Online Authority Blog

Digital strategy for Ottawa Chamber of Commerce Members

by Kelly Kubrick on May 23, 2013

First published in the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce email Newsletter, May 23, 2013

What is Your Company’s Digital Strategy?

Many businesses are aware of the potential digital represents – perhaps for cost savings and improved efficiencies; perhaps for increased sales – but ultimately, for improvement in the overall business. Yet, there is also a sense of feeling overwhelmed by digital and its never-ending waves of change. Which path to take: web? Email? Mobile? Social? All of the above? What to do?

Digital strategy is about competitive advantage

Take a step back to see the larger horizon: your company’s digital strategy is about more than the latest buzzword. Instead, its potential makes it about the larger issue of competitive advantage – identifying it, articulating it, and achieving it.

Yesterday, digital opportunities were limited by bandwidth and a lack of critical mass in the marketplace. Today, digital allows us to better connect our people – customers, constituents, donors, employees, partners – to improve the experience of doing business with our organization. Improving that experience pays off – retaining a customer, employee or supplier is simply more cost effective than acquiring new.

Yet, we’re also challenged by the simple reality that the way our digital stakeholders interact, learn and share has outpaced business’ ability to respond. And every succeeding generation appears to have an instinctive understanding of this world which most of us are still learning. Great. Now what?

Address organizational expectations vs. operational readiness

Make a plan that addresses the realities of organizational expectations and operational readiness. It will become the road map that connects the reality of where you are and where you need to go, to meet those evolving expectations. Identify the risks digital might bring, but don’t let them stop you from uncovering new opportunities. Finally, take advantage of the insights digital data generates – it’s what makes digital fundamentally different from our offline world.

In reality, digital is impacting across all channels, is forcing transparency, and is making it easier for new competition. Organizations that take digital out of its marketing and technology silos and see it a competitive advantage are weaving their digital strategy into their business strategy – challenging what was, acknowledging what is and planning for what could be.

Get advice from other companies facing the same challenges

What’s the next step? Attend Digital Strategy Conference, the first of its kind in the National Capital. From June 3-5, 2013, benefit from three days of advice on how to articulate your company’s digital strategy.

Ottawa Chamber of Commerce members receive a special discount!. Please visit members only section on the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce website.

It’s time to get strategic with digital.

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Kelly KubrickDigital strategy for Ottawa Chamber of Commerce Members
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Understand Your Organization’s Digital Maturity podcast episode from The Voice

by Kelly Kubrick on May 22, 2013

Assessing digital maturity can help your organization prioritize

With Digital Strategy Conference Vancouver 2013 behind us and our next edition, Digital Strategy Conference Ottawa 2013 only days away, I was very pleased to be invited to participate in IABC Ottawa’s the Voice podcast, to talk about the concept of digital maturity that we proposed last month in Vancouver.IABC Ottawa’s the Voice podcast logo

I had the chance to sit down with Danny Starr, host of The Voice podcast for a chat about the launch of dStrategy Media, our proposed Digital Maturity Model and the upcoming Ottawa conference. The podcast, The Voice Episode 58: Understand Your Organization’s Digital Maturity with Kelly Kubrick runs about 20 minutes long, and in it Danny and I discuss:

  • What digital maturity is
  • Why is it important for an organization to assess its maturity
  • Why digital maturity should be looked at horizontally, across your organization, not simply as a marketing-communications issue
  • The Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity, and how they are rated
  • What types of indicators are used in the dStrategy Media Digital Maturity Model
  • How to manage an organization’s tendency to rate itself too highly
  • Who could take charge of the effort to rate your organization’s digital maturity
  • Symptoms or signs that your organization may not be as mature, digitally, as it thinks
  • What the next steps are once an organization has assessed it’s maturity

My thanks to IABC Ottawa, supporting sponsor of Digital Strategy Conference Ottawa 2013, and the crew from The Voice, for giving me the chance to explain more about our proposed business planning tool

Listen: Understand Your Organization’s Digital Maturity podcast from the Voice

Have a listen to episode 82 and let us know your thoughts. During the Ottawa conference, we’ll be presenting two case studies – from a non-profit and from a for profit company, who undertook our digital maturity assessment.

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Kelly KubrickUnderstand Your Organization’s Digital Maturity podcast episode from The Voice

It’s a wrap: Digital Strategy Conference Vancouver 2013

by Kelly Kubrick on April 30, 2013

What an excellent three days!

I’m back from Digital Strategy Conference Vancouver 2013, where we dove deep into the fundamentals of digital strategy. Over 20 speakers / 20 sessions, great conversations in-person and via Twitter (search for the hashtag #dstrategy).

My brain is full.

In particular, I’m very pleased about the audience’s response to the dStrategy Media Digital Maturity Model, a framework that my business partner, Andrea Hadley, and I developed. It’s intended as a business planning tool, to help organizations better understand all the moving parts needed to develop their digital strategy.

Thanks to the furiously-fast writing of Joanne Probyn, we were able to capture an overview of the sessions via the Vancouver 2013 blog posts.

Finally, huge thanks Big thanks to Juliana Loh and Trevor Jansen for their expert photography and visual media services. Take a moment to enjoy the show for yourself via the Vancouver photo gallery.

And the countdown is now on… we’re only a few shorts weeks out from Digital Strategy Conference Ottawa 2013 – hope to see you at the University of Ottawa from June 3 – 5, 2013!

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Kelly KubrickIt’s a wrap: Digital Strategy Conference Vancouver 2013
calm-before-the-storm-by-bob-nardi

Eye of the Storm

by Kelly Kubrick on March 1, 2013

How to find calm inside a surge of innovation

First published by Business in Vancouver, Business Excellent Series – Marketing Digital Strategies, March 2013

Eye of the Storm - How to find calm inside a surge of innovation, part of the Marketing Digital Strategies, Business Excellence Series from Business in Vancouver, March 2013

Eye of the Storm – How to find calm inside a surge of innovation, part of the Marketing Digital Strategies, Business Excellence Series from Business in Vancouver, March 2013

A recurring theme in conversations with colleagues is the sense of feeling overwhelmed by digital – by wave after wave of emerging technologies and trends, by the multitude of channels and the fragmentation of platforms, by the potential they know to be significant, but which is so fluid that it’s hard to get any kind of traction.

This sense of feeling swamped by digital has flowed into many functional areas: marketing and communications, customer service, sales, operations and IT. It’s a digital deluge and it’s not getting easier – in fact, in the short term it may be getting harder.

There is a solution. It’s one that is often intuitively understood, but escapes our reach. It’s about getting perspective, accepting what is and shifting our thinking. We need to step back, see the larger horizon, and remain open.

An organization’s digital strategy needs to be about the bigger issue of competitive advantage – how to identify it, how to articulate it, and how to execute to achieve it.

We need to ask how digital allows us to better connect our people – customers, constituents, donors, employees, partners – to improve the experience of doing business with our organization. And as we all know, improving that experience pays off – retaining a customer, employee or supplier is always more cost effective than acquiring new.

How do you address these issues? Where do you begin?

You need the perspective that can only come from stepping out of the turbulent vortex and into the calm that will result from having a plan. You need to create a framework to address the realities of both organizational expectations and operational readiness, and then establish a road map that connects the reality of where you are to the evolving expectations of your customers, constituents and members.

One of the expectations you need to address is scope – to help the organization understand that digital is not simply part of a marketing or advertising strategy. It is not the launch of a Twitter account or a mobile application. It is not simply a bulk purchase of tablets for your sales team so that you can claim to have a mobile workforce. Your digital strategy is much bigger than any one sales, marketing, communication or technology tactic.

In reality, digital is impacting across all channels, is forcing transparency, and is making it easier for new competition.  While the majority of organizations keep digital in a marketing and technology silo, those with a holistic understanding and an eye  for competitive advantage are weaving their digital strategy into their business strategy – challenging what was, acknowledging what is and planning for what could be.

What to do?

Here are some basic first steps towards planning your digital strategy.

  1. Identify the risks digital might bring, but don’t let them stop you from discovering and leveraging new opportunity;
  2. Although intriguing, intuition is neither replicable nor scalable; it cannot give you competitive advantage. Instead, take advantage of insights from  data that digital generates – it’s what makes digital fundamentally different from our offline world; and
  3. Depending on your organization’s digital maturity, chances are that the thinking that got you where you are today is not the thinking that will move you into the digital age. It would be short-sighted of you not to learn from those who’ve gone before; it is worth asking for input. Don’t be surprised at how accessible insights of others can be; don’t underestimate that the very nature of digital is how it thrives on openness and transparency.

So, when you are feeling overwhelmed, take a step back and get some perspective. Start looking at the bigger picture of how digital can weave into your business strategy, and then start planning your road map that considers new opportunities, data and openness. Suddenly, the noise and distraction of what’s new today will no longer provoke stress, but instead it will take its place as opportunities to be evaluated against your larger plan.

Co-authored by Kelly Kubrick, Vice-President and Partner of dStrategy Media and Andrea Hadley, President and Partner of dStrategy Media, producers of Digital Strategy Conference.

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Kelly KubrickEye of the Storm

Announcing Digital Strategy Conference Ottawa 2013

by Kelly Kubrick on January 29, 2013

Digital Strategy ConferenceAnd it’s official – Digital Strategy Conference Ottawa 2013 dates and location have been confirmed!

Join us on June 3-5, 2013 at the University of Ottawa to get an in-depth education into the key elements of building your organization’s digital strategy.

As with the Vancouver conference, prepare to be immersed into the world of digital strategy development. In addition to sessions in Defining Digital Strategy and Establishing Digital Maturity, you will be taught by industry experts in five  different educational modules – think of them as your five key areas of learning:

  1. Organizational and Operational Readiness;
  2. Digging into Content Strategy;
  3. Mobile to Multiscreen;
  4. Social Strategy: Earned Media for Community Development; and
  5. Making Sense of Advertising / Paid Media.

For answers to any questions you might have about the conference format and logistics please read the Ottawa conference Frequently Asked Questions.

For those of you with a great digital strategy story to tell, you might consider submitting a case study proposal – but hurry – the Digital Strategy Conference Ottawa Call for Speakers ends March 15th, 2013.

Most importantly – you should register soon as double early bird pricing ends Friday March 8th, 2013. See you in Ottawa in June!

Updated: Still hesitating? Have a quick look at this video from our inaugural Vancouver event!

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Kelly KubrickAnnouncing Digital Strategy Conference Ottawa 2013

An afternoon immersion in digital analytics

by Kelly Kubrick on January 28, 2013

Key Takeaways from eMetrics Tour Ottawa 2013

Our thanks to the 100+ hardy souls who turned up for an afternoon of digital measurement resolutions on the first day of Ottawa’s killer cold snap this month. It was a great turnout; we had folks from all sectors and across all industries having lots of  great conversations. My thanks to Jim Sterne and my fellow sponsors for sharing their insight and information. In the hope that it might keep your own digital analytics discussions flowing back at your offices, here are my top takeaways:

Analytics definitions from Stephane Hamel of Cardinal Path

  • “How an organization arrives at an optimal and realistic decision informed by data”
  • “Analytics is context plus data plus creativity”
  • “Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic into small parts to gain an understanding of it

I agree with Stephane’s statements – that the digital analytics industry’s number one problem today is the lack of rigorous process. In my own experience, the only way to keep ahead of all tool and technology changes is to have a framework that articulates what to measure, based on your ‘why’ measure objectives, regardless of vendor. Stephane uploaded his presentation “10 years of hard learned analytics wisdom in 20 minutes” on SlideShare.

(Yours Truly) Kelly Kubrick from Online Authority

Hobbit-Bilbo-Baggins-in-Doorway I was pleased that folks seem to hear, based on tweets, some of my key messages:

  • To an analyst, reporting is practising scales is to a musician; it gets / keeps you limber so that you are more able to achieve more creativity in your analysis
  • For non-techies, know that deconstructing prose and poetry in literature gives you an edge when deconstructing blocks of data. You already know how to assess the “whole” based on your ability to isolate the parts
  • Annotate, annotate, annotate: they give you a contextual lens to better understand your data as it changes
  • Ideally, digital analysts have a belief in Second Breakfast in common with Hobbits  (vs hairy feet).

Feel free to peruse my my list of recommended resources for digital analysts, or to download my full presentation Changing Habits: An Unexpected Analytics Journey” (PDF). Let me know if you have any questions about either.

Jim Cain of Napkyn

Jim tackled the question of data and design best practices for Executive Dashboards. His words of advice:

  • “Use dashboards to replace intuition with information”
  • “Create alignment ~ draw the line between the numbers to sales/leads etc for executives by anticipating the question: “I showed you this because…”
  • “Good data + great analysis = appreciative execs (+ better decisions)”
  • “Your dashboard should inform ‘data focus’ choices – don’t include ALL the numbers; pick the ones that tell the story
  • “The best way to look at the numbers is to compare current to historical and predictive (the plan)”

And my personal favourite: “Think of Excel as a design tool, not just a data tool. Start thinking of your reports as non-fiction stories”. As someone known for singing the praises of pivot tables, the analogy brought a smile to my face.

If you didn’t get the chance to see it prior to our gathering, here’s Napkyn’s earlier post on the event: eMetrics Ottawa – Awesome, Important, Free! (and Napkyn is in the house).

Jim Sterne of eMetrics and the Digital Analytics Association

  • “Big data” is that which no longer fits in an Excel spreadsheet – love that! Update: per Jim’s comment below, this should actually be credited to Stephane Hamel – and with that, thanks Stephane for coining it and Jim for introducing me to it!
  • Snippet answers from Jim’s question: What Makes a Great Analyst? One who “understands the raw material and the mechanics of extraction”, “the problem to be solved” and who is “mindful of built-in biases that prevent one from looking at one’s data honestly”
  • The low hanging fruit of analysis includes “errors, omissions, complaints, spikes and troughs, ‘that’s funny” moments and anomalies”
  • “Above all, have an opinion”

emetrics-summit-logoAlthough Jim had much more to say, for a great summary of Jim’s presentation, you can’t beat Practicing the Art of Analytics published by June Li and the crew clickinsight in Toronto.

For those of you who might be interested in attending an upcoming eMetrics Summit, but you’d like to know more about it, take a look at distilled learning from eMetrics Toronto 2012.

And, congratulations to the Canadian eMetrics Summit Tour winners!

Allan Wille of Klipfolio

Allan gave us his forecast on trends that are changing the weather for marketers:

  • “1) real-time feeds, 2) data democracy, and 3) using the Cloud”
  • “Real time” of automated self-serve dashboards can make a difference”; break loose from the chains of manually updating Excel spreadsheets!
  • Data democracy is about: “aligning the entire organization behind the data, getting everyone in the organization looking at the data and realizing that data needs to be shared no matter what”
  • Communicate goals, measure then communicate again to get everyone on the bus (idea from book From Good to Great by Jim Collins)
  • “The Cloud has helped to develop the maturity if analytics tools” – amen to that!

Learn more from Klipfolio by taking a look at their pre-event post: Let’s talk metrics! Klipfolio an official sponsor of the eMetrics Tour.

Also, to see how our colleagues at the Montreal stop fared, take a look at eMetrics Tour Montréal – Un résumé des conférences (in French).

And finally – thanks to all of you who tweeted up a storm; it was great to be able to ‘replay’ the event with your documentary effort! In particular, my thanks to @w_grimes, @jorrdanlouis, @nellleo and @LindsayMMcPhee. You captured a great deal of information, and I really appreciated it.

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Kelly KubrickAn afternoon immersion in digital analytics

Digital Maturity: the Channel Strategy Dimension

by Kelly Kubrick on January 20, 2013

Originally published on the Digital Strategy Conference blog; republished with permission from dStrategy Media.

The fifth dimension of digital maturity is your Channel Strategy. It is one of Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity™ assessed in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model™, a business planning tool to help organizations improve their digital processes against an established standard.

Channel Strategy icon from the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model

This dimension relates to your organization’s approach to its channel strategy for its digital initiatives. You’ll notice that “mobile” is not a channel – instead, our model assumes your digital channel interactions regardless of the customers use of desktop web vs mobile environments.

Three channel categories

There are three categories of channels, not all of which may apply to you.

  1. Digital marketing and communications channels including the use of paid (advertising), owned (website, mobile app or blog) and earned (social or public relation) media OR
  2. Digital ‘transaction-enabling’ channels such as a) ecommerce or membership sales, or to accept donations b) Non-financial transactions such as accepting job or grant applications, accepting votes or generating leads OR
  3. Digital distribution channels including direct to consumer, retail, wholesale or affiliate / partners.

How does your organization approach its channels?

Think about your organization and its approach to channel management:

1. Which of the three categories of channels described above are you currently using?
2. How would you characterize your organization’s approach to each?
3. What is the funding model for your digital channels?
4. How do you measure performance measurement of your digital channels?

Next, let’s take a look at your organization’s social business strategy.

Answering these questions is will help your organization determine if it is in the best position to implement your digital initiatives. What do you think? Have you got the right channel strategy in place to ensure your organization’s digital success?

Next: Social Business Strategy

Next, let’s take a look at the sixth dimension, your organization’s social business strategy.

Participate in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey

For specific questions that measure the human resources dimension of digital maturity, take the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey. We will share our collective results at the next Digital Strategy Conference.

Learn how to measure your organization’s digital maturity

Or, to measure your organization’s digital maturity across all six dimensions, register for our Mapping Digital Maturity Workshop, a practical, hands-on learning session to help your organization create a road map for digital success.

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Kelly KubrickDigital Maturity: the Channel Strategy Dimension

Recommended Resources for Digital Analysts

by Kelly Kubrick on January 16, 2013

First published in July 2007 – most recent update: January 16, 2013

Every few months, the opportunity comes up for me to share my list of recommended digital (web) analytics resources. Given the number of times I’ve emailed that list, I think it may be of use to you as a blog post. Enjoy!

Recommended Digital Analytics Resources

1. Follow #measure on Twitter – one of several hashtags your fellow digital analysts use – see example results here.

2. Subscribe to Web Analytics Forum email listserv. You can monitor it online or receive a daily-digest email that includes all postings. Lurk on it for a while and you’ll see the kinds of questions getting asked – sometimes vendor specific, sometimes not. I’ve had superb responses any time I’ve posted questions there. As a point of interest, when I first joined the list, there were approximately 2,000 members. Today, it’s over 7,000. FYI – as a members-only list, you must apply to join, but the administrators are pretty speedy at turning around requests, so don’t let that hold you back.

3. Nowadays, there is a plethora of fabulous digital analytics and web analytics blogs, but one of the most comprehensive remains Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik. The easiest way I’ve found to read blogs is to through an RSS reader  (I use Google Reader), which allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds of multiple blogs.

4. Over the years, more and more web analytics books have been published, and I try to get through as many as I can. For my personal list including book descriptions, see Critical tidbits from a Web (now Digital) Analytics bookshelf.

5. If you’d prefer to listen versus read, you should subscribe to the Beyond Web Analytics podcast by Rudi Shumpert and Adam Greco. Each podcast is roughly 30 minutes and they do great interviews with fellow analysts, provide analytics event roundups and much more. One of the things I like best about it is that at the beginning of each episode, Rudy and Adam ask each interviewee how he or she got started on the path of becoming an analyst – I’m always intrigued to hear about the various paths people take.

6. Google Analytics’ Conversion University which offers hours of free online training. Although the material was developed specifically to help people prepare for Google Analytics Individual Certification (IQ) test, and so is, of course, Google Analytics-centric, the material is useful regardless. If you like to set your own learning pace, there are loads of great modules in there.

7. If you’re just starting out and are looking for some hands on experience at analytics, you should check out The Analysis Exchange. It’s a great concept – essentially, it pairs not for profits in need of web analytics consulting with eager web analysts, supervised by veteran web analysts. And the best part? It’s free consulting for the non-profits!

8. I strongly recommend you join our industry association, the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) formerly known as the Web Analytics Association. They provide great research and other useful benefits – events, webinars, articles, discounts to industry events, etc.  I’ve been a proud member since 2006. Most importantly, though, you should consider volunteering on one of several committees – I’ve participated working groups for the Education committee and met some great folks as a result.

9. Today, there are many online web analytics and or digital analytics courses you might consider: The University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Award of Achievement in Digital Analytics, Université Laval”s “Analytiques Web”  (in French) course, McMaster University’s Web Analytics Program,  Algonquin College’s certificate in Digital Analytics, and the University of San Francisco (USF)’s  Advanced Web Analytics program.

Full disclosure: I serve on the advisory board of the McMaster program, am an instructor in the USF program and have served on UBC Course Enhancement working groups coordinated by (as they were then) the Web Analytics Association.

10. If your budget allows, you should consider attending one of several global eMetrics Summits. In 2008, I was very pleased to see eMetrics come to Canada. Now entering its fifth year, take a look at the upcoming eMetrics Toronto conference (March 2013).

What about you? Do you have any favourite web analytics / digital analytics resources you would add to my list?

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Kelly KubrickRecommended Resources for Digital Analysts

Digital Maturity: the Content Strategy Dimension

by Kelly Kubrick on January 10, 2013

Originally published on the Digital Strategy Conference blog; republished with permission from dStrategy Media.

The fourth dimension of digital maturity is your Content Strategy. It is one of Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity™ assessed in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model™, a business planning tool to help organizations improve their digital processes against an established standard.

Content Strategy icon from the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model

With thanks to the combined efforts of Rahel Anne Bailie, Noz Urbina, Halvorson, Kristina and Melissa Rach to provide our industry with working definitions:

Content strategy is “a comprehensive process that builds a framework to create, manage, deliver, share and archive or renew content in reliable ways”

Content strategy encompasses multiple processes

• The inventory and format(s) of the content it produces
• The location and storage of its content
• The organization’s content development and publishing process
• The performance measurement of the content it produces
• The content evaluation and archiving process

Content assets include more than we think

• Information about your organization, the people/employees, and contact information, mission.
• Product and service information
• Sales collateral
• Marketing and or advocacy collateral
• Advertising collateral
• Customer service information
• Employee education and training material
• Product support
• Policies and legal information
• User generated content such as reviews, testimonials, customer service tickets
• Your web, mobile app, blog, social or email content

How does your organization approach content strategy?

Now, think about your organization’s approach to content:

  1. Is there a comprehensive inventory of content?
  2. Which format(s) is that content available in?
  3. Where is content located and stored?
  4. What is your content development and content publishing process?
  5. Who is responsible for producing content?
  6. How is content evaluated?
  7. What is your content archiving process?
  8. Are you producing all the content you need?
  9. What is your policy towards the use of third party sources of content such as user generated content?
  10. Is there clarity internally about the difference between responsive versus adaptive content?

Definition: Responsive Content vs. Adaptive Content

Responsive content “responds to the environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. Content designed for desktop is automatically resized to the screen size of the device in use” – essentially changing in how the content is displayed, visually.

Adaptive content is “format-free, device-independent, scalable, and filterable content that is transformable for display in different environments and on different devices in an automated or dynamic fashion.”

Source: Rockley, Ann and Charles Cooper, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, Second Edition, Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper, New Riders, 2012)

With adaptive content, structure is applied to content so that it can be displayed accordingly to business rules that vary by use case.

Answering these questions is will help your organization determine if it is in the best position to implement your digital initiatives. What do you think? Have you got the right content strategy in place to ensure your organization’s digital success?

Next: Channel Strategy

Next, let’s take a look at the fifth dimension, your organization’s channel strategy.

Participate in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey

For specific questions that measure the human resources dimension of digital maturity, take the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey. We will share our collective results at the next Digital Strategy Conference.

Learn how to measure your organization’s digital maturity

Or, to measure your organization’s digital maturity across all six dimensions, register for our upcoming Mapping Digital Maturity Workshop, a practical, hands-on learning session to help your organization create a road map for digital success.

read more
Kelly KubrickDigital Maturity: the Content Strategy Dimension

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