digitalshift.me

Platform competencies

Sun, 08 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This excellent article by Mark Thompson from 2015 sets out the definition of a ‘digital business’ as one that is specifically configured to exploit shared internet-based infrastructure’s unique ability to:

consolidate consumers into platforms of demand;
simplify supply and value chains; and
readily enable a much wider and plural supply base producing ecosystems of supply.

Sangeet Paul Choudary’s book Platform Scale explains the difference between ‘Pipe’ business models and ‘Platform’ business models:

Pipes create value through processes that co-ordinate internal labour and resource towards efficient delivery of value to aggregated consumers.
Platforms orchestrate value-exchanging interactions in their ecosystems using data about the participant.

The transition from pipes to platforms requires a shift in thinking:

Markets: Consumers to Producers
Competitive advantage: Resources to Ecosystems
Value creation: Processes to Interactions

And interestingly he argues that platforms need interaction-first thinking, above user-first thinking

A whole host of new skills and functions are needed to establish and grow a platform.

Market making

Standards: Define services in common ways to enable the market to operate.
Quality: Make the quality of each service transparent, whether that is determined centrally or through the community
Personalisation: Tailor each participants’ experience to ensure they are served the most relevant services from a large market
Matching: Match supply with demand using data and algorithms
Ecosystem: Enable an ecosystem of ancillary services through plug and play architecture

Growth

Marketing: Attract both producers and consumers to the platform
Virality: Design the platform to enable organic sharing with others
Lock in: Enable the build up of cumulative value such as reputation, influence, collections or learning filters

Behaviour and culture

Governance: Establish rules and decision-making procedures
Culture: Set community norms such as through moderation and curation
Behaviour: Reward desirable behaviour such as through UX or using friction
Feedback: Facilitate feedback from consumers to producers
Empowerment: Train and support market participants and devolve governance roles to them

A model for content and technology

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

To configure an organisation’s content and technology for maximum benefit, you need to know what the options are. This blog describes a model for content and technology options in terms of Sources, Platforms, Relevance, Automation and Engagement.

Sources

Content may be sourced manually or automatically. Once created it adds to a bank of content which can be reused:

User-generated: created by users themselves
Curated: aggregated from other sources and curated
Produced: produced in-house or commissioned externally

Platforms

Content may be published to different platforms (social, email, websites, apps, ads):

Native: content added to third-party platforms is likely to be optimised for discovery and promoted/boosted
Proprietary: content added to owned platforms is likely to be optimised for search and follow-on actions
Syndicates: content syndicated through deals, auto-posting or PR is likely to be optimised for referral
Advertisements: content occupying paid slots is likely to be optimised for clicks

Relevance

Consumers respond better to content tailored to their attributes, behaviours and preferences.

Segmentation: tailored for groups of consumers, based on aggregate data
Personalisation: tailored for an individual consumer, based on their data alone

Automation

Automation helps to promote content to the right person at the right time on the basis of an event, such as:

Attributes - such as location, demographics, interests
Interactions - such as reading, sign up, abandonment
Events - such as weather, holidays, news

Engagement

Users may engage with the content in a number of ways:

Subscribed to email or social channels
Shared on social media
Linked from their site
Commented on the post
Cookied and so available for remarketing

The new rules of digital marketing

Sun, 08 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

How can digital marketers co-ordinate content and data across fragmented systems?

“Multichannel marketing at its most complex includes automation, personalisation, attribution and resolution or transaction across every marketing and communications channel.” - The Reality of Multichannel Marketing, Econsultancy

Single view, not single place

Online channels are hungry: as they grow they generate more data. The temptation to hold onto it is too great to resist.

This creates a headache for digital marketers. A common situation is to find customer data split across many different systems: website content management systems, email marketing systems, social management platforms and search platforms - in addition to multiple internal CRMs and other data stores.

These systems are in many cases managed by different internal teams which makes integration hard. And platform providers don’t help since they prefer lock-in, so are incentivised to keep their data within their platform.

The dream of a single store for customer data cannot survive in this environment. Instead a more fruitful approach is to strive for unified views of customer data, using services that aggregate data from many stores (such as Funnelback). Digital marketers can set rules to determine how data from different stores is displayed alongside each other.

Content lives everywhere

Content lives in multiples places, not just the website. Social platforms demand native upload for the best performance. Mobile publishing, such as Facebook Instant articles and Google AMP, require new content formats. And content might live in other ancillary services too, like optimisation services (e.g. Optimizely) or scheduling systems (e.g. Buffer).

The demand for native upload will only increase as platform providers become more fragmented and more needy.

The dream of a single place where all content lives and is published cannot survive in this environment. Instead a more fruitful approach is to hold content in a system designed to present it in different formats and publish over APIs (e.g. Contentful). Digital marketers can then set rules to determine how content is sent to different platforms.

Analytics on every platform

Every platform includes analytics and this is creating new, more powerful ways of profiling users and marketing to them such as:

Segmentation and personalisation - serving more relevant content based on knowledge of attributes, behaviours and preferences
Remarketing and matches - creating more opportunities to interact based on past behaviour
Lookalike audiences - finding new people to target based on their similarity to existing customers

Each of these tactics could potentially be used on any channel/platform: on every website, email, social platform and search platform. Not just within each one, but between them too.

The dream of a single marketing system where all analytics live and marketing decisions are made cannot survive in this environment. Instead a more fruitful approach is to integrate software bilaterally, tying the APIs of many systems together using a rules platform (e.g. Zapier). Digital marketers can then set rules to determine what marketing decisions are made based on analytics on disparate platforms.

Digital Transformation

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Here are three powerful themes at the heart of digital transformations.

##1. Users Put user needs first.

The internet is a competitive space. Experiences must be world-class or customers will go elsewhere.

Design and manage services to prioritise customer experiences. Use research, data and feedback for continuous improvement.

For more see GDS Service Design manual

##2. Delivery

Select the right delivery paradigms.

Services need different approaches, tools and skills at different points in their lifecycles.

Use agile for new ventures - move fast and break things. Standardise running services - establish common open standards and processes for technology, content and design. Buy in commodities.

For more see Simon Wardley’s blog

##3. Platforms

Build platforms to enable new business models.

Bringing people together using digital technologies creates entirely new opportunities.

Allow people to create value by sharing or exchanging on your platforms or by building on top of your platforms.

For more see Platform Thinking

The New Marketing

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I think a lot of people don’t know what marketing should look like in an internet age.

Some people simply treat the whole internet as an a new marketing channel, like print or TV, through which they can blast their messages. Others claim that digital technologies have transformed our world so much that marketing is dead.

The truth is more subtle. Consumers no longer rely on classic push marketing to hear about products they might want. Nor do they necessarily trust messages they do hear from brands. Yet there are more messages and products than ever before, so they must employ new methods to find their way through the thicket of choice.

The Old Marketing

Traditionally marketing came before sales. Consumers made decisions based on ads. Sure, they might tell friends and family about a particularly good or bad product. But that dynamic was always relatively weak compared to the power of the marketer to influence millions.

As a result people felt distant from the brands that served them. A product was made and sold to them and they had little say in it. The service might be good but it was also opaque. How do you know how good the after-sales support is before you buy it? You don’t.

The New Marketing

Now peer effects are much stronger. People seek validation from the crowd before making decisions and have greater power to influence the buying decisions of others.

There is also more transparency about buying decisions - people know what they’re getting ahead of time. This brings them closer to brands and builds trust. Those companies that listen to what their customers say can create better products, more quickly.

Marketing, sales, the product itself and after-sales support are now completely intertwined. At every stage, peer effects are more powerful than push.

The Stages of Marketing

As always, focussing on the user’s needs and experiences is one of the most reliable ways to ensure a good result.

Here’s how I think about the stages of marketing:

Demand generation: Raise awareness of the product e.g. through search, banners, email, social, affiliates, platforms, partnerships.
Decision support: Overcome purchasing barriers e.g. through chat, documentation, blogs, communities, reviews.
On-boarding: Encourage deeper engagement with the product e.g. through sign up flows, first-run experiences, tutorials, lifecycle emails.
Peer marketing: Facilitate promotion from existing customers to new customers. e.g. by ‘baking in’ sharing or platform effects.
Co-creation: Listen and use data for continuous improvement e.g. through social, communities, feedback, reviews

Digital service maps

Sat, 09 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload - Richard Saul Wurman, What-If, Could-Be

Edward Tufte includes this quote before setting out the ‘Theory of Data Graphics’ in his seminal book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. His theory builds from the notion that information visualisations should seek to clearly portray complexity. This empowers the viewer and enables them to spot patterns and make decisions that they weren’t able to previously.

If digital professionals had better visualisations then they would probably be able to make better decisions too.

A major challenge at many organisations is managing the multiple touchpoints, particularly when there are several distinct audience or customer groups. Which customers are being targeted by which channels? Where are the opportunities for growth? Where is the scope for consolidation?

I’ve developed a simple visualisation which helps to address some of these questions. It shows all of the digital services which a particular audience or customer group might interact with.

The horizontal axis is the style of interaction:

Transactions: When the organisation makes a business-like exchange with others
Communications: When the organisation communicates its messages outwards to others
Engagement: When the organisation listens to, responds to and engages with others

The vertical axis is the place of consumption:

Owned: When the service is consumed on the organisation’s own software (e.g. its website)
Rented: When the service is consumed on third-party software (e.g. social media)
Sent: When the service is consumed on the customer’s own software (e.g. email, RSS)

These aren’t the only important properties of a digital service, but together they provide an interesting at-a-glance view of the customer’s digital experience.

They can also be used to compare the experience for different customer groups or the experiences offered by different organisations.

Changing minds

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

How do you persuade someone of something?

It took me a while to learn that logic, rhetoric and emotion aren’t always the most effective ways of changing people’s minds. It’s so tempting to think that if one argues better, stronger or more passionately then the opponent will yield. In fact, it often pushes them away and may even entrench them in their original views. More respectful approaches are usually required.

The same is true online. Whether you are selling a product or an idea, you have to start by acknowledging that your customer or audience will respond better if they feel in control.

In real life or online, a successful act of persuasion comes in three parts:

Telling a story to entice people’s interest and give them a way to understand your idea on both rational and emotional levels.
Hosting a conversation to help people interpret what they’ve heard and fit it into their worldviews.
Leading to action to help people achieve their goals and yours.

This framework is helpful because questions can then be asked at each stage:

Telling a story
- Who are you telling it to?
  A customer/audience segment
- What’s the story?
  An inviting journey wrapped around your idea
- How do you reach them?
  The right content delivered through the right channels
Have a conversation
- Who do they want to talk with?
  Each other and you
- What do they want to talk about?
  Your idea and their experiences
- How should you host the conversation?
  The right social and community platforms
Lead to action
- What do you want them to do?
  Fulfil their goals and yours
- How do they take action?
  By changing their behaviour

The answers form the beginnings of an online marketing plan.

Dimensions Of Strategy

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Should all digital strategies be the same?

It seems that many of the debates about strategy come down to where one stands on the following four questions:

Stand-alone vs. embedded: Is there a separate ‘digital strategy’ document or is the approach instead embedded in other strategy documents?
Instructive vs. emergent: Is the approach ‘top-down’ or does it emphasise fostering innovation so that solutions emerge ‘bottom-up’?
Centralised vs. decentralised: Is control exerted by specifying individual’s roles or by enforcing rules, standards and processes?
Iterative vs disruptive: Is the approach one of changing the present or breaking with the past?

The choices are inevitably as much a reflection of one’s personal values, intellectual paradigms and preferred styles of working as what is likely to be most effective for the organisation at that point in time.

Visualising Digital Systems

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

How do you visualise a digital system?

What media should we use for understanding the complex interplay of people, processes and technology that make up a modern organisation’s online communications?

This question came to me while watching this wonderful video on ‘media for thinking the unthinkable’ by Bret Victor.

He shows how particular human developments (for instance writing or mathematical notation) enabled great leaps in understanding because they allowed people to deeply consider and manipulate complex systems.

It struck me that there is a missing weapon in our arsenal: a language, a visualisation or - most likely - an interactive tool which would help us to describe, share, critique and play with our digital systems and so enable us to make better ones, faster.

I don’t know what the weapon would look like but I have developed some simple tools:

Project management system: a simple, generalised template for initiating projects of any size, along with a logging system.
Content promotion plan: a list of all the types of content with sign-off procedures and guidelines for social promotion.
Channel matrix: a grid indicating which channel (website, social media account, email list, RSS feed…) is for which audience.
Needs list: a list of needs for each audience
Needs template: a template for describing a need and the products and processes which are designed to meet it
Release checklists: a set of reminders for each stage of a product release: concept, specification, selection, launch, test
Dashboards: a set of real-time charts and tables showing key metrics for each channel

How do we go from these simple tools to a more sophisticated media for thinking about digital?

Design Variation

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The New York Times’ Snow Fall article continues to be talked about online and at meetups.

The Guardian had their own take on the style with Firestorm and usvsth3m have even produced a parody (the ultimate compliment) with Icefail.

Snow Fall and Firestorm are meant to be immersive experiences. Regardless of whether their goal is wholly achieved, they do show the power of considering design in tandem with content.

What’s interesting is actually not whether their particular mix of longform text, full-screen imagery and HD video is exactly right but instead how they highlight that web content as a whole is too uniform.

On most websites, whether newspapers or otherwise, pages carry the same basic design styles such as page furniture, fonts and basic layouts. This suits brand owners - who want recognisability and trust, information architects - who want navigability through the site and developers - who want content consistency.

The site which most consistently bucks this trend is The Verge, which regularly produces feature articles each with their own unique designs.

According to this Reddit AMA with the product team, this is handled in the CMS by letting each page include its own CSS snippets. There can then be dramatic design variation between articles, even though they are all still held in a central repository.

This is an impressive technological achievement which gives The Verge a big advantage in a competitive media environment. Design variation is part of their process, not a collection of one-offs.

It will be interesting to see what impact Snow Fall continues to have and how media outlets respond to the challenge of consistently matching their designs to their content.