Benefits of web sites for businesses

In our scoping questionnaire we suggest that you ask your clients what benefits they want from their web site in order to help you define the functionality needed and to be able to prove that you have achieved what was wanted once you have created a site.
You can of course take a more pro-active stance and list the benefits your clients might achieve and then ask which of them they want. It is always easier if someone else has defined items and you select appropriate ones, don't you think?

With this in mind then, here’s a list of possible benefits. You should present price tag increases for the more options your clients chose.

An Online presence allows:

• Improved communications
• Access to information 24/7
• Improved efficiency
• Opportunities for new business
• More close contact with customers
• More close contact with suppliers
• Online recruitment for your company
• After sales service
• Enlarged market reach
• Marketing new products/offers to suit the customers

Selling online allows:

• A Global marketplace
• Direct selling - no middlemen
• 24 Hour business - If your web site can process payment information you can be open 24 hours a day!
• Increased customer information therefore reduced information distribution costs

Accessibility issues can add more benefits too.

Now it isn't just about the web site. Blogs, Social Media site presence and mobile resources can add more of those intangible benefits like street cred, urgency, emerging trends, personality cults, opinion waves, hype and so on. For more on accessibility benefits see Granite5 7th June 2010 or econsultancy 9th March 2010. For more on the benefits of blogging see Webbiquity 21st June 2010.

Maybe it is time to review your list of benefits of your online offerings for your clients to make your scoping easier?

Identify your competitors and evaluate your marketing strategy

The ideas of competitors and markets used to squarely belong with marketing strategies for off-line companies. The online world has shifted the focus because it allows fast, automatic, analysis of your competitors. Many tools are offered under Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) allowing inside information on what your competitors are using as keywords to hook people in to their site, what search engines they are listed on, what links enhance their optimisation, what ranking they command in the engines and many more pieces of intelligence. Are you checking your competitors regularly? Worse, are they checking on you?

There's a free tool that analyses some basics that you can use for your own site or for a competitor at Search Engine Optimisation.co.uk

Search Quest gives a breakdown of what analytics they offer for small, medium and large companies. Of course, the charges go up accordingly, but it helps to see the range of analysis that is offered for a price. What price is competitor intelligence worth to you?

It's as well to remember a few caveats about trying to emulate your close competitors. They have perhaps forged ahead in their branding for several reasons. Is it worth you always trying to catch them up or should you use the intelligence to out think them? Just reproducing the same strategies but later than competitors will not give you an advantage.

So are you a blue ocean company or a red ocean company? The article from Mind Tools about blue ocean strategies is worth reading to help focus your strategy on winning by establishing difference, not by copying your competitors. Food for thought. Happy strategising.

Social Media Crunching

You can't blame people for getting a bit paranoid about what people are saying about them on Facebook and worse, Twitter. But it is now a serious business if your brand is being dissed on them and you haven't got a strategy to deal with this. Are you advising your clients to think this through? Are you trying to deal with it by using tools to monitor what's going down on the social grapevine?

Well, luckily a few companies are ahead of the game and Fresh Networks with their sister company FreshMinds Research have done an analysis of seven social media monitoring tools in a free report you can download from their site at www.freshnetworks.com.

This also gives some insight into the basics of social media monitoring, where to find social conversations, and the drawbacks of monitoring social comments. I imagine from my linguistic days that it can be a nightmare to analyse chatter let alone texting but I'm interested in this side of things because language analysis has progressed leaps and bounds. I just wonder if the analysis gets hold of the wrong end of the stick more often than not! (Imagine trying to analyse that last sentence!). Get more about this by looking at The Problem with Automated Sentiment Analysis 28th May by Matt Rhodes.

Whatever, social media networks are giving the trad media boys some puzzlement over what good they can be to them. New Media Age (3rd June issue) featured the dilemma for broadcasters after the BBC have integrated the iPlayer with Facebook and Twitter enabling users to share and recommend shows to each other. Of course, the rest of the TV players want in on the game.

Talking of games – yes, we'll be avoiding the World Cup so there won't be a blog next week. We're off snorkelling in warm waters, ash permitting.

Managing client expectations – a common project problem

From the number of job descriptions where this phrase features, this is a skill in big demand. What's more, these jobs are in the higher pay brackets too. Most difficulties stem from lack of understanding on both sides, lack of clarity about what will be produced, and in the end a lack of trust. It needs someone to apply some analysis and jump in and sort out any emerging problems.

In iMedia projects the risk from miscommunication increases. Why is that? Well, we’re talking about what for most people is an intangible process (computing processes), we are working internally across specialisms that have their own language of description, and working with clients who have their own specialisms, descriptive languages and markets. Then, of course, we deal in look and feel – very subjective issues.

Very often it is the things that are not said that prove to be the gremlins. These are implicit expectations the client has about the project. The only way to get clients to verbalise these is to ask specific questions. The client may not have realised that they even needed to consider X,Y and Z, but if you raise the issues and insist you have to have some answers before proceeding, this educates the client into giving information that is vital. (The project 'Scoping' questionnaire we have discussed previously can help with this).

For example, it is very important for you to know if a site has to be designed for the client to update. The client might presume that is what they'll get as all their contacts operate in that way. But, unless you ask the key question about the assumption (implicit expectation), you’ll be up **** creek! And we've all been there!

Just to be clear, managing client expectations is part of the wider role of stakeholder management, that we also discuss in these pages. Stakeholders can be anyone who can influence the project and so this can include clients, your direct contacts there as well as indirect contacts in their company. It can include your internal team and management too. All their expectations have to be managed in appropriate communication – dealt with elsewhere but I felt it needed to be put in context here.

So not an easy issue at all but a skill that is highly valued although not one that is analysed well in cyberspace! All I can offer you in the way of recent thinking is:

• Managing Client Expectations (April 2009) on Continuous Thinking (author unknown)


• Managing Client Expectations (December 18th 2009) by Raj Modi, Ezinearticles.com - a slightly sideways look as he discusses consultancy and client expectations but has validity


• Finally, if you really can’t manage the client any more as they are beyond managing this might hold some answers! How to fire a client (August 2005) by Andrew Neitlich in Sitepoint

Visual perspectives and their impact on iMedia projects

This week we were introduced to a new visual perspective from a client who is a jeweller. In the past we have worked with clients to produce iMedia projects across such diverse areas as digital TV switchover and fashion. But here, the need for close-up, clear images of the jewellery actually showed up blemishes of the hand-worked metals. We didn't notice these as we were concentrating on photographing detailed, well-lit images. The client was easy-going and just said that she’d never realised the blemishes were there despite working under lights and using strong lenses to produce the pieces. Actually, she also decided that they were good because they demonstrated the pieces were hand-crafted, so although we said we could Photoshop them out (ah, yes, what did we ever do without it?), she decided against this to remain true to the image.

It got me thinking however about how often in the past a lot of controversy in projects has been caused by clashes in visual perspective where the differences between how the client views things and how we view the same things were not so evident and appeared subjective. I wondered what the latest theory was on visual literacy and embarked on some research.

Did you realise we've been part of a massive revolution where visual overtakes textual intelligence as technologies such as the Internet, video games, CDs, DVDs and social networks become the communicative media of choice? There remains a gulf between how visual literacy is measured/rated in people and how their intelligence in text environments is measured. Our educational measures lag behind and don't even fit the emerging capabilities and skills used in electronic media. Well, I’m not surprised!

All this leads to how we understand and value other perspectives. Do we stick to what we know and feel happy with, and therefore insist we are right, or do we hold back, wonder if there is another valid perspective, and compromise? Maybe there is more to the saying the client is always right than we realise!

For those who want to drill deeper into this massive field of visual literacy, here are a few current online refs. Enjoy the ride.

Theories of Visual Perception: Problems and Perspectives by Professor Alan Johnson of University College London - bit outdated but academic historical text-based overview of visual literacy theories to the end of last century.

A Perspective on 3D Visual Illusions in Scientific American - makes you think about visual images in a new way, with pertinent illustrations.

Digital Technologies and performative pedagogies: Repositioning the visual by Kathryn Grushka and Debra Donnelly of Newcastle University in Australia - pretty heavily academic but has meaning for us iMedia lot.

Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis? from PhysOrg - a bit of the alternative point of view about what visuals do and don’t do for us.

Your UK iMedia salary in these uncertain times

Do you think your skills are undervalued? Have you morphed your role in your company through experience without anyone noticing? What do you think you are worth?

Now and again it's a valuable exercise to try and understand how your salary fits with the average for your role. It may be reassuring but it can be a shock that may prompt you to think about moving, or educating the right people in your company by getting them to take a look. Mind you, a surprising number of you (three-quarters) would forego a salary rise for a supportive and interesting work environment apparently. Would this include you? See the paragraph under 4 in 10 media players unaffected by recession at www.recruiter.co.uk.

There is the age-old problem of what you call yourself since we've griped for years about the lack of role definitions in iMedia, and this means that it is hard to compare like with like. Do you actually have a job title that makes sense?

Still, it's good to get an overview and one of the best matches we've found is at payscale.com

They also allow you to look at related charts according to experience, employer type and location which are useful since these do affect figures, of course. Don't worry if you're a contractor as they offer a chart for you too.

Times are probably going to get harder before they stabilise again so you may need to factor that in to your thinking as well. Let’s hope the great majority of you are pleasantly surprised.

Have fun.

RACI Chart and iMedia Project Management

Firstly, a quick apology for being 'off-air' for the past week. We inadvertently fell foul of Google's robotic anti-spam mechanism on Blogger and were 'disabled' as a result. Getting this reviewed by a human being turned out to be a process of which Kafka would be proud but reviewed it was and here we are again.

It's been a while since we looked at the specifics of filling out a RACI Chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consult and Inform) although I had to revise the concept for an enquiry about our Stakeholder Management training course last week. We suggest that this tool can really help project managers at the beginning of a project once you've a strong idea of what the project is about and who's involved i.e. you've done your stakeholder analysis both internal and external.

Often the project manager's role is a dumping ground for the responsibilities and accountabilities of other management. So if you've ever suffered in that dreaded lonely field where the fingers point at you and you are thinking. '... but that had nothing to do with me!', then maybe a RACI Chart can help. Essentially, it defines roles and responsibilities in a clear unambiguous way. Ah! Yes, the catch is getting all of you to agree on the role definitions!! So if you get the definitions of the roles very clear in your mind, you will lead others to realise precisely what their role is for a particular stage in the project.

Paul Ritchie does a nice job in finding definitions of Accountability and Responsibility in the Crossderry blog 26th April - his simplified definitions certainly impress me!

• Responsible = Those who do the work in question
• Accountable = The one who signs off on the work that Responsible provides

And, if you want to understand more about drafting a RACI Matrix, Ginny Edwards in, Constructing a RACI Matrix will give you plenty of tips. I know she seems to cover variations on the RACI Matrix but not nearly as well as Wapedia – be sure to scroll to uncover the alternatives.

These alternatives may help you if your way of working and assignment of roles in your organisation differs from the usual suspects (RACI). It's nice to have someone else's confirmation that organisations differ and your organisation may be so locked into its ways that they won't shift and would rather stick with one or two names for comfort. Yeah! Been there, done that!