The Semacraft Blog

Despite your best efforts to define & document the Terms of Reference, document the scope and educate your clients on what to expect (realistically) from a product deployment, things don’t always go like they should.

Sometimes, you’re too good for your own good and your clients come to expect the moon when what can actually be realistically delivered is Mir.  Pointing them back to the TOR and Scope documents sometimes becomes an emotional, difficult process that has you and your staff wondering why you picked this website/scrm project in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Clay Shirky in his latest post ‘The Collapse of Complex Business Models’ makes a statement I find very important for businesses seeking to keep their audience engaged on the web.

“When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to.”  He describes these ecosystems as complex systems where the system’s principals assume that complexity is an automatic advantage.  It’s a post that’s got me considering how I go about doing business. Read the rest of this entry »

A conflicted business is one pulled in two opposite directions by (apparently) valid desires/objectives.  They aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves.  They know they should engage their online audience better but there’s a gap between what they know and what they do.  Sometimes, to the extent of starting something and then using another to fight it.

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Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path makes a profound comment in his book ‘The Elements of User Experience’, “Websites exist to serve one of  two purposes; to make the company money or to save the company money.”

I know the kind of website that will lose you some money. It’s easy. Here are five ways to do it effectively.

1. Have contact details that don’t work
2. Have content that is not relevant Read the rest of this entry »

‘…and we can get you on Facebook because social media is big right now!’

That’s some scary advise.  But many organisations hear it all the time from their agencies when talking about marketing or website design.  No strategy, no governance, just multiple channels where the staff can put out great information about the company and its products. Yippee!

Balderdash! I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what happened at Nestlé, although I choose to believe they went about it a bit more deliberately (being a multi-national and all).  The signs are there to show they have issues with their web governance structures. When their Facebook admin took on some fans in what became a very public and embarrassing spat, a very distressing sign became evident.

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