Make sure you remember why you are doing what you do
So the Great Paywall of Wapping is now in place.
Will the opinion polls be correct and 90% of Times Online readers disappear?
Is this the end of news as we know it?
Before suggesting an answer to these, it’s worth reflecting on the road travelled to this point.
The early corporate web sites (we’re talking 1995 ish) generally tended to be someone in IT playing with the latest technology and seeing what would happen, either because they loved technology or they saw it as the future. Slightly later (’97, ‘98) someone senior in marketing (or whichever department owned the corporate brand) got extremely agitated about how their brand was displayed on the web and demanded that IT hand over the responsibility for the web site to them.
Next up came the dot com boom and bust where the value of a web presence was grossly distorted by the amount of capital trying to invest in one. Once normality had returned the web site became the corporate’s principal means of distributing information about itself and in the case of news organisations distributing their output. As a communication tool it was seen as a means of engaging the consumers with the product and if their was product that was on sale, a means by which the consumer could buy it.
So the purpose of the web site has morphed twice:
From technical test bed to brand augmenter to a place of customer interaction (and hence revenue generation).
Multi-channel became the buzz word description of most consumer facing organisations around 2005. And not long after the numbers browsing newspaper web sites started to exceed the numbers buying papers.
To ensure you deliver value for your customers a key question that every organisation needs to answer for every activity is what is the point of doing this? or put more succinctly: why?
And if you are a commercial organisation, the answer will always be some variant of ‘serving our customers in order to make a profit’.
If the point of your web site is to raise brand awareness then having 37 million page impressions is a great success. If the point of your website is for consumers to buy your product then having 3 million page impressions from 200,000 paying customers shows that you are being successful.
So web site owners, what is the point of each aspect of your web presence?
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