STC09 Social Media and User Experience

Designing for the Conversation Social Media and User Experience Eric Grandeo, Roundarch

Who Am I? Name: Eric Grandeo Position: Social Media Strategist Company: Roundarch, Inc. Site: www.roundarch.com Company Blog: Impost.roundarch.com Twitter: @ericgrandeo LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericgrandeo Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Eric-Grandeo/1402672658

Who are You? Are you an Information Architect or Interaction Designer? Are you a developer? Are you a visual designer? Are you a social media strategist? Do you work in social media, or are just starting? Are you a social media expert?

#stc09

What are we talking about? What is Social Media and Web 2.0? What does Social Media mean to User Experience? What, and who, do we design for now? What are we trying to achieve with Social Media? So…how do we do this? Common Social Media Design Patterns

What is Social Media?

Social Media: practices and technologies which allow people to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives In short, Social Media is… For participants, For businesses, it is a dialogue, a chance to listen, engage mainly between peers… and collaborate… …a conversation in a multitude of forms.

Social Media is… Community

Social Media is… Sharing

Social Media is… Blogging

Social Media is… Knowledge

http://wiki.beingpeterkim.com/

Why is Social Media Important?

1. People

Social Media has enabled “word-of-mouth” to be broadcast on an unprecedented scale

2. Technology

Because the technology is there, cheap and, used regularly by customer and competitor alike

3. Business

The voice projected through Social Media gives us all a much larger audience, turning us all into potential marketers…

Because Social Media has wrestled control of brand and product away from corporations and into the hands of the people

What does Social Media change?

Social Media and Web 2.0 represents the evolution of the conversation and digital user experience…

It represents a fundamental change to marketing…

One way marketing messages are replaced with experiences that fosters conversation with brands and other people

Buy My Stuff!!

The focus for Social Media is building relationships, not marketing campaigns

What does this mean to User Experience?

Let’s start by taking a look at an example…

Problem: I need a new Computer!!!

But what do I get?

After I borrow a friend’s computer, its time to get to work…

Let’s read some reviews…from real people, not companies

Forums and Blogs

What other sites are helpful?

What do my friends think?

I have made my purchase, now where do I go if I have a question?

The Experience Topography

Search Popular Social Reviews Friends (WoM) Brand/Transaction Post Review Support

Social Media Visitors

What does this mean to the user experience designer?

People trust other people’s opinions more than a company’s marketing

The user experience extends beyond the company site

People are talking about your brand, whether you like it or not

If you don’t give your users a means to communicate with you or others, they will find a way

A new way of customer centric thinking…

Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt’s Customer Centric Rules • Encourage customers to go to other sites • You measure how many people refer their friends to you as successes • You let people feed in their content from other sites easily • Your customers are doing things with your product you never dreamed, and you encouraging sharing these experiences

Tara Hunt’s Customer Centric Rules • Influencers are adding you as friends on social networks • You work with your competitors towards better customer experiences for all - Tara Hunt, Whuffie at Web 2.0 Expo

Who are we designing for?

Social behaviors are part of the user persona

Forrester’s Social Technographics

Groundswell Winning in a world transformed by social technologies

http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/ index.html

Charlene Li

Josh Bernoff

• Publish a blog • Publish your own Web pages 18% • Upload video you created Creators • Upload audio/music you created • Write articles or stories and post them • Post ratings/reviews of products/services • Comment on someone else’s blog 25% Critics • Contribute to online forums • Contribute to/edit articles in a wiki • Use RSS feeds 12% • Add “tags” to Web pages or photos Collectors • “Vote” for Web sites online • Maintain profile on a social networking site 25% Joiners • Visit social networking sites • Read blogs • Watch video from other users 48% • Listen to podcasts Spectators • Read online forums • Read customer ratings/reviews Inactives None of the above 44% *source: Forrester

Why do users participate?

• Keeping up Relationships Making Connections • Making New Relationships • Succumbing to Pressure • Paying it Forward Making Your Mark • The Prurient Impulse • The Creative Impulse • The Altruistic Impulse Finding Affinities • The Validation Impulse • The Affinity Impulse •Source: GroundSwell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research

Kollock’s 4 Motivations for Contributing • Reciprocity • Reputation • Increased sense of efficacy • Attachment to, and need of a group

How do we include social media in the UX design process?

Does this mean we have to use a new process?

However, There are some new considerations…

Post Methodology*  People What are your users ready for? Who are your users?  Objectives What are your goals? Are you interested in engaging new users or energizing the ones already engaged?  Strategy How do you want relationships with your users to change? Do you want users to help carry messages to constituents in the organization?  Technology The application and the platform are important, but only as a means of supporting the People, Objectives, and Strategy * The POST Methodology was developed by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research for their book GroundSwell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Social Media Design Process  Discover Who are your consumers? What are their social behaviors? What are the trends and characteristics of the market?  Define What is your organization’s goals? What are your strategies? What are the new business processes as a result?  Design What are the social tools your organization will use? What will the conceptual and detailed design look like? Design the social user experience  Develop Iteratively build and test.  Deploy Implement and optimize. Monitor the conversation, make adjustments as necessary

Discover: User Research and Persona Development

Focus shifts from understanding demographics

To understanding social behaviors and interactions

Questions to Ponder • What do your users do online? • What are you trying to make your users better at? • What are your users passionate about? • How do your users interact with each other? Not just your brand

But most importantly…

Listen to your customers!!

Design Approach: You are not selling products, you are solving problems!!

“I’m Winston Wolf, I solve problems”

Where are your users now?

How are they using social sites? I had so much to drink last night!! LOL! Personal reasons?

How are they using social sites? Anyone need a social media strategist? Business reasons?

Discover: What is the current chatter about the organization?

Is it positive?

Or negative?

Do you have a lot of fans?

Or…other groups that talk about you?

How do I monitor what is said about my brand?

Free Tools

Paid Tools

*source: Forrester

Discover: The Social Media Map

Hedgefundscareer.com Plaxo.com Xing.com LinkedIn Hedgefundblogger.com Ritholtz.com Marketwatch Facebook Albourne Village Allaboutalpha.com Privateequityblogger.com Blogs Social Networks Jigsaw.com QuantNet.org CAIAexam.com Wilmott.com Discussion Microblogging Twitter CAIAA Boards/ Forums User AnalystsForum.com CFAExamForum.com Wiki FT.com News CFAexams.com Elitetrader.com Investopedia Bloomberg.com Finalalternatives.com FinancialCertification.com Social Wikipedia Bookmarking Capital IQ Delicious.com Legend Often Used Moderately Used Rarely used

Social Technographics

Discover: What are the market conditions?

SWOT Analysis from Social Media Perspective

What Social Media tools are your competitors using?

What is working well?

MyBlogSpark has recruited more than 900 bloggers -- over 80 percent are moms -- to register to be eligible for everything from sampling campaigns to product coupons to news of a new ad campaign. General Mills plans to use the network to promote its wide portfolio of products in the food and beverage, beauty, home, electronics, health and automotive categories.

quot;If you feel you cannot write a positive post regarding the product or service, please contact the MyBlogSpark team before posting any content.quot;

What is not working well?

What should you stay away from?

Where are the opportunities?

Opportunities • What are the growth trends in the industry? • How has economic conditions changed the landscape of the market? • Where are the social media gaps closing between the generations? • What social media tools offer the best potential for opportunity?

Define: Develop your Social Media Goals

Where do you want to talk with customers? Buyers Eyeballs Relationships Awareness Customer Support Leads Identifying Influencers Solving problems

Social Media Goals: Overview Traditional Social Media Goals Difference Function Monitoring customers’ conversations with Research Listening each other, instead of surveys and focus groups Participating in and stimulating two-way conversations your customers have with Marketing Talking each other. Not outbound one way messages Making it possible for your enthusiastic Sales Energizing customers to help sell to each other Support Supporting Enable your to support each other Helping your customers work with each Development Embrace other to come up with ideas to improve your products and services *source: Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

Social Media Goals: Overview Listen • Determine brand reputation • Unsolicited feedback • Find influencers, creators, and brand advocates • Help determine where the bad reputation or PR crises is coming from • Understand the buzz about the brand • Where is the buzz?

Social Media Goals: Overview Talk • Solicit feedback from users • Improve brand awareness • Improve brand perception • Improve customer satisfaction • Influence decision making • Manage bad reputation or PR crises • To form relationships with customers

Social Media Goals: Overview Energize • Motivating the base • Viral Marketing/Word of mouth • Recruiting influential customers

Social Media Goals: Overview Support • Connect customers to each other • Reduce support costs • Answer questions…solve problems

Social Media Goals: Overview Embrace • Innovation • Support existing social networks • Crowdsourcing problems

Define: Develop your Social Media Message

How do you want to engage your customer?

How about a metaphor?

The Salesman: • Tries to talk to everyone • Always trying to make the sale • More interested in telling you about a product than real conversation

The Other Guy: • Quiet at first, listens a lot • Slowly becomes engaged • Talks about interesting stuff • He’s genuine, and transparent • Everyone starts to notice him

Which one will everyone like better, and want to talk to?

Authentic Transparent Be Interesting Dialogue Be Creative

UX Design Process

Iterating from Concept to a Detailed Design

Select your Tools

Your goals and social behaviors of your customers dictate the tools to use

Tools Social Behavior Goals

Goals to tools mapping

Goal Tool Listening Monitoring Tool

Goal Tool Listening Ratings/Reviews Talking Forum

Goal Tool Listening Ratings/Reviews Talking Blog

Goal Tool Listening Ratings/Reviews Talking Facebook Energize Viral Video

Goal Tool Listening Ratings/Reviews Talking Facebook Energize Hosted Community

Goal Tool Listening Ratings/Reviews Talking Facebook Energize Hosted Community Support Forum

Goal Tool Listening Ratings/Reviews Talking Facebook Energize Hosted Community Support Wiki

Goal Tool Listening Ratings/Reviews Talking Facebook Energize Hosted Community Support Wiki Embrace Crowdsourcing

Engagement Response Plan

*source: US Air Force

Deploy: Monitoring and Optimizing

What do you Measure? Area for Detail Points to ponder Measurement • Time spent in Social • What is preferable – a shallow Engagement Media forum critique that reaches many or a • Density of commentary deep critique that reaches only a • Reach and spread of few? • What of those few were key commentary influencers? • Number of mentions • Especially, compared to competitor Awareness • Number of conversions • Direct buys through link on SM site • Identify evangelists • Do you know who your evangelists Influence • Identify detractors are? • Measure their reach • How can you reward them? • Do you know who your detractors are? • How can you mitigate their flaming? (E.g. SEO rankings)

Measuring the Impact of Social Media • All Social endeavors should be supported by search (SEO) and Analytic programs • It is NOT possible (nor even desirable) to measure EVERYTHING, nor to relate measurements directly to fiscal gain (see ROI section)

“In the old days, you had one chance to get the message right…today, you have multiple conversations and iterations to build that message with your customers and audience” - Tara Hunt, Whuffie at Web 2.0 Expo

The Social Media Maturity Model From joining to hosting the conversation

Social Media maturity is not achieved overnight…it is an evolutionary process

Typical systems thinking tells us that performance decreases the more people use a system

Social Media is the opposite…the system improves the more people use it

Not performance, but the quality of the feedback and conversations

The Social Media maturity model stages

Stage 1: Listening to the Chatter

You shouldn’t dive right in…until you know what everyone is talking about

Stage 1: Listen to the Chatter • A combination of free and paid tools are used to monitor conversations about Brand • Sentiment is measured using paid listening platforms • Key locations of chatter are identified • Market and competitive analysis is complete • Primary influencers and participants are identified

Stage 2: Develop the Message

Stage 2: Develop the Message • Strategies are developed to add value to existing conversations on selected sites • Internal participants are selected to join the conversation • Applicable content that adds value to the conversation is created • Continued listening warrants engagement strategy refinement

Stage 3: Join the Conversation

Stage 3: Join the Conversation • Consumers are engaged with valuable content • Bad press is directly addressed as per the rules of engagement • Communities are flourishing on existing sites • Incentives are offered for users of that site, and connections are encouraged • Community is supported, not controlled

Stage 4: Host the Conversation

Stage 4: Host the Conversation • Hosted communities are established, members on other platforms are encouraged to participate (incentivize) • Blogs/Forums are developed facilitating conversation about the industry – developing the knowledge base • Direct marketing is integrated with SM presence • UGC is facilitated, encouraged, and incentivized

Stage 5: Full Integration and Optimization

Stage 5: Full Integration and Optimization • Integrated marketing is carried out on all internal and external social media tools • All services can provide communications through social media tools • Blogs, forums, internal and external social networks are effectively used – all are linked and share content • Exposure is increased through podcasting, social bookmarking, and microblogging (Twitter)

What are the Common Social Media Design Patterns?

http://designingsocialinterfaces.com

The Designing Social Interfaces patterns wiki is a companion site to the book that Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone are currently writing for O'Reilly Media

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience

Sign Up/Registration • Collect the bare minimum of information needed that still allows your user to participate in the site • Collect other information only as necessary for a compelling experience. Ask yourself if the data I am about to collect can be collected in another part of the site at another time

Invite Friends • Use an in-context email form • Provide the user with messaging that showcases the benefits of joining the service • Make the pre-filled content editable and allow the user the ability to personalize the invitation • Allow the user to invite others via access to their address books • Provide a mechanism to bring contacts and email addresses over from other social services • Don’t force a user to invite others to the site before they have had a chance to try out the features

Identity • Let your users be expressive where it matters • Give users control over how to present themselves. Users should own their actions and have reputation attached to their identity, but the option to go anonymous should be offered in some instances • Let your users decide who sees what parts of themselves. Give enough control and permissioned access

Presence • Publishing presence information • Displaying current presence • Displaying a timeline of recent presence items • Maintaining a history (partial or complete) of past presence declarations • Providing users with a way to subscribe to presence updates • Providing users with a way to filter presence updates

Reputation • How competitive is the community? • Labels • Levels • Ranking • Collectible achievements • Points • Leaderboard

Tagging • Allow users to add their own tags to an object • Allow users to delete tags they have associated with an object. This allows for deletion of duplicates or misspellings • Provide very clear instructions for how to separate distinct tags. There are two methods currently popular across the web right now – comma delimited and space delimited

Sharing • A Sharing Widget is a small graphical element placed within the markup of a hypertext file that enables users to share content and information resources with the community, in conjunction with a third-party site or social networking application platform like Facebook or MySpace.

Blogs • Present posts in reverse chronology. • Allow the option for posts to be presented on an index page with a title and short description linking off to the longer full post • Provide the ability to have a single page for each individual post • Archive past posts. Consider archiving by date and by tag or keyword. • Provide a search capability. Search titles, content and tags. • Allow users to subscribe to an RSS feed of the blog. Consider allowing users to subscribe to a specific category. • Provide an about area or page for author information. Information about the author lends credibility to the blog. • Unless the blog is private, allow posts to be crawled by search engines. • Comments – most blogs allow for the option for readers to leave comments on a post. When comments are enabled, the number of comments for the post should be displayed and should be linked to the comments.

Reviews • The review form usually includes the following five fundamentals: – Ability to input a user's quantitative (rating) assessment – Field to enter the user's qualitative (review) assessment of the object – Guidelines for helping the user write a review – Any legal disclaimers – User identity, most often a required field or pre- populated if the user is signed in.

Ratings • Show clickable items (most often used are stars) that light up on rollover to infer clickability. • Initial state should be quot;emptyquot; and show invitational text above to invite the user to rate the object (e.g. Rate It!). • As the mouse cursor moves over the icons, indicate the level of rating (through a color change) and display a text description of the rating at each point (e.g. Excellent). • Once the user has clicked the rating (5th star, 3rd star etc.) the rating should be saved and added to the Average Rating which should be displayed separately. • The saved rating should be indicated with a change in final color of the items and a text indication that the rating is saved. • An aggregate or average rating should also be displayed.* Users should be able to change their rating later if they change their mind.

Crowdsourcing • Ideally, offer a dashboard view for management of the project • Where appropriate, incorporate a mechanism for compensation for the participants • Optionally, incorporate a voting tool or reputation system for determining the best contributions (as with user-generated translation systems) • Keep track of tasks that have been claimed but not completed by their deadline, so that they may be returned to the general pool and reassigned

Community • Allow users to browse friends-of-friends • Consider presenting a user’s friends and connections in a graphical grid, showing avatars, and allow others to browse through to their profile. Providing visual clues to a person’s identity (via the avatar) can help confirm that a person is the right someone you know • Allow users to search for friends within the network on your site. Provide a keyword field. Clearly indicate what terms are accepted in a search query – name, email, or other identifying factors • Facebook allows users to constrain a search by known information about the user searching. For example, the user can search for people from their high school or college graduation years, or from recent companies they have worked for. Constraining the search in this way, increases the likelihood of finding people you really know

Community • Allow the user to import their contacts from their address book or instant messenger lists to use as a comparison list to find people already using the service • Compare known data points – name, email address or other reliable information and then present to the user a list (with images for ease of identification) of relevant people who also use the service • Allow the user to select one or more names to become connections • If reciprocity is required, present the message that will be sent to the user and the option to send the request for connection or an option to cancel the request • When bringing in people lists for a user to connect to from an address book or address book service, don’t automatically spam the user’s contacts asking to connect. Don’t automatically spam the rest of the user’s contacts with invitations to join the service

Community Management • Community-moderation • Empowering good users to take ownership of the abuse and quality-level goals • Collaborative filtering • Once critical-mass of good and willing users is reached, the incentive system feeds itself.

Core Principles - Recap • Start small and learn from the community • Design around activity and social objects • Build to support existing behaviors • Tools much match your goals and audience behavior • Make it easy for users to upload and share content • Be genuine, interesting, and transparent • Don’t try and do it all!

Questions?

Eric Grandeo Social Media Strategist, Roundarch 212-909-2353 Twitter: @ericgrandeo LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericgrandeo Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Eric-Grandeo/1402672658 www.roundarch.com

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STC09 Social Media and User Experience

by Eric Grandeo on May 07, 2009

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STC09 Social Media and User Experience — Presentation Transcript