Giraffe Forum

Thanks to the Web, customers are more powerful and demanding and we can learn a lot more about them.

The Web shifts power away from organizations and towards customers. Historically, the tools of organization were scarce and expensive resources. Assembling a couple of thousand people and getting them to work towards a common goal was no easy feat. But the Web has democratized the ability to organize. From the age of organizational royalty, the Web has ushered in a period of customer democracy.

The implications for organizational strategy are significant. Organizations can no longer advertise the customer into submission. Organizations can no longer control the message so easily through public relations. Organizations can no longer expect customers to invest time in learning the language of the organization and/or how to use the organization’s products and services.

The customer demands simplicity, that organizations organize around them. Easy to use is a customer tsunami ripping across the world. Ease of use and simplicity must now be at the heart of organizational strategy.

The customer knows what they want on the Web. Search, by its very nature, is a directed, deliberate activity. When was the last time you went to Google and said: “I don’t know what to search for. Someone give me a word.”

This has significant implications for marketing strategy. Many web initiatives are dominated by traditional marketing thinking oriented towards getting attention. This significantly influences the design of webpages, particularly homepages. But when a customer arrives at your webpage you already have their attention. They have questions. They have a task they want to complete quickly.

On the Web customers always leave a trail. Everywhere they go they leave digital footprints. So, we have this unusual combination of the empowered, confident customer about whom we know an increasing amount.

A technology company I work with has lots of customers who need to repeatedly download a certain type of software. By storing the history of these software downloads and presenting it back in a 1-click download fashion, they save their customers’ a lot of time.

Using knowledge about customers to make their lives easier is a win-win situation. Abusing that knowledge is an increasingly risky business. Social media is the customer’s form of advertising and public relations. The tools of media are now in the customer’s hands.

One of the simplest and most effective ways to understand customers is observing their behavior. The Web is a laboratory of human behavior and knowledge of that behavior is often best gained through watching a customer as they seek to complete a task. This can all be done remotely. In fact, remote observation is the cheapest, fastest and most effective form of observation.

The Web changes strategy from being focused on how things are produced to how they are used, how they are consumed. It is the outcome and behavior we need to pay attention to, not the input. Customers demand ease of use. The way to make things easy to use is to better understand customer behavior. To do that we need to observe what people do.

If your organization wants to make best use of the Web focus your strategy on making things easy for your customers.

Strategy is defined at a senior management level. Good content can help implement that strategy.

I believe in the power of web content, particularly words. I have spent my career of nearly 18 years encouraging organizations to take content seriously. And what’s the most important thing I’ve learned? Don’t talk about content.

If you want to get paid more, don’t talk about content. If you want more respect, don’t talk about content. If you want to make progress in your web career, don’t talk about content.

I love content. My best friends are writers and we can spend hours and hours talking about the minutiae of writing. It’s good fun. But it’s one thing to talk about content to your friends and peers and entirely another to talk about it to senior managers.

Yesterday evening I had a conversation with a senior manager. It lasted about three and a half minutes. It was for a large intranet. I talked about employee productivity, efficiency, being task driven, helping them do their jobs better, get products out the door faster, be more flexible and adaptive. I didn’t mention content once. “Send me a proposal,” he said.

If we get this contract much of the work will involve choosing the right words. We will do extensive research to understand the employee tasks. We will come up with a large task list, perhaps as long as 500. We will work for perhaps 6 weeks to shorten that list under 100. And practically all that work will be around the choice of words.

But I didn’t tell the senior manager about this because I know he has absolutely no interest in it. He just doesn’t care. I have found that not alone does he not care but if I started talking about this content stuff, he’d lose a lot of respect for me.

Isn’t the first skill of the content professional to have empathy for your audience, to understand what they care about and communicate to them in their language? Most senior managers should have an organization strategy with which they are charged to implement. We need to tell them about how we can make them more successful by helping them implement THEIR strategy.

Instead content professionals want a content strategy, user experience professionals want a user experience strategy, IT professionals want an IT strategy, and senior managers, of course, have (or should have) an organization strategy. This silo-fication of strategy does not lead to a better customer experience.

I am well aware that Kristina Halvorson has done excellent work in promoting the importance of quality content, and that she very much stresses the need for content strategy. However, I would argue that content is strategic, not strategy.

To me the essence of strategy on the web is customer centricity. The Web is about the rise of customer power. Social media is just one example of that. Is the organization truly going to focus on and organize around the customer? That’s the key strategic question. How do we frame content in that context? So, it’s not about content but rather about culture, because as the great Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

To earn more money and get more respect, you need to become a manager of tasks, not a manager of technology, and certainly not a manager of content.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years is that content gets no respect from senior management. Associating yourself with content is a guaranteed way to ensure your career goes nowhere.

The phrase “content management” is an oxymoron in most organizations. At best, it relates to the process of buying fancy technology that will hopefully ‘manage’ the content automatically.

Look what happened to knowledge management; a cousin of content management. Knowledge management became data management. It was about finding the cheapest way possible to store lots and lots of stuff that just might be of some use at some point in the future.

I heard a great definition of a knowledge manager once:
My mother doesn’t understand what I do.
My boss doesn’t understand what I do.
I don’t understand what I do.

The library might have lots of books on leaders, but leaders rarely start out as librarians. The people who become CEOs are sales people, accountants, and technicians. And what do they all have in common? What they do has a quantifiable, measurable impact on the success of the organization.

If taking a content approach is the wrong way to manage your website, then taking an IT approach is even worse. IT is essential but it is a tool, not a management approach. Managing from an IT perspective encourages lots and lots of projects with lots and lots of features and lots and lots of complexity.

We need a new type of manager. Someone who understands the value of content and IT, but who is relentlessly focused on helping customers quickly complete tasks.

What the task manager does can have a quantifiable impact on the success of the organization. A government task manager can show that they are delivering better services to citizens. An intranet task manager can show that they are making other staff more productive. A university task manager can show that they are bringing more and better qualified students to the university.

I know lots of talented people working away at web content trying to do the best job they can. The problem is that it doesn’t really matter to the organization whether they are doing a good job or not. 500 words of content is not measurable in any quantifiable way that means anything to a senior manager.

However, quality content is crucial to task completion. Without content, there would be no Google. Without content, there would be no Amazon. Without content, there would be no eBay, no Twitter, no Facebook.

So, why don’t ‘they’ (senior management) get it, you ask? How come your intranet is run on a shoestring? How come your public website is still dependent on the hand-me-downs from print? How come there’s not enough resources to remove out-of-date content?

Because talking about content is talking about costs. Talking about customer tasks is talking about value. Identify your customers’ top tasks. Then measure your success based on your customers’ ability to quickly complete these tasks. Becoming a task manager is how you will advance your career.

“Techmeme has redesigned,” Gabe Rivera founder of the popular technology news site wrote in January 2012. “Drudge Report is now indisputably the web’s ugliest news site.”

I use Techmeme all the time. I find it an excellent news website. It’s a collection of well-selected links to important issues in the technology industry. It doesn’t look pretty but it works fine for me. Asides from the quality of its stories it also has black text on white background and a fairly large size, legible font.

Gabe Rivera claims that Drudge Report is “the web’s ugliest news site.” That’s probably true, as well as the fact that Drudge Report is one of the web’s most influential and most highly trafficked websites. Again, it’s a bunch of carefully selected links laid out in the most basic manner possible.

Just like Craig’s List, another website whose homepage is dominated by links and not a single image. A very ugly website. Ebay, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and Google are not much better in the visual design area.

Did ugly visual design help these websites become more successful? The accepted wisdom in the web design industry is, absolutely not. Most web designers would say that Craig’s List and Drudge Report would be much more successful if they had a more pleasing visual design. There are studies from, for example, Stanford University, that state that the visual appeal of the website significantly influences people.

However, in the research we’ve been doing over the years we have found that visual appeal is rarely a major factor for the customer. The accuracy, up-to-datedness and completeness of the information are critical issues. The clarity of the menus and links is hugely important to people, as is the quality of the search.

But I think there is a deeper reason why people prefer ‘ugly’ design. When I was buying a camera recently I did a lot of research. I learned to avoid most content from the camera manufacturers, particularly videos. These manufacturer videos that claimed to explain how the camera worked were mainly re-purposed TV ads. They were beautifully produced and were really irritating and content-free. They were utterly useless. A hundred times better were the really badly produced YouTube videos by expert photographers who were actually using these cameras.

When we watch people try to complete tasks on websites we notice that often the more visually appealing something is, the more they ignore it. If it looks like marketing or an ad, then people dismiss it as having low value or credibility.

In the eyes of many customers, ugly equals authentic and credible. Ugly helps you get the task completed quickly without any fuss or distraction. Ugly is going to give you the details. Ugly is not hiding anything. Ugly does not waste your time on surface images and trivial jargon and hype.

In about the last 100 talks I have given to web professionals I show them two alternative registration pages that were tested. One page was 40% more successful than the other at getting people to register. That is an absolutely enormous difference in effectiveness. I ask the audience of web professionals to choose which one was more successful and practically every time, 80% of them choose page B. Page A was 40% more successful. Page B was prettier, a nicer visual design. Page A was uglier. But time and time again, ugly gets the job done.

The most important thing is that a link is clearly understood to be a link. That way, when you scan the page you can immediately identify the links.

“Techmeme has redesigned,” a Techmeme story stated in January 2012. “Drudge Report is now indisputably the web’s ugliest news site. In the beginning, links on web pages were underlined, because that let us know they were links. And it was good. But all those underlined words started to afflict the eye, particularly on pages with many links. Over time many web sites, including news sites, abandoned underlines altogether, and more recently even Google News dispensed with all their underlines.”

A link is a signpost. A good signpost instantly communicates that it is a signpost so that you can focus on what is on it. A good signpost does not draw attention to itself. It is all about the destination.

In my previous issue about links, I wrote about how the link should not be the file/format. So, for example, you should not call the link “PDF” but rather “Installation instructions”. What I omitted to say—and what was pointed out to me—was that it’s a good idea to have PDF at the end of the link.

The customer’s expectation is that when they click on a link they will be sent to an ordinary webpage. If anything else is to happen, they should be told in advance. So, the best link in my example above would be: “Installation instructions (PDF, 2 MB)”. So, you are telling people that if they click on the link they will be getting a PDF and it is 2 MB which gives them a sense of how long it takes to download.

Speaking of PDFs, they are generally not a good idea. They are often a lazy way of publishing, a quick and dirty way of getting print content up on the Web. PDFs are not a web format. They are a way of delivering print content using the Web as a distribution channel. If your website is full of PDFs then your organization is probably still living in the print world. Your website will almost definitely be less effective.

One of the most interesting things about thinking linking is that it forces us to think about the outcome rather than the input. Those who embrace links invariably embrace the customer and what the customer wants to do. If the conversation is all about the content itself, the images, the blogs, tweets, the technology, then that conversation quickly becomes very internal, very organization-centric.

To focus on the link means asking crucial question such as: What does the customer want to do next? And once you ask that question you are forced to think of the language of the link. I’ve seen data from political campaigns that showed the words “contribute” and “donate” getting very different reactions. Mere words.

Your words are by far the most powerful tools you have. Specific, precise words. Carefully honed and tested. Anchored in data, not opinion. It was like that back in 1994 when I started off in the Web, and it’s like that today.