“People tend to look at the wrong numbers and misinterpret the results”
Robert Petković is known to get to the point and in our conversation, he’s straight-talking as expected when we talk about his take on digital marketing in 2021 and his background as one of the first full-time digital analysts in Croatia.
Today, his role is higher level as Digital Analytics Director at Pro media group in Zagreb, Croatia, where he focuses on data storytelling and website analysis for large corporates.
In his own words, he frequently draws on his psychology background to help understand human behaviour and from talking to Robert, it’s clear that we’ve come a long way in the past 20 years when it comes to website analytics, but we also still have a long way to go.
Robert is our expert of the month.
Read moreWith spoken content fast becoming a preferred way to get information, how will you prepare your content when navigation becomes negotiation and when links, calls to action, and breadcrumbs become a matter of aural and verbal gestures?
Preston So has written the first-ever book from A Book Apart about voice interface design. It's also the first-ever book to hit bookshelves about voice content, with everything you need to know about voice content strategy and voice content design.
In a recent member conference call, Preston joined us for more about what's inside the new book: Voice Content and Usability.
Read moreIt is an incredible surprise to most people when they see just how large their digital estate has become over the years. Clearly, if you don’t have a grasp on your domains, it can have far-reaching consequences, both legally and financially.
Gavin Colborne from Little Forest in the UK has worked with this issue for almost a decade. He recently shared his latest and greatest thinking on the problem in a member conference call. As he said:
Existing domain management approaches often come up short. In a nutshell, it’s all about brand protection.
Read moreContent strategy in 2021 is changing as we are improving our understanding of both writing for the web and how content is consumed in today’s world
When I recently talked to Michael Andrews, I wasn’t surprised that we would talk about content, but I was reminded of how the explosion in channels is having a big impact on content. Michael shared his latest thinking on how customers are beefing up their content game and how we are moving away from web pages towards content as a living system.
Michael is Content Strategy Evangelist at Kentico Software, where he advises global enterprises on how to innovate their content practices and operations. Today he is based in Arlington, Virginia, but he has also lived and worked in India, UK, New Zealand and Italy. He is our expert of the month.
Read moreGreat content doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It gets bogged down in teams, organizations, silos, and process.
Beth Dunn is a content leader, speaker, coach and author of the new book Cultivating Content Design. In the book, Beth helps you break the vacuum seal and bring unity and joy back to content. She gives you the power to fundamentally change your organization’s approach to great content—with the tools and team you already have.
Read moreSustainability is the big thing and will be for the coming years, but what does it really mean? What do I need to do with my company, my team, myself?
In a recent member conference call hosted by Hamburg-based Christina Rahtgens, she covered how you can start your sustainability journey today and helped us understand the big picture.
Christina works as Managing Partner at Silvester Group, one of Germany's leading stakeholder relations firms. She covered how to level up your corporate social responsibility (CSR) footprint, and provided a glimpse into a rapidly changing topic that is clearly relevant for all of us.
Read moreInnovation rarely happens alone and many innovators are involved in various clusters and innovation partnerships, but what are really cluster business models, how can we design better ones and how does it help us accelerate innovation?
Victor Haze is International Ecosystem Director at Health Valley in the Netherlands and has recently co-authored an extensive report (220 pages!) on the topic of cluster business models and how it creates value impact.
In a recent member conference call, he gave us the inside story on how he has been exploring current practices of cluster business model development and developing a robust strategy toolkit to develop better cluster strategy and cluster business models.
Below are my brief notes from the call. Thanks to Victor for such a monumental contribution to the global community on cluster business models. It’s clear that Victor is kickstarting a wave of cluster business model innovation projects and ideas around the world. As we’ve said for a decade: Sharing is caring!
Read more“What are the key skills that Amazon or Google are looking for?
My conversation with New York-based Neal Stimler quickly turned to our shared appetite for learning and trying to understand what’s next. The top skills in high demand by the tech giants do shape much of the strategic initiatives and innovation happening. Understanding the key skills also help an interdisciplinary talent like Neal work with organisations to bridge the gap to the next level.
Neal now has almost a year under his belt as an executive management consultant in his firm Stimler Advantage. I’ve worked with Neal for over a decade and first met him when he with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in various content and digital roles.
He’s also worked a year as Head of Public Engagement at Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand and worked as a consultant with Balboa Park Online Collaborative. He’s our expert of the month.
Read moreAs a product leader, how do you change the culture of a group of engineers to be more customer-centric? Lauren St. Jean is Senior Product Manager at German neobank N26 in Berlin and recently hosted a member conference call, where she shared her experiences trying to change how backend teams think.
A little over a year ago, Lauren started working with a backend platform engineering group composed of component teams. Talking to them about a customer mindset and beginning to think of their area of responsibilities more holistically and focused on customer problems rather than just improving performance, was greeted with less than optimistic enthusiasm from many engineers.
Read moreThere is nothing better than shared purpose, shared values and value created for all involved. But how does that actually work? You have probably heard of community gardens, co-ops and other community-based initiatives where people come together, put in an effort and everyone gets an output. But how can that work digitally? Does it even work?
When everything we build digitally has some sort of commercial angle or way to create more value for the organisation building it, is it then true commoning? Or is commoning in the digital world quickly on its way to becoming the next greenwashing fad?
Helle Jensen is Experience Director at digital agency Valtech and in a recent member conference call, she shared examples of good, bad and unexpected angles on commoning in a digital context. You might be a part of it already without even knowing it. Helle discussed whether commercial commoning is actually commoning or just a fancy loyalty scheme and if psychological commoning is a trick or a treat.
Read more“The way we have always thought about strategy is very centralised and top-down. That’s controlling and directive - and leads to very detailed strategic plans. We need to move towards something lighter, that is driven by shared-purpose.”
When I spoke to Boston-based Rachel Happe, I was naturally hoping she would elaborate on her memorable remark from 2018 on how control is for amateurs. As you can tell from the opening quote, what unfolded was not just a conversation about control and communities, but a fascinating perspective on its impact on business strategies, organisational structures and how we collaborate. Many executives are really struggling to be successful because organizational models are out of sync with the speed of information.
Rachel is the co-founder of The Community Roundtable and strongly believes in the power of community to enable human potential. She is our expert of the month.
Read moreAs a large, global and complex organisation working with consumer goods, how do you both consolidate your brand websites and make it easy to create new ones? In particular, when brand management is distributed globally and websites developed by different teams in different countries, things can quickly get both painstakingly expensive and, to put it mildly tricky to manage.
French-based global spirits company Pernod Ricard was facing exactly this challenge 2 years ago and looking for a content management system that they could use and scale to meet their requirements.
Read moreGoing agile at scale has been both buzz and reality in many large and complex organisations all over the world during the past decade. Whether you’re talking big or small scale, agile comes with many glorious promises.
We both recognise and advocate the benefits of agile. But in this post, we’ll also voice deep concern about what agile has become, and raise a few flags to be aware of, if you want to gain from the hard-earned learnings.
In our peer group meetings and conferences, we’ve heard about the agile reality several times. In a recent member conference call, Christina took a less travelled road within the topic of agile transformations: What's the dark side of our new organisational models, structures and ways of working? Specifically, she talked about how the industry maintains the “perpetual fantasies of the ivory towers and consultancy houses.”
Read moreWhat do I have to do to earn and deserve the key relationships that are going to get me where I want to go?
As one of the world’s leading authorities on the management of professional service firms, David Maister is among the top business thinkers in the world. His book on Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy is a must-read for strategic thinkers.
Relationships play a key role when it comes to knowledge sharing, as trust is one of the vital factors that makes knowledge sharing work. To paraphrase the classic book title, investing time in both relationships and knowledge sharing is obviously the right thing to do, yet not easy.
Read more“Let the content folks do their job”
In my conversation with Ottawa-based Mark Demeny from Optimizely, the conversation quickly turned to how we can best empower content creators and site builders. There’s still too much thinking required according to Mark and that’s from someone who’s spent his working life since the late ’90s on web systems and digital platforms.
On February 1st, less than 2 months ago, Mark left Contentful and joined Episerver on Feb 1. Just one week later, Episerver renamed to Optimizely and Mark’s responsibility as Director, Product Management turned from Episerver CMS to what is now called the Optimizely Content Cloud.
At Optimizely he is collaborating with many of his former colleagues from his 8 years at Sitecore and on his to-do-list for the coming months is updating the product architecture and integration to the rest of the Optimizely suite. Mark is our expert of the month.
Read more