Last week I attended the WebForward Conference in Sydney (which itself is part of the larger CeBIT Australia Exhibition). It was a really good event during which I got to hear from and meet a lot of interesting people.

The conference had two streams: social media and mobile. I hopped in and out of both streams and here are my notes from the talks that I attended.

Latest trends and techniques in the on-line marketing space and a look into the future

• Speaker: Tony Keusgen, Head of Technology – Australia/New Zealand, Google
• Why is there still a difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ marketing in a corporation’s budget? Why is digital still considered to be “new” media?
• There’s a huge correlation between offline marketing and online searches
  • For example, if you were to place your ad on a number of city buses you could tell, by analyzing Google search on the relevant phrase (assuming its unique enough), when those buses first hit the streets
• Predictions for the future:
  • 80% of screen time will be digital
  • Mobile devices will enable two-thirds of purchases and pay for half of them
  • Consumers will have more power and 80% of future engagement will be opt-in and 2-way
  • Real-time will play a big role; already 30% of Australians consumers access the web via their mobile phones while in a physical store
• Use evidence-based marketing; don’t assume you know what the market wants
• Don’t be scared to experiment with new things and try new ways of doing things (it’s okay to fail, stop what you were doing, and move on to other ideas)
• 12% of all Google search queries in December 2010 came from mobile devices
• Location marketing is key: A third of all searches conducted on mobile devices are location based
• In the US, a quarter of all searches conducted on mobile devices were voice based
• Think about doing how-to videos on YouTube
  • 2.4 million search queries per month on YouTube for how-to content
  • 32% of videos watched on YouTube are of how-to content

Integrating a mobile strategy into your marketing plan to cover multiple channels

• Speaker: Antonio Addario, Manager – Direct Channels Strategy, Efficiency & Innovation, ING Direct
• The online magazine Mobile Marketer is a great resource
• Some of the steps you need to take to figure out your mobile strategy are:
• Do lots of research (e.g. find out which apps people are willing to pay for in various app stores)
• Know your customer really well (both the people and the technology they use)
• Define your success
• Identify the key capabilities of all your online and mobile offerings; then select the ones you want to offer on your mobile platform
• Evaluate your development options (i.e. reuse/buy/build)
• Do plenty of promotion for your new offering
• Get your mobile offering to upsell for you (e.g. tell people to your other services from within the app)
• Measure success (KPIs, adoption, etc.)
• Listen to your customers and make the improvements they want

Utilising mobile marketing to promote your product or service

• Speaker: Julian Peterson, Marketing & Online Director, Time Out Sydney
• Time Out is 40 years old in London but 3 years old in Sydney and 6 months old in Melbourne
• A branded app can work well if your brands are similar and have the same core target audience (Time Out’s app is cobranded with Smirnoff)
• Time Out Australia used the app platform already built by London (which, as it happens, was work done by an Australian firm) so that made life easier for them
• The app does curated content and is really popular with their targeted audience

Recognising the benefits of mobile marketing to drive innovation and growth

• Speaker: Nandor Locher, Manager e-commerce, Virgin Australia
• A lot of the time, when you’re doing mobile marketing, you’re not really being ‘innovative’ in the true sense of the word
• It’s critical to focus your efforts on the unique advantages offered by mobile technology
• Mobile offerings are becoming part of a company’s larger product offering and are not just another marketing channel (e.g. like being able to check-in to your flight from the web, being able to do travel stuff on your mobile is now part of the broader travel services product offered by airlines)
• Mobile is becoming a ‘hygiene factor’ in the travel industry; i.e. if it’s not there, people will go to your competitor
• The ROI from the mobile offering is low so, for Virgin, their offering is largely a medium- to long-term brand and product augmentation investment
• It’s important to have a brand presence in the various app stores
• Integrating mobile with social media is important; particularly since social media is used so heavily in the travel industry
• Thanks to mobile devices, downtime has become the new uptime (e.g. Virgin increased sales by 150% by moving their happy hour sales to a downtime period for the target market)
• Depending on your offering, the usage and usefulness of mobile websites is sometimes greater than that of native phone apps (which many people download and then never use)

Understanding how to drive your brand via mobile

• Speaker: Stephanie Carrick, Senior Producer, Triple J Unearthed
• Triple J Unearthed is one of the largest online communities in Australia (250k registered users)
• They had to had a mobile presence (18-35 is their target market, after all)
• Their app focuses on users listening to music (i.e. they focus on their core value proposition)
• All their music content is available for downloading (for free)
• The app is a huge success, with over 420k downloads in 18 months
• Because of the app, they’ve seen a 50% sustained rise in traffic to their website (i.e. they’ve tapped a whole new audience that was inaccessible via radio)
• It’s crucial to have app maintenance budget because you will need to update it regularly from now on

Using Augmented Reality Technology to promote your business

• Speaker: Glenn Cooper, Executive Chairman, Coopers’ Brewery
• Brand and brand history plays a huge role in the decisions companies make (particularly in family owned businesses like Cooper’s)
• Doing a mobile app – that too, an augmented reality app – was a huge change for the business
• This worked well for them because they used it to promote their low carb beer which itself was a huge change for the business (as they are known for their dark beers)
• The app helped their marketing promotion be completely under their control (i.e. not under the control of the physical store retailers)

Joining the social media conversation about your company

• Speaker: Kristen Boschma, Head of Online Communications and Social Media, Telstra
• There are different types of social media programs (i.e. they have different objectives); for example:
• Listening
• Customer Care
• Thought Leadership
• Marketing & Sales
• The most important part of a listening program is to actually listen (and not jump in every time you’re mentioned or talked about)
• A key phrase to remember in social media engagements is “What’s the gift?” (looked at from another angle, that’s the answer to a customer who wants to know “What’s in it for me?”)
• Social media is an ecosystem: you must treat it with respect (i.e. don’t pollute it)
• In order to get stuff done, you need to have a burning platform
• Social media has worked really well for Telstra: 31% of all their online conversations now happen on Twitter
• All employees at Telstra have to take and pass their online social media course (yes, all 40k existing employees had to do this)
• Sentiment tracking is good, but make sure you provision for human coding in your budget because algorithms don’t understand sarcasm (of which there’s a lot online)

Developing social marketing strategies to transform your organisation

• Speaker: Paul Borrud, Head of Australia & New Zealand, Facebook
• 3 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook per month (globally)
• Australians spend an average of 7.5hrs on Facebook per month
• Facebook in Australia
• 10 million active users (i.e. use the site once in 30 days)
• 68% return daily, 86% return weekly
• 53% of users are female
• The age spread is about even (approximately 17-25% for each of the five major age brackets)
• Facebook lets people connect across borders really easily
• Facebook is about reorganizing the web around people
• In the 80s, the web was all about browsing
• In the 90s, it was all about search
• Now, it’s all about people
• Even gaming is reorganizing around people
• 43% of all news sharing now occurs in social media
• Businesses are reorganizing around people as well; this includes new product development, customer service, and marketing
• There are three types of marketing:
• Paid (e.g. newspaper ads)
• Owned (e.g. websites)
• Earned (e.g. word of mouth)
• Earned is the hardest to get, but is also the most powerful
• Facebook lets you do Earned marketing at scale
• ‘Fans’ are the new popular metric to quote (like ‘Hits’ was popular in the 80s and 90s)
• ‘Social’ is not the salt in the fries, it needs to be baked into the product

Panel Discussion: Maximising the opportunities given by social media strategies

• Speaker: Joe Millward, Innovation Manager – Social Media, Gloria Jeans International; Kristen Boschma, Head of Online Communications and Social Media, Telstra; Paul Borrud, Head of Australia & New Zealand, Facebook
• Ask yourself: What is it that the social media platform can do for you that other platforms can’t?
• Telstra has three rules for new social media ventures:
• You need a six month content plan
• You need someone to run the conversation (interacting at least twice daily)
• You have to have a back-end system to deal with questions, complaints, etc.
• Remember there are two kinds of social media interactions:
• Individual (e.g. my bill is wrong)
• Institutional (e.g. your billing system is wrong)
• These need to be handled differently (e.g. you need to be prepared to have individual interactions after hours as well as during work hours)

Introducing location-based mobile applications into your marketing strategy

• Speaker: Gary Daly, National IT Manager, Surf Life Saving Australia
• Surf Life Saving needed to get the beach safely message across to high risk beachgoers (specifically, males aged 16-35)
• Their app has two messages:
• Primary: be safe
• Secondary: get involved/donate (they are a non-profit that is run by volunteers and relies on donations to function)
• The app uses the phone’s GPS location to deliver targeted messages
• They use web services in the back-end to collect all the information that gets presented (e.g. they get weather data from the Bureau of Meteorology and beach data from their internal Surfcom system)
• Build into your app the ability to collect feedback – this will be vital to future app development
• A good mobile site is more cost effective than creating an app because the latter needs to be constantly updated

Panel Discussion: Keeping up with latest techniques and trends to gain competitive advantage

• Speaker: Gary Daly, National IT Manager, Surf Life Saving Australia; Tony Keusgen, Head of Technology, Google AU/NZ; Andy Ridley, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Earth Hour
• Google’s big bet is mobile (hence Android and Wallet and all their other mobile related services)
• Three key elements for location based services:
• Local
• Social
• Mobile
• Evidence based marketing is very important
• It’s important to go where you users are (e.g. websites, devices, platforms, etc.)
• This includes following their usage-time patterns; e.g. mobile web usage drops at 9am, spikes during lunch, then drops again till 5pm

Concluding Thoughts

The conference was well organized, well executed, and quite valuable in terms of what I got form it (both information and contacts). I look forward to attending it again next year.

NOTE: All speaker photos were taken from the WebForward website.

Michael Specht just completed a blog post series on ‘Social Media as Part of Background Checking’ during the recruitment process:

• Part 1 (Access to a unique view)
• Part 2 (Research into cultural fit)
• Part 3 (Legal issues)
• Part 4 (Bringing it all together)

I personally think that social media checks – or, at the very least, Google searches – are an essential part of recruitment. And I think that goes both ways:

• recruiters and companies learn all they can about candidates
• candidates learn all they can about recruiters and the companies they’re applying to

This is important because:

• both parties get to find out more about each other
• both parties get to assess cultural fit
• candidates get to show off their online portfolio and social media participation

While the last point is certainly vital for people working in Internet-related industries, it is also becoming increasingly relevant for people working in other industries (as more of their lives move online).

A colleague at work recently asked for some advice on using Facebook, specifically Facebook Pages vs. Groups. I dug up some resources for him and here’s what I came up with.

Group or Page?

The first thing you have do is figure out what you want to use Facebook for. Depending on your answer, you’ll want to use a Facebook Group or a Facebook Page:

• If your primary purpose is communicating with a known, closed group of people (e.g. you want to manage communication/interaction with a special interest group) then the better option is a Facebook Group
• If your primary purpose is marketing and awareness-raising (e.g. you want to interact with Facebook members like a brand or company would) then the better option is a Facebook Page

For more information on the difference between Groups and Pages, read these two articles:

• Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better? [Search Engine Journal]
• Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference? [Mashable]

Information About Facebook Groups

Since my colleague’s needs were more Group-related, I also collected these resources for him:

• Part 1: Tips and Tricks for Facebook Groups [Media Mensch]
• Tips for Starting your own Facebook Group [Virtual Marketing Blog]
• HOW TO: Manage a Facebook Group [Mashable]
• How do I make my Facebook group or fan page interesting? [Ask Dave Taylor]
• Facebook Groups: How to be Successful [Web Analytics World]

I recently collected a list of resources for some colleagues at work who wanted an introduction to the Twitter microblogging service. I thought it might be useful to post those here as well.

There’s a lot of Twitter-related information out there, by the way. Most of it is crap or says what everyone else is saying, just in a slightly different way. Fortunately, a few social media heavyweights have made our lives a lot easier by compiling that information for us.

That said, Twitter is an evolving platform so you have to keep up with the way it’s being used in order to stay relevant.

Twitter in Plain English

Let’s start with the very basics. Here’s ‘Twitter in Plain English’ by the good folk at Common Craft:

Also check out their ‘Twitter Search in Plain English’ video.

Twitter Guides

There are a handful of good Twitter guides out there. My favourite are these two:

• ‘The Complete Guide to Twitter’ from MakeUseOf.com, which you can download as a PDF
• ‘Twitter Guide Book’ from Mashable, who have many other awesome social media how-to guides

Twitter Tips

If you want something quicker to read, however, the TwiTip blog has lots of useful tips:

• Twitter for Beginners
• 13 Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners
• Twitter for Business
• Other Twitter Tips

TwiTip is worth subscribing to because they’ll keep updating us on how Twitter is evolving and what we should, could, and can do with it next.

Also nice is the ‘Chris Pirillo’s 140 Twitter Tips’ e-book which you can buy for US$1.40.

Theory vs Practice

Ultimately, though, the best way to learn about Twitter is to use Twitter.

You can read all you like but, until you actually get in there are participate, you won’t know exactly how it works and just how awesome it can be.

If you don’t keep up with large traditional media’s continued efforts to remain both large and traditional you might have missed Rupert Murdoch’s latest thoughts on the topic. Here’s what Mashable’s Pete Cashmore had to say about them:

Microsoft and News Corp in Discussions to Remove Newspaper Content from Google

Yes, really. Rupert Murdoch’s crusade to blame Google for the failing newspaper business model continues today, as it emerges that News Corp has conducted talks with Microsoft about de-indexing the company’s sites from Google and (presumably) being paid to include them in Bing instead.

The concept makes sense only if you buy Murdoch’s claims that Google is “stealing” content rather than simply helping people find it.

A number of people have responded to Murdoch’s proposed (threatened?) business model but Arianna Huffington really hit the nail on the head in a talk she gave at a recent journalism conference in the US.

In responding to Murdoch and traditional media, she said:

In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back. Not in the media. They’d rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content.

[..]

Thinking that removing your content from Google will somehow keep it “exclusive” shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the web and how it works.

[..]

In his speech this morning, Rupert Murdoch confused aggregation with wholesale misappropriation. Wholesale misappropriation is against the law — and he has legal redress against that already. Aggregation, on the other hand, within the fair use exceptions to copyright law is part of the web’s DNA. Period.

She then went on to talk about what the future of journalism will (and is starting to) look like:

We hear lots and lots of talk these days about saving newspapers — Congressional anti-trust exemptions, perhaps? — but we mustn’t forget: the state of newspapers is not the same thing as the state of journalism. As much as I love newspapers — and fully expect them to survive — the future of journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers.

Indeed, the future of journalism is to be found, at least partly, in the rapidly growing number of people who connect with the news in a whole new way.

News is no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news. It’s become something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now — expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.

In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community. And conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.

It’s an excellent speech that’s well worth the read.

Excellent slideshow on social media by Marta Kagan (of the The Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius blog). Language is NSFW…well, depending on where you work and what your team/organization’s culture is.

Enjoy :)

[Via A Blog Around the Clock]

A couple of weeks ago Scott Arbeitman wrote about the technology gap between the street and the enterprise. Carl Joseph replied to that with one of the most painful technology-related quotes I’ve heard (painful because of how true it is):

“Every day you get to use new technology and are exposed to new, exciting things…then you go to work.”

I’m not sure who actually said that, but if you work for a large corporation, then you’ll know what this feels like.

How do I Deal with Such Restrictions?

At my workplace, in order to keep up with the rest of the Internet world, I not only bring my own personal laptop to work I also bring with me my own personal wireless broadband Internet connection. And, despite the fact that my laptop is ancient and the broadband connection is painfully slow (relative to my workplace’s connection), I still get a better Internet experience on it than I do on my work computer.

Why? Because even though my laptop has half a gigabyte of RAM, a slow 30GB hard drive, no built-in wireless adapter (yes, it’s that old), and Windows XP, I get to run on it the latest versions of Flash, AIR, Silverlight, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Seesmic Desktop (along with numerous other applications) and I get to access whatever I want to on the Internet.

On my work computer, meanwhile, I am stuck with no AIR or Silverlight, IE6 as my only browser (I do have a version of Firefox on it but that doesn’t run Flash so it might as well not exist), and restrictions on which websites I can access. What makes this harder to live with is that my computer’s hardware is pretty good (it’s a docked laptop with a dual monitor setup) and my Internet connection speed is excellent.

It’s Not All Bad

I have to admit, though, that I am being somewhat unfair to my workplace. Aside from making us run IE6 and blocking parts of the web (including sites like Slideshare because it’s “personal storage”), they do let us access webmail, all the social networking sites (indeed, according to our IT department, Facebook is one of the five most popular sites at work), and most online media sites (like Flickr and YouTube). Compared to other large organizations – particularly government departments – in Australia, that’s pretty awesome.

In fact, they’ve gone a step further and have provided us (the Web Team) with a special media desktop (for converting and editing video) and a special Internet laptop (with all the latest software and applications installed on it). Bits of the Internet are still blocked on these PCs because you’re still going through their proxies, but that’s not such big a deal.

So What’s an Employee to Do?

One way for tech-savvy employees to get around these restrictions is to do what I’m doing: circumvent the IT department entirely by creating a parallel setup for yourself. With recent technology improvements like cheap netbooks, powerful smart phones, and readily available mobile broadband, this is easy and relatively inexpensive to do. I suspect a lot of Gen-Y will take this route.

The other option – the much harder one – is to get your IT department to get rid of these restrictions and, dare I say, modernize itself. Unfortunately, that’s not easy to do. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo makes a good case for it, though, in his recent article, ‘Unchain the Office Computers!’:

…workplace IT wardens are rarely amenable to rational argument. That’s because, in theory, their mission seems reasonable. Computers…can be dangerous things—they can breed viruses and other malware, they can consume enormous resources meant for other tasks, and they’re portals to great expanses of procrastination. So why not lock down workplace computers?

Here’s why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies’ success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.

The Role of the IT Department

One of the most important parts of Manjoo’s argument, however, is this:

What’s worse, because they aren’t tasked with understanding how people in different parts of a company do their jobs, IT managers often can’t appreciate how profoundly certain tools can improve how we work.

This is often the root cause of the problem because most IT departments are divided into roughly three parts:

• IT Operations: the people who keep the systems running
• The Project Management Office (PMO): the people who oversee updates, upgrades, and all the organization’s IT projects
• IT Planning: the people who plan for the future

What is often missing is the fourth part:

• In-house IT Consulting: the people who liaise directly with different parts of the business and use the latest technologies to improve the way those people work

Without that fourth part, IT departments have a hard time keeping up with what people in the organization believe are the most effective and efficient ways of doing their work. They also don’t keep up with the latest technological solutions for various business problems.

Modernizing the IT Department

So, if employees want to take the route of modernizing the way the IT department looks at new tools and technologies, they need to start by modernizing the IT department itself. And, to do that, they have to look at IT as two different groups:

• IT as a service delivery department: the people who provide us with our computers and networks
• IT as a partner in business: the people who proactively help us do our job better

And if they’re lucky enough to get a CIO who thinks that way as well, things should start to change.

In order to get what can loosely be called a ‘web strategy job’ in Australia I did quite a bit of research and analysis on how different companies hire for that position and I thought it might be useful to share what I’ve learnt. This serves two purposes:

• Others who are looking for jobs in the same area might find my analysis useful.
• Those who know more about this area than I do can improve my understanding of it.

Here’s hoping this blog post accomplishes a bit of both.

What Do You Mean by ‘Web Strategy Job’?

So what exactly does a ‘web strategist’ do? Well, it depends on the industry and company that job is in. In general, though, a web strategist is someone who takes care of everything a company does online. This includes:

• managing the company’s online presence (website, intranet, social media presence, etc.)
• figuring out what the company should be doing in the online space over the next few years; i.e. creating a web strategy and making sure it is aligned with the company’s business, marketing, and communications strategies
• implementing that strategy

This job can be in different departments and at different levels of seniority within a particular company. To explain this further I have come up with the How Companies Build Their Online Presence table (below). The columns on this table represent company size and the rows divide companies into those that consider their online presence to be strategic and those that don’t (yes, this is an artificial, binary division while, in reality, there is a range here). [1]

The text in the cells describes the solutions that these companies implement in order to build and maintain their online presence (yes, I am generalizing here). The jobs that I spent the last few months looking for are the manager-level web strategist/online manager positions described or implied in the green coloured cells.

Interestingly, over the last year, I have worked in companies in all three of those green-coloured areas:

• Shell is a very large company that uses its online presence strategically (both internally and externally)
• Melbourne Business School is a medium-sized company that uses of its online presence strategically (and increasingly so)
• Linfox is a large company that doesn’t use its website strategically but makes very good use of its intranet

Melbourne Water sits in the strategic row and is a large company.

Where the Web Strategist Fits in All This

As mentioned earlier, the web strategist jobs in those green-shaded boxes exist at different levels within different companies. That is why, over the last few months, I applied for jobs that spanned a range of tasks, skills, and seniority levels. In some small companies, for example, the primary driver of the web strategy is the specialist consultant hired on a 3-6 month contract. In some larger ones, the strategy is driven by a small group of people who are, in turn, led by the web/online manager.

There are pros and cons to being in each of those positions. For example, a short-term specialist-level consultant may not have the time, influence, or opportunity to have a major impact on a company’s overall web strategy. That said, this consultant sits outside the internal politics of that company and can be more blunt and direct about what that company needs to do without having to worry too much about what people think of him. A full-time online manager in a large company, meanwhile, many find corporate inertia working against her for the first six months but, once things get moving, will benefit from it. And because this manager knows the inner working of the company, she may get things done more quickly and more effectively.

The sweet spot for me was to get a middle management position in a good-sized company that made good, strategic use of its online space. There is huge potential (and lots of fun to be had) in this role because companies in this position are often quick to move and are willing to make a real impact online. Fortunately for me, this is exactly where Melbourne Water sits.

What About the State of the Job Market?

Of course, all this analysis is useless if it doesn’t help you get a job – particularly if no one is hiring for the position you really want to get. Because of that, I was also looking for less-than-perfect jobs or jobs on the periphery of where I wanted to be. The idea was that I would work towards the role I really wanted.

Speaking more generally: One good thing about this type of job is that every organization needs a website regardless of how the economy is doing (and Australia’s isn’t doing that badly). As a result, web strategists, website managers, and specialist online consultants are still getting hired. And though there are very few perfect jobs out there (and many companies are hiring less senior people to do the same job that more senior people were doing last year) I did come across a whole bunch that were great places to start. Read my previous blog post for more on that.

Further Research

So that is a summary of what I have learnt about web strategist jobs in Australia over the last couple of years. I encourage you to do your own research on this topic. To do that, I recommend the following three things:

• Subscribe to online job feeds from Seek, MyCareer, CareerOne, and SixFigures. This will teach you a great deal about the state of the job market and will help you adopt the lingo that hiring managers and recruitment firms use to match candidates to open positions.
• Talk to people who are in the industry and find out more from them. This is particularly useful if you are targeting a narrower segment in the market (e.g. web strategy jobs in the education sector). Also read their blogs, interact with them online, and get in touch with them through LinkedIn or your own networks (then meet up with them for a coffee or something).
• Talk to recruitment agents who recruit in this area. I mentioned three firms and three recruitment agents in my previous post but there are many others – you just need to find the ones that work best with you.

And when you learn stuff, blog about it so all of us can learn from your experiences.

- – - – - – - – - -

[1] The words ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic’ are used very loosely in everyday speech while, in actual fact, they mean something very specific. Let me clarify that here: when you say something is ‘strategic’ you necessarily mean that it is relative to your competitors. Take your website’s ‘Contact Us’ page. If, along with your office address, you were to give your office’s Melways Map reference, this would not be considered ‘strategic’ because this is common practice. If, instead, you embedded a Google map that showed your office’s location exactly (assuming, of course, that your customers found this useful and that it helped your business) this would be a ‘strategic’ move since few companies tend to do that and this gives you an advantage over your competitors. Note, however, that if you had decided to include that Google map without considering your competition, it would simply have been a ‘plan’. A ‘strategy’, on the other hand, is action taken specifically with your competition in mind (i.e. in order to gain an advantage over them).

The Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) study that I talked about a couple of weeks ago has since been featured on Episode #49 of the University of Melbourne’s Visions Video Podcasts.

Also, you can read excerpts from the the study on the Deloosh Market Research blog:

Abstract

This study finds evidence showing that employees who use the Internet for non-work related tasks during work hours are more productive than employees who do not. We speculated that Internet leisure browsing is an unobtrusive interruption which suspends metal fatigue, resulting in higher net concentration during a workday than when Internet leisure browsing is unavailable.

Smashing Magazine just published an excellent article by Lee Munroe that lists ‘15 Essential Checks Before Publishing Your Website’.

Pre-launch checklists are crucial because they sometimes save you from making the silliest of mistakes. I myself maintain two such checklists when working on website projects:

The first is a general pre-launch checklist like the one Munroe is talking about. I customize that to include all the specific features and functionality of the site that I am working on. Indeed it starts to look a little like Dan Zambonini’s ‘Ultimate Website Launch Checklist’ that Munroe refers to at the end of his post.

The second is a gaps and deviations checklist. This is a list that gets created while I’m working on the site and it covers gaps or deviations that I noticed while working on the site but wasn’t able to address at the time.

A gap could, for example, be something I wanted to add to the site before the launch but wasn’t able to do before, say, showing the latest iteration to the client. Instead of trusting myself to remember this gap later on, I log it into the checklist. This could be something like: “Add image between paragraph 2 and 3 on About Us > Company History page”.

Deviations, meanwhile, include crucial and non-crucial items. Crucial items are those that will cause problems once the site has been launched. These include things like “Remove hardcoded URL to video file on home page” or “Remember to tell ISP about new domain redirect for web server”. I clear all of these items off the list before going through any other checklist. Non-crucial items are those that we can launch with but the editor, designer, or generally obsessive-compulsive person in me would like to fix before we do. A non-crucial deviation item could be something like: “Re-crop image on Contact Us > Branch Locations page to remove tree branch on right side”.

My gaps and deviations checklist is usually quite short and often I find that I’ve already fixed a lot of the things that are listed in it. But still, it’s a useful one to have; particularly if you’re as obsessive about everything being perfect at launch time as I am!