Bluewire Media Web Design Blog » Innovation

How LEAN Manufacturing principles might apply to web strategy

Toby Jenkins — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:49:12 +0000

I went to a seminar recently (The Growth Summit in Sydney) and had the fortune of listening to and meeting Guy Parsons from the LEAN Enterprise Institute in the US. He’s a guru on LEAN enterprise thinking which is all about continuous improvement by removing waste from business processes. The Lean philosophy was founded on Jim Womack’s research into Toyota’s operating principles.

Here’s Guy to explain the concept for you and how it might apply to your business:

How might it apply to your web strategy?

So the key message: your effort might be better spent reducing waste rather than adding value.

To find the waste (especially time – both your and your customers’/prospects’) in your web strategy, start asking some of these questions:

Data – Where in your business do you double handle data?
Customer service – Who answers the same questions day in day out? What are those questions? Can they be put online for your customers to self serve in a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list?
Qualifying leads – How long are the forms on your website? Do you need/use all of the information? Are the mandatory fields wasting your prospects’ time? (Guilty. We had feedback from a prospect on this particular issue last week and we’re in the process of resolving it now)
Website content – What is your most popular content? What is not visited at all? How much of your copy is adding value? Are the key words bolded or made easier to read?
Ecommerce – How simple is your shopping process? Are there steps that could be removed? Do you make it easy for people to come back and purchase again?
Email marketing – Do you know what information your audience enjoys? Which articles are most frequently read and clicked through? Which ones are of no interest at all?

The key principle of LEAN is that you’ll get more return for your time and effort by focussing on reducing the 99% of your time that is wasted, rather than trying to increase the 1% of value add.

With this philosophy in mind, go back to your web strategy and start looking at the areas of waste to reduce as much as you look at the areas to multiply.

Managed web strategy: If you think you’re not wasting any effort in your web strategy, then please call us and let us know what you’re doing! If you think there might be ways we can help to streamline what you’re doing though, then try us on 1300 258 394.

Weekly round-up

Sarah Hyne — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:07:29 +0000

The top 5 web design debates that cause the most riots — Line 25
How to make remote team collaboration work — Six Revisions
All about web accessibility — Konigi
“Mad Libs” style form increases conversion 25-40% — Luke W Ideation & Design
5 reasons to be on Twitter, even if your audience isn’t — Smart Blog
7 creative ways to introduce social media to your team — Learning Putty
Usability review of charity websites taking the lead — Smashing Magazine
How much are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn worth? — Mashable

How to save $US148 on an iPod Touch

via Gizmodo Australia.

Web strategy goes Rock ‘n’ Roll – Radiohead

Toby Jenkins — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:02:42 +0000

So here’s a story. It’s not a new one but I stumbled on it again the other day and was reminded of a few things.

Radiohead are widely regarded as one of the most successful rock bands in the world both critically and in terms of popularity.

Coming into their most recent album InRainbows, they had completed their contract with the record company. Their contract had pre-dated iTunes so the band had received no royalties from iTunes downloads for their previous albums at all… It was time to do something different.

Rather than going down the old path of printing CDs and distributing them, they opted to release the album on their website. This isn’t entirely unusual. What was truly different was that they let their users pay what they thought the album was worth. No limits – you could pay nothing if you wanted.

Wow.

While the exact figures aren’t available, some websites have estimated over a million albums were downloaded and that the band made millions with this strategy. Thom Yorke, the lead singer, in an interview with Wired magazine said: “In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together…”

Why did this work so well for Radiohead?

In my mind, the lesson here is the importance of mutual trust online.

Radiohead had an extraordinary track record for delivering outstanding albums, so the fans were prepared to take a punt – without listening to the music – to pay for it. Equally, Radiohead trusted the fans to respect their music and so handed over the control for payment to the user.

One of the goals of good web strategy is to build that long term trust that was so important to Radiohead’s success.

So ask yourself:

How are you building trust with your fan base and the online community?
Are you thinking about what your customer would like?
Are you prepared to hand over control to your user and empower them to make choices?

Regardless of what you think of the band, the web strategy worked for them because it:

Was interesting (no one had done the “pay what you think it’s worth” approach before in music and hence generated a huge amount of publicity)
Was relevant (it was the first album they’d released in 4 years)
Made it very easy for the customers to go and buy (allowing them to control the price)

If you manage your web strategy with these principles in mind, then you’ll be on the right track.

Managed web strategy Sydney, Brisbane – To find out more about our managed web strategy services, please call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.