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?

NO!

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.

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

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 \"empty\" 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