Five Maxims for a Successful Digital Content Strategy
{self}No longer is “we have a website” a sufficient response to the question “What’s your company’s digital content strategy?”{/self}
Davis ThinkingNow that we've pushed back from the Thanksgiving table and returned to work, it's worth focusing a moment not on our abundance of blessings, but on our glut of content across platforms. These blessings are decidedly mixed. Faced with multiple options we graze and gorge on empty calories, but rarely succeed in satisfying our hunger.
When we counsel clients about online strategy, we frequently use the term “perpetual beta.” The idea is to break the notion of a “complete” web project, that what lies ahead is a continuous learning experience. Corporate response to this is almost universal: Help us make a bullet-proof plan. The problem with “perfect plans” is that they end in perfect failure.
Congratulations. Your business has embraced a digital content strategy. You’ve all settled on the cornflower blue icons. The company president wants to know if you’ve “gotten IT to install the Web 2.0 yet.” You’re sitting in your cube, taking a moment to breathe, thinking that the beast has been slain, the stables cleaned, the rock is on the top of the mountain, and hey, Hell looks nice from up here.
{self}No longer is “we have a website” a sufficient response to the question “What’s your company’s digital content strategy?”{/self}
Time Warner is going to spin off AOL by the end of the year. It should hurry up. It paid $124 billion in 2001; while that's less than a decade ago, it might has well have been a different planet. The Internet was fast becoming the superhighway for business and entertainment, and AOL owned one of the first and largest tollbooths. It was the Google and Twitter of its day. AOL made money, and seemed poised to be perhaps the dominant portal for Internet experience. Some critics even worried that it was poised to take over the Internet.
Digital strategy should be a continuous and iterative process, informed by a steady flow of measurement and used to guide tactical adjustments in pursuit of the client's primary online objective.
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