digitalroadmap® Strategy, Success and Engagement
Urban myth leads many to believe that Online, Internet and Social Media success stories are created by happenstance. Common sense, however, suggests that success using Online is created through good planning and hard work.
That includes articulating your goals, developing and implementing a plan, monitoring your activities, and making adjustments as needed.
Online success is also defined in terms of your intent. For many businesses, this means profits and return on digital dollar investments from their activities. For brand marketers, governments and not-for-profit organizations, this could mean growth in both audience and their engagement. For individuals, it could mean designing and creating your own website page, analyzing and creating a great linking strategy, ensuring your business is advertised correctly in directories, or setting up and executing your own paid search advertising campaign. Regardless of what success means to you, the common elements in reaching it must include both planning and follow-through.
If you agree with what you've just read then you need a digitalroadmap. From a strategic perspective, digitalroadmaps ask you to define your goals, review your options, document a direction and articulate your success measurements. From an implementation and operations or tactical perspective, digitalroadmaps allow you to plan content, product, service and communications activities, ensure the product and services you implement become part of your new day-to-day activities and review performance against your original goals.
Figure 1 - Example of a digitalroadmap Strategy Summary
While the digitalroadmap methods can contribute to success, they are not its sole determining factor. It's been my experience, after working with numerous organizations of all sizes, that in order to create success, engagement with plan creation, implementation and adjustment is required at all levels of an organization. New habits may have to be developed, particularly in the management of social media activities, and like with many new habits, it may take time to see the results of your actions.
The engaged organization is able to understand and appreciate the transformation that is taking place through digitalroadmap planning and implementation. It is also able, upon comparing planned to actual results, to make necessary adjustments in a seamless manner while promoting a positive organizational culture. This capacity creates an environment where it can be fun and extremely motivating to work, and such an atmosphere can also create a better focus for the work at hand.
Joe Wozny, author of The Digital Dollar: Sustainable Strategies for Online Success, is a digital and online media thought leader, strategist, author, blogger and international presenter on strategies to improve the reach and success of Internet, social and digital media initiatives. Through Concentric, he helps leaders leverage their businesses using smart, well planned digital strategies. For more information on Joe as an author, please visit joewozny.com , and follow him on Facebook and Twitter
