Process and Project Management

10 characteristics of a digitally friendly company

Why is it that some companies embrace and succeed in digital, while others fail?

I am becoming convinced that the failure of a digital strategy often has little to do with the competence of their web team. It is more to do with the culture of the organisation itself.

You can have the best web team in the world who produce the best websites and apps, but if the organisation behind them is not digitally friendly then the results will be disappointing.

So what makes one company digitally friendly and another not? Below I outline my top ten reasons, but I would be keen to hear yours in the comments too.

trends

Digital marketing and ecommerce trends for 2014 by Econsultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein

Each year I try to give my personal thoughts on what will be interesting and important in the world of digital marketing and ecommerce for the year ahead.

These are somewhere between trends and predictions. They are based largely on the many conversations I have with industry influencers and practitioners. 

Following are just a selection of 10 trends that I’ve chosen to highlight. However, there is free report to download and share which is over 40 pages long and covers all of my trends and predictions for 2014 across the 10 core digital topics that Econsultancy cover. 

Digital marketing and the music industry: six key trends for 2014

One of the interesting things about being a digital marketer that specialises in a certain niche is that you get to understand your niche from many different angles.

Over the past 12 months I’ve talked to hundreds of music companies; understanding what works, what doesn’t, and where they think their corner of the industry is going.

Here’s my summary of what I think will matter when it comes to digital marketing in the music industry in 2014.

Five brands with effective content strategies

Ad campaigns come and go, but stories endure. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning audio historian, Studs Terkel, said: “People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another”.

Brands can build audiences with content that contributes to a relevant, human conversation.

Below are five brands that have taken the time to get their content strategies right by keeping their overarching purpose clear.

Selling your agency’s services is like making love to a beautiful woman…

Anyone familiar with the brilliant sketch show, The Fast Show, will know used car dealer Swiss Toni. He compared everything to “making love to a beautiful woman” especially selling….cars in his case.

Although a fan of Swiss Toni, I tend to disagree with his New Business philosophy. The smooth salesman façade is thankfully rather dated and there are a lot more….well, nicer ways of developing partnerships with clients.

This blog post will discuss a few things I’ve learnt over the years.

When does a project start?

Our projects would end better if we accepted the fundamental fuzziness in their beginnings.

Projects often end badly. They go out with a skyful of fireworks, finger-pointing and blame. Why doesn’t the site perform adequately?  Where’s all the functionality we expected? Where has all the time, and budget, gone?

Some people say this is because we start projects so poorly.

What probability and loss aversion can teach us about reporting results

An argument for not reporting results in marketing: if you find yourself in times of crisis having to report frequently, try reporting on actions rather than numbers.

Report on the things you did rather than the traffic you achieved.

Here is my argument for not reporting results in marketing…

The basics of using alt text for SEO

Alt text is an important yet occasionally overlooked part of making a site accessible to all users. What is alt text? Alt text is a simple bit of HTML code that essentially describes an image that appears on a web page so that the user still knows what the image represents if they are visually […]

How to use reviews to manage product development risk

Product and service development is all about risk. We take on a range of market, design and technical risks in order to gain rewards – new products, better conversion rates, increased market share, improved margins, etc.

Sometimes, however, the risks win. Projects fail for a whole host of reasons: our aspirations run ahead of the technology; we fail to find a commercially feasible solution to design challenges; our competition beats us to the punch. The list is almost endless.

And too many items on that list are entirely manageable. Poor internal communication. Ill-defined scope. Failure to engage key stakeholders. Unrealistic estimates. The project management literature has been calling out such risks for decades.  

We know how to solve these problems. We just don’t do it.

That’s the real failure on many of our projects: we fail to see and manage the basic stuff.

board-members

What every digital leader needs to know about securing board buy-in

Are marketing and digital having a greater influence on coroprate strategy and its execution?

There can be little doubt that digital leaders within organisations are increasingly finding themselves charged with driving organisational transformation, growth and the development of capability, and are spending more time than ever working with the main boards of their businesses.

So what are the main barriers to securing the backing of senior staff for digital investment and initiatives, and what are the best practices for ensuring not only one-off approval but ongoing support from the C-Suite? 

The results of Econsultancy’s new research into Securing Board Buy-in reveal both some key challenges but also some smart strategies for success.

Ryanair gives its homepage a makeover

Ryanair was, and is, famous for many reasons; cheap flights, luggage restrictions, perceived sexism, a crazy boss, a refreshing approach to PR, and the list goes on.

But perhaps Ryanair was most famous as the poster child for the upsell, and the doyen of poor UX.

All this might sound harsh, but it is thankfully all changing. Michael O’Leary has been all over Twitter recently talking about forthcoming improvements, particularly to the web, and luggage restrictions, too.

And today, via its Twitter account, Ryanair announced the first stage of its website rebuild, the homepage, is now live.

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