Whenever I look at websites or blogs, there’s one key ingredient which is essential 99.9% of the time. It’s so obvious it can easily be missed, and isn’t down to technology or snazzy design. And, despite my slightly misleading title, it can be the easiest and the hardest thing to create and maintain.
It’s focus.
To clarify, I don’t mean a dogmatic clinging to one aim or proposition set in stone for all eternity. In the social we we now inhabit you’ll need to change and adapt to the needs and desires of your potential and actual audience.
But there’s an overwhelming amount of ways and means to achieve your goals – and a similar amount of things you might wish to cover. No matter how big your team or organisation, by trying to be all things to all people you’ll end up spreading yourself too thinly, and doing everyone a disservice.
It’s a lesson I’ve sometimes struggled with in the past, and one that reappears with my current employment, my blog, and Disposable Media all asking for my time – in competition with my life offline.
That’s why I have to prioritise my work first, then my blog, then Disposable Media, and then anything else online.
It’s also why the blog I started to look at anything online which interests me is now increasingly about social media marketing, community marketing and social networks. It’s my work, my main interest, and the thing it makes sense for me to focus on.
It’s also why I value the reminders about priority from a colleague of mine, and why I’ve already seen how much value comes from her work in establishing clear propositions on some of the titles I work with.
As another example, compare Pandora.com (If you’re in the U.S. and still able to) with what I thought would be a good substitute, Meemix. Both have a streaming radio station of your preferences at their heart – but where Pandora was incredibly quick and easy to get going, Meemix is prettier and yet less satisfying. Meemix has games, profiles, and all sorts of lovely graphical interfaces – and yet for me it crashes, cut outs, and fails to load. And whilst I can understand their need to differentiate themselves from Pandora in the past, now that non-U.S. residents are looking for a quick musical fix, they could be serving the millions now searching for a replacement. Instead, it’s just as quick to go to Last.fm, and gain the extra social context it offers.