To microsite or not to microsite... that is the question

That is the question if you are a web information architecture geek anyway.

For those of you who aren't web information architecture geeks and have little idea what this is or why it is important, here's a quick summary. A traditional "microsite" is a section of your web site that looks... well.. different. It's usually put up in support of specific marketing or outreach campaign. The design will (if it is done well) look like part of an existing brand, but the interface (how the page actually looks) and the navigation (the names of the buttons you click on) of the microsite is usually significantly different.

Needless to say, ad agencies with bigger graphic design staffs than technical staffs, LOVE microsites to boost the billing. They are little (ie., have an end point where the client can sign off on a deliverable), the sites usually have lots of flashy, moving things on them, and it's rare that there are large quantities of high quality (or any quality) written content on them.

They are mostly about the pretty pictures.

The Web developers' community typically don't like microsites. It adds a dangerous level of inconsistency to what is already a very complex environment. When the Web was young, web sites were a series of individual pages that had to be coded and then maintained separately. Since you had to touch every page for every little change anyway, maintaining some slightly different page designs (microsites) was a pain, but not a show-stopper. Now most sites are run on content management systems. Those are database-driven computer programs that remember a series of rules and apply those rules to individual pieces of content (words and graphics) to build the individual web pages "on the fly" as a person on the website clicks on links.

Anyone who has worked with a computer for any period of time knows that computers are mind-bogglingly stupid. The more rules you give a computer to remember, the more likely it is that the computer will apply those rules... stupidly. That means already-busy people need to spend more time managing the rules and that leads to poor maintenance: updates being forgotten, links breaking, and a certain lack of timeliness.

Every time you create a design that is different, you need to give the content management system a new system of rules.

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts don't like them because it basically dilutes the efforts. The idea of search engine optimization is to make sure that a particular web site appears at the top of the search engine results for as many searches as possible. If you've got microsites with similar goods and services to your main site, you are essentially competing with yourself for space on that first page of search results.

The designers I've worked with (we'll just take the agencies out of the mix for now), are mixed in their feelings about microsites. On one hand, a microsite is a chance to stretch those design muscles when a designer has been trapped into a consistent look and feel. This is particularly tempting to designers who work in corporate environments in support of enterprise-level sites. They just don't get to do a lot of "fun" stuff with the site.

On the other hand, consistency rules in graphic design. That is drilled into any designer by grouchy design teachers in school or by grouchy art directors at work. Advocating for microsites feels a little selfish.

So if everyone is against microsites, what's the issue? Well, people who are not developers, people who don't spend their days typing sweet nothings into the virtual ears of stupid content management systems trying to get them to function properly... people who tend to hold the purse-strings in a professional relationship, love them. The corporate web site is like the family minivan. It's important, but boring. A microsite is a chance to have something genuinely cool that a person can point to around performance review time.

It's a chance to buy a Jag without begging the wife.


Like it or not, microsites are part of life... and they aren't all bad.

Addressing the needs of all members of a corporate web site audience is always a challenge for the person designing a user interface. The more (and more diverse) people you try to please, the fewer people will actually be served. You have to compensate for what one group wants vs. what another group needs. A microsite could be a way to address this. Say you have a set of customers or a constituency base that is significantly different from what you are mostly marketing to. Perhaps it is a growing group, and you want to make sure it keeps growing. A temporary microsite could be a way to create a very targeted conversation with this new audience. A small site, separated from the "mother ship" of the main corporate site could be flexible enough to adjust products, messaging, interface design, and information architecture to see what appeals most to the new group. That knowledge could then be folded into the design and structure of your main site. Your group can be pulled into the main site with minimal loss and the microsite can be closed down.

Now there are catches to this, of course. You have to be really strategic about using this tool. You can't achieve this if you are trying to maintain 15 of these suckers to find out about poorly segmented and overlapping audiences. You have to pick one audience. You have to pick a time frame so that there is an ending. The goal of the microsite needs to be learning about the audience, not about becoming the most popular site on the Web. The measure of the success of the effort has to be the number of people who engage with the main site (per the main site's engagement goals) after the microsite has been shut down.

If microsites stay "behind" the main site instead of serving as jazzy doorways to the main site, I think they can help an organization build in an economical, day-to-day, ongoing and consistent tool for targeted learning about how best to serve their audience. Carefully selecting the audience for your microsite will minimize SEO cannibalism problems. Make sure that the testing and learning that happens on microsites are done and shared routinely with the internal web site staff (if there is one) another interested corporate stakeholders. Don't outsource. The information about your audience is too valuable to let it disappear when a contract ends.

Appropo to nothing...

In the part of the country where I grew up, it was common practice to plant big, strong trees around the house. The land around here is pretty flat and once the fields were cleared for planting, the wind whips through without mercy. The trees break the wind in the winter and keep things cool in the summer.

It's just part of the landscape -- Victorian (or older) farmhouses surrounded by tall, strong trees.

This is valuable farm land that isn't particularly close to any population centers. It has largely escaped the fast urban development I'm accustomed to seeing in central Maryland. The landscape changes more slowly.

When the old farmhouses are taken down, the grass always returns to cover up the remains but the trees remain. They sit like living guardians or ghosts in the general shape of the houses that they once surrounded -- gates to a place that doesn't exist anymore.

It always struck me as sad.

How to manage a web site... flexibly

One of the realities of being in the web business is that sometimes you have to do things -- create interface designs, define information architecture, move that stupid home button 6 pixels to the right because someone just HAS to make some random change to prove him- or herself worthy of a big salary. You know that the change is wrong. Maybe it's more than wrong. Maybe it's making your site unusable.

...And you do this wrong thing knowing that you will be considered the reason that the web site failed.

Such is life. Every creative deals with this on a regular basis. The only way to have full creative freedom is to do all of your work the darkness of your own basement -- unpaid, unseen, unshared, un-commented upon.

Where's the fun in that?

So in return for a tiny bit of notoriety, the mindblowing joy of getting a paycheck, or just the human need to FINISH SOMETHING FOR ONCE we become...

...flexible.

Flexibility is tough -- kind of like falling into a fast-moving river with really big rocks everywhere. I've seen many "true believers" in the art and science of information architecture and interface design fall before the firing squad of clueless web site owners. They would not budge from their golden path; would not consider a different way to achieve the same (or very similar) results. Instead of talking to their clients, they would clutch holy books of taxonomy, data structure and usability in white-knuckled fists and, red faced, would preach from the gospels of heuristics.

I have a deep respect for both holy books and for doing the right thing in the face of those who don't want you to, but what if your books are wrong? The Web is still a mind-bogglingly complex and fluid environment. Every web professional has stories of how they tried to duplicate a successful strategy, only to fail completely because, in the time I took to build, the strategy became irrelevant.

How can you be sure what you are doing is right? Isn't it prudent to keep your attitudes as fluid and flexible as the environment you work in?

If you do, how do you avoid going completely nuts?

There are strategies to navigate this river, but they won't be the same for any two people. The environment you work in (your organizational goals, your audience's expectations, new technology) keeps changing so you can't follow the route of a predecessor (or pricey consultant) exactly. You'll be making what feels like a long series of micro decisions in order to move ahead toward your goal.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you make these micro decisions.

Have a clear and realistic goal. Whenever you read a book or listen to a consultant, this whole goal thing is the first thing to hit you in the face. Actually, it sort of sounds a like a cop-out first step. I know when I was starting out, I'd read this and say to myself "well, duh".

It's not a cop-out. It's serious. Respect for having clear and realistic goals comes from soul-sucking experience of having to work to a vague goal... or no goal at all. Having clear and realistic goals suggests the following:

• You understand what your goals are.
• Your goals are complementary (one doesn't completely undermine the others).
  
• Your boss/client has exactly the same understanding of your goals as you do.
• You have ways to measure the success of your efforts toward your goals.
• You have a timeline against which to measure the success of your efforts.

Your "goal" could be a sentence or two (although those tend to be too vague to be useful) or 10 pages (yikes). Most of the time, it'll fit on a single, easy-to-post-on-the-office-corkboard page and have a lot of bullets.

Here's the really sneaky part of creating clear and realistic goals, however: Be ready to change them.

You are going to learn new things about your audience along the way. You'd be stupid to ignore these learnings just because you are stuck with the goals you came up with before you even started. That is part of the fluid environment you are working in. When you gain a new insight about how your audience wants to interact with you, incorporate it into your efforts. You should be able to incorporate them into your original bulleted list without too much trouble.

In fact, you should probably just schedule in hard review of your goals into your timeline... as often as monthly.

If you find that you are completely trashing your original goals in order to incorporate these new learnings, you should stop what you are doing and talk to your boss/client about rethinking your goals and strategies completely. You got something seriously wrong.

Now a bit of a warning on this: People with a background in traditional business really, really hate this -- so do most computer programmers and technical project managers. You might, in fact, be thinking the same thing: Well, if you are just going to change the goals, what's the point of having the goals? Well that is where you need to be making your micro decisions. Use your own common sense (that'll actually take you pretty far), business experience, and knowledge of your corporate environment to weigh how much you can change the goals. Little tweaks here and there in response to properly measured and documented customer response is common in business and won't be a problem. Just be sure you are properly measuring and documenting... and sharing these insights with other web site stakeholders (ie., boss/client) as you go along.

Be absolutely, positively sure that you aren't suggesting the goal changes in order to make your life easier or to make yourself look better. You'll need to defend these goal changes. Personal convenience is really hard (and quite awkward) to defend.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do know that from personal experience -- on both sides of the situation. Seriously. You don't want to go there.

Goals (and measures) are critical. If you don't have them you never know if what you are doing is having any affect. That is hugely frustrating -- like trying to find your way home from a strange city all while wearing a blindfold. Set the goals, keep re-evaluating them, and keep measuring your effectiveness.

Flexibility with your goals in this case isn't being spineless, it's about being agile. When you are building and maintaining an effective web presence, agility is everything.

An intriguing ad, I must admit…. Is it a bottle that, perhaps, once tasted like a platypus? What does a platypus taste like? I admit that I’ve never tasted one and, while I suspect they taste pretty wretched, I could be wrong. Probably not.... particularly if REI feels the need to advertise that their bottles DON’T taste like a platypus.

I’m also curious about the “& More”. Goodness. Do we have any other exotic animals that we don’t have to taste in bottles?

Honestly people. This is basic editing. I know you don’t have much space to work with, but a few more minutes of wordsmithing would have really helped.

Thinking about changing behaviors

I had a conversation with a doctor recently that got me thinking. This doctor works in a large, inner-city teaching hospital. He was talking about how to get groups of people to do something... in this case getting people tested for HIV.

It's a significant behavior change. It means addressing at lot of things that people don't like to think about, much less talk about.

He was gently trying to tell me that computer mediated-communication wasn't the best way to change behavior. He said that, in his experience, the most successful outreach was through traditional broadcast media. It was important to reach people with their own communities. There was also a need to have a physical presence in those communities somehow.

But even that doesn't always work. His point was that to make people change dangerous behaviors (like smoking, not getting tested for HIV, or even not getting enough exercise), you are dealing with a lot of complicated norms and attitudes -- some very social and some very personal.

Creating healthy behavior (like creating world peace or fixing the environment) is a "wicked problem". It impacts a very large number of diverse people -- all of whom have different ideas of what "success" looks like and all of whom have problems and issues in their lives that impact making these healthy changes in some significant way. "Wicked" problems are basically problems that are impossible to solve.

Yet things do change.

The doctor I was talking to said that people needed a catalyst to make these behavior changes a priority. They needed a close call -- a close friend or family member unexpectedly dying perhaps -- to pluck this one issue out of mad soup of day-to-day problems and make it a priority. If the issue stayed a priority in the person's life for more than about three months, it tended to become a permanent behavior change.

As a strategist who spends a lot of her time working wicked problems, this is an interesting insight -- a subtle consistency to hang a theory on. It tells me that:

• There is probably not much my web site will do to change a behavior, except keep reminding people that there is a behavior that should be changed.
• I need to be ready when this person experiences his or her "close call" and strongly support the changes that he or she is willing to make for about three months.
• This is all happening on a very personal, very individual level and that I need to speak to that person with a very personal voice.

Get A Grip: The Summary

Yeah. I'm finally going to climb off my soapbox on this. I just thought I'd summarize things a bit.

At some point (I don't really remember when anymore), I asked five questions. Here's your executive summary of the answers:

Now what do I do?

• Make sure that this social media tools actually support your goals.
• Make sure your intended audience members are actually using the tools you choose (as opposed to just jumping into whatever online tools make the morning news shows).

How fast does it work?

• Not fast. Get over it and set your expectations appropriately. Be suspicious of people or organizations offering "quick results" for a price.

How much will it cost to run?

• Unless you are very lucky, a lot. Adjust your strategy and budget to allow for a long haul.

What can I do to get results?

• Look for ways to engage many voices toward your communication goals. That helps the credibility of your efforts, as well as spreads the tasks across many people (giving your team energy for the long haul mentioned above).

Now what do I do?

• Clear your mind of the "overnight success" stories about using a social media tool or network. I think that you'd find that very few happened "overnight" and that even fewer were "successes" when measured against the original goals or (*gulp*) corporate ROI.

Social media is here to stay. To not engage with it is to miss a wonderful opportunity for really talking with your customers or members in a very individualized way -- but be realistic about it. People have lives and loves and joys and problems and aren't just visiting these networks hoping that you'll pop up and tell them what to do. You can't ignore the customs and norms of human communication just because you are talking via a computer.

I like to keep going back to a wonderful list of "reality checks" created in 1999: the Cluetrain Manifesto. Nine years later, many of the cautions listed here are still valid for most organizations:

• "These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked."
  
  
• "Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do."
  
  
• "But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf."
  
  
• "While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it."

You can use these tools strategically and effectively. Just do your homework, speak with a genuine voice (or many voices), and get a grip on your expectations.

Get A Grip: How much will it cost to run?

Twitter is free. That's the part that usually hooks people. "Whoa! Free access to millions of people who are just sitting around waiting to do our bidding! Let's do it!"

Then this excited person skips lightly to wherever the web team (or web person) sits and shares this fantastic new insight.... only to be crushed by the lack of enthusiasm in the web person. You might see frozen smile or the rolling eyes and probably assume that person thinks you are an idiot.

Let me fill you in on what's really going on inside that web person's head....

*frozen smile* "Great, they've discovered Twitter. Now I have to maintain that on top of the 50 other random requests I get from you people every day plus the stuff I'm actually committed to doing in order to keep my job... and, of course, there's the stupid custom code that blew up about 10 minutes ago that I'm trying to band-aid back together with digital duct tape and spit so that the site doesn't go down...." *eyes rolling* ..."And you think I should drop everything to start tweeting I-don't-know-what because no one gives me any content."

Most often it's not arrogance... it's panic overlayed and mellowed by being really tired.

What does this all have to do with cost? The biggest cost you will have (assuming you aren't reinventing the wheel by creating your own version of Twitter because you can't stand the thought of people interacting on a site that isn't your own) is in human resources. If you dump this on the web person described above, you will get negligible (if any) response. He or she is probably juggling too much already to do it properly.

Hire a full-time "tweeter"? Probably not. What does that job description look like anyway? Alternatives? One organization I ran across took a bold move to make this happen -- though the solution had some problems.

This organization identified the web site as central to doing business and demanded that social media become part of everyone's job -- basically a small, controlled crowdsourcing of this task, extending well beyond Twitter into participation in other social networks and blogging. You train everyone about social media culture and etiquette and give them talking points. This gives your organization a diverse group of voices all pointing toward a single set of coordinated tasks and goals. Sound strategy.

Here's the problem: Not everyone in the organization thought that they had bandwidth for another responsibility and they definitely didn't think that "tweeting" was a good use of their valuable time. Others had personal presences on these social networks -- some rather extensive -- and they weren't anxious to mix business with personal. Others were straight-out technophobes (or just nervous perfectionists), afraid of "doing it wrong".

Here's what happened: The efforts were lackluster. People did only what they were specifically told to do and tended to do it only when told to do it... by their immediate supervisors. These supervisors weren't all completely bought into the strategy or sophisticated about social media and so the specific instructions were not always coordinated or strategic. The problems snowballed to the point where the strategy just couldn't work anymore. Responsibility for the social media efforts once again fell to small group of "web people" and consequently fell far short of both stated organizational goals and its real potential for effective outreach.

I still think this is a useful strategy, but I'd suggest some adjustments:

• The supervision and management of this task needs to be constant and strong. If there needs to be a full-time person anywhere, it should be the manager of the effort rather than the "tweeters".
  
  
• A 2-hour briefing about online etiquette won't do it -- education needs to be constant as well. Everything makes sense in the briefing... the questions come up when people sit down and start to apply what they learned.
  
  
• There needs to be a constant sharing of what different people are doing, what information and insights they are uncovering, and best practices. People can't just go back to their desks and do this in isolation.
  
  
• This might have worked better if people came into the organization more experienced with (and enthusiastic about) web. While this would have been an unreasonable expectation ten years ago, it's becoming more reasonable with every wave of people graduating from college.

It's going to be a significant outlay of time and will impact the rest of your business.

I know I started out writing about costs and seemed to devolve quickly into whining about human resources again. It's a constant theme in this series because it is the fundamental barrier you are facing. It takes a lot to maintain these presences the way they are need to be maintained in order to "move the needle" on your overall web strategy. Human resources cost a lot, at every step -- the person doing the work, the person managing him or her, and the organizational resources needed to support this person.

The tools are generally low cost or free. Your costs are in the craftsmen.