Digital strategy seeks to bridge the gaps between technology, the creative idea, the target as user, business objectives and the brand – and brings grounded creativity to technology

Great definition of digital strategy (a/k/a what I do).

I’m not sure if you heard, but it’s not about centralized hubs of communication anymore.  It’s about listening.  It’s about taking what you learn from the inbound and enabling and empowering communities around you—small pieces loosely joined.

- Charlie O’Donnell on NYC’s new Chief Digital Officer position.

the learning school also argues that virtually no strategy ever works as originally planned. The point, they say, is for the company to set off in one direction, learn from the response it gets from markets and competitors, and then adjust accordingly.

That’s from Ben Casnocha who is quoting The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel.

They interact with the peers across the globe: This impacts employers, brands, teachers, parents, as this first generation enters the workforce.

Always online: By age 20, kids will have spent 20,000 hours online –the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practicing Urs Gasser, paraphrased Multiple identities, personal and social, shared online and offline (blurring): Online representation is the same as physical representation: what your clothes, friends, vehicles say about you.

Swiss Miss points us to Dr. Urs Gasser of Harvard’s Berkman Center who coined the term Digital Natives. There’s some deliberate practice thoughts there (10,000 hours of practice).

I spend lots of time trying to tell people that while social networking (and media) sites are quite useful, you should pick which ones you’re going to use wisely. I’m going to start referring people to this line from now on. It’s more succinct than I ever am.

But the intelligent use of the various media we now have isn’t just a matter of doing more digital. Rather, it’s a matter of more consciously allocating your use of different modes of communication: for example, making face-to-face communication a priority for those stakeholders with whom it’s needed, while using digital less. It all depends on what’s going to work best for you and for them.

Usually I go with something along the lines of, “know your audience” (do they still like snail mail) and “do what you’re comfortable with and will stick with” (if you don’t know what a tweet is, maybe you shouldn’t twitter?). Like I said, this is more succinct.

Digital shops can bring not only the expertise of management consultants, but also the tech chops to execute, he said. “Our model is more powerful because not only can we come up with these ideas, but we can build them,” he said. “A lot of great ideas would fail if they’re not well designed.”

Well said (oh yea, hi!).

Mike Arauz knows digital strategy. Here’s an old excerpt I’ve had bookmarked for a while that I finally got around to re-reading. I’m posting the parts I want myself (and my clients) to remember.

Digital strategy should be a continuous and iterative process, informed by a steady flow of measurement and used to guide tactical adjustments in pursuit of the client’s primary online objective.

This thought was taken from Gavin Heaton’s two excellent posts last week about digital strategy.

Continuous Digital Strategy

Strategy is an ever-evolving process which is revisited across the lifecycle of any project. …each of these steps are to be touched on in rapid iteration in the planning, execution/implementation and evaluation phases of any project.

Strategy Drives Decisions

It is easy to think that once you have set your strategy, that a button is flicked and that the focus switches to execution/implementation. But this is rarely the case….The are always, always, competing priorities – and what may appear to be strategically necessary one day will be out of favour the next. This is frustrating, time consuming and expensive for all involved. The opportunity, however, is to focus on a flexible approach to strategy – and this means using strategy not as a way of aligning messaging or building a campaign or a brand. It means using strategy to drive decisions.