Let’s look at music for example – you can have one hit as a musician on an album with 20 mediocre songs, and you’re a success. An author can publish one great book a decade and be a bestselling author. A movie director or actor can make one great movie out of every 10 and be deemed a success.

You can fail spectacularly and still succeed – as long as you make an impact.

What would you rather have – 100 people who love what you do or 1,000,000 people who think you’re ok?  Let me ask that a different way, would you make more money if 100 people loved your product/service or if 1,000,000 thought your product/service was mediocre and forgettable?

If you chose the million people keep reading. If you chose the 100, good for you, but keep reading anyway so I can pitch you at the end of this post.

Mediocrity is death – a long slow painful demise into nothingness.

Having 1,000,000 people think you’re “just ok” is translated into having 1,000,000 people acknowledge you for one second and forget you the next second. You are in the noise floor, part of the background, lost in the crowd.

Last year I attended the Montreal Salsa Congress (I performed in it actually), and I remember 4 shows from the dozens that were showcased. I remember the 2 best performances – and I can recount the worst 2 performances – I have stories to reference both of them.

Everyone I know who went to that Congress can recall that same list of performances. All the other performances were good, but forgettable. But 2 failed spectacularly, and 2 succeeded spectacularly – and therefore both are memorable.

Look at Britney Spears, a come-back queen. She fails spectacularly more often than she succeeds – what’s the result? Millions in record sales and sold out concert tours.

Look at Paris Hilton, she built an entire career and millions in endorsements, fashion, even music sales (agh!) by literally failing at everything (except getting attention!).

One of my favorite advertisers, self titled The Wizard of Ads, Roy H. Williams, coined this phrase: “the risk of insult is the price of clarity”. I am borrowing it Mr Williams, and I’ll tell all my readers to buy your books in exchange (go buy his books please).

Memorize this: The Risk of Insult Is the Price of Clarity.

Achieving clarity is inherently risky.

If you run your organization with the #1 priority being risk mitigation (reducing risk), you are not hedging your success, what you are doing is failing slowly.

So how do you use this axiom, “the risk of insult is the price of clarity”? Well first, it’s the RISK of insult, it’s not actually insulting. Although that is a strategy that can work…

What this statement means is that you have to speak to your fans/tribe/followers/fanatics/whatever-you-want-to-call-them. You are never advertising to “everyone”; you are making ads that appeal to those who you want to buy your product/service – so you real prospects say “THAT IS AWESOME”, while everyone else might say “I don’t like that” or simply nothing at all. Your attitude should be Well fine, don’t like it, I don’t care about you anyway.

Look at companies like American Apparel, Diesel, Tommy Hilfiger. Youth amorality, alternative rock, preppy sailer boy. Each one has a distinct polarizing brand.

Apple and Microsoft are another great example, the geek vs the nerd arch-types. Apple made the geek the cool version of the nerd. They totally polarized the audience and made them choose a brand association – ie. they made them choose a side.

These companies take risks to be great. There is another great book called “The Strategy Paradox” by Michael Raynor I highly recommend (go buy that book as well, it’s a heavy read, but well worth it).

The strategy paradox describes companies focused on mitigating risk simply put off their demise for a long time. They are shoring up their success and using their size and market leadership to beat down competition. They stop innovating because they stop taking risks. Basically, they are guarding what they have until what they have is innovated away from them – someone comes along and does it better, or different, and makes them irrelevant. Great example is the MP3 and the music industry…

Jim Collins in the book “Good to Great” outlines that most companies are great for short periods of time, but very few seem to be able to sustain “greatness” for very long. The bigger a company gets, the tougher it is to take chances, they just have so much more to lose. Dozens of smaller companies will burn out before one invents a technology or process that brings the goliath down. Smaller companies have much less to lose on an absolute scale, so they can take bigger chances.

What i’m trying to say is — whose side are you going to be on? David’s or Goliath’s?

Are you going to take the risk of being BOLD in your marketing and advertising or are you going to play it safe?

Are you going to only do what has been proven and you can find good case studies for and know others in your industry are doing or are you going to be innovative in your marketing and brand position?

If you want to help figuring out how to be bold, how to punch well above your weight class, how to find and aggressively market to your target audience, and how to do it all profitably and grow your business by an order of magnitude (10x!) this year alone, then get in touch. Do It Now.

So here is an idea i’ve been toying with for a while. A colleague at Jufa Intermedia and I drew it out on a whiteboard over lunch one day. Should we develop it?

The idea is developing a CMS that treats pages as stand-alone pieces of micro-content. Here is the gambit: the navigation structure is dynamically created, and the pages are easy to find using search tools. So you can both explore and/or search for specific elements. If you don’t know what you want but know the topic you explore, and if you do know exactly what you want you can narrow your search down rapidly. But wait, there’s more…

People don’t usually consume whole websites, they use parts of it at any given moment of need. Search boxes are the second most used navigation element within most sites, yet most site-specific search functions… well, frankly suck.

One of the biggest problems client’s have is
how they will structure their IA:

copy the organization’s operational structure

or

discover how the user consumes the information provided.

The answer is sort of obvious from an effective marketing stand-point – you design for the user. But it’s not that simple, because in larger organizations, the workflow of how content is published does not usually correspond to how the world consumes that information. So if you can’t create good content, then your “effective” user experience is for naught.

So instead of publishing to an area that you are responsible for maintaining, you simply publish for various categories (to seed the choice), you tag it and you tell it who your intended audience is from pre-loaded user-profiles. So you don’t publish to a part of the site, you publish to the TYPE of person you want to read the content.

The CMS will dynamically generate menus based on traffic patterns for each pre-determined user type.

It will guess at what a particular user is looking for based on what the user is looking at and how long they spend looking at it. That’s the first part. Second, is that each page must standalone. So you publish a page so it can be found using an onsite search engine. You can categorize and tag, as you may a blog entry. So instead of a site of pages linked together through a man-made and stagnant architecture, you effectively create a catalog of the content.

Imagine surfing a large site
(1,000+ pages) like you would looking for a book on Amazon.

You have recommendations based on previous experience, you have recommendations based on others experience, you have categories you can browse, and you have simple and advanced search functions for narrowing your results. If the content contains “web 2.0″ user-generated features such as comments, ratings, etc. then they can be integrated into the CMS as well, by helping rank search results, and offering new navigations methods.

So, any VC’s out there want to fund this project?

Bruce

What do you think? Which of the last three do you think will draw the most interest? (see the last two posts for the other proposals)

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What do a 19^th century Italian economist who accidentally defined a pseudo-law of nature, a post World War II American statistician who is responsible for today’s dominance by Japanese car manufacturers, and the 80’s poster boy for glam rock Boy George, have to do with Web 2.0?

Better yet, how can these diverse individuals help your organization leap frog the competition, create consistent and constant innovation, and drive your marketing so hard and fast that your operational people hate you?

So many questions! Come, listen, and participate. I may not have your answers, but I do have tools for you to use to come up with your own. Learn lessons exemplified by popular Web 2.0 successes (and failures).

Who should come: you are a bricks and mortar organization selling products on shelves, you are selling services at the boardroom table, you are a non-profit raising awareness, you are a pure Web company trying to manage its meteoric success, you are a corporation trying to find new ways to be nimble. Everyone can take something away and apply it immediately to their organization.

This talk can be personalized to use the audience to provide examples of how Web 2.0 success principles can be applied to your organization. If you’re interested in having me personalize the talk for your organization, please email me ahead of time with your organization’s background and I’ll see if I can fit you into the presentation. Take advantage, this is free consulting!

Tags: Business Strategy Innovation Audience Participation

Technical expertise: Low

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Total Mash-Up Web Design and Development

There is no point in starting from scratch anymore. This talk will show you how to create a web architecture for your organization that takes advantage of world-class applications. Mash and grind up together the best the web has to offer to create an enterprise class web presence so you can spend your budget on content and marketing instead of re-creating the wheel.

These websites:

• Are fully scalable; they will grow as your organization’s needs do.
• Are easy to administer – they are designed to be user friendly.
• Allow you total flexibility over design, layout, look and feel.
• Are Search engine friendly.
• Are primed for all sorts of marketing tactics.
• Can be constructed iteratively; get pieces up as you need them.
• Are cost-effective to build and design.
• And much much more!

Your project can range from a simple small business web page to major corporate rollouts supporting client log-in support, customer service ticketing systems, e-commerce, fund-raising, and many other applications.

Stretch your budget and impress your stakeholders – come and learn how to mash and grind at Web 2.0!

Client: International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Project: Re-think, architect, and design IDRC’s website to better reflect the organizations leadership in international development and research.

Challenge: The IDRC website receives millions of yearly visitors, unfortunately many find it difficult to navigate its hundreds of thousands of pages. The site needed a complete overhaul from the ground up, but with a diverse organization with many constituents, objectives and audiences to satisfy, the task was daunting.

Services: Web Strategy, Architecture, User Experience, Usability, Functional Specifications

Delivered: This 12+ month project began with in-depth research and analysis of IDRC’s organization, values, and how that would translate to its online presence. Insight was sought from executives, managers, staff, partners, donors, researchers, grant recipients, media and others.

A Web Communication Strategy was drafted detailing the findings, analysis, and expert recommendations.  This document became the framework from which future decisions would be made. It also proved to be the gospel from which sermons were crafted to preach the new site’s purpose to gain needed buy-in and support from all levels and disciplines of the organization.

The Web Comm Strategy led to developing the Architecture of the site, including navigation and content on each page. Next came a content migration strategy which focused on eliminating and consolidating the hundreds of thousands of pages of content, most of which was unnecessary. The site was reduced to ~30,000 pages, less than 20% of the original amount.

Finally a complete set of functional specifications and detailed sitemap was crafted. These were presented to the developers in a 2” thick binder, as they represented every component, detailing exactly how each would work.

Problem: Attended the Web 2.0 Expo (April-2007) in San Francisco; a lot of great insight, but not very many speakers brought it down to the concrete and practical – how can SMB and enterprise use this stuff?

Let’s start with defining some basic fundamentals of Web 2.0:

Q. What is it?

A. Web 2.0 is about harnessing user (user = visitor to your website) generated content to add value to the experience of future users. So basically, if I interact with your site, it makes the next person’s experience richer, and so on.

examples: I write a review, rank an item, share a link, contribute knowledge, vote on a process, edit information (fact check), and so on.

Web 2.0 is about the power of the masses, building community, and self-expression.

Power of the Masses:
This theory is fairly straight forward – the more people you have who perform an action, the greater the ability to determine its true nature.

example: if 1 person rates a movie, you have no idea if it is good or bad, but if 10,000 people do, then you have a large enough data set that you can get a good indication if the movie will suck or not.

Building Community:
Now here is where it gets interesting. Web 2.0 allows for global congregation around any common interest.

example: So 10,000 people rating a movie should give a clear indication if its good or not – but that depends on who those 10,000 people are. Now if the movie is a cheesy horror flick, and the site rating it is dedicated to cheesy horror flicks, and most of the users are fans, then the 10,000 reviews now have much greater context – because the ratings are contributed from like minded individuals.

Self-Expression:
The final piece of the Web 2.0 experience is the capability of anyone, with no technical skill requirement, to publish anything they want at any time. Web 2.0 has put the power of the media into the hands of the masses.

example: so I, you, or anyone with an Internet connection, can, for little or no cost, publish or views, perspectives, or information on any topic we want. These are blogs.

Ok, so how do these all tie together?

First, anyone can be a publisher of words, images, audio and video.

The barrier of entry has been collapsed to zero. Off-the-shelf hardware and software can be purchased or used for low or no cost to create a message in any medium and launch it on the Internet. Where “mass media” had the only access to ubiqitous reach, now everyone does.

Second, mass media curated content only from a select few people, but now everyone with an interest (expert or amateur) and a passion to share that expertise can do so.

This gives greater perspective to the individual knowledge seeker – as there are many more sources to learn from.

Third, in a technically driven world where human interaction seems to suffer with automated services (Web 1.0), now uses technology to create natural communication and conversations – between individuals, groups, and of course entities (governments, businesses, non-profits, etc).

Next post:

The Tools of Web 2.0 – how to use Blogs, Wikis, Reviews, Ratings, Community Building, RSS, and other items. I will define what these items are and how to use them effectively.