Interactive/Social Media Insights

Post by Mark Drespling

A Colleague of mine (Thanks Colleen!) pointed out a couple articles this week about Comcast and their success using Twitter as a tool to monitor and improve customer satisfaction. According to a recent Chicago Tribune article,

“…Researchers said Comcast benefited from its efforts to monitor customer feedback on blogs and Twitter so it could pinpoint disgruntled customers and address issues on a case-by-case basis…”

Like many large media organizations, customer satisfaction is key to both market and economic growth and this is another indicator that business is “getting it” and embracing emerging tools as essential to their business.

This post at Social Media Today details the Comcast/Twitter story even further with an in-depth analysis of the interactions with Frank Eliason, the man behind the Comcastcares Twitter account:

“…To date, Frank has sent 4,000 public updates to his twitter account, each under 140 characters. He answers questions as well as he can and sometimes forwards information to his office for direct follow-up…”

While the second account is one detailing a customer nightmare, it is clear that Comcast’s efforts to listen and engage directly with its customers, while not always solving the problem at hand, clearly is building stronger relationships and trust that may have not been there before.

These stories are not as isolated as they were a year or two ago and they will continue to grow rapidly over the next few years. I find that I cannot stress to our clients enough that the conversation is already happening and that the best way to minimize the bad and maximize the good is to just get in there. The tools are there and they are remarkably accessible. Ask yourself, how are you using emerging social media  tools to connect with your customers? You may be surprised by how much or how little you are taking advantage of social media and no time is better than now to engage your audience.

Post by Mark Drespling

Content Management Systems (CMS) have become a standard component for modern web sites. With the number of available packages on the market and the laundry list of options available in each one, making the right selection can be difficult and time-consuming. We have had considerable experience helping clients devise their web strategy and select the appropriate CMS, but key criteria in the selection process is often overlooked prior to our engagements. Here are a few questions that can help in the selection process.

How do you currently manage your web content?

Most organizations have some sort of method in place already for managing their web content. This may be an existing CMS platform (Sitecore, Sitefinity, & Drupal to name a few), a lighter content editing tool (such as Contribute, or one of the numerous blogging platforms for instance), or a trained expert within the organization that edits the code and publishes content on demand. Since any change in the current practices will require time and training, not to mention a potential resistance to the new way of doing things, a deep understanding o the current process needs to be assessed before selecting a new model to fit your needs.

Do you have staff in place to manage and create web content?

One of the biggest roadblocks to launching new and revised web sites is content. Generally speaking, integrating a CMS into a new or existing design is not as much of a challenge and sourcing, editing, generating, and governing the text and images that are to be included in the site. Without dedicated staff to handle the content needs of the site, you run the risk of having an easy to update site that no one is interested in viewing. To accommodate these content needs at the base level, you will want to consider the writer(s) of content for the site and at least 1 visual designer to assist in layout and imagery. Beyond that, custom HTML and development work may be needed from time to time for even the most robust CMS platforms.

How many people in the organization will be responsible for content on the site?

As an elaboration on the staffing question, determining the right CMS is often a matter of the number of authors and approvers that will be using it. For instance, if you currently employ a “webmaster” to manage you site and content is managed through this person, the user interface and content approval process may not be an important part of the selection. ON the other hand, if your organization is large with several different authors generating content with several more individuals approving and publishing, an easy-to-use tool set with comprehensive role management options would be the best approach.

How frequently will you update the content and on how many pages?

We have built a lot of sites in the past using CMS platforms that get little in the way of updates over time. Sure, some of the pages are regularly changed (events, news, & calendars to name a few), but a majority of the pages are fixed and may remain unchanged for years. If the site is primarily a brochure that requires little maintenance, some of the more powerful CMS tools may be too much. Alternatively, some sites that have a lot of content that needs to be changed regularly can be built on platforms that cannot handle this or scale as appropriate over time.

What is the criteria for successfully using the CMS?

Ultimately, understanding what indicators will point to a successful implementation will help greatly in planning and selecting the right tool. Time and money saved, less errors and bugs in the site, removal of bottlenecks from the publishing process, and empowering more individuals within your organization are just a few of the ways that CMS platforms can be selected and measured.

These are just a few of the questions that we ask when engaging with clients regarding CMS implementation. Creating a strategic foundation for a CMS platform will aid your organization greatly in making the best selection for your web site.

by Mark Drespling

One of the major debates I find myself having, both with myself and with colleagues over the years, is in the form vs. function conversation. Which is more important? Which one should lead a project? When does one end and the other begin? Ask a dozen designers and developers and you are likely to get a dozen different answers. Usually, they all are right from their own unique perspectives.

My perspective has generally been one where the two are united. In the case of web site design, long-term success is realized through the effective balance of both. A site that is stunning but doesn’t work is an immediate failure. A site that works flawlessly but doesn’t captivate and engage an audience over time runs the risk of becoming a virtual ghost town of a site. Our Interactive practice wrestles with this type of issue almost daily.

A recent article, In Defense of Eye Candy, delves into this subject at great length. In the article, Stephen P. Anderson describes the various dimensions and characteristics of aesthetics and beauty and how they influence and persuade individuals to use and appreciate interfaces on the Web and in the real world. As he asks questions about what we see and how it affects behavior, it becomes clearer and clearer that people are greatly informed about products and interfaces by the way they look, and that perception, while not always everything, is often the determining factor in a person’s choice to use one thing over another regardless of ease-of-use or convenience.

I leave you with a couple questions for discussion. What are your experiences with aesthetics and usability? Have you found yourself choosing one thing over another even though it is not the simpleset, easiest, or most reliable option available? Or, does the way something works, regardless of the “pretty factors”, the determining point that you make your choices?

…and it’s crowdsourced! Peter Kim has a constantly-updated blog post up that lists the social media usage of major companies.

Here are a few examples:

Acura:

• Social networks: Facebook Acura TSX Connect fan page.
• Widgets: Acura RDX Traffic on Yahoo.

Acuvue.  Social networks:  Facebook "Wink" application.³

Addison Avenue.  Crowdsourcing:  Suggestion box.⁷³

Adidas.  Social networks: adidas soccer on myspace; 70% of ROI driven by pass-along, aka "never-ending friending."

Adobe. Tagging: Delicious account used to bookmark primarily tutorials.²

Airplay.  Social networks:  Baseball Gameday Challenge Facebook application.⁵⁶

Marc Danziger is attending the MW HIMSS conference October 23 -24 “Virtual Healthcare: Keeping IT Real.“ He is co-presenting with Revere customer, Florida Hospital – Setting Healthcare IT Strategy in a Web 2.0 World. In 2007 Florida Hospital engaged The Revere Group to assist in the implementation of their portal strategy and requirements. Web 2.0 in the healthcare industry is growing at an incredible momentum and is predicated on the emergence of tools that enable interaction and communication in ways that simply were not possible a few years ago. Florida Hospital is well underway in implementing Web 2.0 strategies throughout their organization. We are proud and honored to work with such an esteemed healthcare organization.

The social networking landscape is vast and limitless from networking for patients – patientslikeme.com to networking for doctors – sermo.com; and incorporating health-related videos, as some hospitals are doing, on YouTube, and the addition of podcasts, blogs and wikis on their own corporate websites as well as related healthcare sites. There are many opportunities to share, be heard and stay informed. We welcome your comments, your experience, and engaging healthcare and web 2.0 questions and insights.

One thing I regret not doing is taking screenshots of my Facebook ‘friend wheel’ (an app that arranges all your Facebook friends in a circle, then shows the links between them all) over the last year. As the circle has grown, the richness of the internal connections has grown as well.

Yesterday, I was on a blogger’s conference call with Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen, who discussed the efforts by the Coast Guard to use social media tools both as ways to improve internal communication and management and to improve communication between the Coast Guard and it’s stakeholders.

I’ve had some exposure to the military’s adoption of commercial tools like IM, blogging and wiki within secure military networks, but it was interesting to hear the guy at the top of the command chain say things like this:

If you look at the recent coordination in our response to Hurricane Ike, I knew from my own experience as the principal federal official in Hurricane Katrina that we can only be effective to the extent that we empower our leaders on scene and make what they are doing visible to senior leaders without endless routing of information through echelons.

To that extent, we empowered Admiral Papp as the Atlantic Area commander to coordinate directly as the lead operational responder. And to the extent that he needed resources from Pacific Area, they actually coordinated that between themselves without any Coast Guard headquarters intervention, which is probably a first for a major operation.

That said, what they are doing has to be visible to us and using things like chat rooms among senior leaders at the same time we’re using conference calls to using all the modern IT tools we have within the Coast Guard suite to simultaneously make all senior leaders aware of the situation and the operational picture down there is what we’ve got to do. And we should endlessly restless and curious about new ways to do that and flatten the organization.

…it’s everywhere.

Dionne Hintchcliffe is a really smart Enterprise 2.0 thinker, and someone whose blog (at http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/) you ought to be reading regularly.

He has a post up this weekend titled ‘Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know,’ and you ought to read it.

And you ought to realize that I think he’s fundamentally wrong about several things he discusses.

Let’s start with his list (note: he’s got long interesting explanations of each over at his blog; I’ve brought over the lede for each and them have my own comments below each):

Read more…

So I’m in the middle of designing a set of social media tools for a small post-startup company, and it’s a very different experience for me than the usual discussions I have with clients who are large companies.

Where - in the big companies - I find myself pushing back against HR and legal, here in the small company I find myself echoing some of the concerns that I’ve had to work to resolve.

But what’s most interesting here is this: that a lot of what the tools will do is to enable processes that are already in place. The company has about 4,000 customers, and the staff - including the CEO - spends a few hours a day dealing directly with them. Which is partly why the company grew 60% this year - in the face of a horrible economy.

So where in a larger company, I’m triggering conversations with the tools, and worrying about whether there will be anyone on the company side to participate, here I’m streamlining a process that’s already going on. It’ll be a great learning experience, and I trust that the value added will pay off for the company as well.

Mashable (a blog you ought to put in your RSS reader) links to this perfect example of a company monitoring social media chatter and responding with - so to speak - a hole in one.

A user took some video screen capture of a glitch in the Tiger Woods golf title from EA showing how the ball could be played by walking over a water hazard and swinging as if the pond were dry land.

The savvy folks at EA noticed the video, then produced and posted the following as a video response.

Here’s the video on YouTube.

OK, you may not have Tiger Woods available to do a custom video in response. But watch this video a few times and marvel at the perfection of the aikido here, taking a public criticism and turning it into a viral advertisement.

They saw, understood, decided, acted.

What’s the lesson for you? Well, what will you do when a customer embarrasses you a little bit on YouTube?