Definition

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Six Dimensions of Digital maturity podcast episode with Mr Marketology

by Kelly Kubrick on October 11, 2016

What are the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity?

Recently, I had the pleasure of chattting with Jeff Beale, aka Mr. Marketology as part of his Marketing Strategy Sessions podcast and YouTube channel. Jeff and I discussed the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity, the business planning model we first proposed at Digital Strategy Conference.

Watch our conversation on YouTube (20 minutes, 47 seconds) by clicking the video embedded below:

In this episode, Jeff and I discuss how the digital maturity model came about and how organizations can use it to their advantage. In particular, we talked about:Image of the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity - the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model

My thanks to Jeff Beale for his interest in sharing the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity the larger Mr Marketology community! Learn more at the Mr Marketology website, on Facebook, @mrmarketology on Twitter or Google Plus.

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Kelly KubrickSix Dimensions of Digital maturity podcast episode with Mr Marketology

Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity – Introductory Review

by Kelly Kubrick on April 29, 2014

Originally published on the Digital Strategy Conference blog; republished with permission from dStrategy Media. Author: Jeremy Whittingstall – Professional communicator with a penchant for filmmaking on the side. Masters Degree. Accredited Business Communicator. Husband. Dad.

Take a deep breath, here is the Digital Maturity Model™ from 10,000 ft

The Digital maturity Model exist to give perspective on your current state and prepare you for moving forward. In 2013, Andrea Hadley and Kelly Kubrick introduced the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model™ and over the past year have conducted research that suggests the point in which an organization graduates from one level of maturity to the next. When you understand how the dimensions of digital maturity are measured, you’ll be better positioned to rate where your organization stands today and how to anticipate the next curve in the road.

Let’s dive in!

What is Digital Strategy?

Digital strategy is the process of identifying, articulating and executing on digital opportunities that will increase your organization’s competitive advantage.

So – if digital strategy is a process, remember that a process presumes a progression – from an initial starting point, to the approach of and overtaking of milestones to destinations both identified and unknown.

However, most of us need something far more concrete to take those first steps into digital. A practical and efficient way to do this is to take advantage of established planning tools, such as a maturity models. “Maturity Models” are a tried and tested planning tool and can be found across industries and topics.

Maturity Model = Planning Tool

“Maturity” relates to the degree of formality and optimization of processes. Think about a process in your organization, complex or simple:

  1. Opening a new store
  2. Publishing a web page or email newsletter issue
  3. Producing a conference

As a planning tool, maturity models can be used to help you improve these processes by assessing your approach to them today. As with other maturity models, the Digital Maturity Model™ is also a business planning tool. It is intended to help your organization assess and improve its digital processes.

The Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity

Think of these as the resources and capabilities your organization must have in place in order to identify, articulate and execute on digital opportunities.

  1. Human Resources
  2. Technology Resources
  3. Data Strategy
  4. Content Strategy
  5. Channel Strategy
  6. Social Business Strategy

Ratings of Digital Maturity

The second key component in the Digital Maturity Model™ is the rating scale. The model contains assessment criteria you can use to rate your organization’s current approach to each dimension.

Image of dStrategy Digital Maturity Model™

dStrategy Digital Maturity Model™

Breaking down the dimensions

Human Resources

The first dimension of digital maturity is Human Resources. Think of your people in three different groups:

  1. People currently working with digital technology and process.
  2. Senior management / C-suite looking at threats and opportunities resulting from digital, and the impact of digital on the organization’s business model
  3. People who are not using digital technologies, processes or media who could be; finding increased efficiencies

Now, think about your organization’s approach to its people working on digital:

  1. Who are they and what level are they at?
  2. Is digital their primary responsibility or is it an ‘off the corner of their desk’ prioritization?
  3. What kind of organizational support is provided?
  4. Do they work alone or as part of a larger team?
  5. Do they report to management that has digital training and or expertise?
  6. If part of a team, is the team predominantly working on digital or non-digital initiatives?
  7. What kind of training – in digital – is provided to those resources?
Technology Resources

The second dimension of digital maturity addresses your organization’s approach to the technology resources your organization uses to implement its digital initiatives. Think about your organization:

  1. Which technologies have you invested into support your digital initiatives?
  2. How are those technologies used / supported?
  3. Are the technologies used by individuals? By teams? Or across the organization?
  4. What policies and procedures do you have in place to govern the use of the technologies?

We’ve identified four core technology categories:

  1. Content management systems
  2. Analytics
  3. Channel management
  4. Social business
Data Strategy

Data strategy reflects all the ways you capture, store, manage and use information. What do we mean by data? Your data sources might include:

  1. Email marketing, Social media and/or campaign data from ad networks or paid search
  2. Market Research data from surveys, focus groups or usability testing
  3. Sales, prospecting or lead nurturing data; or CRM data; ecommerce data
  4. Call center data from call logs, interactive voice response (IVR)
  5. Web analytics data from tools such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics
  6. Data from Content Management System or social business tools

In our “digital” world, it is a key dimension of our digital strategy. Data is the output of the implementation of our digital initiatives and it is what’s driving continuous improvement processes (or optimization); as well as increased accountability and the opportunity for making more informed business decisions.

Content Strategy

This section relates to your organization’s approach to content. content strategy is a comprehensive process that builds a framework to create, manage, deliver, share and archive or renew content in reliable ways. Remember, your content assets could include:

  1. Sales / advertising collateral
  2. Product support and / or customer service content
  3. User generated content such as reviews, testimonials, customer service tickets.
Channel Strategy

Our model assumes three potential channels you may be leveraging:

  1. Marketing/Communications channels
  2. Transaction enabling channels
  3. Distribution channels

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.

Social Business Strategy

“Social business” is an emerging term with a three pronged approach. It presumes an intent to interact and collaborate:

  1. With your community (Requires a foundation in social media)
  2. Between your employees (Requires the culture and technology to support a collaborative work environment)
  3. Between your customers (Requires infrastructure to support their efforts)

The Social Business Dimension speaks to the organization’s approach to interaction and collaboration with all three audiences.

So that’s it! The Digital Maturity Model from 10,000 ft. Over the next three days we will be going into granular detail on what each dimension means and how to map it for your company. Stay tuned!

kellykubrick_100

Kelly Kubrick, President, Online Authority / Partner, dStrategy Media

andreahadley_100

Andrea Hadley, Conference Chair, Digital Strategy Conference Vancouver

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Kelly KubrickSix Dimensions of Digital Maturity – Introductory Review

How mature are we, digitally?

by Kelly Kubrick on February 3, 2014

Originally published on the Digital Strategy Conference blog; republished with permission from dStrategy Media. Post updated with availability of subsequent Benchmark surveys.

Share your digital experience

Consider participating in our digital evolution by completing the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey online.

When we first formed dStrategy Media to launch Digital Strategy Conference, we kicked off the Vancouver and Ottawa events by introducing the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model™. Not only did the audience confirm the tremendous value that our digital maturity model provides, they promptly asked, “what’s next?”

Benchmark our industry’s digital processes

Both in answer to that question, and to help our digital strategy community plan for the coming year, we are fielding a research study. Our findings, along with a review of the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity, will be delivered at the next Mapping Digital Maturity Workshop.

We welcome your participation by completing the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey online.

How does your organization compare?

Interested in learning more? Consider our Mapping Digital Maturity corporate training – a practical, hands-on day of learning help your organization create its road map for digital success.

To learn more about the Digital Maturity model, research or workshop, contact Kelly Kubrick.

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Kelly KubrickHow mature are we, digitally?

How to track digital campaigns using Google Analytics utm codes

by Kelly Kubrick on November 27, 2013

“Tagging” Credit When Credit Is Due: Understanding Digital Campaign Tracking

Imagine a website…It’s a good website. It deserves visitors.

 

 

 

 

 

Those responsible for it agree, and the marketing / communications plans initiate:

  • Press / news releases are issued
  • Advertising is purchased
  • Keywords are bid on
  • Emails go out
  • Social media gets conversational

Good news! Website visitors start showing up…

 

 

 

 

 

Lots more visitors…

Image credit: Penguins sculpture, by Nao Matsumoto

Image credit: Penguins sculpture, by Nao Matsumoto

And right in the middle of all the celebrations, you get the dreaded question. Someone asks you which marketing or communication effort did the trick.

They start pummelling you with questions – which effort brought the visitors? Which didn’t? How did the efforts compare? Which should we do more of? Less of? Should we double down on any of them? Or discontinue any of them?

And once they hit you with all the ‘quantity’ questions, they then want to know the ‘quality’ questions: which effort(s) brought the right visitors for the campaign objective?

And you slowly back out of the room…

I am pleased to tell you there is good news – you can answer all those questions, and with flair and panache. The bad news is that it does take some advance planning.

Campaign tracking is about taking – or ‘tagging’ – credit

Web analytics tools attribute visitors to 1 of 2 ‘default’ traffic sources: the “Direct” (aka No Referral) or the “Referral” source:

“Typical” split measured as by web analytics tools - Direct vs Referral

“Typical” split measured as by web analytics tools

 

 

 

 

 

Direct is traffic a measure of brand awareness

Direct traffic website visitors are those who arrive by bookmark or memorized domain or URL. Think of this source of visitor traffic as a measure of brand awareness; visitors must have had previous exposure to your brand or URL,  to recall or type it into a browser window and / or bookmark it.

Referral traffic is closer to publicity

By contrast, the Referral traffic source ‘refers’ (get it?) to visitors arriving via a third party website. However, to make Referral more useful, we immediately segment those third parties into more specific organic (or unpaid) sources. Examples include:

  1. Search: traffic from commercial search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing or About
  2. Social Media: traffic from social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram
  3. Publishers such as online newspapers, magazines or bloggers
  4. Institutions such as universities, hospitals or government websites

Think of these referral sources as a kind of publicity (for good or bad). And, as wonderful as all that referral traffic generally is, it can be challenging to secure, and it can be unpredictable. When it does show up, it is fabulous. And when it dries up, it can be scary.

To combat the unpredictable nature of referral traffic, we have another category of traffic source, known as “Campaigns”.

Campaigns are sources of traffic that you have defined in advance of your effort / spend

The definitions are unique to your organization’s marketing / communications / advertising efforts. When those definitions are aligned with your digital campaign tracking efforts, you’re able to isolate those visitors and report on them separately. You can answer questions such as”

  • Do particular campaigns bring more new leads vs. other sources?
  • Are those visitors of a higher quality? Do they read more content? Do they exhibit higher engagement?
  • Do they convert at a higher rate?

Campaigns are sources of traffic unique to your organization’s efforts to drive traffic

Campaigns might include:

  • Emails sent to your newsletter subscribers, prospects or customers that drive traffic back to your site
  • Display advertising (banners, buttons or other ad units) you purchased or traded for
  • Keywords you bid for via networks such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads
  • CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per thousand) or CPA (cost per action) media buys from publishers
  • Social media updates posted to your organization’s profiles / feeds
  • Press or news releases distributed to your networks
  • Affiliate / partner websites where you negotiated placement; and even
  • “Offline” efforts such as print or radio ads (where you included a unique, or vanity URL)

As they typically require additional effort or cost, campaigns are those sources of traffic you’d like to measure return on, compared to the default direct and referral traffic sources. To do that, we need to isolate campaign visitors from Direct or Referral traffic sources.

But how do we isolate campaign visitors?

By tagging those sources of visitors:

 

 

 

 

 

Like marine biologists who tags wildlife to identify an animal later, or farmers who tag livestock to identify animals in a larger herd, digital analysts ‘tag’. We tag sources of visitor traffic to identify different segments in a larger herd of visitors to a website.

It’s just that we do our tagging via campaign tracking tags, otherwise known as “utms” codes in Google Analytics. FYI, ‘utm’ stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Urchin was the predecessor technology to Google Analytics, and the legacy term has stuck.

Examples of tags

Picture of a penguin tag

Penguin tag

Animals are tracked via physical tags that are attached to them. And digital campaigns are tagged via ‘extensions’ to the URLs we send visitors to.

Every digital analytics tool has a unique set of extensions available to track campaigns.

As a result, the specifics of campaign tracking implementation differ depending on whether your organization uses Google Analytics, Webtrends, Adobe Analytics or another tool.

Below, I’ve provide campaign tracking tags for Google Analytics vs Webtrends:

Google Analytics campaign tags

utm_source=source1
utm_medium=medium1
utm_campaign=campaign1

Webtrends marketing campaign or paid search tags

WT.mc_id
WT.srch=1

Web analytics tools recognize their own campaign tracking tags

When visitors arrive at your website via URLs that contain your campaign tracking tags, your digital analytics tool will recognize them as belonging to particular segments of traffic, and will attribute their arrival to the correct segment for you. Here’s how the magic happens:

When you create content that drives visitors to your website, you typically provide a link: http://www.mysite.ca

In digital analytics, we consider that an “untagged” link. And, regardless of which analytics tool you use, visitors who arrive via untagged links are attributed to the “Direct” source of traffic.

If you want to attribute visitors to a different source of traffic, you need to tag the link accordingly. To tag links, you ‘extend’ the link with extra information. And – the best part is that the extra information does not interfere with the way the web page is displayed to visitors.

Here’s an example of a tagged link:

https://www.onlineauthority.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=signature&utm_campaign=2013

What makes the link above special?

image of a question mark

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seriously. It’s the question mark.

The question mark signals that the link is what’s knows a ‘parameter’, and in the case of particular parameters, they are contain messages recognized by particular technologies, and ignored by others. So web servers ignore campaign parameters. Internet browsers ignore campaign parameters. And thus, there’s no impact on the user’s experience of your content.

Parameters have a particular structure: a question mark followed by an ‘equation’ separated by an equal sign:

?parameter-name=parameter-value-decided-by-you

So, if the parameter name were “source”, then you might decide the parameter value is a publisher or your house email list.

Or if the parameter name were medium, then you might decide en the parameter value is a banner or a particular email edition or issue.

Or, if the parameter name were campaign, then you might decide the parameter value is a campaign name like thanksgiving or rrsp-season-2013.

Examples of untagged links:

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/learn-google-analytics

Examples of those same links, tagged:

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=adwords&utm_campaign=2013

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/learn-google-analytics/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=adwords&utm_campaign=2013

Notice how there are actually three parameters in there, all strung together by ampersands?

Examples of those same links, tagged in colour:

In the first URL, I’ve shown the parameter name in blue:

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=segment-a&utm_campaign=2013

And, in the second URL, I’ve shown the parameter value in red:

onlineauthority.com/digital-analytics-courses/learn-google-analytics/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=segment-a&utm_campaign=2013

Once you’ve tagged your URLs with campaign parameters, or utms, and distributed them via email, social media, or as the destination URLS for your display ads, those visitors will appear in your campaign reports.

Where do the tagged visitors appear in my reports?

Look for them in your Traffic Sources, or Acquisition reports:

Screenshot to show where campaign-tagged visitors show up in your Google Analytics or Webtrends reports.

Campaign-tagged visitors are found in campaign reports in Google Analytics, Webtrends or other digital analytics tools.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each parameter represents one report. Thus, the values of your campaign parameter utms will will appear in your Google Analytics campaigns report:

 

 

 

 

And, your Source and Medium parameter values or utms will will appear as secondary dimensions in your Google Analytics campaigns report, and as a stand alone Source/Medium report.

 

 

How do I tag my emails with Google Analytics utms?

Example of an HTML email with links circledIn the code of an HTML email, an organization can include links to their website. And those links can be extended, inside the HTML, with campaign tracking tags or utms.

So, again – instead instead of attaching a tag to an animal…we tag the link inside the HTML code in the email that brings visitors to the website. The tagged links inside this email might look like:

cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/trades/apply-who.asp/?utm_source=bulletin&utm_medium=email_03&utm_campaign=aut2013

cic.gc.ca/francais/immigrer/metiers/demand-qui.asp/?utm_source=bulletin&utm_medium=email_03&utm_campaign=aut2013

 

How do I tag my social media with Google Analytics utms?

Social media screenshot with shortened linkIn a social media update, organization can include links to their website. And those links can be extended prior to being shortened, with campaign tracking tags or utms.

How do I tag my display advertising banners with Google Analytics utms?

 

 

 

 

When providing creative to your agency or to the publisher you’ve purchased advertising with, you also provide them with the URL you want them to link to. The button and banners above might have the following tags:

digitalstrategyconference.com/ottawa/2013/?utm_source=publisher-a&utm_medium=250×250-ros&utm_campaign=dscott13-eb

digitalstrategyconference.com/vancouver/2013/?utm_source=publisher-b&utm_medium=728×90-biz&utm_campaign=dsvan13-reg

In the examples above, the value of the source parameter is the name of publisher where the button ran (publisher-a vs b), the value of the medium parameter represents the size of the ad unit (250×250 vs 720×90) and its placement (run of site vs business section) and the campaign name represents the offer: the city and pricing codes.

How do I create my utms?

You can certainly create utms and tag URLs manually, using something like Google’s URL builder:

 

 

 

 

But, it’s far more efficient to do it via a spreadsheet, which will help you create and organize Source, Medium and Campaign naming conventions. That way, over time, you’ll maintain consistency, adding more value to your reporting and analysis efforts. In addition, you can use very simple formulas in Excel to automatically build the URLs and thus eliminate potential tagging errors.

Below is an screenshot of an example spreadsheet I created for my clients:

 

 

 

 

And with that – congratulate yourself! You’re now ready to ‘tag credit’ for your brilliant campaigns!

And of course, you’ll be annotating your Google Analytics reports throughout to provide context to the changes in traffic, right?

If this intrigues you enough to begin developing your organization’s digital campaign tracking strategy, contact me to request my campaign tagging spreadsheet template.

When you and your team are ready to roll up sleeves and dive in, we would be happy to provide a proposal to provide your team with training or consulting to implement digital campaign tracking for yourselves.

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Kelly KubrickHow to track digital campaigns using Google Analytics utm codes

Establishing Digital Maturity

by Kelly Kubrick on June 3, 2013

First published on the Digital Strategy Conference blog by Arianne Mulaire. Arianne is a co-founder of Reachology, an Ottawa-based digital marketing firm. As managing partner, she creates and manages online presences for organizations both large and small, private and public. Follow her on twitter @amulaire.

Session Presented by:

Kelly Kubrick, Partner and co-Founder, Digital Strategy Conference and President, Online Authority   – @KellyKubrick
Andrea Hadley, Partner and co-Founder, Digital Strategy Conference  –  @AndreaHadley

Maturity models exist to give perspective on your current state and prepare you for moving forward. You will learn how to assess your organization’s level of maturity with respect to digital, and the degree of formality and optimization of processes currently in place.

Understanding your organization’s digital maturity provides an effective approach toward improving related processes. We’ll help you recognize key signposts to help with your planning so you’ll understand where you stand today and how to anticipate the next curve in the road.”


This is to help you planning your digital strategy by first determining the digital maturity of your organization.

The maturity model is a traditional tool that has been reformatted to reflect the digital world.

This is a process where you move from milestone to milestone.

The dimensions for digital maturity are:

  • human resources
  • technology resources
  • data strategy
  • content strategy
  • channel strategy
  • social business strategy

These are the dimensions that should be considered and rated individually. From level 0 to level 3 (none, low, medium, and high).

Over the next three days you will be able to assess where your organization is and how to move it forward.

As you map your organizational readiness, you will see how it maps out. There are no right answers. All organizations map differently. The goal is to have a balanced maturity level through all dimensions.

Use the summary of indicators, dimensions and ratings to define where your organization is.

Human resources

Level 0 – There is no presence.

Low – Very limited resources and not supported by training.

Medium – Teams are forming around digital (internal or external), limited support, some expertise by leads, management has no training. Still have to sell digital to the organization.

High – Resources are embedded in cross functional teams, digital specialists are on staff, ongoing training including industry certification, resources are supported, management has understanding or expertise.

Technology resources

Technologies necessary: marketing and communications, collaboration tools, customer relationship management tool, analytics to measure

Level 0 – There is no presence, no investment in technologies necessary.

Low – Little bit of everything, everyone in different directions, using different tools, it’s like “herding of cats.”

Medium – More organization, uniformity in training, can manage complex processes, some departments are looking to participate, it is a dedicate line item – budget.

High – Everything is talking to one another, you use the systems and help them talk to one another,  you have the people that are part of the system, in the center of it.

Data strategy

Data strategy: reflects all the ways you capture, store, manage and use information. How you use data is key to your success.

Level 0 – Information is in cabinets, there is no digital data.

Low – Online and offline data, but still in silos, decision velocity is quarterly or annually, you are therefore using old data, there are data gaps and denial of the risk (lack of governance) of not having digital data.

Medium – Value the data, use the data in some strategic ways to optimize/improve, tools are implemented, decision velocity is daily or weekly, act on the data regularly, nothing is automated, governance is planned and initiated.

High – Data is an asset, decision velocity is now realtime, can take advantage of data, automated, secured, formal risk management plan.

Content strategy

The term is starting to come up more frequently.  It’s a comprehensive process that builds a framework to create, manage, deliver, share and archive or renew content in reliable ways.

Looking at: inventory and formats, location and storage, development process, publishing process, performance measurement and evaluation as well as archiving process.

Level 0 – Developing content for single use.

Low – Digital format is now starting to appear, not consistent, silos of production within the process, awareness of repurposing through different formats, content is becoming available digitally, but not online.

Medium – Source content is now consistent, centralized production, multiple digital formats, starting to allow user generated content (e.g. comments), content is available on the network, objectives are set and evaluation is now ongoing rather than once a year.

High – Adaptive content (format free, device independent, transformable and in an automated fashion).

Channel strategy
Three categories :
  • Marketing – paid, owned
  • Transaction enabling – financial/e-commerce, application forms, voting online, lead generations
  • Digital distribution – OEM, direct, partner and affiliate
Level 0 – No digital communications, no use of transaction enabling or distribution.

Low – Pieces are in play, but not aligned with business objectives, vertical siloes, ad hoc.

Medium – Multichannel marketing, objectives are validated, planning and funding are in place, a need for governance is articulated.

High – Multichannel strategy, regular evaluation, governance established.

Social business strategy

“Ways social media tools and practices are being adopted within organizations to support both internal employee collaboration and external customer engagement.”
– Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, Designing a Social Business (recommended reading)
  • External – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
  • Reviews and ratings
  • Internal applications for employees and suppliers

Level 0 – No use of any customer facing application, low awareness of social business.

Low – Silos of social activity, fragmented, ad hoc representation, an employee is becoming the defacto social media person, sporadic usage.

Medium – Awareness across the organization that social media can be used above marketing and communications, understanding of value, key performance indicators, cross usage.

High – Customers help you, social media and collaboration is both internal and external, social media is no longer only a marketing tool.

 

 

References:

  1. “Social Business By Design” · Dachis Group · June 3, 2013 · www.socialbusinessbydesign.com
  2. “@jeffhorne” · Jeff Horne · June 3, 2013 · Twitter
  3. “@mandirv” · Mandi Relyea-Voss · June 3, 2013 · Twitter
  4. “@ResultsJunkie” · Laura Wesley · June 3, 2013 · Twitter
  5. “@StruttinMyStuff” · Lisa Georges · June 3, 2013 · Twitter
  6. “@scottduncan” · Scott Duncan · June 3, 2013 · Twitter
  7. “@joegollner” · Joe Gollner · June 3, 2013 · Twitter
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Kelly KubrickEstablishing Digital Maturity

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

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

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

Digital Maturity: the Data Strategy Dimension

by Kelly Kubrick on December 20, 2012

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

The third dimension of digital maturity is your Data 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.

Data Strategy icon from the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model An organization’s data strategy “reflects all the ways you capture, store, manage and use information.” Without a data strategy, organizations struggle with

  • Uncertainty about what data is collected / available
  • Poorly understood data standards, and how that can lead data quality issues
    • Is it ‘stale’?
    • Is ‘clean’ and / or ‘trusted’?
    • Is it ‘usable’ / is it ‘accessible’? In which formats?
  • Deciding how long they should store data
  • Who / which roles should be responsible for protecting and securing data
  • A lack of recognition of the strategic value of the data collected

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

  1. Could you inventory the different data sources your organization has available? Within each, do you know what data you are collecting?
  2. How would you characterize your organization’s collection of customer data such as email addresses, ecommerce sales data, or member information?
  3. How would you characterize your organization’s use of data?
    • How ‘clean’ is your data?
    • Do you trust the data?
  4. Who is responsible for collecting and cleaning the various data sources?
  5. Are you collecting the data needed for you to take action with it?
  6. How quickly does your organization act on the data (offline / operational, customer, or digital) you are collecting?

When assessing your level of maturity in data strategy, think about the data you collect, how you use and share it and how frequently and how quickly you act on it.

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 data strategy in place to ensure your organization’s digital success?

Next: Content Strategy

Next, let’s take a look at the fourth dimension, your organization’s content 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 Data Strategy Dimension