Let me set the stage for what I mean to discuss here by sharing Ryan's Two-Minute History of Web Marketing:
The web has been defined by three revolutions over the past 20 years.
Prior to the involvement of business, the web was a connected ring of online communities. People interacted with each other and shared information. But the threshold of entry was relatively high, and there was no business model in place to drive innovation. The web kind of stayed the same for a long time.
In the early 90's, businesses started to get involved with the web, and driven by advertising dollars, they applied the same approach to the web as to broadcast media: This was the Broadcast Web. Web as TV commercial, billboard, brochure.
In the late 90's, e-commerce emerged. Amazon started kicking peoples' butts. The web was now a storefront (minus most of the customer support, but that's another story), complete with data-driven pages and integration with business and financial channels. Give me your credit card number, and I ship you a book: This was the Transactive Web. Remember? The one with the bubble.
We're now at the flashpoint of another revolution, driven by the convergence of three forces: Widespread availability of broadband, the lowering of thresholds of entry to publishing (especially for photos and video), and popular awareness of social media (especially MySpace and YouTube). We're only beginning to see the impacts of this change. We're at the bottom of the curve of the Participatory Web. In some ways we've come full circle, returning to a web of connected people sharing information. But in other ways, the emerging web is a new beast entirely: Bigger, faster, with exponentially more people and institutions involved, and with more at stake.
My point with all that is to suggest that most of the way we do our work today in the web-site-making profession reflects the demands of the Broadcast and Transactive web ages. Our planning, processes, tools, and tasks are undergoing a shift—and we’ll be well-served to get out in front of the demands of the Participatory Web.
So what's changing? Most obviously, a greater proportion of the total work of the web site happens after launch. And in a world of limited budgets, budgets built on the idea that the site is mostly done at launch, we're challenged to be faster before launch and smarter after.
Here are some ideas about the disciplines of the people I work closely with day-to-day at ZAAZ. I'm not an expert in all of this, but I sent an early version of this post internally as a memo and got some great feedback. And I'd really love to hear what you think. What have I got wrong, or missed entirely?
Client Services will shift toward helping clients plan for ongoing engagement with customers through the web channel. We’ll be supporting policy development, leadership, and moderation, and we’ll be helping clients transition over set timeframes to self-sustaining community management. We’ll be scoping and planning iterative work responsive to user communities.
User Research professionals will shift toward working to understand issues like value, trust, identity, reputation, motivation, and social ecosystems--online and off.
Information Architects will shift toward organizing user-generated content; participatory interaction; and emergent and self-organizing content.
Designers will shift toward faster prototyping, with an emphasis on developing brand-aligned affordances for social and participatory spaces.
Developers will shift toward increased reuse and customization of third-party tools, vendor assessment, portability standards, and integration with third-party sites. We’ll be supporting prototyping and iterating live sites. Standards will become more important for client work.
Search professionals will be supporting on-site metadata definition for user-generated content and driving awareness beyond the site. Findability is a key differentiator in the crowded social media marketplace.
Web Site Analytics will shift toward measuring engagement, affinity, and cross-domain activity. Analytics reports will become thermometers for measuring the health of communities and guiding site iterations. The convergence of ad network power and data portability will have huge impacts. It's not about what happens on only your own site anymore.
Web Site Optimization folks will work in closer partnership with analytics, design, and UX to improve engagement, raise trust, and build motivation to participate--conversions that address customer lifetime value. It’s no longer going to be all about pushing more purchasers through the funnel.
Every web discipline is affected by the revolution at hand. To be successful, we need to define how to talk about our capabilities in that light, to frame up those capabilities as offerings, and integrate them into an overall story about our ability to execute social media--because clients are asking, and very soon they're going to want proof.
I've got plenty of ideas about this stuff, but I'd really love to hear from you and write a follow-up post summarizing your perspectives. Do share your thoughts about your discipline and how you see it changing in the next few years!
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