Do you wake up in the morning and wonder what exactly you are doing wrong when comes to your web or mobile web strategy? I mean you check your website stats everyday and well, it is not going up, if anything a graph drawn from it over a period of time resembles a plateau which is about to give in to downward slope. Yes, personally I do pinch myself everyday trying to figure out what i am not doing right.
Then I came a cross this excellent post Web is a customer service medium. Great advice and the following part changed my thinking:
I like to think about media in terms of questions answered.
Here’s one question: “I’m bored, and I want to get out of the house and have an experience, possibly involving elves or bombs. Where do I go?”
The answer: You could go to a movie.
Here’s another: “How do I distract myself without leaving the house?”
You might turn on the TV.
“I’m driving, or making dinner. How do I make a mundane thing like that more interesting?”
Radio! Especially NPR or talk radio.
“What’s going on locally and in the world, at length?”
Try this newspaper!
A medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.
When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is:
Why wasn’t I consulted?
In the world of web, people want to be consulted, engaged with and whatever you do, do it in partnership with your readers, visitors or whoever.