Well, when I first heard about Google Wave, I was curious.  Then I watched the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009 (fair warning, pretty long but worth it) and I was BLOWN away!  My mind started racing thinking about the possibilities.  This real-time interaction with an audience was absolutely mind-boggling.  I really think that  Google can give Facebook a run for it’s money if they were to integrate it with Orkut. From the things called Wavelets , Blips and Robots to my favorite, embedded wave (see below), there are amazing and endless possibilities.

At first, Google Wave was invite only.  That created such a feeding frenzy!  The twitterverse was clamoring and bartering for Wave invites.

After 2 months of begging and pimping, I FINALLY got my invite!  Exciting, right!!!  I jumped right in like a kid ripping open the GI Joe box on Christmas morning!  I’m logged in!

Then….the unthinkable!

Uh….er…now what?!  Where do I start? This isn’t like my beloved Gmail.  This isn’t like Twitter.  How do I add an extension?  Where do I find them ? And most importantly, I had no one to Wave to <play fail music from the price is right here>.  So I’ve been sitting in waiting, diligently sending out my invites to friends and family only to have a handful actually try it.  Imagine what it was like to be the first few people on Twitter.  Without the masses GWave was like being a castaway on a deserted island with my fellow plane crash survivors staring at a screen goin’, “ok, now what”.  Oh there have been some REALLY creative uses.  Take this video for example:

Google Wave has just been released to the masses with the doors to it’s potential WIDE open.  I’ve set up our company with the apps integration and we can now start waves with clients and partners for great collaborative efficiency, realtime feedback, and powerful extensions that make the client experience that much richer.

But embedded waves are where I’m really excited to see the imagination of developers with extensions and new dialogs that will emerge from both P2P but also a new dialogue with brands.

If you have a Google account you can sign up for Wave and reply to the poll, add comments, widgets, blips bleeps and blops!  Then when you’re done, you can share this Wave with other wavers.

If you haven’t tried it, you really should and this could be your first blip! When you’re done, you can tweet about it or even Buzz it and keep it in the family!

After countless conversations with advertising agencies struggling to introduce either trusted partners or build in-house digital capabilities into the fold of their client deliverables, I decided to write this a series of posts to help agencies turn picas into pixels.

In this series you’ll learn how to evaluate if adding Interactive capabilities is worth the effort, who should OWN Interactive within your agency’s organizational structure and how to find and vet out trusted and valued partners and staff.

Those Were (NOT) the Days!
Back in the mid-nineties download speeds were 14.4 baud rates (look it up kiddies). There was nothing elegant about the user experience. The IT department owned Interactive and the Marketing department was the client. Talk about oil and water. “Back in the Days” it was like the wild west. Every week the rules changed, new technology advancement spawned countless other great innovations nearly as fast as the bad ones simply disappeared.

It’s not What it Looks Like
With the advance of browser capabilities, computing power and authoring tools, the importance of the visual design helped shift the balance of power from the IT team to the marketing departments. For the most part it has now become a client/vendor relationship where IT (read development team) is serving the Marketing department (read creative team) as their client. The problem, unfortunately, is that marketing departments typically don’t have neither the understanding nor the appreciation for the complexity of producing digital works.  In addition, the principals of designing for print do NOT apply for the web.

The Missing Link
So IT shouldn’t own Interactive because they just don’t get design. Marketing shouldn’t own it because it’s heavily dependent upon technical execution. So who owns it? Wait, there’s more. Digital works are interactive in that you push a button and something happens; they are utilitarian in that the serve a functional role of the user. Enter UX design. UX design is an amalgamation of visual design, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, heuristics, taxonomy, library and information science, human factors and psychology. And because of the nebulous nature of UX, it is the most elusive element for advertising agencies grasp it’s importance. If you think about, the user experience is much different when your target audience is driving down a freeway compared to the user experience of casually perusing a magazine. Now throw in a media channel that mimics the video message of TV, audio voice of radio, content depth of print, 1:1 messaging of direct mail, oh, and the user can provide input that generates real-time metrics! This is like no other user experience in a traditional agency’s media arsenal. This is why UX matters- it is the missing link.

Can’t We All Get Along?
So, IT doesn’t own Interactive nor creative. Who, then? The answer is none of the above. Ownership of Interactive projects should rest with highly specialized teams of a triumvirate of marketing/creative, IT/technology and User Experience (UX) design experts where Marketing answers the “who and why”, IT answers the “what” and UX Design answers the “where and how”. It’s not to say that that the interactive team becomes a silo, on the contrary, you’re still the client’s brand steward and without the traditional media in sync with the interactive tactics, it becomes a disjointed mess. Ego clashes will occur. The Creative Director will want to ignore basic usability tenants for a creative end or a developer will push back on a design because it adds to their workload and all the while, the client is asking you to make the logo bigger <wink>. In the end, remember, it’s all about aligning the team’s input to with user’s intent on the site. Follow the WWUD principal – ask yourself “What Would the User Do” In a old school v. new school stand-off, ask that question and right decision will be clear. Remember, a beautiful, well branded site with dysfunctional usability is not a site – it’a a PowerPoint presentation.

Interactive is Old Enough to Sit at the Adult Table
In the end, you must rethink the agency organizational structure to include your interactive lead (in-house or partner) at the strategic planning level. It’s tempting to feel like an Interactive expert after running a couple successful projects. Don’t trick yourself! Interactive changes at the speed of light. Unless you are constantly reading, learning, eating, breathing and living digital, you will make very costly mistakes. You must create a collaborative process whereby input from the Interactive lead is provided at the very earliest stage of client engagement.

<< Part 1: Picas to Pixels Coming Soon – Find a Partner, Build a team or Both

Let’s start your journey with some thoughts that will help set your bearings:

Reality Check
So, are you sure you want to make the leap to go digital? Yes, you may have done a project here or there that you outsourced to a freelancer, but what I mean by “going digital” is committing to making it an on-going profit center. It’s important to understand that delivering interactive solutions goes way beyond putting links on a print communication piece. It’s a constantly evolving challenge where new fountains of specialties rise from the ground like geysers. The interactive space is both new and old, creative and technical, deceivingly simple and amazingly complex. Be aware that there’s no definitive RIGHT way to do anything digital; but there are definite ways to do it wrong. It will be your role to navigate these mine fields and to articulate the inarticulable to drive business goals that have the potential to generate millions and millions of directly attributable revenue for your clients.

You’re not in Kansas Anymore
If you are going to go digital, you must first forget everything you’ve learned about the organizational structure of a traditional agency. YOU WILL FAIL if you try to departmentalize the Interactive studio as a production resource. Interactive MUST be structured in a way the it interfaces with every single department of your agency- PR, HR, Media, Creative, Research, Client Services, you name it, it must be at the table. There is no right way to structure this because it greatly depends on your agency’s internal talent pool, access to trusted and valued partners and your willingness to go head-strong into an organizational paradigm shift.  The definite WRONG thing to do, is do what you’ve always done.

Anesthetize your Clients
What flies in the traditional space may crash in the digital. For example, a client may ask you to “move that image over a bit” on a web site after it’s developed. It may be innocuous or it may be as complex as asking the offset printer to move the image on a brochure that just came off of the press. Setting client expectations is critical. Educate them that Interactive is a process-driven, milestone-dependent and time consuming endeavor. Make it clear to the client that milestones are absolute and change orders will be eminent and budget and timelines will be directly affected by their actions. For example, early in my career I had a client on a big project who was constantly having us make really simple changes. It wasn’t until we were nearly completed the project that I realized the cumulative effect was over 50 hours in changes. So when I pushed back on the 51st hour of changes, it was really difficult to justify my position. Think of it as anesthesia-a little pinch in the beginning will eliminate a lot of suffering in the future.

Who Moved My Client?
If you lost a direct mail piece project to a competitor because they were doing the email flight, you should be “go digital” and fast. Each time a competitor has an opportunity to show of their skills to a client, it weakens your position with them. Why take the chance?

I’m Sorry…What Did you Say Our Budget Was?
When budgets are being threatened we all know advertising is the first to go. Demonstrating ROI on your deliverables is a great tactic to, at least, keep your share of the budget and at best–grow it. An inexpensive way to get data is using web analytics. Find a a brilliant digital strategist who is well versed in the available solutions, build a digital measurement plan and then have a team implement plan that will attribute your efforts and to the clients bottom line. Remember, arming your client that is jockeying for budget dollars within their organization with quantifiable data will not only defend your revenue share but also build loyalty to your agency.

Yes, We do Windows
The digital space is here to stay and more and more clients are looking for help with delivery. You have the home field advantage with your existing clients because you own the creative and/or strategy. Client’s are smart enough to know that they need to partner with an agency with demonstrated expertise so at first, building your portfolio will hinge on leveraging your relationship. Without this, you not only miss out on the revenue opportunity but also on landing a new client or expand your footprint in an account.

Never Count your Money When You’re Sitting at the Table
Let me be clear – profitable interactive work is NOT easy to accomplish. If done incorrectly, it could be very, very costly from not only a profitability perspective, but more importantly, it could kill a client relationship. But, if done right, it can be very profitable. The key to profitability is project management. Build processes, systems, routines and documentation crafted around your organizational strengths and weaknesses. Be sure to budget time for quality assurance and never forget that each change, regardless of how seemingly insignificant, impacts hours (re-read “Anesthetize your Clients”).

Never Color within the Lines
I don’t know about you, but I got in to this industry to exercise my creativity not to be the poster child for mediocrity. When you go digital, two things will happen: your least creative clients will start pushing out of their comfort zones and secondly, you’ll attract clients that value innovation and creativity. “What about this Twitter thing?”, clients will start to ask. Then all of the sudden your working on a new campaign integrating social media with their CRM platform that triggers 1:1 email campaigns to email address captured from the $2million dollar TV buy who’s CTA was to visit the $100,000 microsite you created. Did you see just what happened?! Yeah…you wanna “Go Digital”

Part 2: Who Owns Interactive ? >>

Are you using collaboration tools today to get things done through your team(s)? You probably are in some form or another (a shared folder on a server is a very simple collaboration tool). Do you wish you had that killer tool that solved all your problems? Well, the bad news is that one probably doesn’t exist. But to find the one (or two, or three) that best suit your needs, you need to spend some time developing your requirements before you hit Google and go crazy with trials. Chances are that you may have jumped into this process before without doing some up-front work, only to end up in the ‘death spiral’ into trial software evaluation hell.

This post assumes that you are in the application development space, although many of the concepts apply to other disciplines. Please also know that I won’t make any specific recommendations or in-depth comparisons of actual tools. That may come later, but the thrust of this post is to help you think about the many different considerations that should go into the selection of a tool for your needs.

Methodology
OK, so you’ve probably heard this or said this before. Make sure you understand your requirements! Trust me, you will save a lot of time and hassle if you do this up front. Here is the process I try to follow when evaluating software:

• Develop list of functional requirements
• Establish criteria for each functional requirement
• Create tracking mechanism for evaluation results
• Short-list tools for evaluation based on requirements
• Evaluate and record results
• Score results
• Choose!

General considerations
Here are a few things to consider before developing your requirements and scoring criteria. These will help generate some specific requirements based on your needs.

Team Geography
Teams that are disparate in location have some different needs, and if the location disparity involves significant time zone differences, the needs are even more specific. For example, if you are agile, you may want to use a tool that not only provides robust story management, but also includes some visual representations of the ‘big board’.

Development Methodology
If you want to use your collaboration tool(s) to enable your existing methodology, you will want to consider the key portions of your workflow that you want the tool to enable. For example, a lot of tools that I found are really geared toward agile methodologies. If you’re not using agile, and need to manage things at a more granular level, you might find that agile-focused tools won’t fit the bill.

Deployment
Are you prepared to host the software yourself? Remember, this means you’re on the hook to support it, install upgrades, deal with versioning issues, and all that fun stuff. If you even think that will be a struggle, then you’re probably not ready for it.

Cost Structure
There is little consistency in pricing structures for these tools. Drivers can be based on number of users, number of projects, storage, etc. Consider developing a couple of usage scenarios before evaluating tools. i.e. a scenario might assume 5 users, 10 active projects, 5 inactive projects, etc. Bump the numbers up based on a 6-12 month growth assumption to see how the cost scales.

Tasks
Task functionality could be as simple as being able to assign tasks to people and see the status of those tasks. It could be as complex as being integrated with project planning functions like milestone management, dependency management, GANTT views, etc. Does the tool send email notifications when tasks are assigned, when they are overdue? Are there customizable views for each user?

Document Management
This is probably the most common function of a collaboration tool. Think about whether or not you’ll need robust version control within the tool. Will you need to grant different users to the same project different permissions on different documents? Will you need to keep documents outside a ‘project’ (for example, process documents that are relevant across all projects). Is an automated workflow/approval process necessary to ensure the integrity of the documents being managed?

Issues/Defects
In my opinion, issues and defects are the two most critical aspects of a collaboration tool being used for software development. In essence, both require very similar elements. Description, priority, assignment, and status. Across those elements, you might have attachments, screenshots, etc. Consider workflow, as well. Is it important that defects pass through a specific workflow process to ensure that all are addressed appropriately? Some tools provide static, fixed workflows, while others allow you to create your own. Again, think about reporting, notification, and view customization as important considerations.

Source Code/Build Integration
Depending on your build/deployment process, you may desire some integration between your source code management system (Subversion, GIT, etc). There are a lot of considerations and variables here, so I won’t go into detail…that would be an entire post by itself.

Nuggets to Start With
As much as I’d love to just give you a ‘top 5′ list of the best tools out there, I don’t think that be fair. However, here are a few resources that should help get you started…enjoy!

Wikipedia list of collaboration software

Wikipedia comparison of project management software

Overview of available project management software