We built it - but why do they come?

April was a record month for the Agency website I manage.

We've been on an uptrend for awhile, but this month saw the traffic (measured in visits and unique visitors) jump north to an extent I did not anticipate.

It's definitely a nice surprise and gratifying to be able to claim that the website is growing faster than the average website growth rate in Australia (using Hitwise to prove this).

However how much is due to the work of my team and I, or that of the ICT team who actually code and deploy the site?

Websites are at an unusual end of the marketing and communications spectrum.

While they exist in a public (albeit virtual) space, there's realistically little passing trade who can stumble upon them.

Websites rely on people discovering about them through other means such as word of mouth, advertising, search engines and other websites.

Without these discovery approaches any individual website is virtually invisible except by lucky chance.

If your role is to manage a website, but you do not have influence over the communications going out from your organisation, you have to really consider whether you have much impact on the website's success.

Certainly the content can be kept timely and accurate, the navigation well-thought out and the design superb.

But if you built a shop in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain you'd probably get more passing trade (though they might glow a little).

So how does a website manager solve the audience drought problem?

If you listen to an SEO enthusiast, the secret is in optimising your search engine listing - Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

This involves a collection of techniques to ensure that when someone is searching online for appropriate keywords your site is up the top of the results list.

It can also involve paid search advertising, where you place paid ads next to search terms that may lead someone to your site. The bonus is that you only pay when someone clicks on the ad, making them a very cheap option.

There is also link exchange - where you agree to link to someone else's website if they link to yours. This works well if the other site already has the audience you want to attract, otherwise it can be a waste of time.

There's online advertising - banners, pop-ups, spots, and all the different shapes and sizes available. This is less targetted, but can still deliver good results if ad sites are well selectd.

Sponsorship and social marketing are also possibilities - sponsor another website or post your web address in appropriate topic forums and blogs.

However there's a vital ingredient all of these online tools lack.

1. They're all online tools and don't reach your audience when they are not online, also
   
2. if your audience doesn't know they need to visit you, why would they click on you in search results, a banner ad or a sponsored site anyway?

So what's the best way to get an audience to your website?

Your comms
My role as Online Communications Manager means that besides looking after the website and intranet (and advising on online advertising), I also poke my nose into any Agency communications or marketing activity just to make sure that our website is front-and-centre.

To ensure that my nose doesn't take any damage in all this poking, in return I give the people preparing the material the one thing they cannot get on radio or TV, in print media, in our own printed materials or in any other form of communications outside the web - unlimited space for their messages.

• You're restricted to a 30 second spot on radio?
  No problem - tell the audience to come to the website and we can provide a home page item and 50 pages of background material.
  
• Your new printed customer publication is restricted to a 64 page fold (due to print and envelope stuffing costs)?
  No problem - let's convert the document into a 120 page website section, which includes all the detailed information you really, really need to tell customers but cannot fit in a shorter form.

When people visit a website they've made a conscious decision to do so. That makes them more engaged than if the material simply arrives in the mail or is blasted at them from the car radio. This opens the door to tracking what they really want - which pages do they/don't they visit? How long do they stay? Do they email us? Do they post about us online?

I've found this kind of tit-for-tat trade a powerful tool to both ensure that the website gets the coverage it needs to be found and help reinforce in peoples' minds that the web isn't simply another distribution tool for the same material.


Your staff
The other very powerful and influenceable way to get your site into customer minds is via your call centres and other staff. This involves communication within your organisation.

To get your staff to recommend your website you must first convince staff that your site has something of value for customers.

To do this you must first identify and provide appropriate tools and content. This includes material of high value to your customers as well as content that staff find difficult to explain over the phone, or tools that allow them to complete calls faster.

Once the tools and content are in place there needs to be an ongoing commitment to educating staff that your website is the place to go. Call centres often experience higher turnovers than other areas of an organisation and staff can only keep so many things in mind at once, so a once-off campaign won't deliver lasting results.

So how do people find your website?

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Blogging in government intranets

I have been working on building the correct conditions for intranet blogging within my agency.

This has involved introducing the concept (or 'meme') into the collective consciousness of key managers over the last twelve months, through;

1. forwarding links to online blogs which were of interest to individual managers,
2. publicising the increasing use of the agency's intranet by staff and the specific effectiveness of certain communications using the medium,
3. providing information on different approaches to communication using language and materials readily understandable by a lay audience (such as Commoncraft videos),
   
4. positioning my self as knowledgeable in the area - by being knowledgeable, and
5. identifying existing problems within the agency which could be addressed through the medium of a blog - such as team communications across diverse sites.
   

It's a slow process but has begun to bear fruit. Our Internal Communications team is now interested in exploring the use of a blogs by senior managers to provide a two-way communications option for their engagement with staff.

There's still the need for executive mandate, to fund ICT to deliver and the challenge of supporting senior management in developing blogs - helping them develop appropriate communications styles and approaches - but the seed has been planted!

Here's an interesting article from Andrew McAfee of Harvard's Business School which demonstrates one of the benefits of internal blogs.

Homework the Teacher Learns From

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BarCamp Canberra

FYI See the presentation I gave - Game Design (from the school of hard knocks)

A colleague alerted me to the upcoming Canberra BarCamp at the ANU the other week and it was fortunately on an otherwise free weekend.

While I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and my colleague fell sick at the last minute, I found it a thoroughly enjoyable day.

The event, in the style of other BarCamps around the world, was a spontaneously organised conference of online professionals using digital technologies to bring people together.

There are no pre-set speakers or timetables, talks are organised on a whiteboard during the day.

All talks are limited to 15 minutes and people flow freely between rooms to listen to those of interest to them, as you can see in the photos of the event.

In this spirit around half of the 60 or so people who attended took the opportunity to present on a topic as narrow or broad as they liked, generally to an audience of 10-30 people at a time.

I attended some interesting presentations ranging from web design principles to building a free wi-fi network to usability research techniques to open source and while the speaking skills varied, the passion and experience was always high.

WHile I had not come prepared to speak myself, given there was some demand for a presentation on game design from a couple of people I met at the event, I quickly whipped up a presentation based on my game design experience and attracted an audience of about 15 people looking to break into the industry.

While I'm not entirely satisfied with the depth of the presentation, given that it was pulled together in about 10 minutes, the responses were positive and I've loaded it to Slideshow entitled Game Design (from the school of hard knocks).

BarCamp Canberra was sponsored by Microsoft, Acidlabs (who helped organise the event) and Michael McGoogan of AussieHQ (who shouted drinks and dinner).

I've known of Michael for around three years, from when I was looking at the business case for ActewAGL entering the web hosting area. At the time I suggested that ActewAGL consider purchasing his business, which was growing rapidly. This suggestion wasn't pursued and Michael has used the last three years to grow his business enormously. He's one of the lesser known Canberra IT success stories, though, at the age of 21, he has plenty of time for people to become aware of his success.

One of the most interesting parts of the BarCamp experience for me was observing how people flowed natively between physical and online social interactions. At all times during the day, thanks to the free wi-fi network at the venue, people were interacting both with others in the room and with people around the world via Facebook, Linkedin, blogs, Twitter and other online tools.

At least three-quarters of the attendees had laptops with them, including a number of mini-laptops, and others had iPhones (at least five at the event) and other handheld internet connected devices.

I personally used the network to message friends who could not attend, to grab material for my presentation, and to ensure it was up on Slideshare before I gave it - so others could access it as needed. In fact I gave my presentation from Slideshare rather than using the copy on my harddrive.

The ability to participate both physically and digitally at the same time showed me an interesting and positive vision of where we're heading in our social and professional interactions.

Currently strict boundaries exist in many workplaces and conferences between physical and online socialisation. However the capacity with which people were able to multitask and engage in simultaneous social interactions across mediums demonstrated that the enforced boundaries can (and hopefully will) be deconstructed.

Given the widespread adoption and use of mobile phones and increasing penetration of small internet-connected devices, this is already beginning to occur.

As with many other changes, I expect this one will take more time and pain than already digitally connected people would like. Society's norms are hard to shift, particularly whilst power remains in the hands of a pre-digital generation.

But, as they say, the future is a new country...

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Holographic meetings are now

This is the next generation of teleconferencing - telepresence via holographic meetings - where people from somewhere else in the world appear right in the room with you (or in this case on the stage).

All using internet IP-based standards.

Think of the travel savings!

No sense of smell yet though!

http://www.musionmedia.co.uk/cisco_day.html

And an article about it is at the Human Productivity Lab.

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Web Strategy in Sydney

Earlier this month I presented at the Ark Web Strategy conference in Sydney.

It was quite a mixed event, about 40 attendees across a spread of government and industry, although a few less people from the business world than I would have expected.

Having been around for awhile I did know or know of about half of the speakers, and as usual people like Donna Maurer from Maadmob and Rebecca Rodgers from Step Two Designs were both entertaining and provided valuable insights.

In particular Rebecca's presentation made me rethink aspects of our website's search approach, leading my team to make some adjustments to further simplify our search results for a more relevant experience. Less is more!

Some of the less known speakers also did an excellent job, with Josh Borg from AGL providing a very frank and open presentation on his experiences redeveloping the AGL website and Gian Wild from Monash University providing a passionate view of accessibility. I'm reusing some of her examples to help communicate the accessibility message to staff at my agency.

As for myself, as the first speaker I chose to take a big picture look at the purpose and process of online strategy to 'keynote' the event.

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