Radical Social Design
The days of social media marketing campaigns are numbered. The future lies in radical social design; the ability to socially-enable the things we do everyday. I'm not suggesting we share EVERYTHING we do, but share valuable things we don't even realize are valuable yet.
6 OBJECTIVES OF SOCIAL DESIGN INTEGRATION
Establish A Presence
Even @chrisbrogan once had no followers. As hard as it is to believe, even the most well-connected users were once disconnected. They had to invest in building a brand & building an ecosystem they wanted to participate in. Not sure how to get started? Start by identifying users who you aspire to, and investigate how they achieved their goals.
Build Social Capital
The more you contribute, the more social capital you'll earn. Earning social capital can be thought as earning a share-of-time from your audience. With a maximum number of sources for information, every user needs to prioritize where to gather his information. The likelihood of being chosen as a source for information increases with the level of social equity you've earned.
Personalization
Those users who actively participate in social networks leave a trail of personal information behind them. Some smarter marketers are figuring out how to collect & analyze that data. Tools like Facebook Connect, Open Graph, Open ID, Friend Connect, etc. are making it easy to share personal information with marketers you choose to connect with. This type of data can be useful in personalizing a users experience & serving up the most relevant content. Eventually websites will know me so well, I won't need to search for information because it'll already be served up to me.
Research
Until recently many marketers didn't have the resources to effectively monitor brand conversations. Many leading brands are using radical social designs to encourage users to participate in brand conversations; using these conversations as a sound-board to do serious market research.
Customer Service
Real-time online customer service has been an aspiration of many marketers for many years. Marketers have subscribed to proprietary chat-clients prior to the existence of real-time social networks; but now that we have them, we need to figure out the best use of them. Marketers like BestBuy, Comcast, and British Airways are all making very good use of Twitter as a real-time customer service channel. I'm still waiting for a integrated radical social customer service design. (Maybe a dynamically generated user manual, based on socially generated content? Maybe a site-search that indexes customer service conversations?)
Entertainment
With advances in non-linear TV entering mass markets; social entertainment is booming. The social entertainment market has been increasing steadily for the past decade. First there was entertainment through conversations. Then we started social gaming, broadcasting audio & video, and are now moving into branded & interactive entertainment.
MATRIX OF RADICAL SOCIAL DESIGNS
Different techniques of creating radical social design are being explored everyday. I've had the opportunity to work on many different types of radical social design & would like to share some of the insights I've learned.
(Group/ Community Integration
This is the most common type of radical social design I've come across. This covers preliminary community integration (i.e. Facebook activity) to deep integration (i.e. complete syncing of YouTube comments with your website).
Best For: Service Industry. Some level of community integration can be beneficial for most marketers, but the service industry has the most potential, in my opinion. Because of the inherent benefits of networking for the service industry, community integration shines a new light on your networking activities.
Best To Avoid: It's important to understand that community integration gives some control to the community. Things like censorship & ambiguity should be avoided. It's also important to understand that the most effective use of community integration allows community to remain in the network their familiar with. (i.e. if users are talking about you're brand on Twitter, allow users to participate without leaving the Twitter environment.)
Key Insight: Be transparent & authentic.
Non-Linear Experiences
Non-linear TV generally refers to 'on demand' television, but non-linear experiences go far beyond. Non-linear experiences generally have multiple touch-points; some that are new to users. (i.e. Ordering take-out from your X-Box) These experiences generally allow users to participate from any touchpoint they want. (i.e. Order pizza from my computer, pay through my iTunes account, get a receipt on my mobile phone)
Best For: Retail/ CPG. Social & e-commerce is emerging as a major distribution channel. Most North American retailers/ CPG manufacturers are not tapped into the potential of multi-channel e-commerce. The e-CRM potential of creating non-linear experiences is also being largely ignored.
Best To Avoid: The biggest mistake in adopting new technology is to make the adoption too soon. If the technology running your non-linear experience is not efficient or unproven, you need to mitigate the risk of down-time by being transparent with your audience. Apart from technological limitations, non-linear experiences need attention to architecture. Users should have pre-defined expectations that are met from channel to channel. (or node-to-node)
Examples:
www.hboimagine.com (HBO)
www.amazon.com (Amazon/ Facebook)
Key Insight: Be accessible & available all the time, in real-time.
Streamlining & Simplicity
Using your community to help streamline or simplify an experience can be substantially rewarding. Although your users might not all be right, when viewed collectively, you can extrapolate trends and make design decisions that impact the overall experience. (i.e. If usage patterns show that users rarely use a particular filter, you can remove it and make the whole experience simpler.)
Best For: Two of the most confusing categories of content-rich sites are: financial sites & government sites. These sites have the most potential for improvement. Combined with profile tracking and social CRM, these types of sites could serve up a customized experience for every user. The larger trends could be incorporated to their generic site and tested for optimization.
Best To Avoid: Allowing users to influence (or control) overall experience requires a substantial community. You need to get enough vocal or active users who can provide you with the data necessary to extrapolate trends. Small communities have the potential of feeding in less accurate data.
Examples:
Key Insight: Decentralize the design & approval process. There are often too many layers of vested interests between the user & the final experience. Decentralization tends to move those approving authorities closer to the end-user.
Augmented Reality
Users have been drawn to virtual experiences, but marketers are beginning to make the attempt to virtually enhance real experiences. There are mobile devices that can augment reality through it's camera in real-time; QR codes connect the virtual to the real; Google Maps allow users to experience locations virtually prior to visiting. These technologies that blur the lines between the real and the virtual are enabling social networks to leave the internet and enter the real world. Best For: The Telecom/ Technology industries has the biggest potential to facilitate augmented reality adoption.
Best To Avoid: Platform agnostic systems tend to take the lowest-common-denominator to build the experience. Platform specific systems allow you to take advantage of all the unique features of the platform. It's often more effective to create a really awesome iPhone app than it is to create a mediocre app that works on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. It's also important to create a multivariate test (mvt) plan with an iteration schedule built-in.
Examples:
www.yell.com (Yellow Pages)
Key Insight: Whatever you do should improve the users reality in some way.
Visualization
Data visualization is emerging as a useful way to display complicated information. This data is more relevant and more likely to be shared when it's driven my social/ digital actions. Interactive data visualizations are showing a lot of promise in terms of time-spent on pages that include interactive data visualizations.
Best For: Travel/ Automotive industries show potential for making use of data visualization. Having the ability to track and display what users are doing, where they're going, and who they're going with has substantial value. Imagine, knowing the number of free parking spaces within a city, or seeing the approach of everyone from your family during the holidays.
Best To Avoid: Make sure you actually use and display the data information you're using for your visualization. Missing out on SEO opportunities accounts for most mistakes from marketers finding utility in data visualization. Another common issue is having an inadequate technological solution displaying your visualization. It's important to re-evaluate your solution every 6 months, to ensure an optimum user experience.
Examples:
picclick.com/Etsy/ (Etsy)
www.bankofimagination.com (Camper)
Key Insight: Make the point easy to see. Although a data visualization is great at showing a complicated process or set of information, it needs to have a point. That point should be made clear instantly.
CONCLUSION
Understanding how radical social design can be most effective is an important part of being able to offer the world-class marketing campaigns. With these insights, models and matrix; you have some tools that can help you through the planning, ideation, design and execution phases of your marketing projects. In addition to all these insights, integrating a radical social design puts your audience front-and-centre. Once that's done, you'll have to pay attention to them. The simple act of giving your customers a voice can help make your company more customer-centric. Keep in mind, there are lots of marketers doing it right & making lots of money. Don't miss out.
