(I originally published this post on UXmag.com)

Over the past few years there's been a lot of discussion around whether an experience can be designed. But it seems like everyone's just getting hung up on semantics; an experience can be designed, but the user will always have the opportunity to experience it in a unique way. The reason every experience has the potential to be unique to the user is, in part, because cognition is unique to each user.

Cognition is about knowledge and understanding, so there's a ton of psychological principles that fall under the umbrella of cognition. I'll focus on two principles that, once understood, will elevate a UX practitioner’s designs to a whole new level.

Even when experiencing the same stimulus at the same time, many users will have completely unique experiences. That doesn’t mean an experience can’t be architected that utilizes knowledge about cognition to increase goal conversion. We create experiences to elicit a response from users; those users’ responses are either extrinsic (e.g., subscribing to a newsletter) or intrinsic (e.g., developing brand loyalty).

Some of the most important decisions UX designers make are those they don’t even think about. It’s generally understood that creating an intuitive interface is important, but few people are really good at articulating what makes an interface intuitive. This is where the concepts cognitive load and cognitive barriers play a huge role.

When dealing with web and software development, principles associated with cognition can be distilled into six distinct categories: three related to cognitive barriers, and three related to cognitive load.

Cognitive Barriers

A cognitive barrier is something that prevents a user from performing the action required to complete his goal. Most cognitive barriers are temporary in the sense that they can be overcome just through information processing. For example: John begins to fill out a credit card application online and is met with a series of open form fields asking for his name, address, phone number, etc. He’s able to quickly move from field to field using the Tab key on his keyboard. The last question on the form asks him to select his interests and provides him with an array of checkboxes. The momentary pause required to process that he needs to shift from keyboard input to mouse input is a cognitive barrier, but only requires that he understand what to do in order to resolve the barrier. That said, this still represents a potential abandonment point if John isn’t able to figure out what to do.

Barrier #1: Number of steps

Everyone has known about this barrier since the beginning of the Internet, and long before then. Why take three clicks when we can get it done in two?

Despite being the most well known barrier, it’s probably also the most misinterpreted because many people don’t understand that all three major cognitive barriers to have to be balanced. User testing and ongoing multivariate testing are two very good options for striking the right balance between number, length, and difficulty of steps in a user journey.

The takeaway: Understand that it’s equally important to know when to add steps as it is when to remove them. Five easy, short steps often impose a lower cognitive barrier than one long, difficult step.

Barrier #2: Length of steps

Just like barrier #1, the length of each step needs to be appropriate for a given experience. We can’t adopt a blanket rule that shorter steps make better experiences. In some cases, a longer step upfront could provide a substantially better experience as a whole.

There are two major considerations when examining length-of-step barriers: users expectations, and cognitive load. A user might expect to spend ten minutes applying for a credit card online, but might only expect to spend one minute finding show times for a movie. Additionally, users will only interact with systems they understand. Understanding the principles of decision-making, cognitive recognition, andcognitive recall will ensure users are not overwhelmed, while providing affordances for a complete experience.

The takeaway: Design pragmatic step lengths based on how motivated the user is to achieve his goal. Users will spend longer with sites, tools, apps, and products they enjoy than they will with ones they’re simply required to interact with. Users tend to prefer short steps that only ask them to resolve the immediate issue they’re faced with. For example, when a user lands on the Wikipedia page for the first time, he’s faced with the issue of selecting a language. It’s better to get him to select his language as one step and then get him to enter his search term as a second step rather than requiring him to fill out a series of questions that could be used to personalize his experience.

Barrier #3: Difficulty of steps

The difficulty of a given step is subjective, and is a main concern of UX professionals. Generally, it’s better to have easy steps; however, there are a couple of downsides to making things easy. Users tend to develop a greater sense of loyalty toward experiences that they’ve invested time in. Conversely, users tend to be fickle about experiences they’ve not invested much time in.

It’s important to understand that users tend to make quick decisions based on previously experienced conventions. This means that when steps of a process are considered important (e.g., selecting a payee, making a purchase, entering a contest) they need to make use of special design patterns that cause users to slow down. This type of slowdown often involves making steps more difficult to process, but result in less user error.

The takeaway: Don’t create unnecessarily difficult steps, but don’t immediately discount adding difficulty to limit conversion and increase the quality of the converted. Remember, users will be more likely to complete difficult steps if they understand why the step needs to be so difficult.

Cognitive Load

Cognitive load is the amount of working memory required to achieve the user’s goal. This principle forms the basis for Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think. The less a user has to think about what he needs to do to achieve his goal, the more likely he’ll be to achieve it.

Attribute #1: Number of choices

Choice/decision architecture is becoming one of the biggest and most important specialties within the UX field. Understanding natural decision pivot points and how to manipulate the saliency of decision-making elements is key to ensuring users are quickly able to make the right choice.

For example, the most effective e-commerce sites focus on getting users to the product they’re looking for as quickly as possible before hitting them with related products/up-sells. These sites make great use of natural decision pivot points. Once a user has found what he’s looking for, there will be a natural point at which he’ll be receptive to additional offers. If there are related products, up-sells, or related promotions, capitalizing on these pivot points is important.

The takeaway: Human working memory is limited. Users are more likely to move around a site with a simple structure than one with a very wide or very deep structure. George A. Miller published a paper in 1956 calledThe Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information is the quintessential guide to avoiding choice paralysis. It essentially stipulates that the majority of people have the capacity to remember 5–9 things. So if you’re creating a taxonomy, it would be ideal if it were somewhere in that Goldilocks zone. That said, a more recent study suggests that working memory limits are likely lower, possibly as low as four things.

Attribute #2: Amount of thought

The most important part of understanding cognitive load is understanding how much a person needs to think about a decision prior to making it. Thought processing is somewhat of an abstract concept because is varies substantially from person to person and doesn’t directly relate to real-world time. This means that it’s possible to create a longer experience that has a lower cognitive load, and conversely, to create a shorter experience that has a higher cognitive load.

Each experience has to be evaluated individually to determine whether people would:

1. understand that they need to take the time to make the desired decision, and
2. are willing to spend the time required to make the decision.

These are two distinct considerations. Many people are used to making hasty decisions online because they rely on their own experience to interpret design patterns. If they are asked to take the time to make the optimal decision, even if it only requires one second longer than it would to make a satisfactory decision, users will need special design patterns to recognize they’re being asked to do this.

Take the current incarnation of fox.com, for example. The primary navigation has little downward-facing arrows next to each element. Here’s a great example of a design pattern intended to slow users down and make an optimal decision. These arrows indicate that users should not simply select a section, but should expect to see a mega-dropdown with sub-categories.

Although this is a valuable design pattern, Fox has failed to use the appropriate interaction design pattern. They’ve decided to expand the mega-nav on click, which is fine, but rather than closing the mega-nav if the user clicks again (i.e., making each navigation element a toggle), Fox takes the user to that category landing page if the user clicks again.

The takeaway: Users rely on their own experience interacting with digital, and non-digital, products. Therefore, users will make decisions they understand first, and will only stop to consider their decision if they don’t understand what to do. If you use standard conventions, you’ll ensure users don’t have to think too hard to use your site, app, or product.

Don’t ask users to select between too many options. Again, the 7±2 rule is a great guideline to adhere to. Don’t have more than 5–9 calls-to-action, categories, or menu items displayed at any given time. This can be achieved by hiding additional options off-screen, or though a well-thought-out taxonomy. Hiding elements should be done using standard conventions, e.g., standard vertical scrolling, “Advanced” buttons, split buttons, collapsible areas, ”Show more” buttons, etc. Avoid hiding list items that need to be evaluated together.

Attribute #3: Confusion and choice

How would you log into an investment account with your online bank if your bank has two options: “Online Banking” and “Credit Cards”? Most people would use process of elimination to select “Online Banking,” but some users may abandon their goal if the don’t understand the choice. It’s kind of like asking people if they want a fork or a knife to eat their soup.

Many UX professionals get caught in this pitfall by not allowing users to evaluate a complete set of options at a glance. Remember the 7±2 rule? Well, this is where it starts to get slippery. If you’re unable to reduce the breadth of a site to 5–9 top-level categories, it’s better to display all of them than to display a subset of them. For example: John is looking for a set of work gloves and visits the Canadian Tire website. There are eight top-level categories that appear in the primary navigation. John begins to look for which category he thinks might contain work gloves. He doesn’t see a category that makes sense but knows that Canadian Tire sells them. The issue is that the canadiantire.ca only displays a subset of the total number of departments within its primary nav. Along the left rail, there’s local navigation that includes all of the departments, one of which is apparel. Apparel does not appear in the primary nav. It’s okay to show a subset or summary of options upfront if it’s clear that it’s only a subset, and if there’s an option to show all options.

There should never, or rarely ever, be a need to hide a selection of navigational options. It’s fine to hide the navigation as long as there’s a clear way to access it again; but it’s important to show all of the options when the navigation control is displayed.

The takeaway: Users often mistake a selection of options for the complete set of options. It’s easier for a user to understand which option to select when he can see the alternatives. If only five options of a 20-option set are visible at a time, it will be more difficult for the user to decide which option to select.

Conclusion

UX has a lot to do with how users find and consume content. Understanding the cognitive processes and nuances people go through when finding and consuming content is important to architecting an ideal experience or, at least, to architecting a set of conventions that support a user having an ideal experience.

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I've been working with CPG's for years and have figured out why so many have trouble staying relevant online. These insights come from examining internal documentation, and conducting ethnographic studies, from four different global CPG's and finding correlations. 

The synthesis of this work has cumulated into "The Ecosystem of Understanding", a framework for keeping CPG's (and everyone else) relevant online.

(View Full Size)

Although this framework was created specifically with CPG's in mind, it applies to many other industries. 

I've been able to extract 5 insights common to every CPG I've worked with; even the most innovative.

1. We don't know who we're talking to, but we like to pretend like we do.

2. We don't know why we're talking to them, but we know we should be.

3. We suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome.

4. We're inconsistent, but we're learning.

5. We're old, scared, and angry; but its only a matter of time before we're phased out.

THE SOLUTION: THE ECOSYSTEM OF UNDERSTANDING

The Ecosystem of Understanding was produced out of necessity. It began approximately a year ago, when the biggest of the CPG's I've been working with began asking some interesting questions. They asked things like: "Why are we spending so much time managing our vendors?", "Why are we the last to hear about emerging digital trends?", "What digital tools do we need to measure ROI more effectively?", "Why aren't our customers getting more excited about our products?".

After expanding my consulting contract beyond simple user experience, to include all aspects of the customer experience, I began a the long process of identifying issues, insights and eventually solutions.

A version of this ecosystem has been blown-up and pasted on the wall of several global CPG's brands walls. I was actually engaged by one to extract each element, and export each to allow them to print the ecosystem as a series of magnets.

For those of you who find the entire ecosystem overwhelming, here's a breakdown of each element.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY AREAS OF USER INTEREST

CPG's are generally very accepting of performing user research, if there's a good reason to do so. Many times, existing persona research is repurposed from print/ broadcast to be used to inform digital marketing/ communications. This tends to provide exactly the WRONG information digital strategists need.

Here's the process I like to go through, and recommend to the clients I work with:

1. Begin a social-listening campaign: This campaign should be run like any other social campaign. A social monitoring tool should be utilized to help identify authorities within your industry, use those authorities as hubs to identify related topics of conversation. Map those topics back to your original audience pool and expand each topic-pool by identifying all users who frequently discuss both topics related to your industry and topics from the related industry. Mapping these using a modified binned analysis will clearly indicate which topics you should be including in your communications strategy.

2. Within the selected topics, identify sub-groups (or Cohorts) who have similar traits. Each cohort grouping should have a clear authority (or hub) individual.

3. Within each cohort, identify common online activities every user participates in. Also identify what motivates each user to perform each activity. (i.e. Entertainment, Necessity, Security, Convenience.)

STEP 2: CREATE AUTHORITIES

Although this step can work on a departmental, or brand level; it works best when an entire organization has committed to the process of creating authorities. 

In it's simplest terms, a corporation can create authorities or 'centres of excellence' who'll be mandated to stay up-to-date on a particular channel, or topic. These authorities might work for a particular brand, but will operate like a consultant for all brands within the corporation. 

These authorities will need to be tapped into the collective wisdom of both internal teams, as well as all vendors. The easiest way I've been able to establish this type of collaboration, is through a micro-blog. In different circumstances, I've recommended both Tumblr, and Posterous to support collaboration.

Essentially, anyone from any department internally, and anyone from any vendors department can contribute to the micro-blog. The authority will curate what actually gets published, but will be notified anytime someone wants to contribute. 

Ideally, everyone from the authority team will subscribe to the micro-blog using an RSS reader, and will keep the RSS reader open in the background throughout the day. If a team member is often out of the office, a mobile RSS reader would work just as well. 

STEP 3: IDENTIFY COHORT COMMUNITIES & COMMUNITY HUBS

Micro-segment and automate social signal response assessment: At this point, I think everyone knows how to set up Google Alerts, Sysomos, or HootSuite to help with brand monitoring. These tools (combined with a governance document) can help determine when & how to respond to any given social signal. Many tools can take it one step further and establish a triggered workflow, alerting authorities based on pre-defined triggers. (i.e. If someone mentions the brand name with a negative sentiment AND mentions a competitor, that conversation can be automatically distributed to the most relevant set of authorities with a recommendation on how to respond.)

Create experience map to illustrate campaign, program, platform, and account user journeys: For any digital project, a large experience map (ideally printed on large format 3'x20' paper) that utilizes swim lanes to organize multiple user journeys across all digital channels. (Ideally, these user journeys will include all mediums, digital and non-digital.)

STEP 4: UTILIZE AUTHORITIES TO LEARN AND TEST

Utilize collaboration principles established in step 2 to organize learnings and establish ongoing testing. Here's one of the processes I've helped establish:

A. Each authority is responsible for managing their own test schedule, and test budget.

B. Each test (and the test parameters) will be posted within the respective category on the micro-blog and will automatically alert every other authority.

C. Each authority will have at least 2 business days to add comments to the post (test plan).

D. The test will be recorded and results will be shared in their raw format immediately upon receiving the results.

E. Each authority will have the option to analyze the results independently

F. The authority conducting the test will upload the results as an EDIT to the original post.

G. Anyone subscribing to the authorities collaboration RSS feed will be alerted to the final post.

H. 30 days after the publication of the test results, all users will be asked to rate the test & results and comment on how the information has been helpful or comment on how the information needs to be expanded upon.

Obviously, this framework doesn't work for every industry, but it does apply to many different industries outside of CPG's. I'd like to provide everyone with an editable PDF of the full ecosystem: this can be downloaded and edited in any vector editor like Adobe Illustrator. 

If you have any comments, questions, or thoughts about this; please leave a comment. I'm always looking for ways to improve, and expand. If you want a quick response, message me directly on Twitter. (@thejordanrules)

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Did anyone else else grow-up on stories about the old automotive pioneers? Stories about how every innovation pushed the industry forward. I'm not sure what happened, but let me outline a 5 point plan to re-energize the automotive industry.

1. THE CAR API

Let's assume the constantly connected car is already here. I think there can be 4G syncing for the short-term, and think wireless networking will become available globally within 5 years. 

If the possibly of having a connected car is already here, why isn't every car connected and transmitting data? We should have bidirectional communication between the cloud and any vehicle. This communication & data can be built on, and monitored by developers. 

I think this should become standardized, and mandatory for all new vehicles. This could revolutionize traffic reporting, toll roads, parking, law enforcement, driving, emergency response; as well as the automotive aftermarket, and automotive retail.

Automotive manufacturers: Imagine having access to data from every vehicle you have on the road, and imagine offering that data in a smart system to every owner. Imagine those owners monitoring their data through your site & apps. You'll have the attention of millions, and will have enough data & infrastructure to communicate real-time hyper-targeted notifications to anyone. From traffic alerts, to law enforcement alerts, and from marketing alerts to  alerts based on bio-sensor data; the potential of the CAR API is only limited by what we can imagine.

2. TAP THE CROWD

Understand the value of long-tail innovation. Essentially, there are lots of people who have lots of ideas. They don't always have good ideas, but establishing a listening & curation team can help utilize the power of the crowd.

Try using the opposite of the long-tail graph to outline how much listening you need to do in order to get the most value from the long-tail.

Some of this is already appearing in social media governance and organizational structure for supporting social business practices. I think the science and art of LISTENING is still in its infancy. Everyone needs to understand that listening isn't just a passive activity, but deserving of a department, and deserving of active analysis and testing.

3. BECOME MOTION FACILITATORS

I don't want to get too abstract, but the original requirements for cars were, at one time, fulfilled by horses. The world was getting bigger, and people were living further away. The further we live from each other, the more we rely on vehicles. 

So, now that we live all over the place, and have roads connecting us; why would we want to move in any other way than by car?

This is actually a big issue. Why would any industry work towards its own demise? Because it's them or us. Either we phase out petroleum reliant vehicles, or we won't be able to curb climate change enough to continue our way of life. The automotive industry isn't ignorant to this fact anymore. The overwhelming move to electric & hybrid technology is testament to the shift in thinking. 

Although electric vehicles is a great first-step; we can't stop there. Clean efficient mass transit for short, medium, and long distances is ideal solution. I think the automotive industry needs to lead this transition, and I believe a CAR API may be a great first step. Complete automation & logistic management over fleets of clean vehicles would allow us to:

A. Reduce/ eliminate roads & associated costs: Creating roads took a long time, and costs a lot of money. Replacing them with anything will take a long time, and will cost a lot of money. If we believe its worth it, we should start immediately diverting funds associated with building new roads to building a new infrastructure of mag-lev rails or something. I'm not staying we have to move to rail transportation, but we can definitely come up with something with a smaller physical and economic footprint than roads.

B. Reduce/ eliminate vehicular crashes: If we're building new infrastructure anyway, lets build it with automation controls to avoid people from having the ability to get into accidents, or drink and drive, or purposely run someone down.

C. Improve planet health: Obviously reducing emissions associated with vehicles will help curb climate change, it can't be the only effort. 

D. Improve human health: Again, it's obvious that making people walk a little bit, and bike a little bit, will make people a little bit more healthy. A side effect of shifting people away from cars, and building facilities to accommodate more bikes & people on-foot, is that more people will feel safe and encouraged to take healthier alternatives. I mean, I'd bike if I didn't see at least one bike accident each day. There are also psychological benefits associated with being more social and spending time around others.

4. THE NEW ROADS

By now, I'm sure everyone's seen Transcendent Man, and understands the idea behind the Singularity premise. For those who don't know: Transcendent Man is about a guy who thinks technology will merge with biology enough to allow us to live forever and connect in a way never thought possible. No one's really sure what it'll look like, but I'm thinking it'll start like the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution; with technological enhancements. 

Anyway, roads were always meant to be a way to connect people. They helped make the world smaller and more accessible. I think the internet represents the foundation for new roads. If vehicle automation is going to work, we need to have a network that can support that kind of traffic without losing connection. Essentially, we'll need to have access to the network from anywhere. There are several technologies that could provide us with global coverage. 

Once we have access to the network from anywhere, we'll need to improve bandwidth - or data compression. We'll need to prepare the network for improved interfaces. Now, when you think about it, our current interfaces rely on human physiology to interface with machines. (i.e. we have gestural interfaces because we have fingers, we have vocal interfaces because we can speak.)

So, once we have an omnipresent network that can transfer huge amounts of data, we can take advantage of biological & cognitive interfaces. We'll essentially be able to move from an age of sharing knowledge to an age of sharing understanding.

5. THE CORN OF THE MODERN WORLD

I think, at this point, everyone knows that corn is the most pervasive ingredient in the North American food industry. Corn starch, corn glutton, corn syrup, and a host of other corn byproducts make it directly into our foods and corn feed is often given to farm animals. 

Cars have become the corn of the modern world. Cars gave way to roads, roads shaped cities, and cities shape the world. I think the oil industry got a bad rap - I think the oil industry scaled up to meet the demands the automotive industry put on it.

What kind of world to we want to live in? Why don't we work backwards from there? Let's say we want to live in the world of 1000 years ago, with all of the conveniences of today. What would it take to get that done? 

1. Landscape

Ideal: Remove all the roads.

Problem: How will we be able to connect with one another?

Solutions: Either live closer together or find a way to travel long distances without roads.

2. Unite & Understand

Ideal: Reduce Population.

Problem: No one likes regulations, especially not on life.

Solution: International support of community planning initiatives. At one point in time, the automotive industry united communities. We need that sense of community again, this time on a global level. Individuals tend to do what's best for their community when community planning works.

3. Connect

Ideal: Wireless Innovation

Problem: Infrastructure 

Solution: WIthout diving too deeply into the technology, I believe wireless networking technology can encompass the world. This would essentially provide connectivity to anyone anywhere on the planet. I also, believe this same solution can be applied to power distribution. Allowing devices to access power anywhere.

4. Move Forward

Ideal: Learn from the Past

Problem: Mediocrity & Survival. People don't all like things the way they are, but are all used to them. It's hard enough to survive in the world we live in. Many people just want to get by.

Solution: Revolutionize the education system. Stop focusing on teaching every child the same stuff, in the same way. Start bringing psychology and anthropology into teaching by observing and listening to children in the early grades. Use empathy and sociological experimentation to determine what each student likes to do. Allow their interests to guide their educational experience. 

OK, so I'm not saying all of my ideas warrant exploration; but if you're reading this, I'm sure you have your own ideas that are worth exploring. Don't wait for the automotive industry, start exploring your ideas on your own. Explore them, and find a way to share them. 

I don't know about you, but I'm alright with things changing if they change for the better. I'm even ok with things changing for the worse, if we're striving for a long-term improvement. 

All I'm saying is, if we know we need to change the automotive industry - can someone please figure out how; and how we're going to get there? 

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Introduction: How digital ecosystems have evolved.

Over the past two decades, the world watched as brand-ecosystems evolved online. Where once, brands merely wanted to establish an online presence; now, they want to engage their customers through transmedia ecosystems.

This shows an evolutionary leap forward in terms of digital thinking. Many marketers and agencies have been slow (VERY SLOW) to react to the nature of this paradigm shift. It's hard to say who's catering to whom, but it's distructive. I believe education is the only way to move the industry forward, which is why I'm still committed to giving away my knowledge, templates, diagrams, and any other assets necessary to help encourage user-centric projects.

The two biggest problems & opportunities: design-centric projects & technology-centric projects. First, let me be clear about what I mean when I say design-centric or technology-centric. I simply mean, the driving-force behind the project is design or technology focused. (i.e. Starting with a CMS and designing templates that fit, or starting with photoshop and presenting a sleek set of mock-ups.) If you don't begin a project by engaging a UX strategist (or some similarly titled person) you risk running a project that isn't user-centric. I'm more convinced now than ever, that ALL digital projects should engage a UX strategist at some level.

A simple exercise I call Prioritization Scaling allows a project team and client to align quickly on what's most important.

(Download PDF Copy)

The scale is divided into two sections, top & bottom. The top section is intended to define what type of project we're working on. Is it: experiential, informational or usable. Obviously, these aren't mutually exclusive, but should be prioritized. The above example is for a usability-driven project, where content consumption is the biggest goal, and design takes a back-seat.

The bottom section is intended to determine the implementation priorities. What elements are most important: Accessibility/ Responsiveness, Visual Appeal, Utility/ Content, or Navigation. Again, this is just trying to strike the right balance.

Once the two sections have been arranged, they should be compared against each other. If there are inconsistencies, they should be discussed and the sections should be reordered if necessary.

Process: Standard project management methodologies lend themselves to user-centricity

There's a standard project framework that I refer to anytime I'm engaged to work on a project. Whether it be run in an agile or waterfall methodology. 

Essentially there are 4 phases, that are sometimes combined, or split-up. There's some level of research done, whether we actually conduct the research or it's given to us for analysis. We're looking for key user insights. When we've found them we need to synthesize a project roadmap that outlines how we plan on using the insights. This could be a BRD, brief, user stories, or sketches. The goal is to put some boundaries on the scope of the project. The end of the planning phase should produce a set of detailed wireframes or a prototype; ideally with a working design specification document (DSD). 

Baselining a set of wireframes or a prototype will allow the creative team to begin brainstorming on how to interpret them. Personally, I like to be involved with this process to help the team understand the underlying principles and intention of flows etc. By the end of the creative phase we should have a baselined design specification document. This can often serve as the online style guide.

The DSD and wireframes/prototype will be used concurrently by the development team to build the final deliverable. By the time the build phase is finished, we should begin to get data back so that we can begin to determine new user insights.

Now, the reason I don't think this process works as well with a design-centric project is that they tend to begin with creative and 'post-rationalize' planning and research. It might not sound like this is a big deal, but starting with creative doesn't always take users needs into account. This could lead to usability, business, or conversion issues down the road.

90% of the creative directors that I've worked with understand that this isn't the most ideal way to work and participate in the research and planning phases to understand and help guide certain key decisions. 

Benefits: How it benefits the WHOLE team

Understanding the user and what they need is a key aspect of any strategy department. A user-centric project gives the strategy department the time they need to do a proper discovery with users and the client.

Having key user insights and a framework for best practices with regards to IA & UX allows the creative department the freedom to focus on being really creative and innovative. The biggest hurdle I've experienced is the unwillingness to deviate from the wireframes. Including your experience strategist in brainstorming will allow you to blue-sky the interpretation while using the wireframes to stay grounded in reality.

Since users are the people who'll actually be using the end product, developers like user-centric projects because they take the time to figure out how everything will work. 

Project managers tend to like user-centric projects because they follow an easy-to-understand process. They also don't require that people take responsibility for aspects of the project that are outside of their expertise. (i.e. developers figuring out how creative should function)

It's easy to sell user experience and user-centric projects. It's been my experience that user-centric projects make clients happier, and keep them coming back, longer than design-centric projects.

Long-Term Revenue Model: Why user centric projects will keep the lights on.

I'm a strong believer in iterative improvement, even on a campaign-basis. This means you do something, measure it, analyze the findings, and improve it. The more you improve it, the better the experience will be for the user, the better the ROI will be for the client, and the more the client will want to invest with you.

Conclusion

Why wouldn't you want to have a user-centric project? The only reason I could think of: We don't have a seasoned UX professional to guide us. I actually think this might be a more pervasive reason that you might think. Many agencies make their name on their creative, and think they should lead projects because they've had success in the past. This kind of thinking is great for agencies who want one big campaign to sweep the awards shows, and make a big name for themselves - but one 'hot-spot' for a client doesn't mean as much as consistently delivering quality. So, it's not only that you might not have a UX person to guide you; it might be that you don't even know you need one. UX people only help the creative process when they're used properly. If you're not sure how to integrate UX into your practice, let me know, I can give you some tips in 15 mins.

Note: Next article will focus on user-centric pitches

Follow me on Twitter @thejordanrules

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Over the past three years I've invested a lot of time and energy figuring out how digital channels, specifically social media, can be used to achieve business objectives. I've received a number of requests to summarize what I've learned. This post represents a compendium of my work on social media and digital strategy.

This post will cover the following note: I tried making these anchor links, but it didn't work:

Determining If You Should Be Using Social Media

Part 1: The pervasive reach of social media

Part 2: Information distillation through social media

Part 3: Propagation of News through Social Media

Part 4: Corporate Adoption of Social Media

Part 5: Process of participatory marketing

Part 7: Maximizing revenue through social media

How You Should Be Using Social Media

Part 1: Which social media channels should You be using

Part 2: How you should be using social media

Part 3: Framework for branding through social media

Part 4: Social Media Lifecycle Framework

Part 5: Why PR is ruining social media

Part 6: Collective Storytelling

Part 7: Social Customer Service

Advanced Social Media Planning

Part 1: Iterative Brand Equity

Part 2: Radical Social Design

Part 3: Models for Social Media Integration

Part 4: Cohesively Tie Marketing Tactics Across Multiple Social Media Channels

Part 5: Permeable Community Strategies & Sympathetic Social Systems

Part 6: Social Media Achilles Heel - Content Generation

DETERMINING IF YOU SHOULD BE USING SOCIAL MEDIA

PART 1: THE PERVASIVE REACH OF SOCIAL MEDIA

I think everyone should be using some form of social media; especially in business.

Many businesses have started making use of social media in some way; however many still aren't participating in any form of social media. Of those, the most common reason for non-participation is that they genuinely believe that their customers aren't using social media; therefore they shouldn't.

In fact, I've recently heard that some businesses don't even think their customers are online.

I've compiled the following, to address why even businesses without online customers should participate in social media.

If you think your customers aren't online at all, here are reasons to participate in social media:

Reason 1: Even if your customer isn't online, those people he trusts and looks to for advice might be.

Reason 2: Your business can collect valuable research on your competition, industry trends, upcoming technology, etc. Using social media as a business intelligence gathering tool is a valuable reason to participate.

Reason 3: If your customer isn't online; there might be an opportunity to market to those who aren't buying from you. You can endear your brand with a new audience without alienating your current audience, or you could create a brand extension that would appeal to a new market.

Reason 4: Influential publications often pick up stories that make use of social media in new or unique ways. Start a social media campaign; and get in front of your customer via traditional media covering your campaign.

Reason 5: "Bacterial Growth" - What I call "Bacterial Growth" is like viral content; but when something goes 'viral' it generally means that it spreads until market saturation is reached, then effectively dies. "Bacterial Growth" refers to a multi-channel infection that experiences a heightened growth period and a long sustained brand equity. Where the 'bacteria' doesn't die; it just changes. I suggest that a well-thought campaign that includes offline components can go viral online and offline. (e.g. iCoke, Foursquare)

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PART 2: INFORMATION DISTILLATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

It's generally accepted that we have access to more information than we could ever process in a lifetime.

Social and online media are especially great because they are inherently more manageable than offline media.

I suggest that users get information from 3 main categories online:

1. The Micro-Blog: Includes Twitter, Friend Feed, Facebook; and any other site that makes use of micro-interactions.
2. The Blog: This would include blogs; but would also include any site that's article-based.
3. The Email: Includes newsletters, promotional emails, and any other media sent to someone's inbox.

With those assumptions; here's the model:

There are inherent information management problems with each channel.

The Email

In this model, this will represent a message: 

Email generally contains unidirectional messages, that come to one place (the user's e-mail address). In this model, our subject would have subscribed to several interesting entities that send periodic information via email. These emails might contain multiple messages, but will generally have unique content.

Primary Problem: Information quality - Receiving email means you're at the mercy of the publisher. You receive the information they deem to be relevant & often don't get to clarify any ambiguous content.

Solution: Sophisticated Email Client - many e-mail clients offer auto-storing; where you can have e-mails filtered and sorted into folders for your review. You can also use search tools to quickly locate the most relevant information.

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PART 3: PROPAGATION OF NEWS THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

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I've been thinking about news lately. What it is, how its transmitted, and how it changes things.

News is undoubtedly important; it's how we learn what happening around us. Other than experiencing it for ourselves, it's the only way we know what's going on in the world.

News takes many different shapes, from formal investigative reporting, to anecdotal storytelling. All news are stories; but not all stories make the mainstream news. Here enters social media and the independent reporter.

We no longer have to accept the sensationalized definition of news. Mainstream media, in my opinion, creates news that the largest percentage of the population in a given area will find interesting. This averaging of news often ends up including reports some people don't care about; and not including reports other people really care about. Through social media we can now choose what we consider news - and here's how news propagates through the social media universe.

Often, news starts out as rumor and speculation. One person hears something from a source, and it gets spread to another and another. The more interesting the information, the quicker it will spread.

Once a legitimate news source picks up the story (you can decide for yourself what a "legitimate news source" is) they'll start the reporting cycle: Research, lead checking, analysis etc. Until they produce a finished news product. This could be a written story, tweet, photo, video, etc.

When a finished news product is released, it'll spread throughout the social media sphere based on how relevant it is, how trust-worthy the source is, and how engaging the story is. It'll eventually reach maximum interest and start becoming 'yesterdays news'.

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PART 4: CORPORATE ADOPTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA

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.

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PART 5: PROCESS OF PARTICIPATORY MARKETING

I'm not saying that this model is the best way to run social media projects; but if we start listening to customers and use those insights to drive business needs we're already starting on better footing. Keeping the user engaged throughout the process will help ensure the campaign is really targeted to the right crow

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PART 6: SOCIAL MEDIA CRM

We all know there are essentially 2 ways to increase ROI.

Here's a quick review:

1. Get new customers to buy your product
2. Get existing customers to buy more product

The way to do this; combination of increased message reach and increased message frequency.

Assume, for every 10 people I reach with a message, I get 1 conversion. (1 person buys from me).

Reach: If I reach 20 people with a message, I'll get 2 conversions.

Frequency: If I hit the 10 people with 2 messages, I'll get 2 conversions.

Pretty straightforward. Everyone understands that.

ROI is different in the social media universe. Why? Because reach and frequency are, in majority, controlled by the community.

PART 7: Maximizing Revenue Through Social Media

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 forindividuals.

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.)

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HOW YOU SHOULD BE USING SOCIAL MEDIA

PART 1: WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS SHOULD YOU BE USING

I've categorized and compared 7 social media channels that are currently being used by both B2B and B2C brands. I've suggested which type of brand works best in each channel.

(click here to view full size)

Blogs:

Generally, blogs work better for B2B brands because they require a certain level of prior knowledge and interest. The effort required to follow blogs generally means that the audience already has an interest in the industry. That is why there are so many industry-based blogs.

B2C brands can still take advantage of 3rd party blogs; but generally don't get the ROI required to justify maintaining their own blog
 

Micro-Blog:

For a similar reason, B2C brand's likely won't find the value in maintaining a micro-blog. However there are exceptions, and this particular channel is evolving.

B2C brands are starting to exploit micro-blogging for customer service. Additionally, some B2C brands are figuring out ways to integrate the real-time functionality of micro-blogging platforms into their marketing efforts.

I maintain, that at the present time, this channel is still better suited to B2B brands; but I can recognize that it has value for B2C brands.
 

Social Networks:

 There are many types of social networks; many niche social networks are specifically designed for B2B brands, and, therefore, are better suited for them. (e.g. LinkedIn)

Excluding those social networks that were designed for a niche market; I suggest that social networks are better suited for B2C brands. The reason is that brands can take advantage of being introduced to their potential customers through their friends.

People have the ability to 'discover' brands their friends like. Additionally, many social networks offer in-network multimedia communication options. Example: Facebook allows you to create a dialog with your audience through images, video, text, and interactive applications; while Twitter allows you to create a dialog using text & links only.

B2B brands definitely should take advantage of social networks; but many social networks are better suited for B2C brands.

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PART 2: HOW YOU SHOULD BE USING SOCIAL MEDIA

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PART 3: FRAMEWORK FOR BRANDING THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

I suggest there are 5 primary models a brand can use to communicate with its audience via social media. (These models can be applied to other media as well, but some work much better, and are much easier to execute using social media.)

1. Direct Communication
2. Communications Catalyst
3. Cooperative Communication
4. Participatory Definition
5. Brand Embodiment

Direct Communication: Occurs when a brand communicates it’s message directly to the audience.

Timeline: Instant

Participation: Minimal

Example: Youtube Video (Dove Evolution)

Communications Catalyst: Refers to a brand that encourages or provides the means of communication between two or more customers.

Timeline: Short

Participation: Minimal

Example: Crowd Sourcing (Best Buy IdeaX)

Cooperative Communication: Is a type of participatory marketing, where the brand proactively participates with its audience.

Timeline: Intermediate

Participation: Results proportional to participation

Example: Dynamic Facebook Page (Dew Labs)

Participatory Definition: The opening of a brand to influence, or re-design by its audience.

Timeline: Intermediate to Long

Participation: Minimal, but ongoing for better results

Example: Customer-Generated Branding (Doritos Undefined Flavour)

Brand Embodiment: Happens when an individual, or group of individuals, develop such a strong affinity for the brand that they will recommend it without being prompted. (Of course this also means, that if prompted they’ll recommend the brand, and also means that it’s their brand of choice.)

Timeline: Long

Participation: Substantial, and ongoing

Example: Apple* (Check out the # of related videos & comments)

*Note: Apple isn't the best example, because they didn't strictly use social media to follow this model. A better example might be Best Buy.

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PART 4: SOCIAL MEDIA LIFECYCLE FRAMEWORK

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.

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PART 5: WHY PR IS RUINING SOCIAL MEDIA

I remember when social networking was about sharing personal content with family, friends, and colleagues. Lately, I've noticed a lot of inauthentic brand communications littering my streams with noise.

The Conflict

I do 'like' certain brands, and want my friends to know which brands I have a particular affinity for. However, I don't want to get spammed with creepy questions, or comments from a brand spokesperson. (or Brand Ambassadors)

Branding and PR are intrinsically linked

I subscribe to the idea that it's possible to create and maintain a brand through social media. I don't believe PR is the most effective way of doing that.

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PART 6: COLLECTIVE STORYTELLING

The ability to tell stories has always been one of the most powerful ways to connect with other people.

Social media has given us a unique way to to tell stories as a collective. Here's a road map for collective storytelling.

Stop #1 - Define Your Story

The process of discovering what you want to tell a story about is always different, but the most important step in storytelling. You need to be an expert on what your story is about.

Starting a story without knowing what it's about will likely cause confusion. If the collective is confused by a story, it's unlikely that they'll participate in telling it.

The collective will look to that person who started the story for reinforcement and reassurance that the story is still on track. Ensure you monitor your story and continue to participate in telling it, or risk the story ending.

Stop #2 - Spark a Conversation

In collective storytelling, stories are made up of wide-reaching conversations. Those conversations begin with a 'conversation spark'.

PART 7: SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

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.

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ADVANCED SOCIAL MEDIA PLANNING

PART 1: ITERATIVE BRAND EQUITY

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.

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PART 2: 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.

PART 3: MODELS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION

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.

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PART 4: COHESIVELY TIE MARKETING TACTICS ACRROSS MULTIPLE SM CHANNELS

Let's first decide which tactic will work best.

Here's the Social Media Tactic Refinement Framework I use:

(Click here to download as a PDF)

Here's how it works:

Part A: Consider business goals, and distill them into a coherent strategy.

Part B: Take the strategy and derive campaign objectives. Distill your objectives into the primary message you want to deliver.

Part C:

Plot whether your message is targeted to businesses or consumers. Refine the message as necessary. 
Then, plot whether the campaign will be providing more value, or more entertainment to the community. Again, refine the message as necessary. 
Then, decide the type tactic you'll use. 4 basic social media tactics are:

Content: Where original content is created, or content is reused.
Contest: Where a submission is entered, and winner announced.
Game: Where one or more users play a game. Prizes are not required.
Incentive: Where the company will give you something, if you participate, or do something for them.

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PART 5: PERMEABLE COMMUNITY STRATEGIES & SYMPATHETIC SOCIAL SYSTEMS

Create permeable community strategies & sympathetic social systems.

Mastering the permeable community strategy

A permeable community strategy is special because it allows marketing & other communication messages to pass through without altering the fundamental social constructs of the community. (i.e. if I join the Nike Facebook fan base because they were supporting the Tour De France. I'll eventually become a disenfranchised fan because they'll eventually move to a new discussion. In fact, I might find all the other non-Tour-De-France updates annoying. If Nike created a community called "Enjoy the Ride" and encouraged people to share bike-riding related information, and provided curated content year-round, it could easily support the Tour De France sponsorship campaign.)

There are 3 steps to create a permeable community strategy.

1. Identify your customer: This isn't always as easy as it sounds. Identifying your customer involves a market analysis that should tell you who your highest-value customers are, and what they think about you. It should also tell you where your customer tends to spend his time online.

2. Identify topics your customers find interesting: Once you know who you need to observe, begin observing them. This step can also take some time, but it shouldn't prevent you from doing a preliminary topical analysis & begin to create a broad-topic community; it can be focused over time. Observing your high-value customers will help you identify topics they're interested in.

3. Create topic-based communities: Once you've identified topics your high-value customers are interested in, you can craft a creative platform that can support the community.

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PART 6: SOCIAL MEDIA ACHILLES HEEL - CONTENT GENERATION

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. 

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I hope this compendium of my work on social media will be helpful for you, your organization, and your clients. The more everyone understands, the easier it will be to create effective communications, content, and experience strategies. 

Questions or comments, please let me know below or @thejordanrules

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As more-and-more brands increase their online presence, they'll be faced with a dilemma: create strict UI standards, or flexible UI guidelines.

There are pros and cons associated with either choice but, with the chancing face of the internet, flexible guidelines seem to be the best option.

Firstly, let me explain what I mean by UI standards or guidelines. Anytime a online style guide is created, there should be a section for UI and UX guidelines. Creating this type of document is often lead by the creative team. When creating this section, you'll be faced with the decision to create strict or flexible guidelines. Note: Not all online style guides govern an entire portfolio of sites or the entire brands online presence, but a more succinct user experience will be achieved if the style guide takes everything into consideration.

I recommend having the following sections, relaying the following information, within this section:

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Considerations when defining a guideline

Cross-Domain Frequency

Description: How often your users move between the different web properties your brand owns or has an established presence. If each site caters to a different audience, there might only need to be branding similarities - rather than UI consistency.

Question to ask: How often do users interact with your multiple online properties each session?

Importance and Impact to User Experience

 Description: The reasoning behing applying this guideline to all sites. For instance, if a consistent link style across all platforms increases usability for 4% of users it might be worth implementing, but if it didn't increase usability for anyone it would be better to allow different link styles on each site. This can be easily measured through remote usability testing.

Question to ask: How does this guideline contribute to an improved user experience? Answer in the form:  This guideline will provide consistency when creating __________ , which is important to the user experience because _____________.

Dependencies

Description: Some conventions will work for all situations, but some require that additional conventions be established. A good example are tool-tips: Some forms can open a tool tip when a user interacts with the form field, but some forms (like radio buttons and drop down lists) will require an icon or label to trigger the tool tip.

Another great example are the search fields associated with google and youtube. There are consistent elements, but diveate when it benefits the user.

Question to Ask: Will this guideline work for all defined use cases?

Context

Description: Some conventions work when in context with specific content, visual design, or other conventions; and don't work outside of that context. A good example is the left navigation established on sears.com - This navigation works very well for the amount of content on the site, but wouldn't work as well for a microsite, or the sears card site.

Another great example is any site that has a registration process and checkout, but the primary site is more of a brochure site. You might want to create a guideline that suggests that the header/ footer be omnipresent, but it's often better to remove all distractions during registration and check-out.

Question to Ask: Does this guideline enable the optimum user experience when examined in different contexts?

As an experience strategist, the only thing I dislike more than a poor user experience is being forced to create a poor user experience due to a lack of understanding of how strict guidelines and rules interfere with experience architecture. Although this often comes from either creative directors, or clients who are misinformed; it can happen at any level when online brand/ style guildelines are created.

In the end here's my advice to anyone relying on established guidelines to inform the UX of a site build or redesign: If the guildeline doesn't support a good user experience, it needs to be re-examined. Strict, detailed guidelines tend to get outdated quickly, and broad guidlines tend to last for years (if not, forever).

If you're a marketer and you're agency creates guidelines for a portfolio of sites that suggest unreasonably strict UX/ UI, question them on it. Fight for guidelines that focus on great user experience over unnessessary consistency.

Share your thoughts below, or let me know what you think on Twitter.

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Brands have been focusing of integrated experiences and integrated marketing for the past decade or two; recently social media integration has pushed marketers to try new things, like transmedia storytelling.

Now, Bloom’s Taxonomy was first proposed in 1956 by a committee of smart people, chaired by Benjamin Bloom. The first domain that was described in first publication is the cognitive domain.

The following classification system first appeared in The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. 

Here, I describe how the classification system can be applied to integrated experiences.
 

Remembering: Refers to remembering a specific brand

Understanding: Refers to understanding that a specific type of product/service/idea exists. (i.e. I never knew they made tablet computers.)
 

Application: Refers to conversion. Think applying for a credit card or bank account. This could also include subscribing, or purchasing.
 

Analysis: Refers to the cognitive processing of a specific message as it relates to other messages the user may be receiving.
 

Creation: Refers to the response from a user in reference to a specific message. A user can create an actual artifact, or simply create an opinion.

Evaluation: Refers to ongoing evaluation of individual experiences, which contribute to individual preference.

What does Bloom’s Taxonomy tell us about integrated experiences?

1.    Integrated experiences should only utilize channels that facilitate achieving one of the goals established above.
2.    Buying has nothing to do with sales.
3.    Integrated experiences and integrated systems are two different things

How does Bloom’s Taxonomy help us map an integrated experience?

Introducing the Deconstructed Bloom’s Wheel Ideation Map

(Full PDF Download Here)

This type of ideation map will help:

A.    Keep the team focused & on track
B.    Deliver stronger ideas, with a stronger rationale
C.    Produce more ideas
D.    Prioritize communication channels
E.    Create synergy between strategy and creative
And more.

Here’s how it works, but keep in mind that the PDF can be opened and edited to allow you to customize the maps use for your specific needs.

Bloom’s cognitive domain information is categorized and spread across the map.

STEP 1: Define & segment your users.

If you haven’t already done this, it’s an important first step. Define your target audience, ideally as personas, and map them against the categories established by Bloom’s Taxonomy.

STEP 2: Identify what you want your user to do.

This step is often forgotten in many marketing campaigns; instead, many marketers define a project from a business requirements standpoint. This can leave the end-product lacking focus.

Reference how each category is used and decide on realistic goals for each persona.

STEP 3: Ideate vertically & theme

Look at the map as vertical columns, and ideate. Take Bloom’s verbs & assessment types into consideration while focusing on each individual persona & goal.

I recommend using the KJ brainstorming method to develop ideas for each column & persona, then pooling those ideas based on their similarities. These pools will represent your idea ‘themes’.

STEP 4: Ideate horizontally across 3 individual themes

During step 2, you may have several dozen themes. The task, at this point, will be to find (or develop) 3 themes that are common to each column or persona.

[Note: You don’t have to create 3. The number you chose will represent the concepts you’ll be fleshing out. Choose as many or as few as you want to present.]

STEP 5: Sketch

If you have a media strategy already done, you can use this to help inform which channels of communication will be used; if you don’t just start selecting some.

For each channel of communication (i.e. website, search, facebook, email, newspaper, tv, magazine, billboard, bus shelter, etc.) sketch out implementation concepts that align with the ‘idea platforms’ you’ll have developed in step 3.

I recommend using the large paper approach proposed by David Sibbett over sketching out experiences/ ideas on your own.

STEP 6: Evaluate

Don’t evaluate immediately. Let each idea compilation marinate at least a day. Ideally, you’ll have a week to think, compare, enhance, and experiment.

The goal of this step is to identify which concept will be your recommendation, which channels you want to focus on, and how the concept will come to life on each channel.

Obviously, a similar process can be applied to content strategy; and a slightly enhanced process can be used to create a CRM strategy.

I’d love to answer any questions you might have, or respond to any comments you’d like to leave. I encourage you to leave comments, or tweet me @thejordanrules.

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If you’ve ever wanted a resource that outlines a easy-to-reference library of social media interaction patterns, you’re in luck. I’ve outlined the 12 primary social media interactions, their standard conventions, how to use them, and what goals are best achieved with them.

If you think there are any additions I should add, let me know. Leave a comment, or send me a note on Twitter @thejordanrules

12 Primary Social Media Interactions
 

The Vote

Use: A user is given the opportunity to show favor, or disfavor, for some content like a photo, video, blog post, etc. OR for a brand, group, individual, or idea.

Goals: Research, Awareness,

Examples: Facebook Like Button, Linkedin Like Button, YouTube Star Rating (before they were removed)
 

The Share

Use: A user is given the ability to share content with a friend, or group of friends.

Goals: Awareness

Examples: Share This Button, Post to Twitter Button
 

The Comment

Use: A user is given the ability to respond to a piece of content.

Goals: Research, Lead Generation, Engagement, Awareness

Examples: Blog Commenting, Facebook Comments, Disqus
 

The Post

Use: A user is given content to consume.

Goals: Establish expertise, Lead generation, Awareness

Examples: Flickr Photo, Blog Post, YouTube Video

The Chat

Use: A user can directly communicate in real-time with another user

Goals: Customer Service, Engagement, Establish Expertise, Awareness

Examples: Twitter @reply & Direct Message, Facebook Chat

The Play

Use: A user can engage with a game, contest, or other system that employs game mechanics.

Goals: Awareness, Engagement, Lead Generation

Examples: Farmville, Burger King Sacrifice, FourSquare
 

The Join

Use: A user can show interest in a brand, group, individual, tool, or idea by becoming a part of a group.

Goals: Lead generation, Awareness

Examples: Facebook Like Button, Sign-in with Twitter, MSN Passport

The Buy

Use: A user can directly purchase a product or service; or make a donation.

Goals: Sales, Awareness

Examples: Facebook Storefront, Groupon, Amazon
 

The Update

Use: A user can quickly share a short thought, idea, or other piece of content.

Goals: Branding, Establish Expertise, Lead Generation

Examples: Twitter post, Facebook Status Update, Linkedin Status Update, FourSquare Check-in

The Tag

Use: A user can identify another user when posting some content.

Goals: Awareness

Examples: Facebook Tag, Twitter @ Reply

The Invite

Use: A user can ask a friend to perform an action.

Goals: Awareness

Examples: Linkedin Group Recommendation, Facebook Application Invite
 

The Connection

Use: A user can create a link between himself and another user.

Goals: Lead Generation, Awareness, Establish Expertise

Examples: Facebook Friend, LinkedIn Connection, Twitter Follow

I've found it valuable to refer to this list (and use these graphics) for roadmapping social media strategies.

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Mediocrity is relative, so it's not usually something that can be monitored. You can monitor the people you put in charge of leading your business, however.

Innovation is rarely the reason companies fail, but when it is, it tends to be a acute failure. On the flip-side, mediocrity is like a chronic sickness that will kill a company, but can keep it alive for decades.

I'm usually hired to help guide marketers toward achieving their goals by improving user experience. However, doing this can sometimes lead me down a path I was never expecting to go.

Late last year, a major Canadian financial institution hired me to improve online customer experience. It started off as a great project, they had huge budgets, and have been stagnant for years - so they were focused on getting it done right, over getting it done fast.

I'm now involved with a inter-departmental restructure, and the distribution of talent. When I started the project, I never thought I'd be involved with something like this, but I feel very lucky to be able to be a part of it.

Although I'm not allowed to reveal the name of the financial institution, I've been authorized to share some key learnings, and solutions to issues that ran much deeper than a mediocre online customer experience.

Insight #1 - The organization has too much red-tape to be innovative.

Solution: Institue TOMB protocol

Description: To enable innovation from every corner of the organization, I worked along side an ethnographic research firm to identify key barriers to achieving this goal. We created the TOMB protocol to expedite potential issues, and ensure those issue don't prevent forward thinking & innovation.

TOMB stands for: Technology, Operations, Minority customers, and Budget. Essentially, there are interdepartmental directors that facilitate the TOMB protocol, which can be used to identify concerns without placing restrictions on a concept. Whether there be technological concerns, operational/ organization concerns, concerns regarding minority customers, or budgetary concerns, the TOMB protocol can be used to ensure a concept can make it through the red-tape without being shot-down or diluted.

Cutting through the red-tape doesn't mean a concept will actually make it to implementation, but it's surprising how much money, time, and resources can be made available for good ideas that might never have gotten past gate-keepers.

Insight #2 - Jaded business leads are relying on outdated thinking to inhibit innovation.

Solution: The 3-Year Glitch

Description: I'm not sure if this is as pervasive as I think it is, but it was definitely a big issue in this company. Many business leads have held their positions for decades, while producing mediocre results. They weren't doing anything that would require disciplinary action, but they weren't doing anything that required recognition. They were meeting their goals; many seemed to be struggling to even do that. We found out the reason was the goals were often set on market analysis that put very little weight on the decisions made by the business lead. As long as they maintained the status-quo their goals should be achieved.

So, when business analysts and external consultants were hired to identify how the business could move to the next level, many business leads resisted any suggestions that put the status-quo at risk. I actually used a quote I took from a business leads email correspondence to her business analyst to explicitly illustrate this point: "Well, yes, we NEED to get better, but we don't want to change anything substantial to do it."

This helped us to pass a new HR policy called The 3-Year Glitch. Essentially, once a business lead has held their position for 3 years, they will be moved to lead a new part of the business. We created a series of programs that supported this in terms of training, peer reviews, mentoring, skills/ interest analysis; but essentially, after holding a position as a business lead for 3 years, you got to own a different piece of the business. The rationale was that the open-mindedness of business leads within the first three years of holding the position, encourages innovation, discourages mediocrity, and fosters trust & reliance on subject matter experts & consultants.

Insight #3 - Fear of failure is causing inter-departmental sabotage

Solution: Transparent Non-Departmental Bonus Structure

Description: This one still hasn't passed, but is being presented to the board of directors. The issue we identified was that business leads were deflecting potential failure by transferring issues to other departments. An example was, rather than improving recruitment & training for call centre representatives; the business lead for online customer service buried contact numbers. Although this might help short-term figures in the sense that there's fewer calls, and less of a requirement to have staff available to take calls; it eventually will lead to customer dissatisfaction, or a branch visit. Either way, the offset cost, is simply a band-aid solution for an overwhelmed call centre. So, instead of rewarding the business lead for saving money in his department, we'd penalize the entire corporation if the bottom-line fell.

This suggestion has a substantial appendix of methodologies to improve collaboration, communication, and team work among different departments. Essentially, we want to enable employees to identify root-causes of issues & ideate innovative solutions. With regards to the call centre issue; we'd prefer the business to put the contact numbers up-front, and staff properly. Ideally, some of the collaboration methodologies should help him identify that the root cause of an overwhelmed call centre is because of unclear communications, lack of self-serve options online, and improperly trained customer service representatives. These would all be actionable items that could increase profit for the entire company.

Although these three insights & solutions are specifically designed for one large financial institution, many of the principles can be applied to any size company, from any discipline. I know that some of these solutions don't contain enough detail to be implementable, but I'm not writing this article to provide you with specific, actionable, solutions - but am writing to (hopefully) inspire you to join the fight against fear-based mediocrity. If you have business leads who're afraid of a lower bonus, losing their job, or just being blamed; you're encouraging fear-based mediocrity.

I encourage you to find solutions. If anyone else has run into issues like this, I encourage you to share them & share solutions you think could correct the problem.

Obviously, not all companies are willing to change; but those that are open to it are setting themselves up for success.

@thejordanrules

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One of the most common questions I was hearing two years ago was "How should I use social media?". Recently, I've been hearing the question less and less. I'd normally be thrilled that people were learning how to effectively use social media, except people aren't. People have stopped asking, but only because they're jumping in without a plan - or worse, with a poorly designed plan.

Since November of 2010, I've been collecting data from a series of spiders, feeds, and alert platforms I was able to tie together. I've sliced the data-up and created the reference guide (located below) outlining the most effective ways to use various different social media channels, some pitfalls to be aware of, and some opportunities & insights to consider.

I also included three pieces of "stinky" advice that have been presented to me over-and-over. These are some of the most dangerous pieces of advice, because they seem logical, yet can be interpreted in hundreds of different ways. People misinterpreting these pieces of advice are actively damaging brands, wasting money, and annoying their audience.

Stinky advice #1: Fish where the fish are.

I have two big problems with this; it's obvious, and it's misleading. It's obvious because it's common sense; you don't fish in the city, and don't market AXE deodorant in bingo halls. It's misleading because people have been using it to rationalize being on Facebook & Twitter. Sure, your audience might be on those social networks, but so is everyone else. The real question should be: how are they using those social networks? Answering this can provide you with insight on how to really target the people who'd be most receptive to your message.

Stinky advice #2: Listen & respond to your customers.

On the surface, this seems like advice that everyone should follow. My issue is that it's not specific. Almost anything can be considered a response; and your customers talk about so many different things, the real value is finding commonalities between the subjects your customers talk about. Many agencies & marketers I've been working with have interpreted this as: listen for brand mentions, consider sentiment, and respond accordingly. This, obviously, isn't a bad thing to do; but it's the least you can do. If you're not doing this, you're missing out on the lowest hanging fruit social media channels can produce. If you want to really create brand advocates & engage with your customers demonstrate that you're listening through real-world actions. (i.e. Don't just tell me you're sorry, fix the problem so it doesn't happen again.)

Stinky advice #3: Content is king.

This has to be the most ambiguous statement I've ever heard. Everything a marketer produces can be considered content, so yeah, it's king, queen, and everyone else. I've actually worked with several major brands that use this statement to fuel their shotgun approach to content development. They've interpreted this to mean: Create an editorial calendar that focuses on supporting different business units throughout the year by targeting different user personas. The problem with this is that a brand that tries to be many different things to many different people risks alienating everyone. A better option is to focus on something you can own, and use alternate communication channels for secondary messaging.

(original size)  or  (PDF)

The better you understand the concepts illustrated in this reference guide, the better you'll be able to craft a communications plan.

1. Understand what you want from participating in social media:

Branding: building or maintaining an image or reputation.

Direct Sales: selling a product or service directly to users.

Indirect Sales: converting a user into a customer through the use of a conversion funnel.

Research: finding out insights about your customers, your market, or your industry.

Customer Service: helping users who are already customers.

Collaboration: helping employees learn & communicate with each other (and your customers).

2. Understand the issues & opportunities associated with each potential social media channel.

3. Select channels, and set realistic benchmarks. Understanding how different networks grow, and what to listen for is key.

4. Never stop testing, evaluating, and learning from the communities you participate. It's better to participate in fewer channels effectively, than it is to try and participate everywhere the "fish" are.

I encourage you to ask questions, post comments, and share any insights you have.

If you'd like a high-res PDF version of this, you can download one here.

@thejordanrules

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I think R&D and an investment in a "Labs" strategy can drive any business forward. I've surveyed a total of 1000 agencies & marketers from North America to find out one thing: What do you do with your R&D budget?

Although many respondents have a substantial R&D budget, only about 25% have formalized a "Labs" department that drives company-wide innovation. Of those respondents that do have a "Labs" department, less than 1% encourage innovation from outside the organization.

Open innovation can do something almost magical for businesses; it can give perceived ownership to customers. The pervasiveness of open innovation can reach every facet of of business, from marketing, to product development, to human resources, and administration.

Some companies like Dell & Best Buy make affordances for open innovation, but very few do an adequate job at following the cycle of open innovation. If you get your customers involved with core business strategy & product development; you need to explicitly show the results of their involvement, and support the outcome in an ongoing iterative way.

Introducing "The Cycle of Open Innovation"

(Full Size)

Understanding: A Great Place to Begin

Social media represents an invaluable resource for developing a deep understanding of your customers. The simple act of engaging and communicating with communities on social networks can reveal powerful user insights that can change the way you approach business.

The best way to gain these insights is to listen to what your customers are interested in, and probe them on the identified subject to find out how your business can take advantage of their interest.

Don't patronize your community members by asking them inane questions; demonstrate that you've been listening & ask them questions that link back to your company; or at least your industry.

Example: The way Steve Jobs described the reason for introducing the iPad was that a market gap was identified & the iPad was created to fill the gap. Then Apple (theoretically) went through the process of producing the iPad (designing it, sourcing the production with Foxconn, and beta testing it.)

What if Apple followed an open innovation model of product development? Would there have been a camera on the iPad, a finger print resistant screen, a usb port, near field communications, a fold-able keyboard?

Better yet, what if Samsung followed an open innovation model for the Galaxy Tab? Could they have figured out how to better compete against Apple?

BIG QUESTION: Why do companies think they need to identify and solve business problems internally?

Identification: An Expert Analysis

Business strategists, market analysts, brand managers, and all those well-paid titles are still valuable, and often essential, for open innovation to work. Being able to interpret user needs, market requirements, and business goals is best left to those people who understand them.

The better you understand your customer, the more likely it'll be that the experts will craft successful strategies and create products/ services that work.

Test: The Missing Link

I understand the value of being first-to-market, but strongly believe the value of open innovation outweighs the risk of potentially not being first-to-market.

I know that spending three months experimenting, testing, and analyzing feature sets costs additional money, but think the value of doing this is worth it. These types of activities can often be conducted without revealing the end product.

Example: You don't need to reveal that you're making an iPad in order to test & facilitate recommendations on gesture-based text input. If this was experimented with, and open to the community, it's possible that Swype might exist as the native text input method for the iPad.

Produce: Standard Model, Opened

The standard production model wouldn't change, but there are opportunities to accept innovations surrounding production from an public, or semi-public community. I've seen examples of sourcing influencing design. An example could be the shift from plastic casings to aluminum casings. If materials affect price, and material quality affects purchasing behaviour, than innovations surrounding the ability to use materials that can be perceived as higher in quality, while maintaining price, will affect design. (This is all too true with web development. User experience architecture is often influenced by the technology being used to create the site, app, or software. There are things that work well in HTML5 that wont work at all in Flash. There are designs that produce a positive user experience when created using AJAX that produce a negative experience when created using Javascript.)

So, if one manufacturer can produce a higher quality product for the same price through an innovation in their production process, designs can be reexamined to be optimized. (Example - Using micro-dimpled glass decreases glare & fingerprint smudges. However, creating a mass production system specifically designed to create the glass would be expensive unless the sourcing is opened to the community & a production facility already equipped to produce the glass comes forward - or is open to sharing their technology.)

Adoption: Integrate or Abandon

Rather than simply making a decision to keep or scrap a product or service based on preliminary business data, an open innovation model would allow for community input. There's been instances where communities rallied to save a product, service or idea just as is was about to be scrapped.

There's also the potential of being able to use the community to identify why the product or service is either successful or failing. Working together, the community and business leaders might be able to turn a failing product into a successful one through iterative design improvement; additionally, they might be able to identify keys to success that can propel future products/ services to success.

Key Takeaways:

1. Don't assume you know what your customer wants
2. Fostering personal ownership of product/service development can create powerful brand advocates
3. Innovation can come from many sources; tap into them
4. Using social media to encourage & utilize innovative ideas is one of the most powerful methods of communication and one of the most relevant uses of social media
5. If you're investing your R&D budget building & investigating ideas & technologies that already exist, and are well established, you're doing your business a disservice. Labs should not be about training, they should be about innovation.
6. Experiment with the Open Innovation Life Cycle model. Even in small-scale, it will work.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, comments, feedback & questions. @thejordanrules

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I remember when social networking was about sharing personal content with family, friends, and colleagues. Lately, I've noticed a lot of inauthentic brand communications littering my streams with noise.

The Conflict

I do 'like' certain brands, and want my friends to know which brands I have a particular affinity for. However, I don't want to get spammed with creepy questions, or comments from a brand spokesperson. (or Brand Ambassadors)

Branding and PR are intrinsically linked

I subscribe to the idea that it's possible to create and maintain a brand through social media. I don't believe PR is the most effective way of doing that.

The Dell Example

I like some of the stuff Dell's been doing, but think some of their more recent initiatives have been misguided.

Richard Binhammer (@RichardatDELL) according to this interview, Richard was involved with a team that intended to build Dell's presence in communities around the world, and was subsequently asked to interact with bloggers.

It's important to note that I think Richard is doing a great job at being a part of many communities, and establishing dialogues with influential people around the web.

That said, I don't believe attaching a friendly, well-spoken, public face to the brand is addressing the root cause for needing a friendly, well-spoken, public face. - Don't get me wrong, I think Richard would be a great member of any community regardless of whether he dropped the "atDELL" or not.

The real question is: Why are so many negative Dell conversations occurring in the first place? Sure, you can make use of fancy PR strategies, but it doesn't correct the underlying cause.

The Dell Social Media Listening Center & DellCares are recent initiatives that are, seemingly, intended to monitor the entire social web & respond when appropriate. Again, this is just my opinion, but I think this is one big PR stunt. If you check out this article, you'll see a couple people behind a glass door, in a dimly lit room with about 10 large monitors displaying all kinds of data. Its reminiscent of that command centre Jack Bauer visits in 24. It looks cool, but information about what they do with the data they collect doesn't seem to be available.

From visiting the @DellCares Twitter account, it looks like they're a customer care centre that reacts to brand mentions. Although I see the value in customer care via social media; Twitter's inherent 140 character limit makes helping users somewhat difficult.

Again, the big question is: Why are users so frustrated that they resort to posting negative information about Dell? Not to say social media isn't important, but why aren't traditional customer care channels working? As a user of a Dell Laptop; if I needed customer care I would definitely use Google to find self-serve support first, check-out their .com site second, make a phone call third, and only post negative information if I finally gave up.

To be clear, I'm not saying what Dell is doing is wrong, I'm saying it seems like a PR play to mitigate how far negative brand mentions travel. In doing this, they've subscribed to a method that's ruining social media.

Noise & Authenticity

Here are my two big concerns with PR gaining a foothold in social media.

1. PR causes brands to create a lot of noise. As I said earlier, 'liking' a brand is very different from wanting to receive a status update in my news feed, every day from a spokesperson from the brand. If a brand has something real, something important, or something beneficial to say to me, I'd appreciate hearing it. But don't clutter up my news feed just for the sake of engaging with your audience. This is the big reason I don't think social media PR will ever be as successful as social media marketing initiatives.

Side Note: The best social media marketing initiatives are either entertaining or useful. This is, generally, a polarized scale; meaning, the most useful things don't focus on entertaining you, and the most entertaining things don't focus on providing utility (and by utility, I don't mean usability.)

PR, generally, falls in the middle. Most of it isn't useful or entertaining. I'd suggest upwards of 90% of it gets ignored completely. Within the next two years, I think social media filtering will advance to the point where community members will be able to ignore brands attempts at meaningless engagement, and pay more attention to their family, friends, and colleagues. I also think this evolution will regress many business from focusing on social media in a PR respect, and focus on creating provocative, engaging content that allows users to share initiatives amongst themselves.

2. PR is often unauthentic. Although I like & appreciate RichardatDELL, and DellCares, there's a strategic business reason for bringing them into existence. I believe Dell is a smart company, and has very smart advisors, but they are using their understanding of communities, and human nature to improve brand perception. I'll say there's some utility in having customer service available through Twitter, but I don't believe it's more useful than an easy to use, salient, chat portal on Dell's .com site. It seems to me that disguising true intentions of PR is less authentic than marketing initiatives. (For instance, I expect marketing initiatives from Old Spice; when Isaiah Mustafa's YouTube responses were introduced, I had no question that he was an actor that was representing Old Spice. The content was entertaining while involving the community. Additionally, my news feed wasn't spammed by him, and I developed brand affinity.)

Conclusion

I recently read a post by David Armano on his blog Logic + Emotion that suggested a framework for creating a social business plan. I felt that he hit all the right points, but then I read this related presentation "Community Engagement: Managing Communities Across Digital Embassies" and started questioning long-term value of this framework. Slides 11-20 seem to directly speak to reasons I believe PR is ruining social media. Specifically, slide 14 that talks about ambassadors and envoys. In many cases they're the same person, the community manager or community management group, and they're the ones doing this low-level "Social Engagement" as an attempt to facilitate low-level "interactions, communications, and participatory behaviours between individuals".

That said, I'm not completely discounting David's framework. In fact, it's just the implementation and examples that were provided in the presentation that make me feel that some of these deep insights are being misused. I agree with the principles of embassies, outposts, ambassadors and envoys, but think they should be used to support social media marketing initiatives. Well crafted marketing initiatives, that use rich content and employ an iterative brand equity framework can be much more effective than more frequent low-level engagement methods.

In the end, I don't want to be friends with the majority of brand spokes people; and they don't really want to be my friend either. The fact of the matter is that they get paid to interact with me and they have a set of goals that motivate them. If businesses are planning on becoming truly social, they'll need to do something they probably won't ever do - stop being afraid.

For instance, if Dell really cared about me, they'd put a lot more weight behind their "Ideastorm" platform. There are hundreds of fantastic ideas on there, many have been implemented. Making this system more robust, interactive, and creating a community of "ambassadors" and "envoys" who actively seek out this type of information & follow-up with community members would be a great way to use social media resources. Maybe one day product development, and beta-testing can be facilitated through social media. Obviously, the issue with no stealth product development is that first-to-market benefits could potentially be reduced. (i.e. If Apple told everyone a year in advance that the iPad was coming, and how beta-testing was going, it might have made the iPad v1 better, but would have shown their hand to companies like Samsung, Dell, and Microsoft.)

To those in social media public relations

I've worked with several large PR firms over the years, and appreciate the work you do. I just don't think you should be leading social media activities. I think many marketers have taken your advice, and have engaged you to lead some initiatives, but I strongly believe you're ruining social media for everyone. Please let content & creativity lead marketing initiatives, be more transparent, better understand what members of social networks expect, and stop getting brands to use spokes people that actively try to make us believe they want to be friends. [example: JenniewithAXE is an employee who could care less about what my new years resolutions are, so why is she asking me like she's my best friend? What would be more expected is if you created an iPhone app that tracks how well you're doing at achieving your new years resolution, and allows users to post their status to Facebook & Twitter. It could potentially be made more viral by tying into a leaderboard that shows who's doing the best at achieving their goals, and allows other community members to add supportive comments that spawn push notifications on the users iPhone. - like "Way to go!"]

I know the friendly spokes person tactic tends to work short-term, and it removes any barrier to participation, but keep in mind those status updates appear in my news feed. You're participating in my network, if you keep hitting me with messages that are perceived to be irrelevant, it's less likely I'll pay attention to you at all. The response rate isn't that grate anyway: considering the AXE Facebook page has about 730,000 fans (which would translate to over 1M with the halo effect) having 150 likes is about a 0.02% response rate; is that worth frustrating some of your fans?

I'd appreciate any comments, questions, or feedback you might have. If you don't think PR is ruining social media, let me know what you believe. If you post a comment here, or ask a question on twitter, I'll definitely respond. Happy 2011. @thejordanrules

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Social networks like Facebook & Twitter have massive participation figures. In this post, I offer some thoughts on why people become loyal to certain networks & what marketers can do to encourage community loyalty.

The Loyalty Cycle

The cycle of developing loyalty is pretty simple, you ask users to take action & for every action they take, they receive a reward. The reward doesn't always have to be a monitory reward; in fact there's substantial research that suggests intellectual or emotional rewards are more effective than monitory rewards.

It's also important to understand The Cycle of Social Interaction when trying to build community loyalty.

The Cycle of Social Interaction

It might seem simple, but many marketers abandon this cycle and focus on marketing tactics while trying to build a community. I understand the importance of marketing & the value of building communities to market to.

Here's the key: Show users you care about them before, during, and after interacting with them. This is best achieved through a deep understanding and empathy toward your customer.

There are several loyalty building strategies that can be exploited to deliver desired results.

Recognition

Description: Is one of the simplest and least-used methods of creating community loyalty. It's also one of the most effective; which begs the question: why aren't more marketers making use of this strategy?

All you have to do is single out a member of your community to say something nice about. For instance, if a member posts a movie review on your brands Facebook wall, you could comment on it.
 

Why it works: It's human nature to seek approval. If your brand has an active community & a user perceives your brand as an authority in the space, recognizing that a user took the time to interact with you will act as positive reinforcement of their activity.

Badging

Description: Is a specific form of recognition. It involves awarding a 'badge' to users that complete pre-defined actions. Badges represent social-capital & can increase a users influence within the community; because of this, badges become coveted.
 

Why it works: In addition to the reasons recognition works to create loyalty in general, badging employs an effective gaming-mechanic thats easy to understand. If I do what they want, I can be part of an exclusive group.

Points

Description: Is a system that's commonly used with loyalty programs. It's one of the simplest reward systems. It involves awarding a specific number of points to users when they complete pre-defined actions.
 

Why it works: This employs the 'collecting' gaming-mechanic. It's easy to understand because many societies economies are based on the same mechanic. If I collect enough points (or money) I'll be able to get the stuff I want.

Exclusives

Description: Are most effective for niche communities. When you know what users want, you can offer things the general public can't get. (i.e. If I manage a community site, offering back-stage, or sold-out tickets to users is a powerful incentive to get users to complete the action I want. Additionally, they'll be more likely to participate in the community for the potential of more exclusive offers.)
 

Why it works: Unique or hard-to-find experiences are coveted by the most influential people in the world. For example, I might be able to afford a box-seat at a U2 concert, but if there are only 10 box-seats available, I probably don't have the clout to get ahold of one.

Rewards

Description: Are so common, they've started to lose meaning. It's a simple premise, if you complete an action you stand a chance of getting a reward. Many times, marketers offer rewards users don't want in the first place. (example: a free sample, or a 2-for-1 coupon.) If you're going to use rewards to build loyalty, you NEED to have a deep understanding of what your community wants.
 

Why it works: People like to get free stuff. If the TV show Hoarders has taught us anything, there's a certain portion of the population who don't even care about what kind of stuff they're getting. The most effective way to use rewards to establish loyalty is to combine rewards with recognition, which would give you recognition rewards. These can be little token rewards given to 'surprise-and-delight' users for participating in the community.

Data Storage

Description: Is more of a byproduct of being a part of a community. Part of the reason I actively use Linkedin is because I've filled out all my information, have recommendations, and have a rolodex of people I consider valuable. If I were to migrate to another community, I'd have to re-enter all my information, and re-establish connections.
 

Why it works: Humans inherently look for the easiest way to get things done without sacrificing quality. If a community has successfully gotten a user to join & complete a profile, the user has a personal investment in that community. The more time a user spends contributing to the community, the harder it will be for the user to leave the community.

Summary

If you understand these two cycles & strategies, you can begin to build community loyalty. The more you exploit these strategies, the happier, and more active your community will become. Building a loyal user base for your community is very important. Loyal community members are much more likely to be brand ambassadors outside of the community.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback & comments. I encourage you to post comments, or tweet about this (@thejordanrules).

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There seems to be an emerging social media trend toward creating brand profile pages intended to have 'conversations' with customers. I feel like this is a horrible misuse of social networking & digital strategy. It also creates a poor user experience & is less effective than the strategy I'll outline below.

THE PROBLEM

Treating social networks as a medium rather than a community. If you only see social networks as a distribution channel for your message, you're missing the point.

More and more marketers are spending time crafting content & communications strategies that force un-unified conversation streams to interact with each other in ineffective ways.

Example: Red Bull has one of the largest fan bases on Facebook in a large part thanks to the multitude of contests & games it deploys. However, the content that the Red Bull fan page 'shares' with it's fan base varies drastically.

They take the shotgun approach to content curation by offering up content that might appeal to many different segments within the RedBull fan base. The thinking is that "because you already have a lot of information coming through you're news stream, you can ignore what isn't relevant & pay attention to what is."

The long term result are users who feel disengaged with your brand. Although seeing large numbers of updates improves brand recall, the end result still tends to be less effective than creating permeable communities & sympathetic social systems.

THE SOLUTION

Create permeable community strategies & sympathetic social systems.

Mastering the permeable community strategy

A permeable community strategy is special because it allows marketing & other communication messages to pass through without altering the fundamental social constructs of the community. (i.e. if I join the Nike Facebook fan base because they were supporting the Tour De France. I'll eventually become a disenfranchised fan because they'll eventually move to a new discussion. In fact, I might find all the other non-Tour-De-France updates annoying. If Nike created a community called "Enjoy the Ride" and encouraged people to share bike-riding related information, and provided curated content year-round, it could easily support the Tour De France sponsorship campaign.)

There are 3 steps to create a permeable community strategy.

1. Identify your customer: This isn't always as easy as it sounds. Identifying your customer involves a market analysis that should tell you who your highest-value customers are, and what they think about you. It should also tell you where your customer tends to spend his time online.

2. Identify topics your customers find interesting: Once you know who you need to observe, begin observing them. This step can also take some time, but it shouldn't prevent you from doing a preliminary topical analysis & begin to create a broad-topic community; it can be focused over time. Observing your high-value customers will help you identify topics they're interested in.

3. Create topic-based communities: Once you've identified topics your high-value customers are interested in, you can craft a creative platform that can support the community.

Let's say you've identified 3 trending topics amongst your high-value customers: Cars, Beer, & Hockey.

Logic might say: I should create 3 sponsored communities, one for cars, one for beer, and one for hockey. This could work. If these topics are ingrained into the fabric of who your customers are, these topics will remain relevant and can afford to have ongoing support.

Although this could work, creating three permeable communities is generally not enough to ensure success for campaigns. For this, we need to ensure we choose topics that appeal to the largest percent of high-value customers, but also can work sympathetically to support campaign-based initiatives.

Mastering the sympathetic social system

Creating a community that provides its users with a positive user experience is only 1/2 of the problem. We also need to ensure those communities can work together to support ongoing marketing campaigns. This requires a special kind of content strategy that maps out community synergies against a marketing calendar. A deep understanding of the brand & user will help determine the most relevant communities.

[This map shows how sympathetic social systems work together to integrate campaigns.]

[This map shows multiple communication streams within one social system.]

For our example, the best community platforms might be: A community focused on the value of team building within the sports area & a car-lovers community focused on life enhancement called "Pimp my life".

The goal is to be able to map out how various types of campaigns can engage with the different communities and show how community response can be throttled to increase a campaigns effectiveness or mitigate a negative sentiment.

Guidelines for creating sympathetic social systems

1. Identify what makes popular topics popular within each community

2. Determine topics common to each community

3. Compare common topics to marketing objectives & craft a creative solution that can integrate with a common topic and achieve marketing objectives.

4. Share response assessment & community moderation for campaign-related communications between all communities. This allows a single moderator to connect cross-community communications to throttle response.

SUMMARY

Stop assuming your community will sift through feed-spam to locate relevant information & start showing you care about the members of your community.

Start figuring out what your high-value customers want & begin facilitating conversations, and curating content on the subject.

Start using networks to draw users into campaigns, rather than creating networks around temporary campaigns.

Start using multiple networks together to throttle response, engagement, & moderation.

If you liked this, let me know by leaving a comment or follow me on Twitter (@thejordanrules)

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Having just made the jump to full-time freelancing, I've been confronted recurring question: "What exactly do you do?"

I've primarily been focused on my existing clients, but am starting to get a number of new requests to work together; so I wanted to tell everyone what it is I do - and how you can start working with me.

There are three primary ways I'm engaged:

1. True Consulting: I have built several relationships with global marketers using this method. The marketer, or agency, hires me to review materials & provide an opinion on how to proceed based on experience, research, stakeholder interviews etc. I've generally begin a relationship consulting on an ad-hoc basis, invoicing the client on a project basis. I've recently been retained by a couple clients who wanted the flexibility to engage me anytime, on multiple projects, by paying for a number of yearly hours upfront.

2. Integrated Project Consulting: I've worked with several marketers & agencies in this method. This normally happens when the marketer, or agency, has a process & a team assembled, but is missing an element. I'm normally engaged to fill a missing strategic roll or to fill a missing user experience roll. I prefer to use this method, it allows me to engage with the team early, and stay engaged throughout the project. Getting the opportunity to review design & final development allows me to ensure the interpretation of strategy or UX doesn't compromise any elements.

3. Document-Only Consulting: This is a low-impact, easy way to engage with me. The document-only method is generally used by marketers or agencies who have a very specific need on a project. For instance, if a marketer needs a second opinion on a set of wireframes, or social media governance document, he will engage me to create that specific document. I've also been engaged by agencies to simply create a site map, or conduct a forensic audit of an existing site. This is generally not the best method, unless we've done work in the past and I'm familiar with the client.

That said, I have been asked about what types of documents I generally create throughout a project. Although every project is different, and may require customizations, here are some documents I'm engaged to create often:

**Note: If you're not sure which of these documents to use, or when to use them, skip this section.**

Strategic Models: Modelling is a visual way of strategic planning. Models without the right background research, context, or explanation can be good visual aids, but are poor investments. The point of modelling is to show why a strategy works, why some strategic elements were selected & others excluded. Complicated strategies may be governed by several models.

Strategic Road mapping: Mapping out a high-level strategic roadmap & detailed campaign-based roadmaps help avoid misunderstandings between stakeholders, and allow teams to have a unified view of upcoming activities.

User Personas: I was engaged by the Ontario government to create one of the largest sets of user personas I've ever created. It was 8 months in the making, and involved a 15 person team performing a month-long ethnographic study. Most persona development doesn't take that long, but it is a substantial investment that pays off over time. Understanding who your users are, and what they want, allows you to customize your campaigns, strategies, and offerings to speak to the most interested audience at the most relevant time.

Mental Models: I generally like one-page mental models to identify gaps, opportunities, and cognitive processes. Creating mental models are useful throughout the project in multiple ways, from focusing creativity, to managing scope. If feature-creep begins to happen, the mental model can be used to eliminate irrelevant features.

eCRM Strategies: A strategy generally pulls together several documents into one cohesive deck. I have my own style & template for a eCRM deck, but can adapt it to match your internal style if required. An eCRM strategy is somewhat complex in the sense it deals with multiple platforms, content strategy, communications strategy, social media strategy, and data segmentation. That said, everyone has to start somewhere - if you don't have an eCRM strategy, it's time to get one ready. Even if it's a 3 or 5 year plan, it's better to be working toward a goal than not to have a goal to work toward.

Social Media Strategies: This is another strategic deck (see eCRM Strategies) that I can customize to match your internal template. This is a document where I'll make recommendations on content, moderation, community management, platform selection, monitoring guidelines, integration opportunites etc.

Experience Maps: Is a broad term that refers to swim-lane-like documents that map out a unique campaign experience, platform experience, or an entire customer experience. This can be mapped back to business objectives, or to a mental model.

Site Maps/ IA's: A good first step in any digital project is to create an information architecture or site map. This visually shows the parent-child-sibling relationships, as well as being an overview of all pages. In addition to standard labelling, site redesigns may append template letters to the site map which will indicate which template governs each page.

Navigation Design: It's somewhat rare to be asked to do a navigation design without being engaged to do the entire site redesign, however it's happened before. In this document, I propose a new or enhanced navigational system & structure. This might involve re-categorization, but might not. I'll show how parent-child relationships are shown, where user-feedback is required, and how navigational buttons behave.

Forensic Audits/ Content Inventories: This is a must-have document for all site re-designs. If I'm being engaged to do a re-categorization, or any part of a site redesign, I will complete a forensic audit of the existing site (if one isn't provided) & will deliver a content inventory of the proposed solution. This will generally be delivered as an Excel document, unless otherwise specified.

Wireframes/ Prototypes: There are many different programs & methods of creating wireframes & prototypes. Unless otherwise specified, I tend to either use Omnigraffle or Axure to create these. I have my own style, but can adapt it to mimic your internal style. I prefer to go through two rounds of wireframing, a preliminary-draft round and a detailed round. Sometimes these are delivered with additional supporting documents like a site-map, user flows, user stories, or a functional specification.

User Testing: User testing is always a good idea on every project. At least one round of user testing should be performed prior to handing off prototypes to design. Ideally, a second round of user testing will be performed after implementation; with a focus on iterative improvements. MVT should be an ongoing process in addition to qualitative user tests.

Re-categorization/ Card-sorting: When users are having a hard time finding what they're looking for, you might need to re-examine your sites taxonomy. For smaller sites, this can be an easy exercise, but can be much bigger for e-commerce or informationally-heavy sites.

For those of you who are confused about these documents, don't worry; there's an easy way to figure out what you need. Ask me.

Again, these are just some of the most common documents. These certainly don't speak to all the methods & documents I use to help define goals & objectives, or the documents I can create to help project teams document requirements.

Mixing and Matching

I know that deciding to hire a consultant can be challenging. No one wants to introduce an unknown element to a team dynamic. Although I'm generally a great team-member, there are certain atmospheres that I work better in. Setting up an initial interview is always a good way to begin to get to know each other.

I'm easy with regards to meeting in person, over the phone, or via email. An interview will give me the ability to find out what your goals are, what your customers goals are, and how I can help. It'll also give you the opportunity to get to know me better.

I'm often engaged to perform a mashup of responsibilities. For instance, a number of clients engaged me for true consulting on an organizational level & document-only consulting on a couple projects. This worked out well. It allowed me to stay involved at a high-level on all ongoing projects, and allowed me to lead the UX design for the intranet-redesign.

If any of these services sound like something you could use, the first step is to make contact & let me know three things:

1. Who you are: Both personally, and organizationally. Tell me as much as you can about you, your company, and your users.
2. What you're doing: Tell me about what marketing & business activities, opportunities, and challenges you're engaged in or have identified.
3. What you want to be doing: Tell me about how you'd like to see things change. Would you like to drive traffic, gain sign-ups, increase market-share, build awareness? Or do you just need help defining what you want to be doing?

Hopefully, this clears-up what I do & helps you understand if you need someone like me to help you out.

Contact me anytime: thejordanrules@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter: @thejordanrules
Follow my Blog: blog.thejordanrules.com
Subscribe to my Newsletter: The Jordan Bits

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I've created the digital ecosystem interaction map to answer the following questions:

1. How do I tie my different digital properties together?
2. How do I achieve successful community integration throughout my marketing & communications channels?
3. What type of content should I be focusing on creating?
4. What metrics should I be monitoring? How do I respond (if I need to respond)?
5. What can I expect from social networking channels?

The Digital Ecosystem Interaction Map

This worksheet is intended to visualize all digital marketing & communications efforts with their desired outcome. It can also align and draw synergies between online and offline marketing/communications. I encourage anyone with large international communication strategies to use a map like this to bring consistency and continuity to all levels of your customer communications. Although designed for large corporations, this map has proven valuable for the majority of clients I work with; from small regional marketers, to non-profits, to governmental organizations, to international marketing giants.

(view full size)     |     (download PDF)

Example/ Description

I was able to get this high-level information out of a 30 min workshop with a national retailer. Although high-level, this worksheet's already beginning to show some insights & opportunities.

The first sections on the work sheet focus on publishing activities. Publishing is an interesting way to think about marketing communications, but more, and more people consume digital information everyday.

This area is used to define what content you plan to publish and where you plan to publish it. (Tip: Categorizing the "What" in this section is very important. A category called "marketing material" is generally not a good category. Ask yourself how you'd respond to "Would you like to hear about the latest _______?" where the blank is the category you plan to put into the "What" column.)

In this example we established 4 streams of content that would be published on a continuous basis: Sales information, New product information, Contesting information, and Category specific information defined by a greater business objectives (i.e. a business focus on Hockey, Running, Biking, or Golf). Those streams of content were published to the internet through several channels (note: I was only engaged to architect the social media component of their digital ecosystem, which is why owned properties aren't in the list.) Facebook (Fb), Twitter (Tw), Email (E-m), & Mobile (Mob). Category specific information is aggregated on Facebook through several category-focused fan pages to prevent alienating subscribers when business focus' change.

The remaining blocks within the publishing hemisphere of the worksheet serve to visualize how your content drives users to pre-defined "destinations".

In this example we show that the CRM program can use data we collect through several channels to increase the chances of driving users directly to specific destinations (or goals). The next areas within this worksheet are only defined at a very high level. We've defined the ratio at which we'll publish marketing-type content to the ratio of sharing "found" content. (Note: Sharing "found" content is a good way to show users that you care about more than yourself. You should always link directly to the original location of the "found" content and specifically cite who created it, if available. Always try to share content your audience finds compelling; try to offer a way to filter content or opt-out of certain content.)

Normally, this section describes how your content mix facilitates driving users to the pre-defined "destinations". In this case, we did a deep-dive on this section & developed a complete content strategy. This notation is just intended to be a continuation point, referencing the content strategy document. For smaller ecosystems, you can define facilitation tactics right on the worksheet (i.e. digital coupons to drive people in-store, contest leaderboards published to Facebook to drive brand awareness)

The right-hand edge of the worksheet is the block allocated to "destination". This area is a simple list of all places you want to drive users, and what you want them to do while there. (i.e. Go to the store & shop, Go to my site & subscribe, etc.)

The "destination" block connects the publishing "facilitation" strategy with the "affinity" listening strategy.

In this example, the listening strategy we use to build "affinity" was defined through another document called the "Response Assessment & Workflow Guidelines". Again, you can define some "listening" guidelines directly in this section that build affinity.

The "affinity" section drives to listening funnel mix. The listening funnel, in this high-level example, simply defines the ratio of brand monitoring to industry monitoring. Again, this is because we have a document that defines additional details.

We also show that there are customer service channels & artifacts (i.e. a # tag) that can facilitate response times.

The listening funnel leads to the first blocks in the bottom "listen" hemisphere. This is where the channels we're listening to get defined & mapped back to business goals (not shown).

In this example, we defined that we'd be monitoring Facebook, Twitter, an Email tracking & response system, a system configured for brand & industry alerts, and a customized dashboard that feed real-time analytics and 'sentiment' data.

Through these channels, we could configure the various systems to track the progress of certain business goals. (In this example, the retailer required that these goals be hidden from this post.) A good example would be monitoring multiple channels for insights on unmet customer needs an innovative product could fill.

There are many techniques you can use to get more value out of this worksheet. I've been working with several agencies & individuals across Canada on developing new ways to use this to visualize interactions within digital (and other) marketing & communications ecosystems.

P.S. I know there seems to be a lot of purples & pinks in my worksheet example. It looks a lot more masculine when you print it & mark it up with darker colours. (If you're concerned about that.)

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Many individuals, marketers, and agencies struggle with establishing a perception of being a thought leader. This post will help you understand the value of being perceived as a thought-leader, and will offer some techniques to amplify your work.

The Benevolent Thought Leader

Creates content & shares it openly. These users care less about distributing content & care more about working through ideas & offering them to their community.

The Connection Hunting Thought Leader

Creates content specifically designed to help build connections. These users are pro's at targeting content & turning readers into connections.

The Conversationist Thought Leader

Creates provocative content designed to create conversations. These users are pro's at asking for feedback & responding to questions. They move beyond simple connections and turn readers into advocates whenever possible.

The Thought Leader Catalyst

Creates innovative content designed to move an industry into a new space, or introduce a new idea. These users often target other thought leaders & attempt to engage them in conversations about innovative topics. Additionally, these users will often identify quality industry-related content & re-publish it; a generally accepted technique of showing your interest in another thought leader.

Regardless of how you want to be perceived, creating quality content & openly sharing ideas is the primary method of establishing a perception of being a thought leader.

Although "The Benevolent Thought Leader" might not care about how he distributes his content, defining content distribution channels is an important step in becoming recognized as a thought leader.

Content Distribution Models

Publishing Model: The one-man show. Users publish their own content and hope though organic search & word-of-mouth to be found. If enough content is produced & enough people find the content, the user may end up being seen as a thought leader.

Revenue Increase Potential: Low, this model will return the lowest ROI. This model will also take the longest to see a return on investment.

Publish & Promote Model: Users publish their own content and promote it though all channels available to them. This might include SEM, networking, direct messaging, media buying, partnerships etc.

Revenue Increase Potential: Medium, promotional strategy will dictate revenue potential. If promoted well & cost/benefit is balanced, the ROI stands to be substantial. Lead nurturing & community dialog are important to turn perception into realized revenue.

Publish & Syndicate Model: Users publish their own content and syndicate it to additional owned channels. This stands to create an integrated web of content thought owned channels, which represents multiple potential points of content discovery. 

Revenue Increase Potential: Medium, time committed to nurturing each individual network will dictate revenue potential. Users tend to develop stronger connections when a dialog can be established. If little or no time is devoted to networking on a specific channel, that channel will likely be less effective at establishing a thought leadership perception.

Re-Publish/ Executive Publish Model: Users publish their own content and get it re-published in a curated forum, or create exclusive content for a curated content distribution channel. (i.e. writing an article for Mashable, or getting an article published on Social Media Informer)

Revenue Increase Potential: High. Sites like Mashable, Social Media Today, & Social Media Informer represent communities of people who are already engaged with a specific type of content. These communities built business models on generating traffic to their site. The higher the quality of content; the more people will visit their site. The more people who visit & share; the more revenue the site can get from ad sales. - For content creators, being featured on one of these sites can represent a major source of content discovery. Additionally, if the content curation is done well, simply being featured on one of these sites can achieve establishing a perception of thought leadership.

Conclusion

I personally use several different techniques & haven't really been creating enough content to qualify as a thought leader yet. I'm still looking for my niche & focused on learning new ideas just as much as sharing my ideas.

I've recently discovered Social Media Informer, a valuable alternative to Social Media Today, and other community-based content-rich sites. I subscribe to Social Media Informer & like the quality of the content curation. I've decided to offer all my content to Social Media Informer to curate as they see fit.

I'm impressed with the range of topics & number of authors being featured on Social Media Informer. In addition to being a great place to keep your thumb on the pulse of global social media, it's a useful resource for identifying smart people that are worth connecting with.

I highly recommend subscribing to the Social Media Informer RSS feed. For content creators, I recommend allowing them to syndicate your content. It's a great networking opportunity & is becoming a very visible, well-read site.

Remember: generating revenue from giving away content can be successful if you understand the principles I've discussed. Define realistic goals for what you want from content creation & choose the right creation/ distribution model for your needs.

@thejordanrules

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This is a worksheet I developed to assist me in my consulting practice. It helps define & focus clients on the project.

(download PDF)

Instead of creating a multi-page document, this is a one-page visual brief, designed for digital projects. It's also proven useful for identifying strategic gaps & managing client expectations.

Here's an example:

(view full version)

The document is divided into 5 sections:

1. Project Information: This section defines the project name & documents key stakeholders.

2. Goals & objectives: This section consists of an goal matrix & definition area. You can throttle how many goals you want to make available to the client & prioritize them. Goals include: Create affinity, create awareness, convert or get a sale, and collect research. These can be achieved though entertainment, utility, or conversation/ communication.

In this example, the priority is on creating affinity through utility. Followed by, increasing sales through utility. Finally, followed by, creating awareness through entertainment.

These high-level goals are distilled to: Increasing online customer service, increasing online purchase/ subscription, and increasing awareness through SEO. These should be further blow-out to measurable objectives.

3. Target & Strategy: This section defines who you're talking to and how you plan on talking to him. The target audience should be defined in terms of online personas. If online personas do not exist, an exercise to define them should be completed prior to beginning the project. If more than one persona exists, list all personas - reference a separate document if necessary.

In the right-hand box, you can list all the methods you plan on using to speak to the various personas. These can be highlighted & colour coded for easy correlation.

4. Features & Functions: This section functions as prioritized high-level user stories. They define the importance of key pieces of functionality. These should be correlated back to objectives.

Obviously, these features/ functions will be blown-out further as the project progresses down through UX archecture to visual design.

5. Channels & Media: This is like a menu of digital communication channels that allow clients to check-off the channels they feel are most likely to fulfill the objectives. Clients should be walked through this process.

This document ends up being a one-page reminder of what the project is trying to achieve. It tends to be a good reference during all client reviews.

There are several advanced methods of getting even more value out of this document. In future posts I'll discuss how this document can be used for brainstorming, strategic planning, visual road-mapping, innovation planning & competitive analysis.

You can download this document in an editable (vector) PDF here.

If you have an iPad, I recommend using Note Taker HD (iTunes Link) and setting this document as a background image. Note Taker allows you to fill out the document by hand. (I created the example document using Note Taker)

You can download the form as an image here.

If you have any questions, comments or thoughts on how to improve the document, feel free to leave a comment or sent me a note on Twitter (@thejordanrules)

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Marketers have more than just marketing on their minds. They worry about lots of things from cost of production, to quality of customer service; from brand perception to communication planning. The key to a successful marketing strategy is recognizing all the work that has to be done prior to creating a marketing strategy, ensuring it  gets done properly & communication between business units are maintained.

The Strategic Framework

Most marketers (especially national & multinational marketers) have strategic frameworks or strategic webs that govern different business units  in various levels of granularity.

Here's an example:

(view full size)

In this example the business strategy governs certain elements. Typically, large amounts of research & analysis are done to support these strategic decisions. Much of this research proves very useful down the road at defining more granular strategies.

Visual Strategic Roadmapping to Identify Strategic Gaps

If marketers don't distribute resources according to how deliverables will be consumed, they'll continually be recognized as 'following' the heard. Consider how valuable a strategic roadmap is for keeping multiple agencies and vested interests on track.

In this example you can see how business strategies support & get supported through the process of defining more granular strategies.

(view full size)

Solid Strategic Footing is Required

Many marketers face organizational problems regarding the definition of business strategies prior to defining more granular strategies.

I've recently gotten the opportunity to work with two major multinational marketers; one who has a strong set of strategic frameworks, and one who's struggling with online strategy due to a lack of strategic frameworks.

Developing online strategies for the company who has a set of defined strategic frameworks is pretty easy, and pretty fun. It allows the digital strategist to find key user insights that can fuel a good digital strategy & support overall business goals. Without the initial market & business strategy research, it would take a lot longer to identify insights.

In fact, the marketer who doesn't have a set of strategic frameworks governing the more granular strategies spends at least 4 times more money on ad-hoc research studies. They generally have access to a lot less experience analysts to sift through the research they do get.

Sheep Stacking

Let me introduce you to a sheep:

This sheep represents all the documentation, research & data that is collected through the process of defining overall business strategies. If created properly, this sheep will be robust enough to support other sheep.

But, what happens if a new area is identified? What happens if every other sheep-pile is using this new area to support its sheep?

It's a dilemma. "Can I just stand in that new area?"; "Do I need to tell the sheep I'm standing on first?"; what to do?

This is a common situation. I've seen it happen over-and-over this past few years with social media. Many digital marketers recognized the value of social media & began establishing a presence prior to allowing the business to adapt its overarching strategy to accommodate for social media.

This caused many marketers to fail because the organization wasn't structured in a way to support social media initiatives (among other reasons). Many marketers fell into the trap of having Facebook fan pages with thousands of fans, but no plan suggesting what to do with the fans once they have them.

In fact, I've seen several marketers abandon social media activities because they didn't know how to show its value to the rest of the organization.

Conclusion

If an opportunity presents itself that would allow you to explore a new strategy; make sure it aligns with higher level strategies. I've seen evidence that creating a complete strategic roadmap helps enable each business unit to find synergies & build more effective integrated strategies.

Thoughts? Leave a comment, or ask me a question on Twitter @thejordanrules.

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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.

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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.)

Examples:

www.cheetos.com

www.cbbgroup.com

www.hyundaimomentum.com

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:

www.37signals.com

www.mint.com

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.ikea.com

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.

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