Gerry McGovern // New Thinking

On the web, we need a new form of communications that focuses on serving customers rather than telling them what to do.
 
Communications and marketing professionals are being offered a huge opportunity by the online world. There is a major need for professionals who understand customers and can generate content that serves these customers better.
 

Converting people is really hard. It's much easier to allow the already converted to do what they came to your website to do.
 
Let’s say you’re running the website for a local church. What should your core focus be? Should it be to get new converts for your church or to help those who are already converted?
 

The fact that GOV.UK has won a top design award shows that the benefits of functional web design are finally being recognized.
 

Why do customers follow Cisco on Facebook, Twitter and community forums? That’s the question Cisco wanted to answer in order to better tailor the content they provide on these platforms. To answer this question, Cisco came to Customer Carewords to leverage our Top Tasks methodology. 
 

Humans and technology are much better at adding than removing. That needs to change.
 
In my online banking there is a feature that allows me to save the details of entities to whom I need to transfer money. There’s a problem, though. Once added, there’s no way to delete the entity. So, my list is getting longer and longer.
 

Customers today have less and less attention to give. On the Web, they’re doing research, trying to complete tasks. They don’t like being disrupted.
 
The traditional communications, marketing and advertising industries are facing major challenges. Their old models aren’t working as well anymore.
 

We are sitting on a goldmine when it comes to our online presence; but we are managing it like a coalmine. There is tremendous consensus among the 1,000 online professionals surveyed in December 2012 that we must:

The more complex the world becomes the less we can depend on individual experts.