09.02.09
Posted in Advertising, CMS, CompliSpace, Compliance, Digital, Intranet, Marketing, Media, Melbourne, Social Media, Video, Viocorp, Viostream, new business, web applications at 3:30 pm by drwarwick
After more than nine years, I have concluded my involvement with digital agency Komosion (www.komosion.com) and the Komodo CMS product that along with others I was instrumental in creating (and still love like a child www.komodocms.com). Nine years is a long time and it was a most pleasant and enlightening journey. Now it is time for a new journey!
News spreads quickly and I have penned this short (I promise) piece to answer the question “what next?” for friends, colleagues and contacts that are interested.
Carefully considered cornucopia
The short answer is that I am not taking a single direction, instead I am fortunate enough to have found some conjoined activities that lend themselves to some interconnected effort. One common thread, is bringing brilliant web based solutions to Melbourne that assist clients in their digital innovation. They are …
Viocorp – www.viocorp.com – @Viocorp
Viocorp is Australia’s leading online video streaming business. Its Viostream product is a world class video content management system. The tagline “get it out there” demonstrates Viocorp’s drive to assist organizations in producing and distributing video assets over the web. I will be working with Nick Bolton @nickybee99 and the rest of the Viocorp team to launch and build their Melbourne operation.
CompliSpace – www.complispace.com.au – @CompliSpace
Another Australian success story, CompliSpace provides corporate governance programs and services. CompliSpace delivers a web platform for sustainable business growth in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. The tagline “Bringing Good Governance To Life” highlights the practicality and ease of delivery of their Intranet based solutions. As with Viocorp, I will be working with the CompliSpace team to launch and support their Melbourne operation.
Veridian Media – www.veridianmedia.com.au/wordpress – @VeridianMedia
Rounding out the trinity is my business Veridian Media. Working with some brilliant colleagues I have met along the journey, Veridian Media delivers digital strategy for marketing, social media and application scoping activities. These services will support my efforts in promoting, growing and supporting Viocorp and CompliSpace as well as provide a vehicle for industry comment and consultancy. Lets face it, who else would take responsibility for this blog and unfettered comment. Recent output includes:
IDM Magazine July/Aug 2009 – Cover Story on Twitter – “Does Twitter Mean Business”
Marketing Magazine August 2009 – “Branding a Corporate Figurehead”
Loose Ends
That pretty much covers my immediate future, although I will still have some involvement with Smart Works (www.smartworks.com.au), CM Pros in Australia and some other project initiatives just to fill in the empty spaces 
Thank you to everyone who has been in contact and shown support. To many of you, I will be in contact soon to discuss Viocorp (web video) and CompliSpace (intranet procedures) and how one or both of these can help you grow and improve your business.
You can contact me going forward at:
Viocorp: david.warwick@viocorp.com
CompliSpace: david.warwick@complispace.com.au
LinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/in/drwarwick
Twitter: www.twitter.com/drwarwick
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07.01.09
Posted in CMS, Digital, Marketing, Media, web applications, website at 3:25 pm by drwarwick
“The real winners in life are the people who look at every situation with an expectation that they can make it work or make it better.” Barbara Pletcher
Redraft of second essay from the ‘Black Art of Web Publishing’ site http://www.blackartofwebpublishing.com/
What are you trying to do?
What is your organization’s objective? How will your organization achieve this objective? How do you measure this success - what will it look like? Sound’s obvious, but like much that is obvious, it is also often forgotten or ignored as we let detail and complexity derail us.
Write down your answers and check everything that you do back against objectives and measures - make them a mantra. Even producing the answers is probably not as obvious, or as easy, as you may have assumed. Lets spend a short amount of time looking at ‘Business Strategy’ and why understanding it is so important to effective online publishing.
The ‘top of the pyramid’ - a nice view!
The temptation with online communication is to start in your comfort zone. Most authors start writing, most designers start designing, most developers start cutting code and on and on we go. As the saying goes, if you’re a hammer, most problems look like a nail!
You may not be the source of your organization’s strategy. You may not even be able to influence it in any significant manner, however, if you are going to be an effective online publisher, you had better take more than a passing interest in the strategy you are aiming to implement and deliver. So before we jump into the ‘middle of the pyramid’ - design, structure, content and message - let’s set the goal posts, so that when we get to measuring effectiveness, we have a clear understanding of what the objectives, measures and signs of success are.
Practical first steps
There is a host of material available on business strategy and planning if you are starting at the beginning, otherwise, if you already have a business plan, objective statement or marketing material, grab hold of them as a place to start. You can go the whole way and do market research, competitor analysis and apply business theory such as Porter’s 5 Forces, SWOT analysis, Gap analysis and so on. The determination here should be on the size and scope of the project you are undertaking.
If you are just looking to make sure you are heading in the right direction, then take the time to cover the basics:
1) Primary Objective(s) – What is the primary aim of the organization?
2) Target(s) – The organization knows it is successfully achieving its objectives when?
3) Method(s) – The organization fulfills its objectives by doing / producing / undertaking?
4) Market – To be successful, the organization needs to communicate with?
It is also worth documenting where possible:
5) Audience – Everyone, specific segment, geography, age, profession, or defining characteristic.
6) Stage of Development – Start-up, Early Growth, Established, Mature, Multiple/Complex.
7) Target Metrics - Such as revenue, profit, customers, growth rate, production, market share.
All of this information will assist with cross-checking online publish activity and defining tactical objectives for actions taken. Time spent in the strategy phase leads to time saved in implementation and of course a much better chance of achieving operational goals.
Now that we covered the importance of strategy (BAOWP1) and documenting business strategy (BAOWP2), the next post will be specifically discussing the crafting of a website publishing strategy that delivers on the organization’s objectives. Hold onto your strategy information and answers to the questions above, you are going to need them.
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06.24.09
Posted in Advertising, CMS, Digital, Marketing, Social Media, web applications at 7:23 pm by drwarwick
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)
Preamble
Back in 2006, I presented a half-day tutorial entitled the Black Art of Web Publishing (hence BAOWP) examining the complexities, trends and disciplines involved in website publishing. The material for this session formed the basis for an ambitious website (time to lower your expectations), take a quick look if you must at http://www.blackartofwebpublishing.com/ (come back, don’t get sidetracked). As is often the case, the project only went part of the way to covering the territory it had carved out for itself. Of course things have changed somewhat in the past few years, most notably that a focus on websites alone is no longer sufficient coverage of the online publishing space. So as my friend James Robertson http://twitter.com/s2d_jamesr suggested sometime ago, it would be better to blog, take comments and then gather it all together.
So that is the plan. Each existing item on the site will be updated to take the passage of time into account - posted here for comment (starting with BAOWP1 - Conceiving an Online Publishing Strategy) and then aggregated back into a resource at some future point. So please, get stuck in and comment, and come back for future installments (I am aiming to do one per week).
Online Publishing Strategy – Are You Going to Succeed?
Have you ever heard of the ‘random walk principle’? In a nutshell, it proposes that if you set out walking, making random decisions about where you are going, then your finishing point (end point with the highest probability) is likely to be where you started. So why is the random walk principle relevant?
The point here is that if you start changing online messages, undertaking a redesign, or amending your online structures without a clear plan, then the most likely outcome is something no better, or no more effective than where you are right now. Taken another way, this is the argument that no matter how good your implementation skills, you need to establish (or be working to) a well constructed plan.
Making an Online Publishing Plan
Of course the plan you make will fail in some way. Nevertheless, you will have moved forward and if a planning principle is applied (plan - implement - analyze - start again) then you will have initiated a learning loop and you can make iterative improvement and modify strategy in a manner that should ultimately take you somewhere better (closer to your objectives).
Topics that will follow on from here will move through strategy creation, implementation and measurement. In practice, this is a loop that you can start anywhere (sometimes measurement of the current state works well as a first step) and create a virtuous cycle of improvement.
The next post will look at developing or understanding your organization’s business strategy.
As discussed in the preamble, please make comment that can assist with the BAOWP site http://www.blackartofwebpublishing.com. Don’t jump too far ahead just yet, remember the site content is out of date.
Thanks, I hope that these posts offer you some stimulation and support for your own online publishing activities and possibly a reminder of things you know and a resource for things you may need to explain to others.
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06.22.09
Posted in Advertising, CMS, Digital, Economy, GFC, Marketing, Media, Melbourne, Social Media, new business at 12:43 am by drwarwick
I know this, because there is even a great website that says so http://notalwaysright.com/ sent to me kindly by Derek Jenkins (http://twitter.com/ozdj/), so that could be the end of the argument! However as you can no doubt guess, I have some points to make and questions to pose (not to mention a #badclient hashtag to launch). So lets start with some parameters …
The Playing Field
I am going to use ‘client’ rather than customer, mostly because I am talking principally about the customers of professional service organisations. I believe what follows can apply to most customers and your comments can bear this out.
Secondly, I am talking about ethical and professional organizations. We have all needed to escalate something to a manager. We have all encountered poor professional service. We have all had communication failings - often two sided. I am not exploring these aspects and as a result, and for the purpose of the argument, I am discussing goods and services provided to industry standard, both professionally and ethically.
Finally, I am not anti-client. In fact the oposite is true, the adage “the client is always right” makes for good client service philosophy because at the very least, the client is crucial, knows their business and is the lifeblood of any commercial organization. They should be respected, heard, courted, valued and ultimately the recipient of something of significant value. There is however such a thing as a #badclient …
Some Bad Client Signals
No mandate - Usually the provision of a service involves the client adopting the service and as a result some level of change. Humans generally accept change poorly. When a client does not actually want the value that flows from a service, there is no capacity for the service to deliver a benefit. This can include services not properly commissioned, services rejected by gatekeepers and my favorite because of the irony: Pro bono services accepted by charitable clients because they are come free of charge, delivered in circumstances where they are not needed or cannot be used by the client.
No respect - The client who thinks they know better. Once the work starts (and often before), this client will give a level of instruction or embark on an ego trip because they believe their knowledge is superior to that of the supplier. In my game, this is the client who wants to tell me how to build a web CMS system after scoping their organization’s needs, without understanding that we have put more than a decade into understanding best practice in this field (enough self indulgence). Of course the supplier who thinks they know their clients business better than their client is also deluding themselves but as mentioned, we are not focussing on the supply side here.
No value - In this case, the client does not value the service enough to cover the cost of there provision. It may be a case of ‘bad-fit’, where the offering simply does not produce enough incremental value for the client to benefit more than the provisioning cost. However the truly BAD CLIENT gets plenty of value but still will not transfer any of this to the supplier. If you break this down, it amounts to their belief that they can build a sustainable profitable business but you shouldn’t be able to. A good client realises that a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit and enlightended self-interest is much better for both parties.
Narcissism -this is really the trigger for this post and I am silent on the culprit that pushed me over the edge. This client has no empathy for you (the supplier) or any other client. Give away signs: (1) deliberately sowing internal discontent by playing supplier staff off against each other, (2) never agreeing that services have been completed or properly provided, (3) every communication is a complaint and there is never a recognition of value provided, (4) services are expected to be prioritized ahead of any other client, (5) the client believes that they are the creator of all intellectual property and nothing, even IP developed for other clients, should belong to anyone but them, and (6) other blatantly manipulative behaviour. Yes, I have encountered client narcissim to this extent and I am interested in stories you may have (no names).
Too Late?
Hanging on to these relationships is false economy. A client who exhibits one or more of the above signals as a standard mode of operation is preventing you from servicing your good clients properly. They are inflating your delivery costs. They are demoralizing your staff. They are sending negative signals to the market. They will not stop and if the cancer gets bad enough they will sink you because at the very least you will loose competitive advantage. So why persevere, is it because your organization accepts the claim that ‘the client is always right’? Will you believe them over your quality staff? It is not too late, let them go and you will be transformed for the better, you may even find your other clients and your staff thank you. Please don’t send them to me
Some Early Questions
I have been working in solution sales for longer than I care to admit. When I hear “we are commissioning you because our last supplier was no good”, I still take this on face value and make the stock standard commitment that we will perform better. In reality, there has got to be an even-money chance that at least equal fault lies with the new client as it does with their former supplier. In this case, perhaps it is prudent to explore your prospect with a bit more attention. It is possible to end up with a worse outcome than failing to win a piece of business.
Why not a client credit check looking for payment history? Why not ask to speak to other suppliers? Does the client exhibit early examples of a lack of respect, lack of value, lack of operational mandate and perhaps most of all excessive self importance. Maybe do what my Grandmother suggested, take them to lunch and see how they treat people who have no power in a transactional relationship. Be warned, I will never again work for a client who tries to impress me by treating waiting staff poorly.
Please tell me what I have missed, your experiences and horror stories. Remember I am not defending suppliers, there are plenty of substandard service moments, I have experienced a bunch of them myself in just the last few days.
My premise is that if you forget the customer you will fail, however as with any relationship, no party is always right. QED - The customer is NOT always right.
Join me on Twitter @drwarwick - http://twitter.com/drwarwick. Maybe we can even start an ongoing conversation - hash tag: #badclient however no doubt a tag #badsupplier would be more successful
Thanks for your attention and in advance for your input.
Cheers and regards,
David Warwick
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04.16.09
Posted in CMS, web applications at 8:28 pm by drwarwick
I have now been working in a space you could loosely describe as content management, or web publishing, or website development, or digital media for well over a decade. One thing I have known for sometime, but for various reasons I now evangelize, is that content management, and all the other descriptions I included above, are not disciplines (in the specific context of a ‘branch of learning’ … see http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/discipline). No S&M or high-school principal connotations here.
Let me elaborate. No one (at least a decade ago) went into a career in content management, and even today, with the exception of few attempts I have heard about, there isn’t a University course claiming the domain in a compelling way. The closest to an aggregation of professionals working in this territory is the Content Management Professionals organization (see http://www.cmpros.org/). As an aside, if you are in Australia, join others in this ‘non-discipline’ at the CM Pros Australia Community Facebook Group.
So what is Content Management?
First and foremost it is a contemporary challenge. We face content management dilemmas at a personal, organizational and global level, as part of the sheer volume of ‘content’ that the information age has delivered to us (and the ease by which we can create our own). In some sense there has always been a ‘content management challenge’, dealt with progressively with the development of language, mathematics, publishing, cataloging and specific areas of specialty - science, accounting, journalism, teaching and so on.
Today we tend to see content management as more about non-systematic content, the type of more ‘organic’ material that proliferates with the web and is now becoming even more fragmented, voluminous, rapid and organic with the online social networking boom. Things will only continue to accelerate.
The content management challenge impacts on us all in both our personal and professional lives. The way we manage content, or more importantly sort through information and leverage the important stuff, becomes part of the path to competitive success. What can be accessed and leveraged is part of determining personal socio-economic success and at an organization level, competitive advantage and the resulting market position and financial outcome.
Given the breadth of this conversation, lets get back to something more discrete – organizational utilization of the internet. The field of ‘web content management’.
Multi-Disciplinary Content Management
In the Content Management Professionals organization, we have vendors (software houses), consultants, designers, writers, marketeers, librarians and a host of other highly skilled practitioners from impacted disciplines. In many cases, they have their own ‘discipline based’ professional association, however they come together within CM Pros because of the challenge and opportunity. As well as the need, discussed below, to call on other disciplines.
Back in 2006, I ran a half-day tutorial at Open Publish on web publishing strategy. As part of the course, I tried to highlight both the ’skill set’ (disciplines) that an organization might need, as well as the process of web publishing (both a longer build/review cycle and a shorter content renewal cycle). The resulting chart (borrowing from an earlier CM Pros content life-cycle chart and other related material) can be viewed at http://twitpic.com/3fwyz, or contact me and I will send you the document itself (david@veridianmedia.com.au).
In short summary, there is a regular cycle of content creation, processing, publishing, consumption and if the organization is smart, analysis and back to more content creation. Then there is a longer-term cycle of developing business strategy, determining the role of online tools, implementing online action and then as before, reviewing performance and back to more strategy (both organizational and online). Within this process, the skills that are called on are strategic, creative, intuitive, analytic and require an understanding of the organization, the media, the audience, trends and the available tools.
I am yet to meet the person who can claim to be a ‘black-belt’ in all of these, so I claim that this is not a discipline to itself that someone can master. In fact, as an organization trying to outperform competing organizations, I would claim that this is the classic example of where a team and multi-disciplinary focus is required. It is also why you want a ‘Content Management System’ to guide the various human inputs, become a repository for best practice and automate the aspects that can be automated. In particular to keep the organization on an iterative loop of sustained improvement.
Not with me on this?
Like I mentioned, I have been doing this a long time. I can write OK, my English good, and I have a Bachelor of Arts with an English Major to say so (blame my teachers if you pick up poor language construction - otherwise it was my fingers that slipped). I think I also understand business reasonably well, and again I have a Masters of Business Administration to say so (although I have not been as successful as others with this qualification). Add to this a long-standing involvement in the development of CMS software and the deployment of hundreds of websites. In another field of endeavor, I could have claimed to have achieved some level of mastery - not with Content Management. I know design well and have managed studios, however I am not an information designer (either trained or with a natural proclivity) - my design sucks (and I can prove it). I am also not a legal expert and I only have detailed knowledge of some business fields and markets. I am also not a specialist in rich media, advertising and I am too expensive (and easily distracted) to do data entry or repeated data analysis.
So once again, and to finalize this piece, I say ‘Content Management is not a discipline’, it is a cross-discipline team effort and if you want to be great in your own field (and have your business win online) - get the right team. Content Management is not a discipline, it is however one of the most significant challenges and opportunities for contemporary organizations, don’t put this in the hands of the wrong people or you will pay a heavy price.
The negative rests!
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03.23.09
Posted in CMS, new business, web applications at 12:44 am by drwarwick
There once was an old BLOG, see http://davidwarwick.blogspot.com/ with comments on PageRank, Komosion (digital agency) and the craziness of the RFP process for web applications (still love that post - but then I am biased). Now, although still heavily involved in all the above, I am providing my services through a new business – Veridian Media – and as a result, I am starting a new BLOG.
My commitment is to post more and try to make it interesting. If I can tear myself away from Twitter for long enough – another link to look at, http://twitter.com/drwarwick.
So this opening post is going to be about Veridian Media specifically. For those who know me well enough to ask ‘What about Komodo CMS, Komosion, eHound and Smart Works?’, please rest assured that I am still involved with all of those wonderful businesses and products, especially Komodo CMS (http://www.komodocms.com/), however the complexity of these relationships is now being handled through my personal business – Veridian Media, and I am leaving much of the day to day operations to much more capable individuals.
The Veridian Media Blurb …
So what is Veridian Media? Veridian Media is a young business (at the time of creating this post) with deep experience in digital communication, technology strategy and project implementation. Founded in 2009, Veridian Media gathers together industry leading consultants that provide specific strategic insight and project implementation skills for superior execution of digital and technical projects for invested customers.
Veridian Media’s core philosophy is a working partnership with committed and involved customers in order to collaboratively develop ground-breaking digital, marketing, technical and strategic outcomes against clear business drivers. Projects benefit from established processes, however no two projects are the same and every engagement benefits from the outstanding depth of our consultants’ experience in combination with the skills and resources of our clients.
I am very pleased to launch Veridian Media and for me, you can assume that future posts are both the author’s opinion (http://www.linkedin.com/in/drwarwick) and that of the consulting business – Veridian Media (http://www.veridianmedia.com.au/ - once the site is up, oops!).
If you are a great online consultant or specialist looking for a project or a business looking for someone to steer your project in the right direction, please contact me. Of course if you are looking for identity development, web CMS, web application development or location based SMS, I also look forward to addressing your needs through Smart Works, Komodo CMS, Komosion and eHound respectively.
I hope you like the posts that will follow. You have the sales pitch and the background which informs the opinion. See you online!
Cheers,
David Warwick, CEO - Veridian Media
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