Social Flare

User empathy

My first car was a Volkswagon bug.

It was every bit as sparse as you’ve heard… just enough to get by and still be called a “car”, instead of a “complicated go cart.”

There was an AM-only radio, and no tape player. There was one dial, way before one dial dashboards were cool. But there was a separate lever as a turning indicator, almost a luxury, all things considered. I bet someone had to fight for that, when sticking your arm out the window and signaling manually would have done just as well.

A curious thing with the turning indicator was the arrow that flashed, when you pulled down for left or pushed up for right. Most cars you can think of have separate lights for the different directions. Not the bug. There was one light in the middle of the one dial, with arrow points pointing off in both directions.

Anyway, more times than I can count, when I was tooling around Joliet in December as a high school junior, frantically rubbing the windshield with a glove because the car had no window defroster, someone would ask me the same question. I’d signal for a turn, and my one light would blink. Someone in the back or sitting next to me would invariably notice the one blinking light, with the two arrows pointing in opposite directions, and ask me very seriously…

“Dude, how do you know which way you’re turning?”

The first time I heard this question, I had to think of the words that might form the answer.

How do I know which way I’m turning?

?

After a moment, “well, I’m the driver,” I’d answer, just as seriously. “It’s my job to know.”

And it was. Clearly there was a disconnect between the person who asked, and the interface of the dashboard, specifically that light. The one blinking light wasn’t communicating a specific direction, and that gave rise to the question, and the concern. Which way am I turning?

The thing is, the blinking lights on your dashboard don’t really indicate to the driver which way you’re turning; they just tell you that you have signaled a turn, that your lights are probably flashing on the outside of your car. As the driver, in almost any circumstance you certainly know which way you’re turning. There are rare exceptions, of course, but almost always, you know.

So, who cares?

Sometimes we have that same disconnect, as IAs, or as designers of an experience. Sometimes we too easily adopt the mindset of the passenger, the person looking over the driver’s shoulder. We see the information, experience the flow as an observer, and make judgments of experience design based on this point of view. Sometimes this works out fine.

Sometimes, there’s a disconnect.

“Dude, how do you know which way you’re turning?”

We make a lot of decisions on how an interface here should look, what information is necessary. “We should really show the price there,” you might say. “How will the customer know what’s in their cart?”

Because they’re the driver. It’s their job to know. They’ve already considered each item they’ve added to the cart. Once off the product page, they’ve considered the price of a product. These are just a couple examples; there are many others, certainly.

Certainly there are cases where the user forgets… but I think that’s probably the exception, than the rule. I think we could do a better job of getting into the driver’s head, instead of being a passenger, as it were.

We should design the experience as if we were the driver, not a passenger watching the driver.

What do you think?

Loose Communities

It might be useful to have a web-based "loose" community, one I can join and leave with ease, one that's designed from the ground up for loose affinity.

For a real life example, imagine a cocktail party, or better, a great wedding reception. For that evening, I am part of the "community" there. I have "friends" after a fashion, we cluster together, share, and then after that night our community disbands.

We go our separate ways, though sometimes you connect with someone special enough to keep in touch with.

I am not thinking about organizing a web-based loose network around wedding receptions ( but hmm ), I am thinking about the idea of a network that enables and supports other loose social interactions; my stay at a hotel or resort, my cruise, my conference. I've blogged in other places about these ideas, but it seems that Mr. Brogan's post would indicate the idea is becoming more and more visible.

As websites became more and more then norm, it said something very definite about a business or establishment that didn't have one. "Oh...  you don't have a website? Hmmmmmm." There might be legitimate reasons for a business not to not have a website, but if you are dealing with the public, selling anything to anyone, or have a message to communicate to others, I can't think of one. I have this suspicion the same thing will happen with social networks.

But not every business or organization has the same social network need. Sometimes your members are transient. Sometimes -you- as creator of the network are transient.

Right now we're in a place where more and more large-scale "permanent" networks are setting up. That's how you build them- to last. To have people come in, and stay. To use a physical world analogy, the whole place is built around the idea of a condo; we build, and you move in, and stay. But what about the space where that's not the best case? What if I need a hotel? or a large tent?

Maybe the idea is that I don't stay for long. The network might last, but my membership is definitely temporary...  this is the case for networks centered around a hotel or resort, or around a cruise. Maybe the network itself is not permanent, along with my membership being temporary...  conferences, family reunions, and one-time events could benefit from such a loose network.

To enable this, a few things would have to be solved for...

You'd need an easy way to join these networks, or at least a feeling that my investment of adding myself to one is worth the payoff of belonging. If I have to spend 20 minutes to join my hotel's social network, it's probably not going to happen. So to a person with my background in usability and IA, this means I'd need a place to host my "profile" in a more or less permanent and very portable way, that I could just apply to these networks as I saw fit. FoaF and other XML dialects for personal profile storage come to mind.

The revenue model seems obvious; who wouldn't want to be able to advertise to such a targeted group of people? Or maybe, who wouldn't want to be able to sell such targeted advertising?

The right tools for the job - choosing a Social Media app that will help.

So, I did a bit of consulting, again in retail. This concerned an internal project, and the consultation was casual and precursory, fitting the state of the project; it hasn't really gotten out of the paper napkin stage.

The idea is this: many very smart MBA-types at this large company sense of see real value in social computing, and would like to introduce some concepts to their company for very good reasons: to effect a cultural change by introducing a social computing app that demonstrates clear value to not only decision makers, but also to the masses. The MBAs themselves are young Facebook-grads newly minted from college, and so they maybe swim in the sea of social computing.

But swimming here, or being native, and developing implementation strategy are two different things.

THe MBAs have access to a wiki solution, and see a lot of potential value in the tool for their organization. Their plan is ( was? ) to introduce it to the higher-ups, let the value speak for itself, and then have use trickle down from the top to the masses.

I advised against this, for a number of reasons:

I have never seen a working example of top-down, mandated social computing. I've seen plenty of grassroots stuff, starting from teh bottom and getting a critical mass of obvious value. Ive seen a few examples of partnered effort, developing a solution that works. But never top-down. It might work, but I get this feeling that mandated social computing ( "now we all need to use the wiki" ) is not a recipe for success. It seems to me this kind of technology needs adoption that can't be mandated.

This is accepting the premise that the MBAs could -get- the higher-ups to adopt the technology. I was not convinced of that, but why strike at pride, when you can appeal to practicality?

Also, and much more important, I opined that it seemed to me that the group had it's heart int eh right place, but might be going about their goal the wrong way. I asked what goals are you trying to acheive? Meaning, what problems are you trying to solve? When you know that, and who you are trying to benefit, then which tool ( wiki, or something else? ) becomes a much easier question to answer. Deciding that you're going to use a wiki because you can afford to keep it up is kind of like going into a hardware store, telling the clerk you have "some work" to do on your house, showing him or her $20 and asking what you can get for that?

You might get a spiffy hammer. But what if you really need to drill some holes, or paint a wall, or grout some tile? Your hammer might not be all that useful.

The same applies for social computing, of course. Except instead of $20 for a hammer, you spend thousands and thousands of dollars in capital, time and other resources chasing after a hazy goal with the wrong tools and a tactical ( as opposed to strategic ) plan.

The ideas of effecting social change, or implementing social media and computing, and solving a tough problem with amazing solutions are all admirable goals. But the planning and thinking things through before hand, with someone who knows how, is essential.

Now, where did I put that hammer...?

You see, I have some pctures to hang. In doing this, I know I have nails to pound. And although I could use the side of a drill, or the flat of a saw, or the bottom of a paintbrush to drive the nails,  a hammer really is the best tool for that.

Where to build a Discussion Forum - Location Location Location

I have the opportunity to work with an individual, a potential client. He is highly placed in a retail company with a name you'd recognize, and he's -the- "Social Network Guy" for his company. He's led them into at least two debacles, public and Dugg, because he's never read Seth Godin's remarkable book "Meatball Sundae".

Well, I don't know that for sure. He might have read it, and then just disregarded all that stuff about using traditional marketing thinking when making forays into new media, and about how bad that is. Which was pretty much the entire book.

Anyway, this retailer now has a forum, a threaded discussion. The idea is that customers can come and talk about our products, collaborate and build content for the community. Experts would emerge, dialog would be engaging, and the company would reap the benefits of a win with this social media stuff, having their own barrel full of fish to shoot market to, so to speak.

The problem of course is in the first sentence of this description. Never never are people going to show up to your community just because and discuss your products, in any numbers approaching a critical mass.

Other companies have done this, yes?

Well, no. Not really.

For examples.... Dell & HP run forums that are dedicated to discussing their products. But these are support communities; people show up with problems, or answers, and these are traded. There's value there. Apple and Lego have strong communities around their products, but this is brand advocacy and serious adopters sharing with one another... something this retailer will never need to worry about. They make meatballs, to take a page out of Mr. Godin's lexicon.

What a tired , borrowed quote "If you build it, they will come" is, eh? But time and time again, stakeholders embracing traditional media views take up this concept, and lose track of a major reason why people come to, revisit, and stay at online communities. At every single successful community, there's some value for the visitors, there.

Very very few early villages ever sprung up in a place that was not a crossroads, or alongside a water source. People gathered in these areas and formed a community because it made sense; "Let's hang out while we exploit the resource."

What resource would "settlers" exploit in this retailer's electronic village?

None. There's no value there. No crossroads, and no water source. As it happens, 10,000 employees were emailed before the public launch, encouraging them to register and participate in the community, a few weeks ago. As near as I can figure, about 50 have posted, about 5 have done so regularly. The busiest thread is the one asking "What ( are we ) doing wrong?", by a factor of ten.

Such low-traffic or meandering forums should not use tag clouds, by the way.

In the book "Groundswell", Proctor & Gamble is held up as a shinning example of how-to start a community. P & G wanted to sell more feminine products. But they also realized you can't really announce a feminine product forum and have the groundswell show up, populate it, and carry your brand off into the future.

So what they did was start a community for girls that focused on their problems, and solving them. For details see the very good book. They made a subtle brand plug here and there, of course. But it was in the context of what was being discussed, and was never in-your-face. The short summary of this story is P & G attracted large numbers of their target demographic with something useful and valuable.

Not their feminine hygiene products and dreams of controlling a community of brand advocates.

...

A book that's waiting to be written ( by someone. Hmmmmmm ) has to do with organic social media; the parallels between nature and the principles of social media. It would demonstrate clearly with fables from nature such no brainers as "don't plan a city in the middle of nowhere".

Location definitely matters, and online that "location" is very similar to what it is in real life - proximity to something necessary, riveting, compelling, valuable, or scarce.

More Babyfoot is Less

( this is a posting I wrote for another blog, but which is apporpriate. The original appeared 12/07 on Sears's internal User Experience blog )

More Foosball is less, and how it applies to UE

 

My cube neighbor Jenn, who is not in UE but who is still pretty cool anyway, tells me that the Canadians and French call foosball a word that translates out to "baby-foot" in English.

 

Presumably this is because foosball is a baby version of soccer, a miniaturization. For those of you living on desert islands and reading this blog through your Kindles, foosball is a table top version of soccer for two players where each player tries to score goals by spinning multiple handles and yelling loudly, just like the real game. Here in UE West we have a sort of group area decorated by furniture raided from Sears of Christmas Past, as well as several baby-foot tables. We had two, yesterday we got another one.

 

That makes three baby-foot tables, for the math challenged. And we don't call them baby-foot tables, of course. We call them foosball tables. And on an extremely busy Foosball Day we use one of them, a couple times. Having three tables in the same small space seems a bit excessive.

 

Meet a need

 

It’s possible someone thought “well, people like foosball; our one table is going over well, lets put more down there.” Or maybe it was a matter of Someone Important deciding that for true happiness, our unit needed three tables. Or perhaps the solution was meant for scale; at some point in the future, we might –need- three tables. Then again, maybe we just have a surplus of tables… and like my mom never wanting to throw anything out, we jam them into 2G’s common area on the assumption that we’ll need them someday. Like that old sweater, or a margarine bowl you automatically wash and save.

 

The thing is, we really don’t need three foosball tables. They languish, taking up space so that ironically it’s tough just to play on just the one table. If we only had the one table, and by some bizarre chance more than two people wanted to play at one time, then maybe they’d have to wait five minutes for their turn to turn the handles and yell. But this never happens, and I’ve been here nine months. I think one table would meet our need just fine.

 

More is less

 

I am pretty sure no one has ever put these next words together in a sentence before… we should certainly be careful not to put three foosball tables into our web experience.

 

What I mean is everything we do on our site should address a need, something we can concretely speak to. We have a pretty dense web environment, from the Home page to the Thank You at the end of checkout. It can be tempting to put something in because we might have a need down the road. Or because they’re doing it over Somewhere Cool. Or just because.

 

This helps lead to a cluttered environment, a confused visual or task hierarchy and people using none of our cool widgets, even though we have plenty of them. More is definitely not always better. We should take care to remember that more foosball is less.

 

Now where did I put that sweater…? And that margarine bowl. Hmmmmm.

Option B - Start your own network site

Option A for most businesses is to create a presence on one of the many social network sites; build a Facebook Page and gather fans, construct and mod out a MySpace page and start making friends, and so on. You can drill down to the really niche social network sites, if that's where your business is. HawaiianBeekepersWhoWatchAmericanIdol.com

Okay, I made that site up. But you get the idea.

This act has the bonus of being able to leverage tools and a network population already in place. Do a lot of your customers go to college? Facebook is -definitely- a place you want to be. You use Facebook's ready-made business page templates, growing population and have a go at it.

But what if your customer base doesn't neatly fit into groups like "All of Facebook members"? What if you want to start a network of your vendor partners, as well as your fans? What if you're hosting a symposium, trade show, neighborhood demo, and the people you're trying to bring together aren't members on any one particular site?

Well, there's an Option B: start your own network.

As time rolls by and the term "Web 2.0" starts to offend even more people, different community-building sites arise. Two in particular include Ning.com and StartyourTube.com . Both sites enable you to create your own full-on network, where others join and buddy up with you and each other. Sometimes it makes perfect sense to use an infrastructure already in place. Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, etc... these sites are ideal. But sometimes, you have to just roll your own.

Ning is a very customizable, general-purpose community building application, a sort of self-developed MySpace.

StartYourTube is a videa share sight, a la YouTube, but also a grow-your-own solution, letting you set up a place for members of your community to develop profile and share videos, but also a place to put your own ads and make some money.

More Option Bs to come, I'm sure.

Participation in Communities is Key

Joining Reddit or StumbleUpon or Digg to surf is one thing. Joining because you're trying to acquire business intelligence is a good step up. But to truly reap the rewards of accessing such social media, participation is key.

To benefit your business or organization, join one ( or more? ) of these sites with a non-personal account, one created under your business's name. They are free, by the way. Set up filters or search for articles relevant to your business, post them in your account area, and discuss them; leave comments in the article trace, and discuss what you find on the site, on your site, and your blog.

Being part of the discussion is part of being an expert. If you're a surfer, you're just taking up time. If you're discussing the relevant topics of your business, and can point to this discussion, your status rises.

Paul Chaney at Practical eCommerce puts it very well:

"A basic rule of thumb in social media marketing is that, in order to gain influence, you must actively participate in the communities of which you are a member. That means commenting on blogs, participating in forums and message boards, joining fan groups at major social networks like MySpace or Facebook, and dialoging via online chat on sites like Twitter."

Mr. Chaney brings up a very good point... beyond the social bookmarking sites such as Reddit and Digg, there is ample opportunity for the same participation on the more general social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

"it's gone viral"

Another one of Pete's Law's of Community Dynamics:

Something is viral when at least as many people know about it as have been told by the original source, plus one.

So, we have a message that got emailed out to a number of people, let's say 1000. This email message had a coupon code from a retailer that could be traced back to its source. If less than 1001 different people ( other than those getting the first email from the retailer ) can be said to have used the code, it is not "viral". Call this "collateral" instead.   If 500 new people use that coupon because it's spread a little, it's collateral success; not really viral.

I have just come from a retailer meeting where one marketing professional let the others gathered know that their recent coupon code had "gone viral". I asked after percentages of new use, and was interested to learn that if a coupon code was used by -anyone- other than the original emailees, around the office that emailing and code were agreed to have "gone viral".

Hmmmmm.

The above Law is for unambiguously stating something has "gone viral". It could certainly be argued that if a million people heard your message when you delivered it, and now 500,000 more know about it, possibly it's viral. So size of the overall first receiver group might matter. Also, I suppose time matters as well... if you reach the magic number of being viral ( original listeners + 1... the Pete Point ) but it happened 10 years after your message, could it truly have been said to have "gone viral"?

More on this, later.

Small Businesses Starting to Use Social Media

Anita Campbell at Small Biz Trends asked a good question of a group of social media gurus... 

“If your goal is to grow a small business online, and you had time for only one social networking / social media site, which would you choose and why?”

The answers are definitely worth the reading, but the standouts appear to be Facebook, Twitter, and a sense of "it depends".  Overall, my recommendation follows pretty closely along these lines. For baby steps, use Facebook; especially if your customers are the Gen Y set. Also participate in at least one social bookmark site such as StumbleUpon or Reddit.

Niche Communites - Bigger not always Better?

Facebook. MySpace. Bebo. Orkut. Livejournal. Multiply.

These are all names of well known, heavily-trafficked social network sites. Hundreds of thousands of members and up. I once worked for a startup in Madison ( I believe I may have mentioned this once or twice  :  ) where Bigger was Better. If we could reach more people, that would be great. If we could build a Bigger community, that would be awesome and we could then sell it for Bigger Money.

In theory, sure. Maybe. But as social networking evolves and the masses settle into patterns, the old marketing thoughts along the lines of more-is-better for a message is not always the way to go, I think.

Consider niche communities.

If you're looking to sell your new gloves to beekeepers, you could certainly market on Facebook. There are zillions of people there, and some small amount of them love to keep bees. Probably. You could spend the money or make the effort to learn how to market there yourself, and draw the Facebook beekeepers into your message and brand with the power of your awesomeness. Or...  you could find the niche community MyGenYBeekeeperSpace.com It would be much easier to find many more people interested in your whiz new gloves, in this space; and your marketing pennies or effort would go much further.

I made this community up, by the way. But you get my point.

There are niche communities for triathletes, fisherman, lapsed Catholics, golfers, doctors, and canoe enthusiasts. These communities are -much- smaller than the biggies but the people who sign up there are -much- more into the relevant pastime, occupation, or niche.

When developing a marketing strategy that includes a market you can narrow down ( and yours should; who can really market to "everyone"? ) find the communities that cater to your target niche. Sign up, poke around, have some conversations. Then start doing some really effective messaging to people who care about your bee-proof gloves.

Or, if you're building communities, find an under-represented niche, build it up, and sell it. Or advertising.

Hmmmmmmm. There's an idea.