06.24.09
Conceiving an Online Publishing Strategy (BAOWP1)
“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.