nothing.

Except that most content deployed in the service of content marketing sucks. For two simple reasons: 1. It is actually really hard to create good content, you have to know a lot about the subject matter. 2. We simply can't help pimping ourselves/our products/our services.

When our current/potential customers encounter the fluff pieces which are glorified vehicles for our not so subtle pimping, they quickly see through both things leading to sub-optimal results. And depending on when you want to open your eyes and see reality, you end up realizing content marketing does not work.

Let me share with you my simple rule for creating content that markets itself.

When people ask me how I decide what I write about on this blog, my answer is that prior to launching this blog I'd decided a simple rule for myself. Only post content that is 1. incredible 2. of value to the audience and 3. sans pimping.

I've worked very hard to follow this rule every single time I post something. The content here – and you are the ultimate judge of this – represents what I consider to be something incredible that you will find to be of value. I have a lot of other incredible things to write, but if I believe you won't find them to be of value, it gets killed. (I wish you knew how many posts I've discarded because they did not meet that simple criteria!)

The rule impacts my work in other, big, ways. For example, if I did not have time to write something incredible of value, I've not written anything. The deadline comes and goes, if I have nothing, you get nothing. It is also the reason my posting schedule over the last five years has gone from twice a week to once a week to once every two weeks to once every three weeks. (Amazingly, the blog traffic has gone from 2k a month to 150k a month!)

Finally, I've never accepted ads on this blog. In the right nav you'll see two discreet sections with my books and my start up Market Motive. That could possibly be considered advertising. There are three posts out of 283 about my book, and just five that mention Market Motive. Very little pimping, because I respect your capability to see what I'm selling and buy it if you feel it is a fit for you. (And you have!)

I'm not unique in following the above visual. There are many, many others. People and companies. Waaaaay more successful than I can ever dream of becoming. If content marketing is their strategy, the common thread is always the same. Something incredible, of value, with the barest minimum pimping.

It is the only way to win big.

#3: Data, Data Everywhere and Yet We are an Abject Failure.

I work with many medium to large companies around the world. Every single one has an impressive array of tools, many of them even have an equally impressive array of analysts.

Yet a heartbreakingly huge number of them stink at a company level. By that I mean they might have some pockets of excellence, but overall their site stinks, their customer experience (end-to-end) is awful, and their digital strategy is, on the greatest possible day when every single star is aligned perfectly, adding 1/10th the value it should.

Why?

It is the simple combination of how each division/group of people inside, and sometimes outside (agencies, et. al.), the company are organized and incentivized (as in what metrics determine their bonus).

Acquisition is everything we do to attract traffic. Behavior covers everything that happens after the person lands on our mobile or desktop site. Outcomes are what happen just before the visitor leaves our site (money to us, satisfaction to them).

Companies have an Email team and an SEO team and a PPC team and a Social Media team and a Display team and…. many teams for acquisition. They are often measured on impressions (or worse, "connections") and clicks. Then that is all they optimize for. They take zero responsibility for crappy landing pages, or even 404s on landing pages.

Then there is the "site team." Euphemism for we will do anything to keep the site up but really all we do is launch pages that someone will ask us for and we really don't know who is coming to the site or what is driving them there and we rarely speak to marketing or agency but the site is pretty cool, we think.

Finally, there is someone in IT responsible for running the cart and checkout process. It is unclear that what their bonus is based on, but it is rarely abandonment rates or task completion rates.

Depending on other variables, there might be someone who looks at conversion rates (usually sans a lot of other context).

Each might work on their own little circle, there is no incentive to look end-to-end, or even at the overlaps/hand-offs.

So fix that.

Make sure your executive dashboards obsess about acquisition, behavior and outcome metrics. Make sure that every single report you create has acquisition, behavior and outcome metrics (download this example:Page Efficiency Analysis Report).

Force each team to think end-to-end and you will incentivize the right behavior across your company.

It is the only way to win big.

[Bonus: Download nine additional custom reports, and a VP-level dashboard, I've created with ABO as a foundation, directly into your Google Analytics account: Occam's Razor Awesomeness ]

#4: Optimize for your Global Maxima: Obsess About Macro AND Micro Outcomes!

The average conversion rate for a typical top ecommerce site is around 2%. And sadly, we are not at the top, so we tend to do worse.

When we obsess only about conversion rates on our website, the problem is that that is an obsession with just 2% of the site outcomes. We end up looking at the world through a straw, and the best we can do is a lot less than the best we can actually accomplish.

This is not to say that you should not worry about conversion. You should. But when your strategy looks like the one above, powered by looking through a straw, you'll optimize for the local maxima.

That is not terrible. It is just not awesome. Your parents will always pat you on your head and say "Oh sweetie, you could have been something. Something so much more."

And who wants that? You want to live up to your fullest potential!

That means you'll have to care about your macro-outcome, the ecommerce conversion or your lead submitted conversion or donations made to your non-profit conversion. But you'll also have to care about your micro-outcomes!

Some of these micro-outcomes will directly lead to your macro-outcome. For example, people signing up for your email marketing list will convert in the near future. Or people who create wish lists, sign up for product alerts, watch product videos today etc. They are all signaling intent to convert.

But other micro-outcomes might not be directly related to a near future macro-outcome. For example, people who subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. Or people who follow you on social media or subscribe to your YouTube channel or sign-up to volunteer for your non-profit or download your utility marketing mobile app etc. All these outcomes bring people closer to your brand, an awesome outcome.

When you measure the success of your AdWords campaigns or your email blasts or your Facebook ads or any other acquisition initiative, make sure you report your macro-conversion rate. But don't stop there. Make sure you report your micro-conversion rate as well. Teach your company to optimize their digital strategy for a portfolio of outcomes, macro plus micro. And if you compute economic value of digital – the value of macro plus micro outcomes – your career will be on the fastest possible track to fame and happiness!

Best of all, this will mean you are optimizing for the global maxima.

It is the only way to win big.

[Bonus: Learn more about macro and micro conversions as they apply to a B2B company, Texas Instruments, and a technical support site .]

#5: Rent or Own? The Optimal Social Media Investment Strategy.

This is a new trend amongst companies. Swept up in the fervor of Google+, Facebook, YouTube and other social platforms, they are massively shifting their resources (people, time, dineros) into their presence on these new platforms.

That in of itself is not a bad thing. Everyone knows there are a quadrillion people on Facebook. It is absolutely a valuable audience.

The bad thing is that all this seems to come at the cost of investing resources on efforts related to the company's website. So many companies have irrelevant posts by expensive employees on Facebook all day long (more on this below), and don't spent the little bit of money to create a mobile website. #arrrrrhhhhh

Remember, when you create a presence on Facebook, Google+, Sina Weibo, Vkontakte, you are renting.

You don't own the domain, you don't own the customer data, you don't create/own the rules, you can't influence changes, you don't have a say in how many characters you can type or how long your video can be or how much creativity you can express. You play by their rules (after all you are just renting).

This does not make those platforms any less valuable. But it is astounding silly to have your rented presence come at the cost of a platform you own!

Build your own magnificent platform first. Where you create the rules, you control the evolution, you own the customer data, you have a direct relationship with your audience, you get to decide what happens next (or if ever!), and there are no limits to your experimentation with creativity!

Once you nail your own existence, move on to nailing your rent existence.

And going forward, always forever remember the balance between own and rent. Outsized investment in ownand an appropriate, demonstrated by the best social media metrics, investment in rent.

It is the only way to win big.

#6: The World's Greatest Social Media Strategy.

Why does L'Oreal Paris USA, a multi-billion dollar corporation with a marketing budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, have fewer followers than I do on Twitter?

Why is the talking about this brand metric for Avis rent-a-car less than half of what it is for my brand page (and I have 50,000 fewer Likes than they do!)? Remember, Avis is a corporation with thousands of employees in tons of countries.

Why does TravelZoo have 224k fewer Followers on Google+ than I do?

All these companies are big and magnificent, and I'm very small and inconsequential. So, why?

The answer is simple: this is their social media strategy…

They wake up everyday and, on the world's greatest channels for conversations, they shout at people. Every single post they write, every single tweet they send, is simply another variation of BUY IT NOW!

The challenge is, as the See Think Do framework emphasizes, a tiny, tiny, minority of the audience is there to buy anything. (If you need more proof, just see how poorly advertising performs on these platforms.)

Just because you are good at shouting on TV/Radio/Print/Display does not imply that that is what you do on social media. Even if you somehow manage to get a bunch of Likes/Followers/+1s, your conversation rate, amplification rate and applause rate will be pathetic.

So stop that.

These channels are awesome (also see visual #5 above). Here's the strategy that works…

Pimp your stuff sometimes – say twice a week. And if you can be clever about it, like getting your customers to pimp for you, even better.

Ninety-five percent of the time create conversations and try to add value to your customers/likers/+1ers.

Write about topics both of you are interested in. If you sell smoothies, talk about food, how to develop a great palette, travel, evolution, agriculture, the future of the planet… the topics are endless.

Provide utility. Share tips on how to make my life better. Share tips on a healthy lifestyles, exercise, wellness of children, latest relevant mobile apps…. the topics are endless.

Your customers have given you permission to interrupt their day. Don't suck at it. Be respectful of their attention. Create a warm space in their heart for your brand. Contribute something incredible, of value.

That is the only way to win big.

That's it. Six simple visualizations, and solutions, for complex marketing, analytics and life challenges.

As always, it is your turn now.

Is there a venn diagram that resonates more with you than others? Which one least reflects reality? What does your company's digital balance between static and dynamic content look like? What percent of your social contributions is BUY IT NOW? Does your company execute for visual number one or two for outcomes? How incredible and of value is your content marketing content?

Please share your wisdom, stories, critique, and praise via comments.

Thank you.

via Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/six-visual-digital-marketing-analytics-strategic-solutions/