2009 TechNO Expo

Luke Bucklin, president, Sierra Bravo Corporation, Bloomington

Sierra Bravo does the majority of its work through partnerships with advertising and marketing agencies. Our partners are telling us that while many clients are looking to reduce their expenses overall, they are typically maintaining or even increasing their investments in their Web strategies. We are seeing many partners and clients refocusing their interactive strategies on mission-critical projects and tactics designed to directly contribute to the bottom line (e.g. promoting sales, reducing overhead, etcetera).

We’re seeing that clients who budgeted for maintenance on existing sites are doing their best to squeeze some new development out of those dollars.

Some companies that are feeling the pinch have delayed projects to the second half of the year.

Typically an interactive project has a lot of flexibility in the bottom line; often companies will get responses to an RFP that differ by orders of magnitude. We encourage our partners to look at our proposals as the beginning of a discussion about the scope of a project rather than a take-it-or-leave-it offer. In many cases, the necessity to cut budget on a given project can be the mother of invention of all kinds of clever and unconventional solutions.

If more companies started the conversation with their Web partners by saying “These are my objectives. Here’s my budget. What can we do?” there would be many more great interactive campaigns out there. Its important for end clients to have a real sense of how a project will impact their business and have a plan in place to measure the results.

The key to success in any financial climate is to look to the competition and do something original and unique. It can be tempting to survey the competition and make your Web site a “best of” compilation of what your competition has put out there, but the truly successful companies are those that find a way to communicate their unique value on line without becoming an echo chamber for the activity of the rest of their industry. Specifically, I think that companies should ensure that their projects include resources to maintain and update content on their sites themselves (keeping in mind that this often means both the development of a content management system and some time from a subject-matter expert within the company). A successful Web project with any kind of shelf life will have costs both in development and in personnel over its lifetime.

We organize an event called Sierra Bravo’s Overnight Web site Challenge where we bring together nonprofits from across Minnesota with a team of Web professionals who work with them to create new sites literally overnight. It’s a great showcase for what a company could do with even just a few thousand dollars working collaboratively with local talent and cutting-edge technologies.