Chisholm and Harper | Creating businesses of the future

In a recent blog post Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/how-to-be-a-great-client.html) gives priceless advice on how to successfully foster innovation within your organisation.

Before you engage an ‘innovator’, or a vendor or supplier, get your house in order.  These are some of the key points he raised:

• What do you want to achieve?  Is this a realistic target for this project?
• Are your objectives attainable given your resources?

• What are your governance structures?  What can and can’t be changed may affect your ability to achieve your objectives.

• Distil your problem down to its very essence; a symptom isn’t the real problem you’re dealing with.

• Don’t just accept that something has to remain the way it is just because that’s the way its always been – it might be hard to change but if it needs to be it will be worth it in the end

• Hire the right person/company for the task – don’t take shortcuts because it will end up costing you more in the long run (both long-term cost savings and potential growth unrealised), not to mention endless frustration…

• Don’t wait until the end of a project to realise that you should have thrashed things out in more detail at the beginning

• Look out for faux innovators  – move on if they’re not all that!

• Recognise that innovation is a constant evolutionary process – similar to a website, once you’ve created it, don’t just leave it there to stagnate.

• If something is impossible, it may not always be so…the things that are impossible today just might be part of the future that begins tomorrow

• Last but not least…let innovation happen!

Lots of people have great ideas.  The hard part is clearing the way for those ideas to come to fruition and taking that leap of faith to invest in them.

One hundred years ago, Gerald Mills and Charles Boon created a user-generated content (UGC) publishing revolution. Mills and Boon started their publishing company in 1908, publishing education textbooks and novels by esteemed authors such as Jack London and P.G. Wodehouse. The problem was these authors cost a lot to sign and their books were only accessible to the educated classes - hence a limited market.

It was during the war that Charles Boon had a brainwave. Mills and Boon would publish books at a price the general public could afford, by getting the general public to write the books themselves! This also had the added bonus of guaranteeing the books topics were exactly what the general public wanted to read. Mills and Boon started advertising for people to send in their stories, and before long they were inundated with potential novels. They published the best ones and the books began flying off the shelves, much as they have been ever since.

You may hear about UCG being a concept created by the advent of the Internet, but in fact it has been a successful publishing model for over one hundred years.

As revealed by The Age in their article of 9 November, according to OECD figures, Australian grocery prices have risen 41.3 per cent since 2000 - faster than Britain's 32.9 per cent or America's 28.4 per cent. This fabulous news is compounded by the failure of the $7.7 million Grocery Choice website. This online tool was to allow users to find cheaper prices for their weekly shopping and put pressure on the big Australian supermarkets to be more competitive. Alas, it was not to be.

Here at Chisholm & Harper, we have pondered over many cups of tea, how this amount of money was blown before someone realised that the prices on the site could not be kept up-to-date in a useful way. In its article of 17 November, The Age suggests that a combination of poor design, adherence to arbitrary time pressures and resistance by Coles and Woolworths, all contributed its demise. It is truly a shame that the design of this really valuable tool and the governance of this huge project could not have mitigated this disaster before so much money was blown. These are certainly areas we see as KEY to project success.

Meanwhile, it seems that iPhone apps are popping up to try an address the gap left by Grocery Choice. Hopefully, there will be enough data available to make them useful and realistic. Unfortunately, I am left wondering if the people who really need to save money on their weekly shopping basket can afford an iPhone, the appropriate application and mobile Internet needed to make it work for them. I hope so.

Clients and students frequently ask me for industry averages against which to measure their online campaigns and website performance. My typical response is "who cares what everyone else is achieving?"

What does it really mean if the industry average click through rate is 0.018%? Surely if your search engine marketing campaign outperforms your traditional DM campaign then that's a good result (except for your DM agency).

Everyone is always looking to compare their performance with others. Maybe the first place we should look is inside. The definition of a good result should be how well you achieve your goals in relation to the investment / effort you have put in. Start by comparing how each of your marketing channels compare against each other as a measure of performance. You could find some interesting results.

Flash intro’s have got to go. I know people are still buying them... a local restaurant which only opened 12 months ago, has one on their website. This redundant animated screen makes it tedious for me to even access the phone number in a hurry.

Those arty, animated pieces of creative navel-gazing just get in the way of what your website needs to achieve. And that is meeting your users’ needs and communicating your business’s key messages. Even the Wikipedia entry on this topic acknowledges that flash intros ‘are considered old hat amongst the web design community’. So if you have one, take a long hard look at yourself and sort it out. If someone tries to sell you one as part of your website development package, I would think carefully about choosing another vendor. They are probably self indulgent and definitely out-of-touch.

This is an extract from an article in our publication section. Read more