Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence. In this whitepaper you’ll learn: £ Why the web is no longer the sole focus of how you interact with users online £ What it means to embrace “digital first” £ Simple ways to start assessing your digital presence
October 2012
www.limelight.com
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence. Your website, as you know it, is dead. That’s because digital marketing is no longer about pushing out content and hoping that users or customers read it. It’s about engaging and interacting with your customers through your content. So you can’t just publish your videos to YouTube and be done with it. You have to do more. Your content tells the story of your brand and your company. And when it’s online, it’s your digital presence. The death of “what you think your website is” isn’t exaggerated. New research from Google and others show that your customers are consuming content across devices. It’s a new world now—a world about consistent content experiences, about engagement and interaction using a variety of channels. About digital presence. This whitepaper will help you understand how the digital world has changed over the past 10 years and how you need to start thinking and acting digitally to take advantage of these trends and changing user behavior. Either that...or your story will never stick.
The Web is so 1990s. Are You Still Living in the Past? It wasn’t that long ago when businesses were clamoring to get online. Not because companies felt that the Internet and the World Wide Web were intrinsically going to change the global economy. No, companies did so as a competitive response. Because of that, nothing really changed. Processes remained the same. If nothing else, marketing simply became responsible for another channel of customer communication. The website, for many companies, was an electronic brochure. Unfortunately for many that is still the case. They see their website as the “end all, be all” of an online experience or digital marketing strategy. But that is not how customers see it. They expect businesses to have a website. They also expect those same businesses to have a Facebook page, use Twitter, and make all of their content available on mobile phones. Why? Because the world is digital…and customers have gone digital too.
Today’s Digital World Today’s digital world has evolved beyond websites. The growth of social media services, like Facebook and Twitter, has extended the original purpose of a website (making content about a company and its products available online) to encompass immediate interaction and engagement. Where a company’s website was once little more than a digital brochure, it is now a powerful tool that can provide visitors with a personalized brand experience. Just as users have integrated social media into the way they interact with friends and family around the globe, they now expect businesses to provide that same interaction. Customers look for a company’s Facebook profile. They want to follow a company’s Twitter updates. They want to consume content in a form that befits what they are doing.
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 2
www.limelight.com
If they are frequenting Facebook, they don’t want to have to visit a company’s website to find what they need. They want that information in Facebook posts. In short, websites are dead...as a standalone representation of a company’s online experience. They are part of a larger story—a digital presence that can span many channels including a website, social media, mobile, and even large screens. Take a look at the data below from a McKinsey study1 measuring digital activity of over 20,000 people ages 13-64. What McKinsey discovered is a “digital shift” that is happening right now—content
consumption across channels is increasing but especially in the younger demographics. Still, before you dismiss the results of their study by concluding that “these aren’t my customers,” consider the following from the same McKinsey study: In today’s world, anything that hinders speed and agility contributes to failure. The $500 billion future that young consumers will drive has actually begun… Ignoring this shift could spell long-term disaster to your business! Capitalizing on it requires a better understanding of how customers are interacting with you through these different channels. First, though, it requires acknowledging that you have a digital presence.
What is a Digital Presence? A digital presence is the sum of engagement and interactivity across all of your digital touch points. Whenever customers interact online with your brand, they are experiencing your digital presence.
1. The Young and the Digital: a Glimpse into Future Market Evolution. McKinsey. January 2012.
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 3
www.limelight.com
The key to a successful digital presence is engagement. That’s what sets it apart from an ordinary website. Rather than the traditional model of telling customers your story by presenting content, a digital presence relies on engagement and establishes a bi-directional conversation around your content and your brand.
In many cases, companies can be unaware of how extensive their digital presence has become. For example, a restaurant may have a Facebook Page and a website, but not know of all the reviews about it that exist on other sites and Web services. In essence, a digital presence can be “intended and attended” or “unintended and ignored.” While the later requires no work and reaps no benefits, in order to capitalize on the former, it’s critical to understand the workflow of getting your digital presence out to the world and how to manage it once it’s out there. Examples of digital touchpoints Your digital presence is comprised of a host of touchpoints, some of which are listed below:
A Unified Experience Before we jump into that workflow, though, it’s critical to understand an underlying thread that will drive it—consistency. Although a digital presence can span multiple channels like web, mobile, and social media, it must present a unified experience. Content can be different from one channel to the next, but the experience must be consistent.
•• Website •• Mobile website •• Email/Newsletters •• Mobile applications •• Social Networks •• E-commerce Store •• Job Boards •• Product or Service Review Websites •• News sites
Unified experiences don’t have to be uniform. Customers need experiences that are right-sized for the touchpoint and their context. Instead of focusing on rote uniformity, firms should strive to deliver the necessary parts of an overall experience that uses design patterns, right-sized content and functionality, and appropriate expressions of brand for the user’s context. (Forrester. The Unified Customer Experience Imperative.) Whether your customers are interacting with an email newsletter or a mobile application, the underlying experience with your digital presence must remain consistent, from graphics to brand to messaging.
•• Blogs •• Discussion Forums and Bulletin Boards •• Support sites •• Video
Can you list how many digital channels your company uses? Do you think you can list some that your customers use which you may not be incorporating into your digital presence?
The goal of a company’s cross-channel efforts should be to create a seamless network of interaction points that enables customers to choose where they want to interact and provides consistency of information across touch points as well as continuity when transitioning across them, all while maintaining a coherent brand personality. (Forrester. The Unified Customer Experience Imperative.) This continuity reinforces trust and ensures that when a user begins engaging in one channel, they can continue to carry that engagement across all of them. Customers expect a consistent experience across touch points and channels when they engage with your firm. (Manning, Harley and Bodine, Kerry. Outside In. Forrester.) According to recent research carried out by Google and market analyst firms Ipsos and Sterling Brand2, this need for a consistent experience is punctuated by media consumption behaviors—approximately 90% of our media consumption behavior, 4.4
2. The New Multi-Screen World. Google. August 2012.
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 4
www.limelight.com
hours each day, is spread across all four device types (PC, phone, tablet, and TV). Our time online is spread between 4 primary media devices. Average time spent per interaction.
30
39
43
17
Smartphones
Tablet
PC / Laptop
TV
Users are interacting with your content across all of their devices. What happens when your content is not there? What happens when the experience with your content isn’t consistent?
The Digital Presence Workflow The answer “what happens” is simple—your brand suffers and users flock to competitors. However, providing an awesome, unified digital presence is more than just publishing content to a variety of channels. Each channel has special requirements that impact the way you create content and engage with users. Failing to satisfy these requirements can cause ripples in the consistency that you need across all channels. If you start creating your digital presence without a clear direction or process you are just begging for problems. That’s where a workflow helps. It not only manages the content that makes up your digital presence, it helps you remain consistent because every piece of content is published out of the same process. There are six major steps in a digital presence workflow: 1. Create. The first step is to create the content. Regardless of the intended audience or channel, you have to develop or source the content that will drive user engagement. 2.
Manage. Once you create the content, you need a way to manage it. That might be through a web content management system. That might be through a social media network management tool. Whatever the system, it must enable you to control what gets delivered and to where.
3. Deliver. Let’s face it, without a way to publish that content into a channel (and ensure that it’s available where ever and whenever the user accesses it), all the work you’ve done to create the content is for naught. 4. Monetize. Whether or not the content is your business, as a part of your digital presence, it drives revenue. You may not be delivering ads into your content or selling subscriptions, but you have to keep in mind how that content converts users into customers or customers into buyers and how it influences customers to make decisions. 5.
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Engage. Once your content has been published to all of the channels in your digital presence, it’s time to engage customers through it. That might be via blog comments or Facebook posts or Tweets. Regardless, this part of the workflow is critical in developing the deep customer relationships that will ultimately impact your bottom line.
Page 5
www.limelight.com
6. Optimize. Without detailed reports that provide you insight into where, when, why, and how users are consuming and engaging with your content, your digital presence might be a whole lot of wasted energy. Whew! When you lay it out, the workflow seems fairly straightforward. Yet as you dig into the individual steps, you may quickly realize that there is a host of complexities and pitfalls that can easily undermine even the best efforts.
Digital First means you have to Be Digital Being digital means that realtime is a state of mind. Using blogs and twitter feeds are not just extensions of existing ways of thinking and doing—they are a new way of thinking. They are a mode of being. Your conversation exists in the 24/7/365 digital world. Just because you close the doors for the night doesn’t mean people stop engaging with your content.
Embracing Digital First The first thing that you should realize when you think about a workflow is, “how does this impact my company?” A digital presence workflow demands process change. Truly embracing it means putting “digital first.” So what is “digital first?” Simply put, that means accepting that your digital presence is not just another channel to push content to customers and users. As mentioned before, it’s all about engagement. But many companies still consider it the responsibility of marketing to engage with customers about brand. Only that’s not digital first . In some cases, the marketing department will not be the best voice to engage with users in specific channels. For example, a software development company may participate in various technical forums around the Web as a way to engage with developers who might want to use their software. If you enable someone in marketing as the voice of the company in those forums it could be counter-productive—marketing may lack the credibility to engage with that specific audience. In a situation like that, it would be far more beneficial for the developers of your software product to engage directly with those users. Enabling digital first means breaking down the traditional silos within your organization. Everyone in your organization has to become a part of the marketing department. Everyone must become responsible for engaging with customers through your digital touchpoints. Everyone is a digital brand ambassador!
Exposing the Underlying Complexities When you start to think about the workflow as an intrinsic component of your entire organization, as the face of “digital first,” the complexities of providing a unified digital presence can seem daunting. Putting aside that you need to establish a strategy (that may include involving people outside of the marketing department), what ultimately makes it so difficult for companies to deliver a great online experience are the tools, or lack thereof, they use to do it. The problem is that most companies, starting with that website back in the 90s, arrived unknowingly at a digital presence piece-by-piece. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just how the technology evolved. First came the web. Then came the blog. Then came social media. Unfortunately, it seemed that for each digital channel, a new tool was needed. By the time you realize that you need a workflow to manage all the content across those channels, you have so many tools and so many processes that your digital presence is an operational nightmare. This creates a number of core issues: Control. For many companies, the tools used to manage content early on were
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 6
www.limelight.com
installed locally. When enterprises were launching websites in the 90s, they were using “on-premise” content manage systems like Interwoven and Vignette, leaving control of the website (and content) in the hands of the IT department. Now that the website needs to be dynamic, changing content frequently to support personalization technologies that target individual users, the control that IT may retain over the process of publishing content and creating a consistent experience can be an issue to the success of your digital presence. Integration. As enterprise marketers expand the reach of their digital presence to new channels, they have sought out tools to help them manage and deliver more effectively in that channel. For some of these channels, like social media, the tools were provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enabling the marketer to break free from the shackles of IT control but introducing a disconnection with other systems. Now content is being created in more than one place with no way to connect the two. Reporting. Just as the tools have proliferated to create and manage content, so too has the amount of data. Structured data from internal systems, web data from server logs, unstructured data from social media and blog comments has contributed to the marketer’s challenge. Bringing all that data together, in real time, to make meaningful decisions about what content to create or update and where to publish it is what enables the marketer to show business leaders that digital presence is critical to company success. Accessibility. When tools for managing and delivering digital presence assets are localized to the corporate network, it can be difficult to remain as dynamic as users expect. The digital world is 24/7/365. If you have to be connected locally to your network in order to access the tools to publish content, your digital presence may be more like 14/3/220.
The Woes of Fragmentation Your Desktop Website is Not Your Smartphone Website is Not Your Tablet Website is Not... Many companies make the mistake of assuming that just because their website displays on smartphones and tablets that they are providing a good mobile experience. According to Google in their study The New Multi-Screen World , “Consumers turn to their devices in various contexts. Marketing and websites should reflect the needs of a consumer on a specific screen, and conversion goals should be adjusted to account for the inherent differences in each device.”
The result of all this complexity can be a fragmented presence, regardless if you have a workflow. Because when IT has control of critical tools for publishing digital content or when tools aren’t integrated, it becomes more and more difficult to create the consistent content experience your users need from your digital presence. An example of this fragmentation is how companies treat their websites on different devices. Yes, a website for a desktop browser and a website for smartphones, tablets, and other devices are the same in purpose. Both are accessed through a browser. Both provide information about the company and its products or services. Only that’s where the similarities end. When users employ tablets or smartphones to access your website, they are doing so based on different behaviors. First, the inputs are different. Most tablets and smartphones utilize touch and swipe-based interaction that doesn’t play well into websites that have complicated, nested menus. Second, the user is mobile. They may be looking at your mobile site while standing in line or waiting for the bus. Not only do they not have time to wade through pages of content or zoom in and out to interact
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 7
www.limelight.com
Focus on What’s Important Just because a social network or publishing channel exists doesn’t mean you have to include it into your workflow. The channel has to make sense. Publishing everywhere, for the sake of publishing everywhere, is just a shotgun approach and could actually be detrimental to creating a unified content experience. Especially when the point of all that content is engagement. How can you engage with users everywhere? Fine-tuning your workflow to address the channels that matter most is how you stay focused.
with navigation, they are probably after specific information. They aren’t just browsing for the fun of it. Ciena, a networking equipment company, epitomizes the screen-specific strategy. Although they have a web presence on both desktop and mobile, the content is presented in a fashion that is specific to the modality. Color, voice, tone, messaging, and engagement all remain consistent. Even content is the same. Only, each version of the website presents the information differently. Companies like Ciena recognize that the consistent experience created by their digital presence is critical to staying ahead of the competition and they have taken steps to build a workflow that reduces fragmentation. “Companies are waking up to the realization that great customer experience (CX) is the biggest driver of competitive advantage today. As customer interactions span an increasingly complex array of fractured touchpoints—many of them digital—such as websites, apps, communities, and social networks, companies need to coordinate well-orchestrated experiences across all touchpoints.” (Forrester. The Unified Customer Experience Imperative.) Fragmentation is counter to creating a consistent, unified digital presence. As your digital presence becomes more complex, as you adopt new tools for new channels and integrate those into your workflow, fragmentation is bound to happen. Think about your workflow now. Do you use multiple tools? Some tools to help you manage web and video content? Other tools to help you manage social media engagement? Still others to help gather and organize data to better target that content as well as identify opportunities for monetization?
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 8
www.limelight.com
Assessing your Digital Presence So how do you take stock of your company’s digital presence? How do you know if the complexities involved in managing, delivering, and optimizing your digital presence are leading to an inconsistent content experience that is, ultimately, undermining your brand in the digital economy? How can you know if the workflow you’ve established is rife with fragmentation? You can answer those questions by taking a look at your digital presence maturity.
How Mature Are You? In an ever-changing digital world, maturity can be subjective. What is mature now might not be in six months. That’s why if you focus solely on the individual elements (i.e., website, social media, mobile) you won’t get a clear understanding of what you need to do in order to deliver an awesome digital presence. When assessing the maturity of your digital presence, it’s critical that you first look at the underlying processes. How well has your company embraced “digital first?” Is the health of the company’s digital presence solely in the hands of marketing? Has the company implemented processes that enable it to remain engaged with users and customers even when people have gone home for the night? Think about maturity in three levels: 1. Very mature. Our entire organization is involved in our digital presence. Everything we do to engage with users is 24/7/365. 2. Mature. We are trying to involve more people within the organization with the digital presence, but there is resistance (even a little at the top). Because of that, we fail to engage with users 24/7/365 and we miss key interaction opportunities. 3. Not Mature. Marketing still holds the reigns to our digital presence. Content is published sporadically. Once you’ve figured out how mature your processes are, you can dig into the maturity of digital presence challenges. How dynamic is your content? How well have you incorporated rich media? Is your digital presence globally available? The table below lists some of the biggest challenges in building and distributing a digital presence as well as some basic guidelines around maturity levels. Component
Not Mature
Very Mature
Dynamic Content
Your web content management system is on premise.
You can make changes to your website in real-time using SaaS-based tools.
You have to rely on IT to make changes.
Your mobile website is tailored to mobile behavior (rather than just a mobile rendering of your desktop website).
You only change content once a month. Rich Media
You aren’t using video to supplement your website content.
You are publishing your videos to multiple sites and driving traffic back to your website.
Your video doesn’t always display on your mobile device.
Your users can engage socially while watching your videos. Your videos are available around the world, on YouTube, on your website, and on every mobile device.
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 9
www.limelight.com
Component
Not Mature
Very Mature
Mobile
You have no special strategy for mobile.
You have mobile applications for a variety of different platforms.
You don’t think mobile applications are important.
Get a Professional Assessment of your Digital Presence! The table to the right is really meant to give you some guidelines around assessing your maturity in meeting critical digital presence challenges. But what about the systems you are using? What about your content publishing strategy? How mature is your process for creating, producing, and distributing your digital presence? And how mature do you want it to be? Those are some of the topics covered in the Limelight Networks Digital Presence Assessment carried out by our industry-leading digital presence consultants. Call today to schedule your assessment!
You think your mobile website and desktop wewbsite are the same.
Your mobile website is converted automatically to provide content more meaningful to mobile users. You have designed your mobile website specifically for smartphones and tablets.
Social
No Facebook page. No LinkedIn profile.
Employees throughout the organization actively engage with customers via social media.
Or, you have all of the above but post to them only once in a while.
Customer postings or direct messages quickly turn into active conversations.
No Twitter account.
You forget to respond to users for days who engage with you via social media channels. Global Availability
You aren’t sure if your website is available in different countries or not. You just know that when your neighbor access it from his browser, it works fine.
Your website is globally distributed using cloud resources. When someone requests it from Germany, it’s available as if they were sitting right next to the web server.
Performance
You haven’t made any special considerations to improve performance although you recognize that the site loads faster on certain browsers and on certain networks. You just don’t know why.
You are using your server logs and other performanceanalysis tools to keep track of how quickly each page and asset loads. You have added technologies to your website and mobile applications to ensure the highest level of performance. You use a distributed network so that assets are available as close to the user as possible.
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 10
www.limelight.com
Component
Not Mature
Very Mature
Optimization
You don’t really have a handle on the data that is being produced by how users are engaging with your content.
You have a dashboard that provides you a single look at engagement data across web, mobile, and social. The data helps you determine what content to launch next...and to what channel.
You have logs and information from different systems but no way to connect them.
For each of those components, you should be able to reflect a level of maturity on some scale as it represents how close you are to either side of the spectrum. Doing so will help you tune your workflow, employ better tools for content distribution and engagement, and ultimately create a more unified and consistent digital presence.
It’s Your Story. Make it Stick... with Limelight Orchestrate! Limelight Orchestrate is a powerful, cloud-based suite of integrated tools to help you manage, deliver, and optimize your digital presence. Featuring a suite of services and technologies, Orchestrate enables you to tackle the critical challenges with your digital presence so that you can show your story with video, tell it with dynamic content, and deliver it blazingly fast to any device, anywhere in the world. For more information about how Orchestrate services and technologies solve your critical digital presence challenges, visit http://www.limelight.com/.
The Eulogy is Over… All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved (Sun Tzu, Art of War). Your website as you once knew it is dead. That’s because your users and customers are online engaging with your digital presence on the PC, their smartphones, tablets, and even the TV. They are interacting with your story across domains including Facebook, Twitter, your support site, review services, and dozens of others. Your website is just one channel in a multi-channel customer engagement paradigm. Where do you go from here? The first step is to establish a baseline around your maturity. Once that is done, the next step is to see where you can close the gap between what you have and where you want to be. Finally, you need a way to make everything more efficient. Let’s face it; you want to spend time engaging with your customers and users, not managing software and trying to get one system to talk to another. You need to look for platform tools, like Limelight Orchestrate, that enable you to manage, deliver, and optimize your digital presence across all those channels. What you don’t want to do is wait. Because every second you delay, your fragmented digital presence and inconsistent content experience are potentially eroding your brand…and your revenue. With the right plan and tools, you can turn your digital presence from a footnote in your corporate strategy to its keystone.
Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 11
www.limelight.com
About Limelight Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq:LLNW) is a global leader in Digital Presence Management. Limelight’s Orchestrate digital presence solution is an integrated suite of cloud-based applications, which allows organizations to optimize all aspects of their online digital presence across web, mobile, social, and large screen channels. Delivered exclusively as a service, Orchestrate leverages Limelight’s scalable, high-performance global computing platform to offer advanced features for: web content management; website personalization; content targeting; video publishing; mobile enablement; content delivery; transcoding; and cloud storage — combined with social media integration and powerful analytics. Limelight’s team of digital presence experts helps organizations streamline processes and optimize business results across all customer interaction channels, helping them deliver exceptional multi-screen experiences, improve brand awareness, drive revenue, and enhance their customer relationships — all while reducing costs. For more information, please visit www.limelight.com, and be sure to follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/llnw.
© 2012 Limelight Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Limelight Networks is a registered trademark of Limelight Networks, Inc. Other products and company names may be trademarks of their respective companies. All services are subject to change or discontinuance without notice. September 2012 Websites are Dead. Long Live Digital Presence.
Page 12