Dear Fred

Thanks for the note. I have reviewed your comprehensive document.

Here’s the skinny. Fundamentally what you seek to do (technically) is pretty simple – it’s a blog – there are many examples of very successful, monetized blogs out there (boingboing.net, huffington post, salon.com, etc) – All of these entities have found a voice and an audience within their sphere of interest that is substantial enough to generate revenue from an advertising-driven model. All of them also got traction in the earliest blush of the internet. Today’s web is a different story.

We don’t currently manage a lot of ad-driven sites – our focus is primarily on the role that the web has to drive our client’s brands and the overall strategic approach to integrating evolving social media and public tools towards generating traffic and creating customers. The sites we build measure success in hundreds or thousands of visitors. In order to begin to monetize a site like you describe requires 100′s of thousands to millions of visitors monthly. In this day and age of the web, aggregating those kinds of eyeballs requires intense technical and creative engagement, as well as significant capital investment. I often tell people to imagine what it would cost to open a national chain of retail stores and use that $$ financial model to understand that the web is little different. It’s a pay-to-play environment now to a large degree.

We would be happy to help you with this but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that the best thing you can do is fire up a wordpress blog tomorrow, a facebook page and a twitter account and start doing the work of publishing and broadcasting content. Design is mostly irrelevant in this space. Choose a template that works for you and go – the doing is all. No advertiser or sponsor will touch you until you have some metrics to show them – anayltics results, facebook fans, twitter followers, etc. Working with a web developer at this point is actually likely the worst thing you can do – you will need to have native fluency in the tools – which frankly is easy to come by – a couple of days of frustration and you can master all of these. Without core fluency, a developer or agency will just be taking your money.

I am sure you will encounter many experts who tell you otherwise, and that you should focus on developing your brand, your design, and getting everything perfect before “launch”. They are wrong. The web is about you publishing today, not 6 months from now, and discovering that everything you want to do in your business plan is literally a couple of clicks away.

We’re the wrong agency to work with on this – you need to look at federated media properties – the people behind the largest independent ad-driven sites in the world: http://www.federatedmedia.net/

Take a look at their stable of publications and you will see what state of the art is – blogging like your life depends on it every hour of every day.

Thanks for the inquiry.
Kevin

I had the opportunity to sit at the roundtable at MassMOCA yesterday with many other people involved in the Creative Economy and have a discussion with Gov. Deval Patrick, Jason Schupbach, Director of the Creative Economy Sector, and other representatives from the state and local government. The Gov. runs a good meeting, and the comments were substantive and useful. It’s all about the money, in the end: how do resources get allocated and where does investing public funds bring you the greatest return.
I had the opportunity to speak to Gov. Patrick after the meeting briefly about my views, that the non-profit cultural sector fundamentally IS the economy of the Berkshires, and that a job at Barrington Stage or Shakespeare & Company is just as good a job, and worth preserving and tending, as a job at a for-profit. As he said himself, “I’m increasingly struck by the opportunity presented by a strong cultural element,” said governor. “How do we build on that even at a time of scarce resources?”
It’s heartening to see the development that has taken place in the past few years since Berkshire Creative (www.berkshirecreative.org) was formed and came on the scene a new voice in the Economic Development world of the Berkshires. It’s exciting to see the changes, but there is still so much to do. I hope that the delegation took away some incentive to reinvest in the MCC, the Cultural Facilities Funds, The Film Commission and other agencies that have seen their budgets cut in the past year. Thanks for coming out to see us, Gov. Patrick.

Posted via web from Kevin Sprague

I’m going to keep the client anonymous for now in these posts, but it’s a significant regional institution. The job I’ve been hired to do is to transform their culture, as relates to all things internet. It’s been a fascinating ride for the past few weeks. 

Fundamentally, what led to this was a series of conversations with the leadership of the institution, who had become increasingly frustrated by the inability of the internal culture to transform from past practice into the evolving future. Back when the web was new, we all ran out and built web sites. We got email. We learned how to create links. Fast forward to today with the rapidly evolving web 2.0 and 3.0 worlds of blogging, social networks, mobile devices, email marketing, and open-source software, and you have a radically different landscape. Well, the news is that for many institutions, conservative by nature and slow to change, this rate of progress presents a somewhat daunting challenge. But change they must to survive.

The context of my strategy on achieving success in transforming the institution into a web 2.0 culture is as follows:

• The internet is a language, not a technology. We have to pursue a degree of fluency across every department and individual.
• If it is hard or technical to do, don’t do it. Find a easier way.
• If there is something you want to do, don’t code it yourself. Go look for a solution pre-built, it’s out there.
• Use the simplest, most common and most popular tools available. Be prepared to try them out and if they don’t work, find another tool
• Plan for change. Everyday.

Steps we are taking are building their web presences on wordpress, for launch in a matter of week. We’re enlisting every employee and department as potential editors and contributors, and we’re setting up multiple points of entry for people to participate. We’re moving off proprietary systems for email communications, networking and ecommerce to robust commercial and open-source systems that are pre-built. And we’re working towards changing the relationship between inspiration, action and event: namely taking down barriers between thought and publishing.

Stay tuned. More to come.