The Jordan Rules

Appealing to the masses by designing for the lazy

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:40:52 -0400

The standards and trends we tap into today haven’t always been standards; they were once innovative user interfaces. Consider the introduction of windowing, the introduction of a pointing device, to the introduction of mega-menus, breadcrumbs, and reductive filtering - all considered innovative and dangerous. Why did these conventions become so ubiquitous, while other interfaces fell to the wayside? Intuitiveness.

I’m a firm believer that the most intuitive interfaces and user experiences eventually become standard & ubiquitous. If a user can understand your UI within 5 mins of interacting with it, there’s a good chance it’s intuitive enough to catch on.

I’ve been working in the advertising/ marketing field for a while & have a unique perspective on innovation & intuition: Many clients equate intuitive interfaces as being proven, while equating innovative interfaces as being risky. This is a generalization, not all clients (marketers) think that way; some reward innovative thinking with bigger budgets. The clients that consider innovative interfaces as being risky are often misunderstood; they’re often considered difficult, or less appreciative of innovative thinking. This is generally not true. Many risk-adverse clients just want to be assured that an innovative interface will work. Convincing a client that an innovative interface works is just a matter of testing. Even if a client isn’t wiling to fork-up the money to pay for testing, you could consider using a ‘labs’ budget to build & refine a prototype and test it on real users. It’s been my experience that the more innovative a user interface is; the higher the fidelity of the prototype required to sell it will be. Designing for the lazy

Good enough

In a world where excellence is rarely expected, helping a user achieve his goal quickly often out-weighs helping him optimize his decision making process.

Consider: I want to buy the new Clay Shirky book. I type “cognitive surplus” into Google and find the Amazon link. I get the book detail page and read the description. I’m prompted for a quick 1-click checkout. From Amazon’s perspective, they’ve just sold me a book. But from a decision making standpoint, did I get the book that I really wanted? That depends; what if I wanted a book that talked about the linear nature of the majority of content we consume? If my goal was to get the best book on the linear nature of media & content consumption this book might not fulfill my need. The Amazon interface makes affordances to help users find the book they really want, but the functionality required to do an advanced search is hidden to users who don’t want to interact with it.

Completing interactions perceived as being tasks are often expected to be quick and easy. The more complicated the interaction is perceived as being, the more time a user is generally expecting to take to complete it. This means, if you’re an online bookstore, a user is expecting to have near-instant access to a book summary; quick access to a check-out; and would be willing to spend more time on advanced search & comparison shopping.

Additionally, users often expect elegance and functionality to increase proportionately with the perceived complexity of an interaction. This means that an average person would expect to spend more time completing a complicated interaction, but would expect more elegance or functionality than he would with a less complicated interaction.

Time

As I alluded to above, users value their time above almost anything else. Many users would be willing to skip 30% of the content they require if they can complete a task in 1/2 the time.

The fact of the matter is, most people don’t want to optimize their decision making process. They want to satisfy their current need and move on. This time-saving mentality is what the majority of UX architects & strategists have to consider when creating online experiences. An understanding of cognitive sciences can help shed light on how to communicate complicated messages through visual cues, audio cues, text and interactions. This will allow users to skim information without missing portions they perceive as being important.

Instant feedback

Exploration and discovery have been fundamental user behaviours since the beginning of time. Now that we’re interacting in a virtual space, with virtual tools and virtual people, we’ve adapted how we explore and discover things. The fundamental rule of exploration and discovery still holds true however:

If the risk of interaction outweighs the probable reward, don’t interact with it.With the invention of the undo & back buttons, users often feel open to interacting with page elements because the worst perceived outcome is that the user might have to hit a button to return to the page he was just viewing. This obviously isn’t true when it comes to user inputs; when a user has spent significant time entering personal information or customizing an input, the user will be reluctant to navigate away from that page without knowing how to retrieve said information. Also, task completing prompts (i.e. submit, buy, upload) often require a greater understanding of “what will happen” prior to engaging.

Most elements that can be interacted with, have some instant feedback built in. For instance, links within a browser usually change the cursor from an arrow to a pointing hand. This feedback indicates that the text can be clicked on; and a user would generally expect to be taken to a different web page. This type of interaction is often built into page elements (i.e. a hover state) but can be effective as element-based work flows (i.e. a quick-purchase button that asks for confirmation and provides a tracking number).

Confidence

Many users who interact with websites everyday still don’t have enough knowledge to actively explore a content-rich site. Even if the IA of a site was architected exceptionally well, a user lacking confidence could still find it difficult to use. This would likely have to do with perceived risks associated with interacting with extraneous page elements. Understanding this principle is what makes sites like google so popular and user friendly.

Although there are some legitimate examples of malicious activities being carried out by accidentally interacting with page elements, the biggest reason users dislike interacting with elements they’re not confident about, is that it could cost them time. Remember, time savings is at the forefront of many users minds. If interacting with a banner could cause the brewer to crash, it would be better to avoid banners. If scrolling down a page causes my mouse to unintentionally expand a bunch of drop-down lists, it would be better if I didn’t have to.

ConclusionStop being chained to conventions. Lets assume 3 things: 1. You know who your user is. 2. You know what you want your user to do, in a prioritized list. 3. You’ve read this article. With these assumptions, you can start doing something important:

STOP FOLLOWING EVERYONE ELSEThis post represents a foundation of understanding user needs & applying cognitive sciences to user experience. With some of the techniques I’ve talked about, you can think about revolutionizing how users interact with your brand online. Remember, before the introduction of the mouse everyone was interested in optimizing keyboard input.

Final thought - If designing for the lazy allows us to access the masses; lets figure out a way to make the lazy even lazier.

If you liked this, let me know. Comment, or follow me on Twitter - @thejordanrules

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Details that can increase your success on Twitter

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:46:34 -0400

Understanding the basics and user expectations can give you a competative advantage when using Twitter to increase revenue, productivity, or brand recognition.

Twitter works like a public messaging system, where anything you post can be seen by anyone:

Mentions & Replies: You can mention a user by using the @ symbol before a users name. Your message will end up appearing in the users @ stream.

Benefits

Likely to increase perceived value of relationship between you and the user you’ve mentioned
Appearing in a users @ stream can help your tweet stand out amongst the rest of the general stream
The more frequently you mention or reply to users, the more likely users are to interact with you on a personal level
Mentioning & replying shows users that you understand how to communicate on Twitter

Direct Messages: You can send a private message to a specific user if he follows you.

Benefits

More likely to be read by the intended user
Helps develop a more personal relationship
Helps facilitate private or personal communication

Hash Tags: An easy way to follow an event, thread, or group conversation is to include a hash-tag with a tweet. A hash tag is a word with a # symbol in front of it.

Benefits

Helps your tweet to be read by users who follow (or search) for your specified hashtag
Allows users to follow a conversation, thread or event
Allows users to gain more context around a tweet

Lists: A useful way of segmenting your general stream into subsections is through Twitter’s list feature. You can create multiple lists and add users to them as you see fit. You can also follow other users lists.

Benefits

Helps users segment and access more relevant streams
Following lists can show users that you’re interested in a particular subject
Adding users to lists helps develop a more personal relationship & can increase perceived value of relationship

Background: You can personalize your profile by changing design elements on your page. Adding a background image is a good way to tell users something about yourself.

Benefits

Can reinforce branding
Can relay additional information (i.e. additional digital properties, personalities that use the account, etc)
Can include clickable links with proper software

Avatar: Attached to every tweet you send, your avatar is a quick way for users to identify who’s Tweeting.

Benefits

Consistency can increase recognition (even available when using 3rd party apps or viewing from a feed)
Can positively affect reputation and increase respect
Can show support for causes or affiliations (i.e. Twibbons)
Can be used to relay information (i.e. email address, name, etc)

User Name: Your user name isn’t just the name attached to each of your tweets; it’s also the URL users type to see your page.

Benefits

Can reinforce branding
Can improve memorability
Can show affiliations (i.e. BillfromDell)

Following: A list of everyone you follow.

Benefits

Following a user shows that users tweets in your stream
Shows that you are interested
Shows that you don’t just use Twitter for broadcasting
Makes you more approachable
Allows users to direct message you
Promotes a closer relationship

Location: Region you live in, or GPS coordinates

Benefits

Allows users in your region to connect with you
Important information when users are looking to do business
Allows users to target tweets for tweet-ups

Bio: A short (160 char) description of yourself.

Benefits

Allows searchers to link with other users who share similar interests
Provides a brief history which can improve credibility
Gives users an idea about who you are (or how you use the Twitter account)

Website: A link that appears on your profile page.

Benefits

Easy way for users to find out more information about you
Important way to connect your Twitter account with the rest of your digital properties
Good for search

Name: The name that will appear on your profile. Good for searching.

Benefits

Helps users find you
Helps users connect with you through multiple channels
Helps with personal branding
Helps users identify with who they’re communicating with

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Understanding Social Group Interaction Dynamics

Sun, 30 May 2010 14:25:36 -0400

Learning how to successfully interact with your customers through social media channels can be challenging. It can be especially challenging because it can be hard to know when you’re talking to an individual, a group, or a whole society.

The viral nature of social media suggests that any interaction could jump across groups & become hard to control. The term “going viral” generally refers to a positive outcome from a message posted on social media channel. The term “fire meme” refers to a negative outcome from a message.
With this lack of control, and risk of losing the essence of the message, why would a company agree to participate in social media channels? I think it’s understood that conversations will happen regardless of your participation, but with monitoring, analysis, and participation a company can act like a conversation rudder. It could help steer conversations, and respond to customers.

Anytime your brand, or industry, is mentioned, you have an opportunity to draw users into the top of your conversion funnel.
Understanding the nature of group dynamics can help you optimize how you interact with members of the social media channels you participate in. 8 Models of Group Construction

The Individual

Members: 1
Model: Individual
Caution: The individual model may have an established network built around him. If the individual deems the content of an interaction ‘shareable’ he may relay it to his network.
Successful Interaction: Although public interaction can be successful, generally, the most successful individual interaction is one-on-one private messages.
Examples: Twitter direct messages, e-mail, Linked-in In-Mail

The Clique

Members: 2 - 5
Model: Hub
Caution: The clique is generally comprised of one dominant personality, or hub of communication. Appealing to (or disgusting) the dominant member will likely be most impactful. Note: Invisible-dominance could be held in the clique model. This occurs when a seemingly passive member has substantial influence over the dominant member. (AKA The Puppet-Master)
Successful Interaction: The Clique model can quickly develop group memes. The understanding and use of these memes is important to successful interaction. Cliques are generally wary of inviting new members to join; a better strategy is to position yourself as a guest. Guests generally have the right to interact within a clique for a short (or pre-defined) period of time.
Examples: Guest blogging, Guest commenting

The Group

Members: 9 - 15
Model: Sympathetic
Caution: Sympathetic group dynamics make it easy for member opinions to be adopted by the rest of the group. The benefit of belonging to the group often outweighs disagreeing with the majority. (or even the risk of disagreeing)
Successful Interaction: Listen to the group prior to engaging. Calculating the possibility of the group responding positively to your interaction will give you insight on whether to interact with this group, or move on to the next.
Examples: Observing a Twitter chat prior to participating, Reading blog comments before posting your own

The Lattice

Members: 9 - 15
Model: Semi-Disconnected
Caution: The lattice is a group that doesn’t have strong connections between all members. This structure can cause miscommunication between sections of the lattice. Much of the information within a lattice gets spread as second-hand information.
Successful Interaction: Following the spread of your message can help you correct any incidences of ‘broken telephone’. An often successful method of following & correcting message integrity is to comment or thank users who contribute to spreading your message.
Examples: Twitter hashtags, Backtype, SM monitoring software

The Class

Members: 15 - 50
Model: Tired (classes grouped together w/ mentorship)
Caution: Classes are hierarchical in nature; effort is required to enter higher classes. Interacting with a class above the class you belong poses the risk of being ignored or receiving negative attention.
Successful Interaction: Understanding the hierarchical structure of the class you want to interact with will allow you to plan how to gain acceptance into that class. Ideally, and invitation or introduction will take place to promote your social equity.
Examples: Re-Tweets from influential members of a class, an linked-in recommendation from an influential co-worker or client.

The Tribe

Members: 50 - 150
Model: Common ideology
Caution: Tribes are often comprised of several smaller group organizations held together by some ideological thread. This can cause radically different points of view on given subjects. Appealing to the common ideology can spark passionate polarization.
Successful Interaction: Offering logical reasoning for tribe approval is a safe way of retrieving feedback without alienating parts of the tribe. Acting as the conversation moderator can help elevate your reputation as an authority of a subject.
Examples: Facilitating a Twitter chat, Opening a Linked-in Group

The Community

Members: 50 – 550+
Model: Common Proximity, Many Ideologies
Caution: The size & nature of a community may require a greater frequency & consistency of messaging. Opposing views will be common, however passionate community members will often adopt the roll of moderator. An influential group within a community poses the greatest risk of a fire meme.
Successful Interaction: Community mapping & ethnography can help derive insights on the most effective interaction techniques. Monitoring software & work-flow management may help with community management. Understanding how to interact and nurture different tribes, classes, and groups within a community is important. Communities can become irrelevant or inactive when sub-groups are not given the opportunity to be expressive.
Examples: The Dell Community, The Kiva Community

The Society

Members: 2500+
Model: Common heritage
Caution: A society often includes a passionate community surrounded by decreasingly passionate society members. Focusing your interaction on the passionate community could alienate the long-tail of less passionate members.
Successful Interaction: A multi-pronged communication strategy (or SCRM strategy) is generally required for the most effective interaction with a society. This would allow you to customize messaging (and frequency of messaging) for the passionate & the less passionate. Conversation support & facilitation is required in a greater degree when interacting with a society. This is best accomplished with a group of individuals & social monitoring, workflow, and analysis software.
Examples: Best Buy Twelp Force, CNN, The Obama Campaign

Understanding this framework of social group dynamics can assist you to craft your social media strategy, response assessment guidelines, engagement activities, and digital communication strategy.

If you found this post useful, or if you have any comments; I encourage you to post them or Tweet them. You can follow my thoughts here: @thejordanrules

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Five Models for Social Media Integration

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:52:59 -0400

I’ve recently been talking to some of my friends & clients about the value of integration of social media efforts with online marketing efforts.

The big underlying question: How should my website integrate content from my social media properties?

HERE ARE A FEW OPTIONS

1. Bi-directional hub & spoke model

Benefits: 2 way syndication and a well thought tagging taxonomy allows much of your social media content to be syndicated in relevant places on your website (and vice-versa) without much work.

Draw Backs: Some content, out of context, can be misinterpreted; especially network specific memes. Syndication can add a barrier to sharability & the organic viral nature of certain social media channels.

2. Multidirectional hub & spoke model

Benefits: All the benefits of #1 plus allows conversations to exist across social media properties regardless of which property a given user belongs to. (Note: certain channels like Twitter & Facebook are easier to integrate in this way than others.)

Draw Backs: A unified tracking system that ties conversations back to specific users is much harder to set up. (Also all the drawbacks of #1)

3. Clustered honeycomb model

Benefits: Allows for additional segmentation of content. This is a huge benefit in an age of information overload. Having multiple streams of content, dedicated to specific user-groups allows users to get the content they want, and avoid the content they don’t. This type of segmentation will help identify potential brand advocates.

Draw Backs: More upfront content strategy planning will be required. A valuable amount of content will need to be created for each segment. Additional effort will be required by community managers to ensure easy cross-channel communications between segments.

4. Dandelion hub & spoke shared community model

Benefits: All the benefits of #2, but monopolizes on the power of cross-channel influencers to introduce content across multiple channels. This means influencers will help to ensure proper memes are maintained, & sharability is intact. Influencers will also lend an enhanced level of trust to content.

Draw Backs: This places significant power on influencers & could backfire if negative information is discovered. (example: Nissan Cube) Requires a more advanced monitoring system to ensure message integrity is intact.

5. Selective multichannel conversation monitoring/publishing model

Benefits: All the benefits of #4 but doesn’t rely on influencers to introduce content. This method would still rely on cross channel influencers to spread content within a specific channel, but would use a re-publishing meme to spread the content across other channels.

Draw Backs: An enhanced monitoring & workflow management tool is required (M). Additional effort from community managers will be required. If influencers aren’t able to add additional value to produced content, re-publication will not be possible; additional effort will be required during content strategy planning.

I was able to use each of these models in different ways to help different companies who were struggling with the big question (How should my website integrate content from my social media properties?).

You should consider company/ brand structure, time/ budget investment, social media strategy, content strategy, and available tools. If you have any questions on which model would work best for your company/ brand - don’t hesitate to ask. If you can think of additional integration models, I encourage you to post a response.

Follow me here - @thejordanrules

For vector (AI) file with these models for editing, you can download it as a zip file here: download

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Lead with an evolving digital business ecosystem

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 16:24:55 -0400

The most innovative companies are engaging their audience, customers, and employees in completely new ways with the help of new technology. In the following post, I’ll outline how we’re currently using some technologies & how new/ emerging technologies are changing how we’re able to use them.

There are 4 primary spheres that are influenced in various ways by various forms of digital media: branding, marketing, sales, and productivity.

Standard Usage: Used to display content without interaction or allow users to interact with content though touch

Advanced Usage: Additional input options can allow users to interact with content in a more relevant way - examples include fiduciary marker recognition, mobile integration via bluetooth or text, facial recognition, augmented reality.

Power Usage: Integrating multiple output options can allow users to extract value from the sign in a more valuable or tangible way. Examples include printing, DM samples, coupons, mobile output.

Standard Usage: A centralized library of company information that is used to distribute relevant information across an organization. Also used for collaboration & administration.

Advanced Usage: Social integration allows users to increase collaboration & communication efficacy. Social integration can also serve as training for social media marketing initiatives. Additionally, data hooks & feeds can be integrated to allow for social media workflows, monitoring, & response assessment.

Power Usage: Real-time marketing metrics & data integration will allow users to analyze and make business decisions quicker and more effectively. Enhanced social collaboration tools will allow decisions to be optimized and agreed to quickly. This quick feedback-loop will allow more effective multivariate testing on all business initiatives.

Standard Usage: A html & text-based communication that is either focused on providing information or focused on encouraging action. Examples: Promotional email, email newsletter

Advanced Usage: An integrated community-based email subscription allows users to subscribe to the content they want and set up delivery frequency & format.

Power Usage: Adding easy sharing features can encourage users to pass-along your content; the real power involves creating sharable content that users find valuable.

Standard Usage: Developing a strong presence on specific social networks involves listening, responding & engaging with your audience. Learning memes from each network you’re using will allow you to communicate & engage in a more effective way.

Advanced Usage: Incentives, games, contests, and valuable content are effective ways to increase community engagement. Ideally, advanced engagement tactics will be ongoing initiatives that flow into each other; rather than the campaign-based system that allows contests, games, and content to end & make way for the next campaign.

Power Usage: Harnessing the power of multiple social networks & integrating communication, engagement, & data with ongoing marketing efforts will allow users to interact with your brand & with each other in ways they’re familiar with.

Standard Usage: SEO & SEM activities have been well documented over the past 5 years. Although often not used, there are guidelines you can follow to ensure good return on relevant search queries. (i.e. Guidelines from Bing, Guidelines from Google)

Advanced Usage: The value of real-time search is encouraging brands & individuals to ensure new content is being created and communicated frequently. Real-time search is emerging as a very important element of SEM activities.

Power Usage: Search has been expanding its capabilities and relevancy weightings into new areas for the past few years. Staying up to date with these advances and new features will allow you to take advantage of valuable changes & opportunities. (Trends: Mobile Search, Visual Search, Location-based Search)

Standard Usage: The e-commerce model allows users to make purchases online. Multiple payment options (credit card, Pay Pal, Google Checkout) and delivery options (instant delivery, postal delivery, in-store pick-up) are available with individual benefits & risks.

Advanced Usage: Adding a social commerce layer allows users to communicate with other users who may have more insight about a product or service. The influence of knowing a friend purchased a specific brand is also a major benefit of adding a social commerce layer.

Power Usage: Integrating mobile commerce with online & in-store systems takes sales to a new level. Technologies like QR codes, visual search, image recognition, and location identification in combination with mobile payment platforms can very easily allow a user to choose where, when and how they want to make a purchase. (Note: This also has can have a major impact on customer service, brand affinity, and loyalty)

Standard Usage: Users are able to download these apps to their device or are able to access them through a mobile browser. These apps use the mobile devices inputs to communicate with & display stored information or information available online.

Advanced Usage: Augmented reality, image recognition, QR technology & advanced security systems are advancing the utility of mobile devices. Ubiquitous device synching with other digital media will add substantial value to all mobile apps. (i.e. bluetooth bars built into digital signage)

Power Usage: Users personalization options are stored within the mobile device which can be easily connected to other devices for quick customization. This would be useful for single-sign on across multiple devices, easy payment options, and CRM type communications. Additionally, when synched with a digital device; the mobile device can offer multiple input & control options. (i.e. controlling a digital kiosk by speaking commands into your mobile phone)

Standard Usage: Most sites exist under as a domain - i.e. www.google.com, Google owns the google.com domain and all the content that lives within it.

Advanced Usage: Cross communication aggregation links feeds from multiple sites and aggregates them for the typical audience of the channel the stream is appearing on.

Power Usage: The invisible site is a concept I’ve been talking about for a few months with a couple clients. The idea involves an advanced monitoring system and a publishing platform. Essentially, a brand manager (or other individual) can set up a workflow based on key words & sentiment. The monitoring system will return results that can be seen as opportunities to introduce audiences to the brand. This would be the primary form of communication with the audience and that ‘brand stream’ could be subscribed to and filtered by any user based on a hierarchical taxonomy schema. There would also be an infusion of the brand in key locations throughout the web (i.e. wikipedia, social networks, etc)

The great thing about new technology & new ways of thinking is that novelty is an effective way of creating awareness. Consider who has the ability to make use of new technologies & who your high-value customers are. If you find out that you’re highest value customers use a specific type of technology, it would be smart to design a way to make use of it in a novel way. (i.e. If you find out 30% of your highest value customers have an iPhone; don’t just make an iPhone app, figure out a way to make your companies core competency more accessible to iPhone users.) It’ll be this way of thinking that will truly differentiate an innovative company from one that’s playing catch-up.

I encourage comments & questions here on via Twitter @thejordanrules

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Controlling your communications

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:34:33 -0400

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An issue that’s plagued marketers since the rise of digital communications has been figuring out how to control the integrity of their message. 2 underlying causes of this concern are the editable nature of the internet, and the ease of online-self-publication. The evolution of search & social media has begun to aggravate this concern again.

I believe a user’s perception of your message can be interpreted many different ways & your message should account for that interpretation; meaning, message control isn’t as important as a user’s interpretation of the message.

There are 2 primary arguments:

1. Ensuring each user receives a properly vetted message will provide the best chances of users interpreting the message correctly.

2. Allowing the message to be altered by each user and redistributed will increase the efficacy of the message. Miscommunication is understood to be the responsibility of the sender, rather than that of the originator.

I think these arguments represent two divergent views on the same continuum. At one end, the marketer wants complete control over the message; at the other end, the marketer submits his message for redefinition to the crowd. Two good Canadian telecom examples are Bell who tried to keep control of the message (http://www.bell.ca) and Wind who turns to the crowd to define a majority of its communication (http://www.windmobile.ca)

Digital communications channels that allow a high level of control

Display Ads

Paid Search

Status Updates

Digital communications that do not offer as much control

Video Channel

Contest/ Content Integration

Organic Search

Social Bookmarking

Social Networking

Mobile Networking

Twitter/ Microblogs

Blogs/ RSS

Combined with the knowledge of which channels deliver the best results based on your business, you now have a framework to help you throttle the control you have over your message. The idea of throttling control is to find the ideal balance between accurate branding, reach, and influence.

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Social Media Lifecycle Framework

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:46:53 -0500

Many of the clients I’ve been consulting for have interesting notions about social media. One common idea is that social media is an ongoing effort and doesn’t conform to normal lifecycle rules.

The Social Media Lifecycle Framework

I would agree that social media initiatives are different than many other campaign models, but I do think most initiatives deliver a higher ROI when the following lifecycle framework is considered & followed.

Conversion Funnel

Monologue: A broadcast form of communication that works well for creating initial awareness. Before broadcasting your message, be sure to craft your message by listening to what people are already saying about you.

Conversion A: Converts users who have simply heard of you, to users who want to have a conversation with you.

Conversation: A participatory form of communication that works well after you’ve created a community. Not everyone in you’re community will feel comfortable engaging in conversations, which means your community needs to be large enough to support multiple levels of participation.

Conversion B: Converts users who are participating in conversations, to those who will take your message & use it to influence others.

Influence: An extended form of conversation that works well when influential community members believe your message. Influential communication is effective at achieving perfect conversion.

Perfect Conversion

Conversion C: Fulfilment of the end objective. This is where the user is converted to customer.

Advocacy: Customer advocacy may occur if users expectations have consistently been met or exceeded. This refers to the entire customer experience; not just through social media. At this stage, customer advocacy can occur at any time.

Amplification Funnel

Customer Service/ Support: A system that ensures customers are satisfied with their purchase.

Conversion D: Converts users who are satisfied, to users who are engaged with your comity & are actively seeking further engagement.

Community Engagement: A system that allows users to interact & share information about being your customer. (i.e. A Burger King campaign connecting personal trainers with Burger King customers. This type of campaign could be used to connect frequent customers with the resources necessary to ‘burn-off’ their favourite Burger King meals.)

Conversion E: Converts engaged community members to participants within the conversion funnel of a product extension.

Extensions: This can be considered the beginning of a new conversion funnel or the end of the current amplification funnel. This is where customers learn about something else you sell. (i.e. A digital agency that also offers search strategy.)

You can now begin the life cycle again.

In an unrelated note, I’ve been engaged to write a handbook on various social media & enterprise 2.0 topics. I would like to encourage anyone who reads my blog to submit topic suggestions. I’m totally open to all ideas & if a submitted topic makes it to the book, I’ll acknowledge your contribution within & will send you a complimentary copy. You can send ideas to me via Twitter (@thejordanrules) - or via email (thejordanrules@gmail.com).

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Does Social Media Make Sense for Me?

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:10:37 -0500

Jumping into social media marketing before you’re ready can be devastating to your business. The argument that people are already talking about you through social media channels has been used to push brands into social media marketing before they’re ready.

It’s a myth that you’d be better off participating than not participating. The voice you create for your brand can have echoing repercussions.

There are 3 questions you need to ask yourself before you ‘take-the-plunge’ into social media marketing. If you can’t answer yes to these 3 questions you need to do some work before participating & engaging with your audience through social media channels.1. Do you have social media balance?
2. Do you have the right corporate structure?
3. Does your T.V. know what your computer’s doing?

Question #1: Do you have social media balance?

This refers to your understanding of the social media space, and what kind of goals you need to define. There are 4 things participating in social media will affect:

Brand Awareness

Even if you’re brand is ubiquitous and everyone’s aware of it; social media connects a human face with your brand. Take Nike, for example; visiting their Facebook page, I was able to find out which of my friends like their brand. This brings a new level of brand-awareness into play.

Of course, the traditional level of brand awareness should be a consideration too. With video’s like the Twilight trailer receiving an estimated 300 Million collective views, social media is quickly becoming a mass awareness tool.

Take Away: Participating in social media marketing will affect awareness. If you’re social media goals don’t define how you want brand awareness to be affected; you do not have social media balance.

Brand Image

Brands can be very effectively defined using social media, but even if you’re not defining your brand using social media, you need to define how you want your brand to be perceived within the channels your participating in.

Social media allows users to connect with your brand in a more intimate way than through traditional channels. This brand intimacy can be a double-edged sword: Wielded properly it can create brand advocates who will evangelize your brand identity & protect you from social media trolls. Wielded incorrectly can create brand dissidents who will actively damage your brand image & encourage users to find alternatives to your brand. These two extremes have always existed; but have never been more prominent than with the rise of social media.

Take Away: Participating in social media marketing will affect brand image. If you’re social media goals don’t define the brand image you want to create & support, you do not have social media balance.

Conversion

Getting users to do things has long been the goal of online marketing initiatives. Social media marketing will affect your conversion funnel. Because conversion goals can range from awareness, to repeat purchase it’s important to note that every level of your conversion funnel can be affected by social media marketing.

A Facebook ecommerce solution can convert engaged users to actual customers. A Facebook Connect-enabled website can convert brand-aware users to engaged users who you’re able to communicate with in the future. A well curated Twitter stream can convert a dissatisfied customer to a satisfied one.

Take Away: Participating in social media marketing will affect your conversion rate. Conversion goals are important to set on a channel-by-channel basis; in many cases several conversion goals will be set for a specific channel. If you’re social media goals don’t define these goals, you don’t have social media balance.

eCRM

Slightly different than the other 3 elements, eCRM is affected by social media marketing by changing the users expectations of the brand/customer relationship. Social media gives brands the ability to collect very insightful user information. If that information isn’t properly collected, analyzed, and used to influence ongoing marketing initiatives users will consider that brand a poor listener.

Take Away: Participating in social media marketing will give you eCRM data. If you will not collect this information, analyze it, and use it to influence marketing campaigns, you do not have social media balance.

Question #2: Do you have the right corporate structure?

Even if you have social media balance, you might be setting yourself up for failure by not having the proper corporate structure. Many brands have delegated community management to specialists. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there should be a response assessment & escalation procedure. I’m currently adapting a process brand call-centers use for contact assessment & escalation to be used for social media response assessment.

The important thing to note, is that a community manager with properly established goals can be a valuable addition to your corporate structure, but social media participation & monitoring should be infused throughout the organization. It should be noted that different members of your team will have different levels of responsibility for participation & monitoring - if a team member has 0% involvement with social media marketing initiatives (and 0% of his time is allocated to participation & monitoring) you need to consider defining a system where participation & monitoring is available to those employees who want it.

Note: In addition to having an enabled & empowered corporate team, you need to ensure the right tools are available. Tools like Tweetdeck, CoTweet, Sysomos, & Radian 6 can help enable your teams to get the most out of your social media marketing activities.

Question #3: Does your T.V. know what your computer’s doing?

Many brands have a ‘zone’ strategy, where brand experts divide duties. The might be one person in charge of marketing communications, one person in charge of business communications, and one person in charge of in-store; authority over these areas may even be further delegated to sub-brand specific, medium-specific, or campaign-specific managers.

If these zones don’t have a good collaborative process; it’s probably not a good idea to throw social media into the mix. As outlined in question #1, social media will affect 4 key areas of your business & should be integrated across the entire business. If you’re marketing, business, and in-store communications are being created for what-works-best; you might be missing out on synergies across communication channels. (i.e. Providing a Facebook url as a tag line at the end of a broadcast campaign might seem like it works best for both the broadcast & social media campaigns; but understanding that users often use the search box when looking for things on Facebook might suggest that you ask users to search for a keyword instead. The extra time it takes for users to listen to this message might not make the most out of the broadcast time, but might provide a better net conversion rate, providing a higher ROI across media.)

I understand that if a brand never participates in social media, it won’t ever be able to perfect things. There is a theory that it might be better to jump in and make corrections as needed. If you’re transparent about the fact you’re learning, you’re audience might respect that. — From a cognitive perspective, it makes sense. People generally understand the learning process and can be gracious about certain mistakes. I’m not suggesting that brands avoid social media in fear of failure; but know the game before you start making big bets.

I appreciate all comments & questions. I encourage you to respond to this post here, or on Twitter to @thejordanrules.

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Reputation & Social Media: Understanding the Fundamentals

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:33:52 -0500

Reputation is an element of what makes up a brand & can help define a brand within a particular medium.

Branding - Primarily about what you say. The message you communicate to your audience.

Reputation - Primarily about what you do. The actions you take and the activities you participate in determine your reputation.

4 elements that contribute to reputation

Identity: The way the brand wishes to be seen. AKA - Brand Identity

Image: The way the brand is perceived. AKA - Brand Image Performance: Track-record of interactions between the brand and it’s audience.

Reputation: The evaluation of Id & Im with relation to P. Meaning, if identity & image align with a brands performance; it’ll develop a positive reputation. (or at least the reputation it wants)The better you define these elements & the clearer you communicate them to your audience; the greater your chances of achieving your ideal reputation.

Reputation Management via Social Media

Responding

There are lots of really GREAT response assessment guidelines specifically designed to help manage reputation though social media. However, many of these guidelines don’t consider which reputation element your responding to.

Although timeliness of response is an important element; the content of the response is generally more important.

Finding the Conversation

There are several great tools available to track conversations & locate conversations that are taking place outside of the channels your currently participating in.

Keeping Track of Your Conversations

Finding Other Conversations

BackType

One Riot

Whos Talkin

The implications of social media on brand reputation are substantial. It’s important that brands actively participate in reputation management through social media channels. The act of not managing your reputation within the social media universe might not result in any negative conversations; but won’t help enforce your reputation.

Although lack of participation within social media probably won’t ‘break’ your reputation; it does represent a missed opportunity to substantially improve your reputation. Creating & maintaining a brands ideal reputation through traditional broadcast/ mass media marketing can be effective, but costly.

How do you manage your reputation? What tools do you use?

Feel free to answer these questions, post comments, or ask questions here or on Twitter. Make sure to @ me when requesting a response - @thejordanrules.

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Data Ownership - the bullet that can kill a social media strategy

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:58:17 -0500

What’s the big deal with companies mandating data ownership for online marketing campaigns? I understand the importance of CRM, and understand that owning data makes ongoing communication easier; but is there really any good reason to alienate potential customers? The way I see it; any marketing campaign that mandates data ownership needs to reevaluate its conversion funnel.

Example:

Scenario:
Nike runs a campaign asking for users to upload photo’s of themselves wearing a pair of Nikes. The business idea is to show versatility of different Nike shoes, and show the variety of Nike shoe owners. Additionally, the users tag their photos indicating the specific model of Nike that their wearing; this allows shoe enthusiasts to communicate on care requirements, purchasing locations etc.

Nike creates an online community and requires users register to their community prior to uploading their photos or being able to communicate with other users.

Problem:
Nike wants to own the user data of all users who participate in their campaign.

Solution:
Reexamine where the conversion funnel begins. Nike could give users multiple ways to engage with the campaign without having to register. It would increase participation, and could act as the beginning of the purchasing funnel. Perhaps instead of asking for a full registration, you allow users to interact via Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or simply by entering an email address. If you have a presence on all of those social media channels, you have the opportunity to communicate with those users within a channel they’re familiar with.

2 main goals:

1. To convert to customer (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Trial)

Let’s say at the top of the conversion funnel, we require users to register. This will make it easier for us to effectively communicate with them and convert them from awareness down to trial.

However, let’s say we don’t require registration at the top of the conversion funnel. We’ll end up reaching and being able to communicate with more users than if we required registration. However, it might make personalized messaging a bit harder. This could cause lower ratio of conversions from awareness down to trial. That being said, in many cases both approaches will end up with the same NET conversions; but not requiring registration will allow us to continue communication with those users who didn’t convert. This is a benefit for 2 reasons: 1, those users might convert given enough time; and 2, those users could influence other users to convert. (i.e. I might never buy Nike shoes, but my participation in their campaign might get me to refer a friend who does buy.)

2. To increase customer spending (Recognition, Preference, Loyalty, Advocacy)

Here, we’d like to increase a users brand preference to stimulate spending. A great way to do this is by engaging with users by providing value. Let’s say we offer a series of how-to video’s to our customers, but only offer them on our own website. This is a great way to track who’s interested in them & can be tied into an eCRM program to help create even more valuable videos in the future. In fact, we can enhance our communications plan with this data and offer alerts to users who might be interested in new how-to videos. This is a great way to build brand loyalty & eventually create brand advocates.

However, lets say we offer our videos on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and other video sharing sites in addition to our own site. This could make things trickier for creating a great eCRM program, but would allow users to view and share our videos in an environment they’re already using. This has 2 benefits: 1, users have access to the communities they’ve built and belong to. This would allow our users to instantly share videos with their friends. 2, bringing value to the user (rather than having the user come to you for value) generally gets more attention. In the end the idea is to increase brand preference; making things easy for the user is a great way to achieve that goal.

The Analogy:

This is a Sheep

Lets say you have a herd of sheep you want to move to the ‘X’

One way to do this is to put some sheep food around the ‘X’ - (Some brands still have trouble figuring out what type of sheep food attracts their type of sheep)

Is it better to leave the path to the ‘X’ open?

or is it better to put a fence in the path of the sheep?

Do you really only want sheep that have the desire to jump the fence?

Let me know your thoughts @thejordanrules

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Is your website costing you money?

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:53:29 -0500

A website can cost its owner money in two ways: It can cause you to actually spend more money to maintain, or it can limit the amount of potential revenue your company can make.

Realizing your site is costing you money is the first step in putting an end to it. Coming to this realization can be a difficult process; it takes reexamining fundamental, and often long-held, beliefs about your company, brand, site, audience, and technology. The English author Samuel Johnson said it best: “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken”; it’s important not to allow yourself to be chained to beliefs, technologies, or memes. Reexamination is key to innovation.

So, I’ve given you two ways in which your website might be costing you money; let me break these down further:

It causes you to spend more money

Time suck: Time suck sites require their owners to spend more time than necessary to take care of them. Sites that require you to make weekly updates or don’t make use of scheduled content can be an indication of time suck sites.

Solutions:

CMS scheduling software
User generated content publishing
Aggregated content from social media

Inconvenient: The inconvenient site requires special passwords or limits access based on location. The inconvenient site requires its owner to spend more time, or spend time in a prescribed manner. It also costs its owner money by putting constraints on its users.

Solutions:

Open ID (RPX NOW)
VPN Access
Cloud-based services

Wrong Technology: The site built on wrong technology causes most of the upfront over-spending. Building systems from scratch can be good for the developer, but bad for the owner; often, proprietary solutions are hard to update and cost a lot upfront. Additionally, using wrong technology can cause a site to become a time suck site down the road; requiring its owner to compensate for distributed content systems, CMS rules, and social networking tools.

Solutions:

Open Source Tools - wordpress, posterous, twitter, Dot Net Nuke
Google Checkout
Google Analytics

It limits your revenue

Hard to use: Usability is considered by many to deliver the highest ROI on existing sites. Ensuring a site is easy to use can make the difference between being an industry leader and scraping the bottom of the barrel. Usability & user experience should extend past the borders of your site into all digital touchpoints.

Solutions:

Tree Testing
Card Sorts
Persona Development
Usability Testing
Ethnographic Studies
User Flows

Hard to find: You can have the easiest to use site, but if your users can’t find it you’re in trouble. Not ranking in search engines is one of the biggest indications you need to reexamine how people are finding your site.

Solutions:

SEO
SEM
Media Buy
Social Media Marketing

Irrelevant: Seemingly obvious, sites that are irrelevant should be discontinued. The idea of keeping sites around because they represent brand equity is a great argument, but when those sites damage the brand, confuse the user, or cannibalize search terms it’s no longer worth keeping alive.

Solutions:

Create a communications plan that updates stale content on a regular basis
Integrate with social media
Create a platform for users to communicate with each other

Disassociated: Disassociated websites often happen when branding agencies and digital agencies are disconnected. Disassociated branding, messaging, or offerings can cause confusion, frustration, or dissidence.

Solutions:

Encourage user feedback and provide multiple channels to receive feedback
Schedule quarterly reviews of campaigns across all mediums and look for inconsistencies

I’ve audited 74 sites over the past 3 months, and 67 of them are costing their owners money in obvious ways. All of these sites I was given unrestricted access to their metrics, administration systems, and database configurations. I was also provided with information on social media management processes and guidelines. It’s unfortunate that approximately 90% of the site’s I gained access to are costing their owners serious amounts of money; but I think it shows progress that they are willing to reexamine their sites. The fact that they’re open to being audited makes me think “the chains of habit” aren’t yet too strong to be broken.

Are you open to making more money?

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How to maximize revenue through social media

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:14:24 -0500

Building legitimate social equity requires slowly shifting the perceptions of others. Building social equity, and understanding how to use it, is fundamental to maximizing revenue through social media.

Three phases to maximizing revenue through social media

These are not steps. When you’ve spent enough time focusing on awareness, your social equity will reach a level that will allow you to create engagement-type campaigns that will be successful. If you try launching engagement-type campaigns without building your social equity to a sufficient level, your campaigns will not be successful - and should be an indicator that you need to focus on awareness & build your social equity.

It’s also important to note that having enough social equity to successfully move to the next phase doesn’t mean that attention should be completely removed from the previous phase. (i.e. If you move from awareness to engagement; you should still continue awareness efforts. If you stop your awareness effort you risk decreasing your social equity.)

Awareness (Social Equity Required: Low)

The first phase of maximizing revenue using social media is establishing a presence and earning a reputation. Before you get started you’ll need to define some goals, and define what groups of people you want to build a relationship with.

Once you’ve defined those things; you can decide what social media channels you’d like to participate in. Depending on your goals and your audience, you might end up choosing several channels. These posts can help you make your decision for companies or for individuals.

Many larger brands want to bypass this phase and jump into engagement; the reason usually is that they’ve built up substantial lists of users via other media. Often these brands blanket-invite anyone who’s interacted with them in the past to join them in their new campaign. The biggest problem with doing this is that you’re not qualifying your audience. Ideally, you’d target users who already participate in some social media channels & are informed about how to participate on the channels you’re inviting them to. These active users have the best chance of becoming advocates for you. (Adversely, if you invite users who aren’t interested in participating - you could end up with a bunch of ‘dead’ accounts following you. This can have negative repercussions for you and your community for several reasons. I’ll cover this in more detail in an upcoming post called “Social Media Deadfall, Dangers of The Unfocused.”)

So once you have goals & defined the channels you want to create a presence on; you can begin establishing your presence and earning the reputation you want. There are two reasons people join communities - for value or for fun. (Usually some combination of the two; but it’s proven helpful if you plot where you’d like to be on the spectrum between value & fun.)

This might be helpful; here are some high-level social activities. They extend across value-providing users and fun-providing users because the actives are basically the same; it’s the intention that sways toward one or the other.

Value
Provide helpful links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content

Fun
Provide entertaining links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content

Once you’ve established your presence and have developed your reputation; you can begin engaging your community in a different way. (There are benchmarks that indicate when it’s time to begin engagement-type campaigns; but it’s often different for every community. The best option is to ask your community if they’re ready for an engagement campaign, and gauge the response.)

Engagement (Social Equity Required: Medium)

For engagement campaigns to be successful through social media, a social equity foundation is required. I realize ‘success’ is defined differently by different people; here’s my definition: To have a successful social media engagement campaign the campaign needs to be directed at qualified users, achieve predefined goals, and increase encourage long term communication.

I’ve been describing engagement campaigns as marketing roller-coasters. Done right, they can create a spike in community participation but once the campaign is over the participation level will likely fall back down to levels prior the campaign. — Of course, there are campaigns that show a spike in community participation which never go back to previous levels. There are also campaigns that cause community participation to fall well below pre-campaign levels after the campaign is done. — The hope is that community participation will permanently increase incrementally with each engagement campaign run. To achieve this; post-campaign analysis should always be comprehensive.

There are many tools and techniques for moving from engagement to social commerce. Determining when it’s appropriate to integrate social commerce into your community depends on the actions you want your community to do. If the cost of introducing social commerce to your community outweighs the potential revenue it can produce; you need to grow your community before investing.

Social Commerce (Social Equity Required: High)

Reviews: A great way to begin to integrate an aspect of social commerce into your community is to provide a product/ service review tool that can integrate with your e-commerce or catalog site. Not only would this give your users the ability to actively endorse you; it would also allow those participants to connect to users who are interested in similar products/ services. (i.e. If I submit a review via Facebook on my new Mac laptop, people reading that review might contact me through my Facebook profile asking follow-up questions. These connections are often the point of joining communities.)

Shopping: The obvious integration option is allowing your community to preview products/ services through the site they’ve been participating on. Systems like Payvment mash-up the social network and the e-commerce website. (video demo) However, you can integrate shopping behavior with your community by making compelling exclusive offers to either visit your e-commerce site, or visit your store.

Sharing: An inherent benefit of social mediums is that sharing functionalities are usually built-in. Getting a qualified, engaged community to share products/ services they’re interested in is usually an easy task. The key to sharing is understanding how the user likes to share & how much control they like to have over sharing. Ensure they have the controls they need to share. (i.e. Many users like to select specific people to share with, rather than posting something to everyone. Many users like to include a personal message, rather than having a standard description included.)

Pricing: If you’re asking members of your community to leave the site and shop, whether it be on a different site, or in-store, exclusive pricing is a fantastic way to achieve it. In addition to getting users to shop through the channel you want; a byproduct of offering exclusive pricing is that you’ll get customers who aren’t yet members joining to get the exclusive pricing. Tip: A great way to ensure quality members is to identify social KPI and make exclusive pricing available to members who help achieve those metrics. (i.e. If you want guest blog posts, make an exclusive available to those who offer them. You can even make offers cumulative or loyalty-based.)

Registration: If you’re asking members to go to your e-commerce platform to do their shopping; offer an express registration to make things simpler for community members. Facebook Connect, and several OpenID methods are easy to integrate. Even if you don’t use a social media platform that allows easy registration; there are always innovative ideas to create an express registration. For instance a social application called Hippopost allows users to send customized postcards, greeting cards, playing cards, etc, to friends. This requires personal information, which can be collected and automatically transfered to an e-commerce platform for express registration.
Tip: Amazon, PayPal, and Google offer checkout options that might help community members checkout faster.

There’s been a lot of talk about social commerce taking over e-commerce. I don’t think that’ll happen; but I do think it represents a massive opportunity to increase revenue. This post represents a framework describing how to maximize revenue through social commerce.

I’m definitely open to elaborating on anything; and would appreciate any feedback or questions.

(Please comment here, or on Twitter & I’ll respond.)

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How to avoid the used-car salesman blog

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:58:58 -0500

No one wants to have a blog that makes people uneasy about visiting & reading content. Over the past month, I conducted a survey across Canada/ US & reviewed several dozen blogs to find collective ‘pet-peeves’.

Here are 7 things to avoid:

Note: There are other content suggestions & UX suggestions I have when it comes to optimizing your blog; these tips are intended to make your users feel comfortable reading & sharing your content.

Don’t polish your information: Valuable content should be simple, and clear. If you have to encase your content in a widget, or have a bunch of sharing buttons surrounding your content, it might seem desperate & confusing. Some of my favorite blogs simply serve up the content without tricks to get users to share.

Remember banner blindness when using widgets: You remember banner blindness. It occurs when users ignore areas on a website that appear to be advertisements. I’m a big fan of having a right or left rail, with additional content; but for blogs that clutter up their rails with badges, and widgets - beware of banner blindness. I’ve actually seen some blogs that don’t have enough room using one rail, so they use 2 to house all their badges and widgets. Note to those users: you’re no longer in the cub-scouts - badges do not need to be displayed. Most people don’t care & it distracts from your content.

Over-the-top personal branding gets creepy: I often read blogs during lunch at work and find it really creepy when a huge smiling face greets me. I’d really like the ability to browse through blogs without feeling like I’m auditing real estate broker ads. Focus on delivering your content in a professional way, and leave the big photo’s of yourself on Facebook.

There are things you just shouldn’t say: I’m not the only one who reads blogs at work. I hate having to quickly scroll past a bad word or cover it with another window. Keep it clean, or notate that it’s not safe for work.

Comments should not be found, they should be posted: To everyone who pulls tweets or facebook shares into their comment stream: please stop. If you’re trying to encourage conversations on your blog; cluttering up your comment stream with ‘comments’ from people not participating is a really bad idea.

Moderation is mostly good: 80% of the blogs I’ve surveyed properly moderate their blogs. Meaning they either understand that comments should be directly posted; or they should be posted quickly - ideally with a follow-up. However, there were a few that use some crazy captcha; or still haven’t been posted yet.

Don’t post useless information just because it’s scheduled: Post useful, valuable content. Posting just because you have a schedule doesn’t make sense. Make your blog a place to come for great content; not a place to come because people remember you’re updating your content. Why else do we have RSS feeds, Alltop, and Twitter?

In the end, you don’t have to follow my advice; but if you’ve gotten this far, you can’t say you were unaware. Before you ask, I reviewed 43 blogs; and surveyed 280 people to get these common ‘pet-peeves’. I’ll be incorporating the advice into my own blogs too. Good luck blogging, and you can check out my blog anytime: http://www.thejordanrules.com (should be updated soon).

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Corporate Adoption of Social Media

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:59:13 -0400

Getting a corporation with established marketing rules and complicated communications departments to adopt a new way to communicating to its audience can be difficult. With the rise of social media, corporations are beginning to listen; but still require a process to get everyone onboard. The following is a framework that reviews an ideal process a corporation will follow when adopting social media as a new communications tool.

Define Initial Parameters

Define how many resources you can devote to social media

Define which sites you want to monitor

Define which tools you’d like to test

Define sampling size benchmarks

Begin Listening

Once you’ve finished defining everything; you can begin listening. Many corporations successfully do this in ‘stealth mode’ - meaning the brand name or corporation name isn’t publicly available to the networks being listened to.While listening, you should also be recording what you hear. There are several easy ways to monitor your brand & turn the streams of activity into an RSS feed and store the RSS posts for future reference.

Analyze and Determine Integration Options

You should never stop listening; so when you have enough information to start analyzing how your brand, or brands, is being mentioned, it’s important to keep listening.

During this phase, you need to define what your brands reputation is. This can be considered the “laissez-faire reputation”, meaning the reputation that existed for your brand prior to active participation from the brand.

After you’ve defined the “laissez-faire reputation”, it’s time to define how you want to change that reputation. (If you’re happy with the “laissez-faire reputation” it can be a bit trickier to define how to begin to participate; but I’ll define the process later.) All activities should help move your brand in the direction of achieving your ideal social reputation.

Once you define the reputation you’d like, you need to define how the brand will appear when engaging in social media activities. This doesn’t just mean its visual appearance, but also means its sociological appearance. It’s important to define your avatar schema, and update your brand style guide to take social media into account, but equally important is to define how you want your brand to be viewed as a part of society, and the community. This has more to do with what you’ll be talking about and the content you invest in creating, than what your visual appearance is.

Perform Internal Response Assessment & Identify Ideal Content Curators

Many corporations have some kind of intranet. The proven best way to achieve corporate adoption of social media is to integrate social systems into corporation-wide systems. 2 ideal candidates for social system integration are email clients, and the intranet.

A great way to define your optimum response assessment policy is by testing responses in real situations. Let’s say you’ve integrated a social system into your intranet, and the entire corporation has the intranet open on their computers. The system is primarily used as a collaboration tool.

What would happen if you started routing the feed you set up in the listening phase into the system? Everyone would get to see what’s being said about the brand. You could encourage conversations through the company intranet, on the posts you’re routing in. If you disable 2 way communication, all the company responses to posts will remain private.

This a great initial test to identify potential content curators: the staff that have a natural ability to interact appropriately with people on social networks. Additionally this testing will identify those who might not understand the benefits of social media and give you the opportunity to schedule learning sessions.

Once you’ve identified potential content curators; you can run iterative live tests. Rotating curators through specific social media channels to figure out who’s the best at participating on each channel you want a presence on. This live testing will serve to further refine who will lead the content curator team for each channel.

Live Iterative Optimization (LIO)

Many corporations jump directly to this phase; skipping some of the most important steps in getting social media adopted by the entire company. Many companies that jump directly to this phase experience social media failure. The reason for this is often that a key individual in the organization doesn’t understand how social media will benefit his department.Once you’ve identified who will lead your content curators for each channel, you can begin moving past simply being present within social networks, and begin really engaging your audience. (In smaller organizations, you might have the need for a single content curator.)

Here are the three key steps in Live Iterative Optimization. Campaign Testing

I’ve recently written a post on iterative brand equity, which can be representative of a social campaign. I don’t suggest running campaigns that don’t fluidly integrate and feed into each other.

That being said, the key to LIO is campaign evaluation and optimization. After running a social campaign; whatever it might be, it’s important to evaluate how it was interpreted by your audience, how it affected your audience, and how you can improve. Regardless of how successful your last campaign was; finding at least one way to improve is crucial.

Synergies Across Networks

In addition to evaluating your campaign, you can examine your social platform & channel selection and find ways to synergize efforts across networks. If you’re running a campaign on Facebook and MySpace; how can you leverage responses of Facebook to amplify engagement of MySpace, and vice-versa?

Policy Correction & Optimization

You should constantly be re-examining your social media policy, and should set up formal post-campaign-evaluations to correct errors and optimize elements.

Ensure everyone has a voice; your audience, your employees, and all stakeholders. Make the social media policy as public as possible. Consider the impact of releasing the policy to the public. Weigh the options of releasing the policy with the repercussions of the policy being leaked.

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Iterative Brand Equity - Model, Framework & Benefits

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:15:56 -0400

Model

Iterative Brand Equity changes. It doesn’t dispose of what existed before; it will update, hand-off, or reconfigure itself to become something new.

(pretty simple, but click here for a larger view)

Framework

Set expectations - It’s hard to set expectations when you’re uncertain how the next iteration of a campaign will unfold. That being said, it’s important to keep your users informed with what you know. If you’re uncertain what the next iteration will look like, it’s perfectly fine to tell that to your users, and ask them for input.

Extract key campaign elements - In every campaign, there are key themes, memes, and technology that can be carried forward in each iteration. For instance, if you ask your users to upload photo’s during a campaign, the next iteration could involve writing captions for the images; or turning the images into comic strips.

Provide a feedback mechanism - The biggest mistake any campaign can suffer from is not allowing customers to provide feedback. If you have a channel that allows customers to provide feedback, you’ll end up gaining some valuable insights. If you don’t have that channel available, the feedback will often be presented to the public via social media. Feedback should always be incorporated into the next iteration of a campaign.

Recap - Just like the beginning of a TV show, an iterative campaign requires a recap. This can take many forms; the best are integrated into drivers to the transformed campaign site. For example, if you have a media buy making people aware of your new campaign, you can include information about how the campaign started, and how its transformed.

Recognize loyalty - Users who stick with you from campaign to campaign should be recognized and rewarded. They don’t necessarily need a monetary reward, but they can be rewarded by offering pre-registration, or access to exclusive tools. The better you treat your loyal customers, the more likely it is they’ll continue being loyal.

Benefits

Increase reach - Many quarterly campaigns just aren’t alive long enough to reach the maximum number of users who’d want to participate. The benefit of having an iterative campaign is that you’ll be able to build on your foundation of users at the beginning of every iteration. Instead of asking users who’ve participated in a different campaign to participate in something new; you can ask those users to continue their participation in a new way.

Increase asset library - Every iteration of a campaign can provide you with new assets. Whether it’s user generated content, feedback, new leads, or new technology; new assets help to ensure the next iteration has more to offer.

Improve engagement - Rather than being engaged for one quarter and waiting for the next campaign, users can continue to engage with a brand throughout every iteration. Each iteration can engage users more and more.

Increase participation - Many users are unwilling to participate in a campaign that will only last a couple months, because they understand the campaign will be ending. A campaign that continues, and feeds into the next campaign can encourage user participation. If you continually use user generated content as the foundation for the next iteration; you’ll encourage even greater participation. Users enjoy having their work matter.

Improve integration - An iterative campaign has the benefit of being able to take its time to get accepted. Every iteration can act as new opportunities for integration. For instance, if your first campaign asks users for photos, the second campaign could include a photo album on flickr, and the third campaign could include a widget showing the photos on the corporate site.

Improve communication - The great thing about having engaged customers providing feedback over time is that you can learn from your communication mistakes and successes. If you find certain communication techniques work, you can carry then forward into the next campaign; and if you find out that certain techniques don’t work you can scrap them for the next iteration.

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How Social Customer Service Can Make You Money

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:47:18 -0400

Customer service has always been that business competency that either makes or breaks the customer experience. Over the past decade, many large organizations recognized this fact and have heavily invested in ensuring extraordinary customer service. In recent years, social customer service has become a necessity.

Social customer service can increase revenue in five ways:

Increased Awareness: Addressing customers issues via social media provides interesting content. The more you help, the better the chances customers will find you.

Increased Customer Satisfaction: The great thing about social customer service is that other customers, who are satisfied with you get the opportunity to observe & participate with other customers. This has the potential of increasing their satisfaction through education. I’ve seen a discussion board with customer service interactions between a software company and its customers; many of the posts indicated that the customers reading the posts discovered additional functionality they’d never have known about. Of course, simply solving a customers problem increases their satisfaction.

Public Customer Reviews: Each time provide customer service via social media is another opportunity to have a public customer review. It shows the issues customers have, and shows how your company deals with those issues. In public forums, an unsatisfied customer doesn’t necessarily mean a bad review. If the company does everything it can, but the customer is unreasonable; the public will often express it’s admiration of the company, and dismiss the customer as unreasonable.

Decreased Return-Rate: As with all good customer service, good social customer service can help turn a brand dissident into a brand advocate. Additionally, social customer service can act as a qualifier in the sense of making sure potential customers are buying the right thing. (i.e. If the Twelp Force informs a customer that the printer he purchased isn’t compatible with a Mac, it could help ensure other Mac owners don’t buy that printer.)

Increased Brand Loyalty: One of the best ways to create brand loyalty is by showing how a company deals with customers who’ve had issues. I recently saw a series of blog posts about a bad experience a lady had with a hotel chain. The post outlined her issues, and the email she sent to management. Subsequent posts outlined responses; and a credit issued for the cost of the stay. This type of story could have made me skeptical about staying at the hotel chain she stayed at; but the way the company handled the issues actually made me confident enough to try them. Additionally, the lady was satisfied with the outcome and probably would be willing to try them again.

How do I achieve the best results?

Step 1: Choose a customer service model

(If you don’t chose a model, your customers will resort to model A)

Model A: Customer seeks customer service
This model could be indirect; where customers are posting complaints about a company. Essentially, this model applies to any customer that requires customer service and is willing to engage in social media.

Model B: Brand seeks out customers in need of customer service
This model involves a brand, or a brand collective, searching out and responding to customer issues.

Model C: Brand encourages & supports a customer support community
This model often has an aggregation site where customer inquires are vetted or categorized and responded to by both brand employees and other customers. Sometimes, brands simply have an account on a particular site and encourage customers to respond to customers with issues.

Step 2: Communicate responses to questions customers need answered prior to engaging in social customer service

Question 1: “What can I get support with?”

Question 2: “How do I request support? How do I communicate after I’ve made the request?”

Question 3: “How long will it take to get service?” Question 4: “What quality of customer service can I expect?”

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Guide to avoiding free mistakes

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:35:23 -0400

The classic double-edged sword; giving things away for free.

I’ve compiled a few guidelines that might help you decide if you should be giving something away for free; or you should be charging for it.

Make a long term decisionThe biggest mistake is changing your pricing structure from free, or to free. People better understand and accept changes in price, rather than a move to or from free.

Example:Let’s say a newspaper that costs 50 cents increases its per issue price to 75 cents. It might lose customers, but many of the customers will continue buying.

Some reasons:

Customers see the newspaper as providing more value than the price
Customers already have established a method of payment, it’s just a matter of increasing the amount
Customers have an expectation of inflation

Now, lets say another newspaper decides to make the jump from being a free publication to charging 25 cents an issue. It’s the same discrete increase (25 cents) but many users will not pay.

Some reasons:

Free is easy. It doesn’t require you set up payment, or look in your pocket for change. You just pick it up and leave.
Publication value is suspect. If it was free yesterday, what are they adding that makes it worth 25 cents.
Comparative pricing can lead to churn. If I’m going to pay 25 cents for a ‘Free’ publication, why don’t I pay a little more for a nationally recognized one.

Lesson: Be very careful about offering something for free. Especially if you think you might have to start charging for it down the road.

Consider competitors

So you now know that you should carefully consider your business model before deciding to make something free; now you should consider your competitors.Ideally, you don’t want to be in a market where your product or service is being offered by a competitor for free. However, if you are - you have to start considering value.

Be aware of the nature of good-enough

This is where you’re offering something that costs something; but your competitor is offering something similar thats free. Even if what your offering is substantially better; if the customers needs are met by the free offering, it’s likely that he’ll take that offer.The reason is comparative thinking. Once a customer starts thinking in terms of components, elements, features, and specifications, you’ll have a hard time competing against a free offer.

How defeat a free competitor

Value: Offer something that the customer values more than the price.

Let’s say you’re an email marketing agency, and your client want to deploy e-mail through a free online service. You can offer the customer expert guidance, proven design standards, and valuable metrics analysis. This would likely be enough to convince a client to use your services.

Risks associated with using free: Another way is to inform the customer of the risk of using what the free competitor is offering.

Let’s say you’re Adobe Illustrator, and a major client doesn’t want to buy CS4 because they found a free alternative. Adobe can make the client aware of the standards they use, and the testing that’s required to create the product. They can show that the free product crashes, often losing work and increasing man-hours spend doing the same thing. They can also show that cut-corners can interact with other programs and leave a security hole in their system; potentially causing server failures.

Understand sociological factors

Ok, apart from the inconvenience of having to pay, and the risk of competitors monopolizing on free offers; there are sociological issues you should consider before making a decision to offer something for free. These relate more to the value you get from your pricing structure.

Reputation: There are essentially 3 basic pricing structures: 1. Free - read my blog 2. Paid - read my blog for a dollar 3. Employed - read my blog and I’ll pay you a dollar. Each of these have certain stigmas attached to them. Each will help you build a reputation. Consider online gaming: where Second LIfe is a free, Warcraft costs money to play, and many branded games a free to play and give you prizes or money for doing so.

The pricing decision those games made, well before launch, have dictated their reputation. Second Life is now seen by many as a game they like playing, but wouldn’t pay anything to play it. Warcraft is seen by those who play it, as a game worth the money. Now, branded games often need to have prizes or incentives to get users to play.

Belonging: People like being a part of something, and are often willing to pay to be included. It seems as though the internet really spread the idea of anyone can belong for free. You can sign up for a free account. Thinking back 10 years, many sites that requested registration were either for paid access, or to allow you to buy something. Both registration options entitled you to additional service, tools, and information. I’ve started feeling like much of the free stuff is free for a reason. I recently had an experience where a client was using a free online project management system which crashed. He wasn’t able to reach anyone from the company, and subsequently had to postpone the project by 2 months. Costing him well over 30 thousand dollars.

I think important stories like this helped encourage many agencies to use paid services like Basecamp; where you can reach tech support anytime; and you can have a reasonable amount of security. As clients and agencies started to subscribe to this service, it was almost a sign of having a good process if you had a Basecamp account. In fact, I was recently told by a large telecom client that they use Basecamp internally, and I needed to use it too. It was great!

Interaction: I’ve always thought this was a really big issue with events; but it’s becoming a bigger and bigger issue with social networking. People who are willing to pay to interact with each other, for a conference, or an event, are usually dedicated to exchanging information. They’re generally seeking value, and are willing to offer it. People that attend a free conference or event might be willing to exchange information, or might not be. Maybe they’re just there to blow time. Maybe they’re there to extract information and leave. Regardless, free often attracts those who offer very little. (They can also bring in people who appreciate a good event, and are more willing to share because it’s free.) - And don’t get me wrong, sometimes paid events attract the wrong people; but they have an additional filter in place to ensure only those who really want to be there attend.

Now, there’s also paid interactions, where a company pays you to interact with people. I’ve been seeing this more and more. Where a company offers an incentive, prize or money to promote interaction. It often has very good results, but the interactions are being paid for; therefore need to be examined for authenticity. For example, the recent success of Whopper Sacrifice; that required users to offer their facebook friends up for some food. This was deemed to be very successful; but how valuable are those facebook users? How valuable are the winners? How much did it cost to get them to interact, how much did it cost to feed them, and how many more burgers were sold because of the promotion? - I’m certainly not saying it wasn’t successful, but it’s a different kind of success. (The difference is between having 1,000,000 people talking about you for 3 months, and never again, and costing $100 to do it; or having an ongoing 50,000 people talking about you.)

Loyalty: In my experience, people are less loyal to brands that are free. This is an interesting topic, and I’m open to comments; but in my experience I’ve noticed that most customers have a closer relationship with brands that they pay for; in one way or another. Some brands are inherently free, like TV shows - but I’ve had experience with TV shows that offer entertainment; and shows that ask users for something in return - and those shows that ask for something end up developing a stronger following.

I’ve been going over a lot of research on this lately, and I’ve been finding a trend that customers develop a stronger relationship with brands they willingly pay for; and appreciate unexpected rewards more than expected ones. This seems to fly in the face of loyalty programs. Are people more loyal to Bank of Montreal because they offer Air Miles? or are they loyal to Air Miles because they offer customers prizes?

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4 ways to elevate your social media strategy

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:00:10 -0400

Niche to Niche

Everyone knows that social media can help you create ‘tribes’; but not everyone knows how to get the most out of the social media niches.

The idea of ‘Niche to Niche’ marketing involves creating multiple tribes and allowing those tribes to interact in some meaningful way.

An example could be targeting 3 separate target niche markets and allowing each group to compete against each other group as a collective in some contest.

Local Affinity

Social media keeps coming out with more sophisticated ways to figure out where your audience lives. This information is invaluable when you want to create local affinity.

One great way to create local affinity is to target local groups, or use local social networks to requisition local supporters. These local supporters can help you with local research, understanding local memes, and defining a local voice.

Analyzing your audience based on geographic location, you can figure out where your biggest supporters are; and which areas you need to work on.Once you know where you should target, and how to talk to them; all you need to do is engage that market.

Social Media Pricing

Social media is made up of memberships in networks. These networks provide users the sense of exclusivity by allowing their members tools, and connections.

Providing social media exclusive pricing, or exclusive added value propositions, is a great way to get your brand messages passed around. There’s nothing users like more than being able to provide legitimate value to their friends.

The additional benefit of making offers through social media is that users will generally only pass offers on to friends they feel would appreciate knowing about the offer. (A free qualification system.)

Real Entertainment

Not everything you think is entertaining is something you should offer to your community as entertainment. There’s been a rash of ad agencies posting their TV commercials to YouTube because they think their audience might find them interesting.

Most of the time, they aren’t something anyone searches out to entertain themselves. However there are some brands that have come up with really entertaining content that people would search out.

In my opinion, real entertainment falls into one of 4 categories:

1. It tells a story worth listening to
2. It has interactive elements worth interacting with
3. It was published by me, or someone like me
4. It has information thats valuable to things I do

The more real and relevant entertainment is to a user, the further the message can potentially travel.

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The Social Media Achilles Heel, Content Generation - Easy to get wrong

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:42:43 -0400

One of the most pervasive social media tactics involves generating content. It’s very easy to do, but very easy to get wrong.

When you think about it, almost anyone can write status updates, add comments, create tweets, or upload photos. The fact that creating content can be done so easily, allows for it to be rushed into.

Here are my guidelines for creating content. Figure out who you know best

Know Yourself: Create content you know about. Be genuine & interesting. People will be responsive to your content, as long as it’s authentic.

Achilles Heel: Lack of focus. In the end, the content you create helps define how people perceive you; this is the essence of branding. If you don’t define how you’d like people to perceive you; you risk misperception.
So, treat yourself, and the content you create, as a brand would. Develop a voice, and focus your content toward achieving the perception you want from your audience.

Know your audience: Create content your audience finds interesting. If you’re able to figure out what you’re audience is interested in; you can find spokespeople to contribute content on your brands behalf. (e.g. If you find out that Toyota Prius owners like gardening, you could get a professional gardener to create a series of blog posts for the Toyota Prius blog.)

Achilles Heel: Creating phony content. The biggest offenders are people who engage in fake conversations. This often happens with brands that outsource social media management to those who aren’t familiar enough with the brand. (E.g. The person in charge of the Nike Plus Twitter account compliments someone on a great tennis win, but doesn’t actually know anything about tennis. If a follower reads the post and tries to engage in a conversation on the subject Nike Plus will have been exposed as not knowing anything about tennis, and might alienate some followers.)

Learn the social media channel you’re using

Know the medium – Content can take many forms, video, audio, images, presentations, motion graphics, or copy. Know what media work best to communicate your message to your audience.

Know the memes – Each social media channel is different, and may have very different memes. Things that are well understood on one social network might not be obvious on others. (i.e. if you try to use a hash tag outside of twitter, users will probably be confused.)

Know the warning signs – Every social media channel has elements you should keep an eye on that will alert you if the content you’re posting is achieving your goals, or working against you. It could be followers, or fans, or retweets, or length of engagement; the idea is to find out what you should be watching, and watch those things.

Know any interaction rules – Think of every site as a mini-social-ecosystem; complete with social rules and manners. What might be a good conversation on one site might be considered spam on another.

Know how/ what to track – Because every site & platform is different, there are many different ways you can track things. Certain sites will provide you with metrics, while others require you to embed tracking codes. Some sites won’t allow tracking code, so you might have to get monitoring software. Additionally, you need to know what metrics need to be tracked, and what metrics will just clutter & confuse your data.

Know how to analyze – Probably the hardest to learn, but if you don’t analyze your data properly you might end up changing your content strategy for no reason. (or you could end up keeping it the same when you should have changed it.) Try to answer questions like: Should I pay attention to averages or extremes? Should I consider positive and negative nature of comments? Should I place a higher value on users who engage with me on multiple channels?

Listen and adapt

Know what to listen for – In the same way you need to know what to track; you also need to know what to listen for. Listening is a skill that many marketers don’t have; they’re often really great at communicating a message, but often fall short when interpreting collective responses. If you can define some key performance indicators in terms of key-words, you’ll have a advantage over much of your peers.
KPI as key-words: a word or words that indicate if a mention is helping achieve business goals or helping to undermine efforts to achieve those goals.

Know what to do – Another important and often overlooked element of listening is knowing what to do with the information you’ve heard. How should you respond? Should you change the mind of a person who posted a negative comment? What if that person is a ‘troll’ who posts negative comments all over the place? That type of person wouldn’t ever change his mind. This is the best guide to evaluating comments and determining the appropriate response.

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A Review of the Importance of Social Media Management

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:12:47 -0400

I’ve been getting asked a lot of questions about social media management and it’s roll in overall social media ROI. There seems to be a lot of confusion about who should be in charge of communicating with the community once it’s created.

First, let me explain that the decision to begin a social media initiative needs to be well defined upfront.

I’ve walked through this Social Media Tactic Refinement Framework with several brand managers and account directors.

I’ve found it very useful in helping to define social media initiatives upfront. (read more about this framework)

As goals are being defined, it’s important to know that fundamental company competencies are required to ensure the success of the initiative.

Listen: Listening to the community helps a company understand issues its customers are experiencing in real time, which will help the company adapt and respond.

Agile: knowing issues customers are experiencing is great business intelligence, but a company needs to have a process in place that will allow it to effectively respond and incrementally release updates.

Cohesiveness: An agile company that listens, responds, and adapts itself to address customer concerns requires cohesive internal collaboration. This will ensure responsiveness isn’t inhibited by traditional bureaucracy.

Accountability: When you have a cohesive team, that’s listening responding, & adapting to its customers; each team member needs to be accountable for achieving specific business objectives.

And, those accountable team members should be responsible for listening for specific things from the community.

Consider a recent ladder of accountability I created for a CPG brand. I was able to convince the brand that one ‘community manager’ wasn’t the answer to their social media management issues.

They had asked a number of specific questions about who should be responsible for what; and how to set up an information vetting system. The interesting thing was that when I examined their organizational structure and external vendors; they already had a system created with individuals assigned to address who was responsible for what.

They just needed to recognize that social media can be used for many different things. So I categorized the initiatives the company was currently engaged in; and helped the company realize who should be accountable for each initiative.

Relationship Building: Considered the most important social media initiative by the majority of the company. The plan is to create brand advocates by allowing users to engage with the brand in a more personal way. It was decided that this initiative requires constant participation. Where the person accountable, would be the most active voice of the brand.

Assignment: Community Manager (via Digital AOR)

Locating The Community: Another important initiative; locating where the community is already talking about the brand requires substantial listening and searching. After locating the community, relationship building can begin.

Assignment: Brand Intern

Customer Service: Considered to be ‘insurance’ against a firememe. If an unhappy or unsatisfied customer engages the community; customer service would help ensure the customers issues are dealt with. Special training/ handling procedures were developed because the team is aware that social media customer service is not one-on-one; but is visible by everyone.

Assignment: Director of Customer Service (and a trained call center team)

Content Generation: A new initiative designed to drive repeat traffic to the brand website; as well as increase user engagement while on the site. This initiative asks users to discuss the brand in new ways; and allows the brand to pull that content into various marketing initiatives.

Assignment: Brand Manager & Account Director (via Digital AOR)

SEO: As part of ongoing SEO; all social media initiatives are frequently reviewed and adapted to include SEO suggestions.

Assignment: Search Analyst (Consultant)

Business Research: Collection and analysis of customer feedback for various purposes. Research initiatives are rare and occasionally get integrated into marketing initiatives. (i.e. fill out a survey to win)

Assignment: CMO, Business Strategist

Running through this exercise helped the company assign accountability. Now that specific individuals were accountable for specific initiatives; they were able to begin listening for what really mattered.

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