We just finished up writing a longish RFP for a client. This client, quite understandably, wanted to make sure to take advantage of all the best new social networking technologies and the hottest trends of Web 2.0.

One point that we regularly insist on instilling in our clients in an engagement like this is that, while all these technologies are great in theory, the key to their success is that they are well integrated into organizational culture, and that the organization can manage and support them well.

We learned this lesson the hard way: The last firm Nick and I worked for had a client for whom we designed a social networking strategy that was, while great in theory, never maintained. Their organization just couldn't support it. Recently, they brought it offline, sinking a significant amount of work. This reflects badly on us and on them, and we're not apt to make the mistake again.

Apropos of a lesson learned, and in an ongoing attempt to maintain the precarious balance in "experience design" between branding and visual design cohesion and business process design, let me refer you to Advertising Week's Benjamin Palmer, who recently wanted to rethink the user experience, and to Ron Shevlin, who immediately wanted to re-rethink it.

Palmer:

What if we added more to the UX designer's plate? What if we not only charged them with thinking about the interface, but also how that interface reflected upon the brand?

Shevlin:

Too often — and this might sound heretical — site designers (oops, I mean user experience engineers) focus too narrowly on the customer or site user. What they fail to recognize is that what they’re "designing" isn’t just a Web site, but a business process. A business process that often exists in the offline world. And a business process that, even though much of it occurs online, still interacts with the offline world and the people (often known as “employees”) who execute that business process offline.

Hence, your weekend ponderable: How can you better design your next website or corporate online strategy to improve the lives of both a business' customers and its employees?

David Armano recently wrote some new lyrics to an old tune at Advertising Age, bemoaning the continued reliance on flashy microsites, and appealing to a policy of community activity as the most effective – however unglamorous – strategy for building brand loyalty.

When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our TV spots on it or – better yet – creating spots that looked like they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action happens in the comments.

He appeals in the article to the My Starbucks Idea idea, which in turn appeals to Starbucks loyalists: "You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What's your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it."

So that's the big idea. Ask people what you should do with your business, and let them vote and discuss their answers. This is, in fact, the big internet idea (qua advertising) in general, at least as it's developed over the past five or ten years. But, looking at the My Starbucks Idea site, I started to wonder if it was really working at all.

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