CollectiveLab

Stop Pretending Content Is Somebody Else's Problem

This is a heckuva quote that had me, embarrassingly enough, fist-pump the air when I read it recently.  It's from the Inspire UX blog which I need to remind myself to check in with more often, and pulls from Kristina Halverson's article.

I'm often asked to improve the UI of an already-designed interface for a locked-in marketing campaign based on content that, frankly, aint all that compelling.  By establishing an internal IA/UX practice (for the retail e-commerce group I work for) I hope to differentiate between the marketing fig-leaf of "adding sharing links" and creating content that is actually worthwhile to our customer.  

We're all familiar with the many customer-focused mantras that brands and marketers like to espouse.  And "social media" has given us the tools to connect with our fans and have our fans connect with each other.  But customer centricity does not mean adding sharing-links to lame content. And if other people in our organization don't get that our content is not compelling it becomes the responsibility and the opportunity for the UX professional to lead the way.

Will You Ever Share Your Purchases or Location through Facebook?

Mashable posted this question on their Facebook Page and the response was a resounding "Hell No."  Going through the comments I counted the following somewhat surprising results:

I've found the commenters (commentators?) on Mashable's Facebook postings to be a fairly inane bunch, but I don't mind having a back-of-the-envelope view of their sentiment.  And, given my relatively low opinion of the quality of their responses, this is my deduction: basically the idea of "Share" needs to be caveated (again, not a word).

1. Would I share purchases to my network of friends? 

My Answer: It Depends (which in this case I think equates with "sometimes")

If I just bought a book that makes me seem smart or clever, why the hell not?  I've seen people proudly announce purchases quite frequently.

2. Would I share purchases to BRAND PAGES that I already LIKE (ie., I'm already a fan of on FB)?

My Answer: It Depends

Given that I'm a fan of Ralph Lauren, would I want to let that page know that I just copped some new gear?  Fans do that a lot already, I read pages fan-comments regularly.

3. Would I share my location to BRAND PAGES that I already LIKE (ie., I'm already a fan of on FB)?

My Answer: It Depends

Fan-dom of brands is huge and growing.  Mobile / Location Aware couponing is often a brand's first foray into Location Based Services.  Foursquare is banking on that model.  Cross-channel marketing hopes to tie online purchase-intent with offline conversion.  It's projected that 50% of all offline sales will be driven by online research in 2011.  Etc.

4. Would I share my location to my network of friends? 

My Answer: Yes / It Depends

People seem to love doing this on all sorts of other services, so why not through Facebook? 

5. Would I share my location to GROUPS or EVENTS that I'm already part of on FB?

My Answer: Yes / It Depends

Groups on FB don't seem to schedule reoccurring events (I don't see a lot of DJ parties or after-work sports teams using Groups, for example), but there are lots of Invites and Bars and Bands that people "ACCEPT" or "LIKE" and I'm sure posting your location to these will make sense to some users. 

So, my conclusion is that, like their adamant rejection of UI changes to their profile pages, newsfeed features and every new bit of functionality, the FB community is not particularly adept at knowing what they'll end up using.  And maybe it's easier just to repeat "no" than sit back and think, "well, maybe, yes."

Adding Comments Has Been Disabled

It appears that there's a campaign where Magazine publishers are trying to make the case that they're just as relevant, or even more so, than they were five years ago.

The campaign comes from the traditional advertising agency of Y&R, and we're told a digital campaign will follow in the Spring.  Yet here I am watching a video of the heaviest-hitters in the magazine biz telling me they understand "how media works," and I'm struck by the glaring stark whiteness of a YouTube page without comments enabled.  What a rare sight!  And quite telling!

Flickr Rant: Get Your Social (UI) On

I'm a huge fan of Flickr - but Picassa is making a helluva good run at it.  It feels like it's just a matter of time.  So here's one note from a Flickr fan(boy?) that would keep me subscribed.

Increase the thumbnail size of the Recent Uploads (from Your Contacts).  100x100 is an image size that was nice and friendly for my 28.8 modem.  Lets move on.  I can't see jack at 100x100, so you're limiting my ability/interest in diving into my recent contact's photos.  That's the worst thing you could do, especially now.  You should be doing a TON of things that make want to dive into these images, from this very page.

For example, give me the ability to

• View more per page ("view 100 per page")
• Sort by most-favorited, most-commented, proximity, etc
• View enlarged image on hover (Bing's image-search beats Googles, a lot to learn there)
• Favorite an image from this page

Those are a couple off the top of my head.  But the first and easiest thing to do: enlarge the thumbnail to something that gives the user a reasonable view of the image. Lets get crackin, Flickr.  Time to get a little more clever about basic socially-minded UI before the big boy runs you out of town.

Social Media Week: Do you have a _____ Strategy?

I attended the final panel of Social Media Week here in New York, moderated by John Abell, the New York Beaureu chief of Wired.com.  The panel consisted of Ian Schafer of Deep Focus, Brian Morrissey from Adweek, and Gary Vaynerchuck, of "Gary Vaynerchuck" fame ;)

Below, some unfiltered notes:

• The end-goals of a brand haven't changed, just new tools.

• "Here's a Brand Strategy: Care" - Gary Vaynerchuck

• What's your DNA, what's your value statement.  This should live across your SMM channels - Ian Schafer

• Newer brands are having an easier time adopting SMM (strategy, voice, process) than established brands.  Zappos, Endless, Etsy; it's baked-in. (Coke was ridiculed for their efforts in SMM)

• Zappos company 360 page Company Culture book (note to self: check it out)

• "Much like brands were talking about building their Email / Registration lists five years ago, they should be building their Communities now" - Ian Schafer

• "People use Social Media not to connect with Brands, but to connect with Each other" - Brian Morrissey

• Case in point, that Nike + allowed people to challenge each other, for cities to challenge cities, in running -- Nike simply created the connective tissue.  Didn't even have to invest in advertising against it.

• "The Agency is the Record Label, they're stuck in the middle" (between Brands and Social Media)  - Ian Schafer

• As you're adopting your SMM strategy, map out Who You Are as a brand, what would you do and what wouldn't you do.  If you make a false claim, people will call you out.

• (I was reminded here of the simple analogy - if your Brand is a person in a room, how would they act?  And using that model to drive your SMM voice)

• "Much more important than Twitter.com is Search.Twitter.com" - Gary Voynerchuck on Listening.

• Brian Morrissey, however, cautions that "listening can become a 'Marketing Fig-Leaf'" (great term)

• "Fly Ball Effect" - Various groups at a Brand say they're in charge of SMM, saying they got it, and the ball falls between us.  (sounds familiar)

• Luxury and SMM: consider having/creating the conversation away from the brand.  But still engaging the specific community in that conversation, the community that deserves your content (like the 10 most influential bloggers on ... high end watches, for example).

  

“Conversational Marketing” and the Luxury Brand: How an internal User-Experience practice can answer the ROI question

Below, a draft of what I'll be submitting to The Project 100 a collaborative book by 100 authors on Social Marketing. 

___

I’ve recently had the challenge of building a Social Media Marketing (SMM) practice within a global luxury/retail brand.  Below are some thoughts on how to engage your brand in that direction, and how to justify an internal SMM practice.

1. Answering the Skeptics: Is it “On Brand”?

I like the term “Conversational Marketing” because it replaces the mystique of “Social Media” with an everyday practice that’s a little more concrete.  The goal of every Marketer is the one-on-one relationship with the customer, and our brand is no different. Luxury brands exemplify impeccable customer service, so which SMM / Conversational Marketing tactics are applicable to us? 

You don’t hear the Voice of the Customer much in Luxury marketing (“My family and I trust Gucci, and you should too!”).   Instead we trade on “aspirational” imagery – a term we use a lot in judging Creative.  This alluring, almost unattainable lifestyle doesn’t fit naturally within a Facebook Page, where it’s invariably followed by wall posts like “Gucci is my sh*t!”  Not so amusing for the internal brand-police.  We enjoy the elevated perception of our brand and don’t know where and how to engage with our customer within an online (public) forum

From developing technologies that allow store representatives to better serve their top customers, to online forms for customers to comment on fit & sizing – Conversational Marketing tactics can benefit our existing commitments to the brand-customer relationship.  But how do you sell this story internally?

2. Internal Education: Illustrating the shift in how the Customer experiences Brands online.

In order to secure funding for SMM efforts I needed to make a case to an upper management that is naturally distrustful of swinging open the doors to a (seemingly unstructured) two-way conversation with their customer. I created a “What is Web 2.0” presentation and went on a company-wide road show. The presentation illustrated the progression of the Business-Customer relationship (see “B” and “C” above), gave metrics showing shifts in customer activity towards online media, and most importantly, detailed recommendations that leverage existing content that the brand develops, with an eye to letting our evangelists share that content across the web. 

Simply put, marketing efforts have always followed customer activity; we put our brands in front of the customer in the places where they spend the most time.  I needed to illustrate that the customer does not come directly to our website from a vacuum (only one-third come through the front door). And they are having conversations about our brand everywhere but on our site.

Every brand must realize that the conversation is happening all across the web, and they need to decide whether to join it.  We need to shift to a “design for dissemination” mentality.  Our job as SMM Evangelists is to answer When and How we join the conversation.   If we’re committed to the customer, we at least need to Listen to the conversation (following that old adage, “your brand is not what you say it is, but what your customer thinks it is”).  How do we pull that off?

3. My experience as an SMM Evangelist (and how to bake ROI into SMM)

SMM Evangelists will tell you that “What’s the ROI?” is the wrong question.  But working internally at a brand, in this climate, it’s clear that you need a clever answer.  I believe that a tactical User Experience (UX) practice gives you a unique perspective into SMM, and answers the ROI question because ultimately good UX design is about improving conversion. 

A little bit on how I got here.  As Design Director I oversaw all of the day-to-day Creative for a 5000 page, 3.5 million uniques, hundreds-of-millions in sales ecommerce site.  I managed a team of 25 designers, art directors, and developers, as well as the studio team where we shoot over 4000 products.  I also led the site through two redesigns (including multiple usability labs and focus groups), where we invariably focus on the pages where customers spend 80% of their time: the grid and the product-level pages. I slowly was transforming myself into “The Information Architecture / User Experience / Interface-Design Guy.”  I convinced the senior management to create a new discipline under the heading of “Global Creative Architect.” In this new role I now oversee the User Experience across all of our interactive projects (Marketing Sites, Kiosks, Store Display, & Mobile), as well as eCommerce.  And it is within this practice that I can best recommend and strategize around SMM tactics.  My history in Creative allows me to apply SMM tactics into our exiting projects in brand-appropriate ways.

The IA/UX practice partners with the Analytics team, who provide a daily dashboard on the performance of all links and functionalities across our site, level-set against historic metrics and our current goals.  Hence the IA/UX team has a unique and tactical perspective into the minutia of customer behavior.  Where we see opportunities we construct a hypothesis as to how we can improve the customer experience -- and then conduct multivariate tests to prove the hypothesis.  Is Send-to-a-Friend working?  What if we displayed the form-fields rather then hiding them behind a button will people use it more?  Yes, in fact.  By getting super granular we’ve empowered our brand evangelists.

4. Looking Forward: Brand As Utility

I approach every project by asking which channels are included and how best to integrate them.  The next evolution in SMM will include brands using Mobile as a key ingredient in the communication mix.  I’m not looking for SMS Marketing to follow the path of Email Marketing.  Instead I’m keen on mobile applications that connect my online experience with my in-store experience (and points in between).  I want to scan a product with my phone and get served a relevant video clip. I want to alert a store that I’ve arrived in London, and have them pull product that’s similar to what I’ve purchased in the past.  I want to browse wardrobes after watching a movie on iTV and click through to commerce.  And I love chatting with my friends watching CNN’s imbedded presidential inaugural address within Facebook.  The landscape for optimizing these connections are endless – and it seems that finally meaningful cross-channel integration is actually attainable.

The Brand Gap

 

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One of the key points in this presentation happens on the 33rd slide -- the issue of developing the Charisma within your brand.  Seems like a point that's very attractive to bloggers, like Rohit Bhargava, one of the members of the 360 Digital Influence Group at Ogilvy.  He recently wrote this book, and not having read it yet -- it seems like it's concentrating on this same responsibility.



The second key point in the Brand Gap presentation is the call for a brand building via a collaborative structure, from an Integrated Marketing Team, which begins on slide 58.  The point that is missing from the presentation is the issue of "Transformative Design," wherein the product IS the message.  More on that issue in a later post.
 

Michael Tchao, GM of Nike Plus

Loc Le Meur speaks to Michael Tchao about Nike+.  Good presentation of the oft-heralded successful marriage of Product & Marketing.

MTV Asia "Being Young"

   

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Found this slideshare on Sean Howards's Craphammer -- where he speaks against the microsite, in favor of "earning" the auidience through the sites they browse through regularly. He also ads this quote from David Armano, a mantra I'm hearing repeated everywhere -- and something we have to answer from both sides of the table:

"Social Networks are all about facilitating human connections, and instead of talking about how we can do this—I hear marketers asking "how do we monetize" and "how do we advertise" on them."
   

The Truth about the Age of Conversation

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Let me interject some good-spirited nay-saying here.

The above is from The Kaiser Addition -- a blog I just checked out on the advice of Paul Isakson.

The slideshare post is cute, clearly.  But this conversation, these Conversations, have gone awry.

Within the thread following this Slideshare's post, was a cute lil' video too, just like the Kaiser's slideshare.  The video makes the following statement, the kind of phraseology that's parroted quite heavily in the Social Media Marketing blog space:

"The web gets really interesting when people pool their ideas, then they start to be really creative ... because new ideas usually come through conversations"

This is a classic case of Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc -- a self fulfilling prophesy within our industry to think that innovation is being driven by community.  And that to be an engaging brand you must join in the conversation.

Believe me, I love this thread, this Age of Conversation thread we've been on for the past year or so, but I think it's time to get more clever.