Why do customers follow Cisco on Facebook, Twitter and community forums? That’s the question Cisco wanted to answer in order to better tailor the content they provide on these platforms.
The basic conclusion from the study was that customers use social media resources to advance their careers. Many Cisco customers are engineers.
They need to be updating their skills, gaining or renewing certifications. And social media is the platform where they can connect directly with brands and their peers.
We compared the social media top tasks results to the Cisco.com website using a study we conducted in 2010. Cisco.com is an enormous website, getting almost 250 million visits a year. The top tasks for Cisco.com were:
1. Download software, Firmware, drives, patches, and updates
2. Configure / set-up a product (tech guides, notes, how-tos)
3. Troubleshooting (bug fixes, diagnostics, guides)
We have done many top task studies over the years for technology companies and the top tasks we found for Cisco keep repeating themselves.
There are patterns out there when it comes to customers’ top tasks.
In the survey, these five social media tasks got as much of the vote as the bottom 35 tasks:
1. Network design (best practices, peer recommendations)
2. Configuration, installation, set-up, deployment
3. Training
4. Events (webcasts, seminars, Cisco Live)
5. Certification (requirements, renewal, status)
In contrast to the Cisco.com top tasks study, training, events, and certification bubbled to the top of customer tasks.
“Resoundingly, we learned our visitors are very focused on their career advancement,” states Leslie Lau, social media manager for Cisco. “They do this by learning from Cisco experts and keeping up with the latest news and technology developments. An effective way to quickly find the people and most up-to-date information is to connect directly with Cisco via our social media channels.”
Configuration is the only top task that appears both in the social space and Cisco.com. Of course, it’s not that one channel is exclusively for a particular task. You might discuss configuration in a community and then get more configuration information from the main website. You might find out about latest training and events on Facebook but then sign up on the main website.
Many tasks will have overlap and that’s why channels should not exist in isolation. The social space affects the traditional website space and vice versa. They are interlinked and dependent on each other. So, we need an overall strategy that focuses on tasks such as training and makes sure that no matter what channel the customer interacts with, they can complete their top tasks in a quick and easy manner.
So, what does Cisco do with this sort of top tasks data? According to Leslie, “It’s important that we incorporate what we’ve learned into what we do every day.” That involves measuring the “ability for your users to complete their tops tasks on the social channel”.
ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.
Governments, brands, institutions, experts are all facing a crisis of legitimacy. Digital is an accelerant in this collapse and in the making of a radically different world. How do we navigate this historically significant transformation?
The anchors of society are loosening. The traditional certainties are fading. It’s getting harder to know the present, let alone predict the future. People are aware that they are faced by enormous change but a growing number of them are no longer turning to traditional institutions in the search for certainty and answers. Religion, politics, brands; fewer people than ever believe.
There is nothing firm or certain about digital. A mountain is a mountain. It might not be there in a million years but it will be there tomorrow. A mountain of data can be quickly deleted, stolen, processed, moved. In minutes, a digital mountain can be gone.
We have never been more connected and disconnected. Paradoxes abound. Contradictions are the norm. It’s called the World Wide Web, yet it seems to create these ever-tighter tribes of like-minded people making like minds even more alike.
Trust, regarded as an essential glue for society, is collapsing all around us. Except for the elites. This small group trusts the institutions of society much more because, of course, they have done very well by these institutions. The incomes of the top 10 percent have grown dramatically over the last 30 years, and the incomes of the top 1 percent have grown stratospherically.
Meanwhile, in many societies, the middle class have become the new poor. The old poor face a world of diminishing choices and opportunities. The vaunted Millennials are better educated and poorer. They are the first generation in modern times that have less financial opportunities and job security than their parents. That truck and taxi overtaking you will soon be driven by a robot. Artificial intelligence is only getting started. The knowledge workers will not be immune to the march of the algorithms.
And yet.
And yet on a global basis, humanity has never been healthier or wealthier. More of the world is at peace today than has ever been in human history. Ordinary people everywhere have digitally transformed. They have embraced digital tools and they are using and innovating with them at a phenomenal pace. There is a world out there—within the many other worlds—of savvy, highly connected customers who are looking for genuine quality and real experiences.
Digital transformation has not occurred for most organisations. Most have fallen severely behind, with often appallingly-designed enterprise digital systems. It used to be that organisations led and invented the future. Today, it is ordinary people who are the inventors, the innovators, the leaders. The clever companies organise around their customers. They don’t seek to invent new experiences, but rather use digital as a looking glass, to see deep into the experiences that are already happening, and design so as to make these experiences deeper and richer.
Trust in institutions is gone and will probably not come back. Trust in ourselves and in our network has never been stronger. Complexity is unpredictability. What the future holds can just be guessed at. And digital transformation of the customer means that they have more power today than they ever had.
ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, which has developed tools and methods to help large organisations identify and optimise their customers’ top online tasks. He has written five books on how the web has facilitated the rise of customer power.
Even after the personal data of its many millions of subscribers had been published on the Web, the Ashley Madison website pretends as if nothing has happened. On its homepage it boasts that it has “over 39,915,000 anonymous members!” It crows about its discreteness, trustworthiness, and security.
Ashley Madison feels that it can ignore the elephant in the room, the fact that its members are no longer anonymous, and that its vaunted security was completely breached. It hopes its members will ignore this reality because these members have always bought the dreams and illusions it’s been selling.
Because Ashley Madison has an even bigger problem. It was estimated that about 9 out of 10 of its members were men. What’s more, Gizmodo reporter Annalee Newitz found out that the vast majority of these female members weren’t real. After extensive analysis, it was discovered that of the estimated 5 million female members, only 12,000 of them belonged to actual, real women. “Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared,” Newitz wrote.
So, how did Ashley Madison approach this ‘woman’ problem? If you look at its homepage you see a picture of a very attractive woman inviting you to become a member. Promote the very thing you are not. Turn your greatest weakness into your greatest strength through marketing. Sell the illusion because that’s what people want to buy.
This old and constantly repeated central idea of advertising and marketing has most definitely worked. It works for Coca Cola, who package their obesity drink in handsome fit bodies. It worked for Marlboro as they sold their cancer sticks with the rugged, outdoor Marlboro man. Did you ever see an ad for a car where the driver was stuck in heavy traffic? No, they’re always whizzing around the empty streets of Rome or Paris, or crossing a shimmering desert.
The core product of traditional advertising is illusion. And where you have sad, old men desperate to have an affair, it still works. And there are many other areas where people are desperate to buy the dream rather than the product. Traditional advertising will work there too. But due to the Web and the availability of information, there are an increasing number of areas where traditional advertising simply doesn’t work anymore.
Sarah Parmenter gave a presentation at An Event Apart in Washington DC where she showed two types of photographs that were being used to promote a hair salon. One type was taken by a professional photographer while the other was more amateur. The professional photograph got 1 like and 0 clicks. The amateur photo got 79 likes and 521 clicks.
We all know about banner blindness. (You are as likely to get hit by lightning as click on a banner ad.) Increasingly, we are also finding that traditional hero shot imagery actually reduces people’s trust in a website. Deceptive advertising has been used for so long that more and more people are not simply becoming immune to it—they are becoming allergic to it.
ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, which has developed tools and methods to help large organisations identify and optimise their customers’ top online tasks. He has written five books on how the web has facilitated the rise of customer power.
Consider most organisations: there is a department of selling to the customer; a department of marketing to the customer; a department of communicating at the customer; there is even a department of dealing with customer complaints – but there is no department OF the customer. None of the other departments really care about the customer. None of them see it as their job to keep the best interests of the customer in mind. Not one is the champion and defender of the customer when marketing or sales says ‘we need to publish this ad banner’, or ‘we need to force them to sign up to this content’, or when someone in pricing wants to milk loyal customers by increasing the prices they pay.
In most organisations there is simply no department that is there just for the customers. All the departments are lined up to sell something to or get something from the customer. Support is only there for those customers who are really in trouble. I’ve been in so many meetings over the years where the voice of the customer (or the voice of the employee, for that matter) is rarely, if ever, heard. There might be one or two isolated voices, but they’re not listened to and instead are often seen as troublemakers.
I remember once sitting in on a presentation where a group of marketers were presenting new product ideas and programmes. Almost in unison, they said to the web manager: “And we’ll be coming to you to get a banner on the homepage.”
Said homepage was a cluttered mess and most of the web manager’s week was spent fighting off requests for banners and other marketing and management ego content.
This website had a carousel for its banners. The web manager readily admitted that it was useless, that in fact it was counterproductive. But he said the reason it stayed was to keep marketing and management egos at bay. “They like interactive things,” he said. “Things that move and are flashy and dominate the page; and you can essentially deal with five ego requests in the one space.”
“ you’re just an entry-level position,” a customer service representative who worked for a home security company recently stated. “You just do what you’re told.” Does it make sense that the employees who interact directly with customers have so little value to the organisation?
More than 70 percent of salespeople, responding to a Dreamforce 2014 Conference survey, said their companies have lost a customer or sale due to poor performance or reputation related to customer support.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal in February 2015, 74 percent of executives state their top 2015 priority is improving customer experience. Yet, Forrester Research has found that “only 25 percent of customer experience (CX) professionals say their company’s CX programmes actually improve customer experience”. We need a radical rethink. The old organisational structures are simply not fit for this Age of the Customer. We need a Department of the Customer that has real power to champion the needs of the customer, to fight for their rights.
These are exciting times. Yes, they’re challenging, but there aren’t too many periods when the nature and structure of the organisation is forced to change. And this is one of those periods.
ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, which has developed tools and methods to help large organisations identify and optimise their customers’ top online tasks. He has written five books on how the web has facilitated the rise of customer power.
Imagine it’s the early twentieth century when electricity is all the rage. Companies are hiring chief electricity officers and the hottest topic for boards is how to develop an effective electricity transformation strategy.
“Everybody’s going electrical,” John Lowe, the CEO says to his newly appointed chief electricity manager, frank. “We can’t be left behind. We have to go electrical.”
“I agree, Mr Lowe, but we can’t simply go electrical for the sake of it. We have to think deeply about this. It’s more than just replacing oil lamps with light bulbs.”
“But it’s a no-brainer, Frank. Let’s just put electricity in the factory and replace those smelly, dangerous oil lamps.”
“Electricity should make us rethink the factory, Mr Lowe. Have you ever wondered why our factory is beside the river?”
“No. All factories are beside rivers.”
“There are two reasons. One is transport. One is power. With electricity we have power. Transport is shifting to trains and soon it will be roads.”
“And what does that mean, Frank?”
“It means that we don’t have to have our factory beside a river anymore. We can have it inland, near a railway station. Land is cheaper inland, and we’ll be closer to the new transportation hubs.”
“That’s an interesting idea, Frank! Wow! This electricity thing is big.”
“We can also build our factory flat, with just one story.”
“But that doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense in the context of water power, Mr Lowe. Water technology dictates that your factory has to be tall and slim, but with electricity we can be wide and flat. That will allow us to more easily design production lines. It will make for the more efficient movement of raw materials within the factory.”
“That’s amazing!” Electricity is going to change how we work, what we work on. It’s going to radically reshape business and the economy. We have to move away from the river, move inland.”
Right now, a lot of organisations have digital transformation strategies and chief digital officers, but simply making what you have digital is not a digital transformation strategy. Turning print documents into digital PDFs is most definitely not a transformation strategy. Digitizing everything and putting it online is not clever.
The revolution that digital is driving should force us to rethink everything. Digital is flexible, malleable, adaptive. Digital is not physical. It lives in the network. It is cheap and getting cheaper. It is small and getting smaller, which means that it will be everywhere and in everything. Digital is the network and everything that has something digital in it (whether it be humans, fridges or cars) will become part of the network.
Digital is an abundant resource and the more abundant it becomes the more powerful and all-embracing is its network and reach. This makes digital a real challenge to traditional organisations that are built on physical principles of managing scarcity and exerting power through proprietary tools that allow them to organise better. Ironically, most citizens are better organised today than most employees. The customers have better tools than the employees, and, of course, there are far more of these customers.
So, if you are still working by the river, thinking that all you need to do is get electricity in, think again. It’s time to move inland. It’s time to move to the network.
ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.
You’re out of coffee. You have two choices. Ask your neighbour or drive to the local convenience store. Your neighbour, John, is nice but boy does he love to talk. You drive to the convenience store.
We don’t always want to engage. We don’t always want an experience. Sometimes, we just want to get things done as quickly and easily as possible.
“Why is usability so often ignored?” Derek du Preez asks in an article for diginomica in June 2014. Derek writes about the problem that thetrainline.com had where there was “a 30 percent drop off between the shopping basket and payment. As a result, thetrainline.com tested the introduction of guest purchasing, where users didn’t require their login details to make their purchase.” By not forcing people to login, thetrainline.com increased its gross margin by more than £1 million per year.
Amazon has known for a long time that the further away they pushed the login process the more they sold. If you make it simpler, people buy more. If you make it simpler, people stay with you longer. Reducing hassle increases sales.
So, why don’t more organisations get usability? Because they often measure the wrong things. Like satisfaction, engagement, interaction, relationships, loyalty. So much marketing and branding hyperbole.
“Feeling overwhelmed, consumers want support – not increased marketing messages or “engagement” – to more quickly and easily navigate the purchase process,” Corporate Executive Board (CEB) stated in a study it published in 2012. “Brands that help consumers simplify the purchase journey have customers who are 86 percent more likely to purchase their products and 115 percent more likely to recommend their brand to others.”
In a study of 7000 consumers, CEB found that only 20 percent want a relationship with a brand. In a study by Havas Media in 2013, over 90 percent of Western consumers said they wouldn’t care if most brands disappeared. Brands and marketing has a hugely inflated view of how important they are in the lives of customers. It’s time to get real.
“Our research indicates that the impact of simplifying purchase decisions for consumers is four times stronger than the favoured marketing strategy of engagement and is the number one driver of likelihood to buy,” said Patrick Spenner, managing director at CEB.
CEB has even produced a book on the topic, called The Effortless Experience. In it the authors state: “Customers want ease. Getting back to their busy lives quickly matters more than anything. The greatest driver of disloyalty is the amount of effort you require your customers to put into their service experience. Customer effort includes repeated contact, repeating information, channel switching (e.g. starting online and ending up on the phone), transfers, policies and procedures, and the general hassle factor that most service interactions create.”
In 2013, The Temkin Group found that IT professionals were 55 percent more likely to buy from tech vendors who made life very easy for them. Only four percent said they planned buying from vendors who were very difficult to deal with.
Today, time is more valuable than a Rolex watch. To save time in a hassle-free way is the best gift you can give the busy, stressed customer. Focus on increasing convenience for customers. Seek to reduce the effort they have to make to do business with you.
ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.
For weeks Disney stalked me. On webpage after webpage I visited I got this horrendous ad for Disney resorts. It was in bright colors and swirled constantly. It literally hurt my eyes. It helped me develop a deep dislike of Disney.
Seemingly, this was one of these “interest-based” ads. But I have absolutely no interest in Disney. I don’t have young children and I don’t long for my childhood, but some system decided that I needed to go to a Disney resort. There was an “AdChoices” link beside the ad and I clicked on it several times and tried to opt out. It didn’t work but I expected that.
“Banner ads didn’t always suck,” writes Joe McCambley of The Wonderfactory. “I should know. I helped create the first one. My children tell me that’s like inventing smallpox.”
McCambley goes on to say that the original banner ads were useful. However, “before long, content and utility were corrupted by the only thing big agencies understood: reach and frequency,” he states. “We were back to delivering what TV spots, radio spots, and print ads had delivered for years: sales messages. The rest, as they say, is history.”
McCambley stresses that the web is about doing things, and that the mobile web is even more task-focused. He quotes Google’s Eric Schmidt, then with Sun Microsystems, who said way back in 1998 that “Customer service is the killer app of the web”. So true. According to McCambley, “Brands such as Google, Zappos, Amazon, eBay, and others win because they ask ‘How can I help you?’ instead of ‘What can I sell you?’”
According to McCambley, “Advertisers and their agencies, for the most part, don’t know how to be helpful.” And this goes to the heart of the matter. “Get rid of the marketing department!” Chris Baylis of Tribal DDB Amsterdam bluntly states. “Marketing departments have become self-serving entities and run the risk of no longer reflecting the company’s interests.”
Are traditional ad agencies and traditional marketing departments in bed with each other in a marriage made in hell? In many organisations the ad agency and marketing department seem to be comforting each other, doing the same old things, putting up big banners and small banners, and trying to think of something really ‘cool’ that will make them relevant. It’s like a death embrace as they spiral towards irrelevancy.
“You can skip this ad in 15 seconds,” Baylis writes. “Your article will be ready to read in 5, 4, 3, 2…1. Welcome to the world of advertising, a world of endless interruptions where brands, at best, try to borrow your attention for a few moments, and at worst, steal your time … Which means agencies are increasingly providing window dressing for their client’s ailing business models and not helping them face the challenges of the modern shared and networked economy.”
The future is about being useful. People know what they want when they come to the web. Don’t disrupt, interrupt, distract or annoy them. Help them succeed at completing the task they came to do.
ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.
First, a few definitions. By content I’m essentially talking about words; both the words in the text on a page and the words in the navigation and search results. During years of testing people’s attempts at completing tasks online we have found that the right words are the single biggest contributor to task success.
By self-service I’m essentially talking about the web, where we go to do things on our own. So, we are not interacting with another human who is directing us through a task. Now, it might be that if we get stuck on a task, we then open a chat with someone. That can still be considered as self-service.
Not every task is suitable to self-service. The optimal self-service task is one where there is high demand and the task is relatively simple and fast to do. The more complex the task is and the longer it takes to do, the more suited it is to a phone or faceto- face interaction.
Task complexity has many aspects. What are the implications of getting the task wrong? Could the person suffer major consequences from a financial, health or personal perspective as a result of doing the wrong thing?
Self-service encourages speed and impatience. It is not necessarily good for decisions that require reflection. I recently had a chat with Tom Loosemore, who is Deputy Director at the UK Government Digital Service. He was talking about divorce as a task, which throws up some interesting issues. Do you really want to make divorce easy to do online? “Get divorced in three easy steps?” There are many tasks where it really is better to talk to a professional or to pause for a while and contemplate.
Another problem is that complex tasks tend to require large quantities of complex content. Most of this content was historically not written for ordinary people but rather for the professionals (doctors, lawyers, HR specialists) who did the advising. Making all this content easily available online may in fact lead to worse outcomes, rushed and incorrect decisions.
Complex tasks also tend to be done infrequently. Self-service thrives on high frequency, repeated tasks. If you only do something rarely, it’s usually better to get help from someone who does the task all the time.
Complex tasks tend to be what I call tiny tasks from the point of view of demand and frequency. However, they are far from ‘tiny’ from the point of view of content. Some years ago Liverpool City found that far more content was being produced for their customers’ tiny tasks than for their top tasks.
Simplification of complex task content may not be the answer if it increases the risk of people seeking simple solutions for complex problems. Also, high volume complex content seriously impacts search and navigation, often smothering the content for the top tasks.
When it comes to self-service design, content is both the solution and the problem. Publishing the right content is a significant management challenge that most organisations haven’t even scratched the surface of.
ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.
“The percent of IT buyers who plan to spend more with tech vendors ranges from 4 percent for the vendors that are most difficult to work with to 55 percent of tech vendors that are easiest to work with,” according to Bruce Temkin, who analysed a range of user studies in 2013. “The percent of IT buyers who are willing to try a new product or service from tech vendors ranges from 7 percent for the vendors that are most difficult to work with to 70 percent of tech vendors that are easiest to work with.”
Many organisations are considering cloud and mobile solutions today, but top of their agenda in evaluating these solutions is ease-of-use. “It’s not just doing mobile, but making mobile more intuitive. It’s not just adding new features but really thinking about making the UI more user friendly,” Rebecca Wettemann, VP for Nucleus Research states.
The old way of buying IT was based on developing a huge feature list. Buyers were obsessed with ‘built to last’ and ‘future-proofing’. The usability of the solutions was hardly ever considered. That often led to massive complexity, added costs, lots of unnecessary features, and usability nightmares.
The move to the cloud is driving simplicity because cloud is about services; and the way we buy services is very different to the way we buy products. Humans are really bad at planning for future needs. When we buy products we tend to choose extra stuff just in case. But when we buy services we tend to buy based on immediate need. “This is what I need to do now. Can your service help me?”
It used to be that if you worked for a large company you had all the cool tools. Mobile phones, teleconferencing, file sharing, people directories, etc. But in recent years, the consumers got all the cool stuff, whether it be iPhones, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook. The organisational landscape began to look ancient and very complicated.
Broadly, we are seeing a shift away from the world of things to the world of use. Organisations are becoming less interested in owning and are more focused on getting the best use.
Wettemann talks about a “partnership approach” that is developing between buyers and sellers, “in an effort to help their customers more easily derive value from features such as analytics”.
The trend towards managing outcomes rather than inputs is one of the most important of the last 10 years. “In the book B4B, we predict that technology customers will begin pressuring technology providers to commit to outcomes,” Thomas Lah of the Technology Services Industry Association states. “In other words, customers will not want to pay for technology up front and hope they achieve some target outcome. Customers will want their technology providers to assure the outcome is achievable.”
Managing outcomes has been made possible because the Internet allows us to measure how successful people are as they interact with technology. The web is the greatest laboratory of human behaviour ever invented. We should use it.
ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.
Historically, the Norwegian Cancer Society worked in silos when it came to managing its website. “A specific example of where there was a lack of collaboration in the old website was skin cancer,” Ida Aalen, senior interaction designer at Netlife Research explains. “In the ‘about cancer’ section you could read about skin cancer, but the section about ‘prevention’ also had pages about what skin cancer was. And neither of these linked to each other.”
This, of course, led to duplication, confusion and content bloat. By focusing on top tasks and becoming highly collaborative, the number of pages on the society’s website has been reduced from more than 5000 to approximately 1000. The way content is managed on each page has also changed. There is now a core focus on the top task of that page (symptoms, for example). The other more contextual information is linked to on other parts of the website.
Collaboration can only be successful if a strong management model is in place. “The new management model, where it is clearly stated that the whole editorial board is responsible for the entire website really helps collaboration,” says web editor, Marte Gråberg.
The old distributed publishing model allowed 45 people to independently contribute to the website. Now, six people oversee and control the site. Not all of these people are full-time. There are roughly three full-time equivalents (FTEs) actively managing 1000 pages. That’s about 350 pages per FTE. We have found over the years that a fulltime web professional can manage somewhere between 200 and 500 pages.
The departments no longer own the content. They’re sources. For many years, distributed publishing has been the preferred model for website management. Give control to the department / author, the thinking went. They know their own content better than anyone. Distributed publishing was also cheaper because you didn’t need a central team. In other words, you didn’t need to hire professionals.
However, distributed publishing has major weaknesses.
It can result in silo-based publishing and thinking. There is no overview of everything that is being published and this leads to organisationcentric writing and duplication as different silos create the same content.
Many content authors like to publish their own content. This can result in a content explosion that causes confusing navigation and search. Also, as the site grows bigger it becomes harder to manage and review.
The new model strictly controls what is published: “If people want to add something to the website,” Ida states, “they need to write down their answers to the following five questions:
- Who’s the target audience?
- Does this content cover some need or task for this target audience? Which?
- Does this content cover a strategic goal for The Cancer Society? Which?
- Describe how you imagine this content will be found and used by the user.
- Why is the website the right channel for this content?”
Collaboration across functions and disciplines is key to maintaining content quality and ensuring that a focus on people’s needs is kept front and centre in everyone’s thinking. Duplication of content is greatly reduced because the team is constantly discussing what they are doing and sharing ideas and insights. There is now a holistic view of the website, rather than the old silo-based view.
ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.
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