Interactive/Social Media Insights

Posted by Mark Drespling

As the old adage goes, keeping things simple has been an excellent mantra when designing and building websites. I cannot count the number of times I have been requested to design and produce sites that try to use every trick in the book and fill pages with function after function because it is what is trendy. That being said, there is a time for enhanced functionality. By continually looking at business goals and aligning them to the desired behavior of the audience, the latest techniques and tools can be effectively implemented delivered to drive greater business success.

We are now seeing a time where the word “Simple” can generally be replaced by the word “Social” in this rule of thumb. As interactivity goes beyond a person interacting with a machine to a person interacting with another person, social tools can be just the sort of feature that a company needs to engage and embrace their audience. Does this mean a site has to become overly complex? No. Again, looking at the specific goals of the business as a whole, and not just in the Web channel, the selection and implementation of tools within the site, and usage of third party tools where the audience already lives, can help keep the overall website simple and easy to use.

Keep in mind that implementing social tools into a site does not necessarily reduce effort across the board. Your organization must be ready to invest the time and passion required to make these tools live. How many times have you seen a blog, a Twitter account, or a Facebook profile, to name a few, appear with great fanfare and then get left abandoned as a company looks for ways to leverage it? Careful planning and a willingness to fully embrace these tools is the key to success.

So, when looking at your next project, make sure to ask a few simple questions:

1. Is our organization ready to more actively engage with our audience?
2. Do we have the resources to invest the time required to cultivate a deeper relationship with our audience?
3. Are there specific areas of our business that can benefit from better connections with our audience?

Answering these questions can greatly assist you in developing a social strategy that is both effective and elegantly simple to use.

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.

…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

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.

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?

One of the features of Web 2.0 is the fact that multiple applications from multiple providers may be combined into one end-user application. That’s generally considered to be a good thing. Sometimes, it’s not.

Ning is a company that provides hosted social media tolls for communities. It’s considered to be a low-cost tool with good - if generic - functionality, and has been one of the success stories in the social media space. Lots of small businesses and nonprofits use Ning, and it’s growth in the last few years has been explosive.

In the product suite we’ll talk about for our clients, it’s been just at the bottom edge, but it’s been on the list.

In response to the perception that the features are somewhat generic, several smaller companies have sprung up that offer additional features to Ning via customer widgets. The leading company in that space is a small company called Widget Laboratory.

Now I don’t have enough information to know what happened or who’s at fault, but the relationship between Ning and Widget Works collapsed, and last week - Ning turned off the functionality of all the Widget Laboratory plugins.

Here’s Techcrunch:

Ning, the build-your-own social network platform, has removed all widgets created by popular premium developer WidgetLaboratory. The news has come without warning and is being met with outrage by a number of users who have spent hundreds of dollars on the widgets to build up their social networks. WidgetLaboratory sells its widgets for around $30 a month, and has managed to become the most popular widget creator on Ning’s platform.

So the first lesson is to be alert to the fact that depending on multivendor solutions isn’t risk-free.

It’s a significant risk in hosted applications, because the vendor manages the live app, not just the codebase (i.e. if you host the vendor’s code, you can determine - in the short term - whether to upgrade your live code).

There’s another lesson, too, which is to see how these events play out in the Web 2.0 world - a world where transparency is considered to be the highest value.

Here’s what Widget Labs had to say (on their new site - their old website was a Ning social network which is no longer accessible):

As promised, here is a complete record of correspondence from August 2nd, 2008 through August 22nd, 2008 between WidgetLaboratory and Ning.

…followed by a list of correspondence.

Ning hasn’t been silent on the issue, but has been much more restrained and corporate in its public face.

…and is losing the PR war.

I can’t comment - at all - on the merits of either side’s arguments, and this post should in no way be interpreted as taking sides one way or the other. I flatly don’t have enough information to have an opinion.

But for those of us playing in the social media/Web 2.0 world - and for companies that will be doing business there - it’s important to remember that the neat things we engineer using multiple vendors, cloud hosted services, and mashed up data - well, those things need to analyzed carefully in terms of risk before you make your company’s communications dependent on them.

And most of all it’s a lesson that in the Web 2.0 market - transparency pays off.

Welcome to my first post blogging on the Revere website. I’m the National Competency Leader for Web 2.0 and Community at Revere, which means that I evangelize within Revere and to our clients about these tools, and I work with clients to strategize and deliver solutions based on them.

More of my professional background is on my LinkedIn profile.

I’ve been blogging for quite some time in my private life, and it’s an interesting thing to see it become a part of my job as well. In the last year, I’ve noted a similar inflection point as the discussions I’ve had with my colleagues and our clients has shifted from “Why would I do that?” to “How do we do that?” - which I do take to be a positive change. Read more…