Here’s my latest post-holiday theory:
There are four challenges facing organisations online and over the next few months, I’d like to dedicate some time to investigating how organisations are responding to these, share lessons between them and analyse best practice.
Each challenge has come about as the internet has evolved though some organisations are at different points in their own internet presence. They are challenges because of the equality of the internet. Fail to meet them, and someone else will fill the void.
The first challenge is getting your content online – and looking good. It was the first challenge of the internet, back in the day when copy had to be well written, graphics large and with plenty of routes back to your offline organisation.
At this stage, you promote your website through advertising. If you watch an old episode of Friends you will see that it concludes with a little strapline giving you the AOL keyword (which was, err, Friends). The challenge for getting your website right was similar to producing a good corporate brochure.
You’re getting lots of users because you are a big organisation, or a smaller number but it doesn’t matter because it’s in proportion with the number of phone calls you get.
A whole variety of organisations are here at the moment. From small charities such as the Social Market Foundation to FTSE100 companies like Amec. That’s not intended to be provocative or pejorative – there may be good strategic reasons for these organisations not doing more online.
The second challenge was getting your content profiled on search engines. Up until Google this didn’t really matter. But from 2000/01 onwards, top ranking on search engines was the critical success factor for an organisation’s website. The content may not change much, although copy could be written specifically for search.
At this point, an organisation starts to spend more money online. It might invest in some search engine optimisation advice or some search advertising. For the most experimental organisations, microsites and subdomains provide a route to improve SEO and rank more prominently on alternative (and competitive) search terms. Now your important audiences are in one place – and it’s Google’s top 10.
You start to get an audience larger than your offline reputation suggests. You can reach to a wider audience – though not necessarily a more useful one – but it reaches beyond your borders.
The Hackney Council is around here and corporates such as BP.
The third challenge is making your website interactive. Now the content really starts to change. It becomes multimedia, share-able, a set of questions and hypotheses with a comments box rather than a statement of fact set in stone.
The task of promoting the site is different because it’s spread over a number of sites – YouTube, Flickr and now Twitter. It’s about establishing your organisation’s footprint across the web and reaching out to users wherever they are. But your reaching an important audience and engaging with an influential community.
Meeting this challenge and larger amounts of money are being spent. Because despite all the free platforms available, the task of making sure your content is better than the lively amateur is tricky. And a larger investment is justifiable because more of your audience is online.
There are many more organisations here, and I’d include The Guardian parts of the RSA site and Liverpool FC.
The fourth challenge is turning volume into value. If you are LFC you may be able to fill a football stadium with your Twitter followers, but will they pay to watch your premium content? They may be Guardian readers who will re-tweet your articles, mash-up your data or help Jemima Kiss with an article. But how many of them will? And where’s the value for the publisher? And how can you get one million YouTube viewers of Susan Boyle into valuable eyeballs for ITV?
Some organisations are here by default, because they’ve chosen to follow a (controversial) paywall system. The FT for example. But many more are asking the question and struggling to find the answer.
These four challenges may be a little broad and they may flatten out some complex issues. But these are the challenges facing organisations online.
Internet advocates, such as Seth Godin and Clay Shirky, rightly praise the maginificent impact of the internet in empowering new communities. But it’s a different task entirely for traditional organisations. It can be done. But until there’s a greater focus on it, the election of Barack Obama will remain the outstanding case study for linking online activism with real lasting social change.
I want to dedicate a decent amount of time to exploring, investigating and sharing how organisations are confronting these challenges. Who’s with me?
Related posts:
- Journalism matters but so do big news organisations
- Activists to members to activists
- Is Compass successful in engaging its members?
- Peter Gulacsi: challenges for 2009/10
Tags: Blogging, online activism
I’m with you. Unsurprisingly. The more I have space to engage with this the more I am interested in it. We should talk – if we weren’t already…good post anyway…
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