Virtually every company is thinking about how to drive digital growth, getting more and more visitors and maybe even establishing something like an online community driven by forums and social networking type functionality. VCs still believe that the number one driver for valuation of a digital business is number of visitors. So how to do you really drive digital growth? Here are my top lessons learned from projects in the media and comms industry:

1. Make sure you have SEO compliant coding of the website
2. Employ SEO and online marketing specialists to drive traffic
3. Use site visitor analytics to understand their behaviour on the site and to adjust your content and navigation accordingly
4. Perform a connected customer analysis to understand what is hot in the market, what are people talking about etc. to adjust your content accordingly
5. Execute on focused 3rd party deals to drive traffic and brand awareness with specific relevance to your site
6. Create sticky applications like tools and games to increase hits per user, visit length but also get additional users by allowing them to share the tool with others
7. Drive cross sales between your offline business and digital, eg with deals or links related to your offline products that drive traffic to your website
8. Configure a site search engine with solid categorisation and predictive functionality to drive traffic through search visits
9. Write good and dynamic content to drive repeat traffic
10. Use personalisation features to engage users with ‘their’ site
11. Drive organic SEO by cross posting on other sites that have high page rank value
12. Pay bloggers or review sites to write about your site or, even better, specific contenton your site
13. Use of rich media and multiple channels (e.g. mobile access) to drive enhanced customer experience and traffic

Just my two cents…

One of the questions we’ve been getting lately with MIKE2.0 is … how do I help?   Its great to hear this as we could certainly use it!

We’ve listed some overall ways here and in this context, the areas where we could really use help include:

• Best practices information security
• Best practices in business intelligence
• Best practices in search
• Best practices in content management
• Success stories from a business perspective using IM
• Requirements templates, ROI models and product-specific best practices

These could be architecture patterns, lessons learned or product reviews.

The easiest way to contribute, however, is to add bookmarks or engage in forum discussions.  Bookmarks are a great way to add content from others sites and link it into the MIKE2.0 framework.

And of course we could always use development help with omCollab.

We’ll work on making this list more clear – any suggestions on how to do this best are welcome!

We’ve been working omCollab, the technology that supports MIKE2.0, for quite a while.  The whole approach is free and open source. You can get the code from here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/OmCollab

Our goal is to not only to build a better platform for MIKE2.0.  Its to provide an integrated product that meets the requirements for enterprise collaboration and will support our key initiative at www.openmethodology.org and the concept of an integrated framework for information development.

A couple questions for this group:

1. Do you think its a good idea?

2. Do you have any recommendations on open source assets we might want to bundle into omCollab?

3. Does anyone want to help?

What to find out more?

• The planned roadmap is here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/OmCollab_roadmap
• You can add bugs/feature requests here:http://waterloo.openmethodology.org/trac/omcollab/
• Join our forum discussion here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=4