Is Culture the fourth attribute of a Web Strategy?

Categories: Web TheoryPosted on May 30th, 2007

James Lim, new contact and budding blogger has been trying on my posts for size, in fact, he’s really done a great job in his latest analysis of my definition of Web Strategy: Long term decision making of a website that looks at Users, Business, and Technology.

He goes on to add that “Culture” is a factor or attribute that impacts any groups Web Strategy. While I agree with his assesment, I could suggest that the culture of both the Users and Business needs to be taken into consideration, so maybe three elements still stands.

What do you think?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 6:44 am and is filed under Web Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

Connie Bensen

Is culture in this case the same as open communication?

James Key Lim

Open and transparent communication is definitely a part of Web 2.0 culture. There are other parts as well like creating a dialogue with people vs. telling people something and not listening to them. Another is the acceptance of open source applications vs. enterprise software. Even more are being casual, agile, and simple vs. being formal, bureaucratic, and complicated. One of the most important things about Web 2.0 culture is to embrace change and evolution in a 'smaller and faster' world as Scoble and Israel wrote about in Naked Conversations.

Connie Bensen

ah yes! I've found this 'casual, agile, and simple' to be true! If the old bureaucratic way is followed, the moment or opportunity could be lost by the time the analysis, meetings, etc are held.

In our case, we've been called 'more nimble'. :) It's because we just 'do it' without the constraints of the bureaucratic process. I definitely think that the Web 2.0 culture is very much related to trying new things & learning from the experiences too. (Is that part of your def'n?).

jeremiah_owyang

some companies and organizations that are trying to embrace web 2.0 struggle. They struggle because their former culture is very top-down and rigid. This breaks tradition and it's very difficult.

Some of these companies I interact with frequently.

Ed Terpening

The culture of the MEDIUM is essential, in my view. Yes, company/people have cultural norms, but so does the communication medium. Think about how you may want to communicate the same message in three mediums: email vs SMS vs blog vs print, etc.

James Key Lim

You're right on Connie! Yes, trying new things and learning... evolving is definitely a part of the def'n :)

That's a keen observation Ed on culture of the medium and do agree with your thought. That micro-culture is very important in the success of Web 2.0 strategy as well.

jenks

the beureaucratic corporate structure is so poorly equipped to handle web 2.0 culture because it is not a democratic culture. it's much easier for democractic companies to embrace web 2.0 culture because they actually share the same fundamental structure. a democratic application or medium can't really be embraced by a long-standing top-down system as anything other than an gesture to fit a trend.