Author Archive

On Monday, Jeff Hilimire posted a blog about the world of statusing in social media. He posed the commonly-asked question, “Have we become a narcissistic society?” What is the point of statusing anyway?

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time and posted a blog called “The Small-Town Internet” about the topic last year. It is fascinating to me.

After having been on Facebook now for a while and recently Twitter, my conclusion is that valuable and meaningful statuses depend upon on our awareness of our audience; the usability of social media.

In general, Tweets are informational (how many tweets contain links?). And Facebook statuses are more personal. This is because the audiences for each are different.

The majority of your audience in Twitter is composed of a lot of people who don’t know you and probably don’t live near you. You may never seen any of them face-to-face. So why would they want to follow you? If you are posting Tweets like “I am drinking my coffee” or “I’m reading a good book”, they won’t. It’s not that interesting for a stranger to know these things about you.

On the other hand, if you Tweet “I am @Starbucks and they are giving away free shots today” or “I am #reading Augusten Burrough’s new book and it has a great twist” you are providing the community with useful and VALUABLE information, to complete strangers, who are mainly on Twitter to consume valuable information and insights.

For most people, Facebook is a more intimate network of friends, colleagues, family, etc. There are definite possibilities of seeing Facebook friends face-to-face on a regular basis. As such, the statuses that we post are more intimate: “I am grilling some steak and drinking wine with the wife”, “I am excited for the weekend”, “Just finished the best book by Augusten Burroughs” etc. Our friends on Facebook keep up with us in our life and on the web. They care not only about the valuable information we have to offer, but our feelings, our day-to-day lives, etc. And for our friends and close associates, this is interesting and important for them. These are our intimate relationships.

This understanding is important if you are attempting to get people to notice you. Whether you’re a company wanting to grow your brand loyalists or whether you’re a blogger that wants to attract more readers.

If you are diving into Narcissus’ pool of online social media, don’t drown by ignoring your audience and their expectations. If general, if you have a presence on Facebook, the community will want to interact with your brand’s personality. If you are on Twitter, you should be providing useful and valuable information, which is an aspect of the brand’s personality. Get to know your audience in each and speak to them.

As the web becomes the more prevalent marketing channel, the role of the Business Analyst in the marketing agency becomes more critical for the success of a project.

Traditionally, Business Analysts (BAs) have served as the intermediary between the business owners/users and the software developers. Typically, the BA is part of the IT team, but could also be part of the business or marketing teams. The primary function of a BA is to gather the appropriate requirements and needs from the end users, document the requirements, and work with the software development team to develop solutions that meet the end users’ needs. This can be for anything from an intranet, to an internal operations tools, to shopping carts.

Normally, the BA works with or within marketing teams to understand product development and user needs, but typically has not influenced those marketing decisions. This is changing.

The skilled BA is proficient at uncovering what is working, what is not working and discussing possible solutions to solving the inefficiencies of technical systems. As the web (social networking tools, search, media, etc.) becomes a greater share of marketing budgets, the BA plays a critical role in helping the entire interactive team – from the UE to the Designers to the Developers – understand what is working, what is not working, and what the client expects from the system (ROI, Click-through rates, KPIs, etc.).

However, to become an influential part of the strategy and end solution of marketing projects the BA may need to undergo an ideological shift. While most BAs are very comfortable with technical requirements, use case, process flows, etc. they may be less confident in understanding creative or content requirements and articulating front-end design needs.

I encourage Business Analysts and organizations who hire or plan on hiring them to shift their perception of the BA as a technical and functional analyst and start to view them as an “entire-solution” analyst. For example, most consumers need to be educated and inspired before they actually put products in their basket and check-out. The BA should be thinking about how or why someone even gets to the point of interacting with the shopping cart. This will make the BA more valuable and more importantly, the end-solution even better for the users.

This is what we have done at Engauge and continue to do on our big projects. Seeing the value that this “entire-solution” analysis can bring internally with our team, I believe we provide more value to the client.

I’ve been thinking a lot about privacy, lately. Consider what has become the norm in the past couple of years:

• social networking is becoming the prevailing source for information about family, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers
• bloggers spill their deepest thoughts into public posts
• Youtube and Flickr host thousands/millions of videos and pix of intimate family moments

For a culture that apparently prides itself on its right to privacy, this shift is intriguing.

Personally, I want the ability to post whatever I choose on the web about myself. Posting mainly to my friends, family, co-workers, etc. For their benefit, mainly. However, there are definitely people I don’t know that come across and read my blog posts. But when asked, I would definitely say that I value my privacy and don’t want people using this information for nefarious reasons.

Consider Twitter or Facebook statuses. A bunch of ordinary folks are posting to the world-at-large the minutia of their day.

• Angie is not feeling so hot
• Angie is wishing she could go to the beach
• Angie wants you to read this…
• blah, blah, blah

Seems boring, right? Initially, while pondering whether we want to participate and divulge all our feelings, thoughts and activities to our entire network, it seems preposterous. “Who really cares what I’m doing right now?” We think, “Who could be interested in my boring life?” Or the (more) narcissistic think, “Will enough people really pay attention?” In general, privacy isn’t necessarily top of mind.

In a recent NYTimes article, this phenomenon was discussed in great detail.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, said. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

Each individual bit of social information our friends post about themselves is insignificant on their own. Pretty mundane and boring. And especially not that important relative to our privacy. But taken as a whole, as an aggregation, these bits become themes and stories about us, posted and logged like an electronic journal of our day-to-day lives.

It is almost as if we have re-created the structure of small-town living, where everyone knows your business, but on a big-world scale.

In this context, privacy becomes more important, yet increasingly complex. What if government agencies start aggregating and mining this data? What if marketing agencies do, if they are not already? Would we mind? Could we stop it from happening? As always our laws and policies are years behind the technical and social movements.

It’s an interesting dilemma. Do we abstain from the social media and leave our networks to those that we can see and touch (or call up once in awhile)? For myself, who really doesn’t like talking on the phone that much, I have reaped the benefits of staying in touch with people that are miles away. All my friends from school, my family, etc are scattered across the country and the world. Yet, those that are in my network, I feel like they are closer than before. We are re-creating the neighborhood, the small-town over the web.

In the same NYTimes article, Leisa Reichelt, a consultant in London, contemplates where this will lead us as a culture and asks, “Can you imagine a Facebook for children in kindergarten, and they never lose touch with those kids for the rest of their lives? What’s that going to do to them?”

Gen Y’ers, probably the most embedded generation of the small-town internet, seem at once vigilant and laissez-faire about their privacy. If a company is found out to be “posing” in the blogosphere or in the social networks, they can be revealed and quickly lose their reputation. Yet, more than any generation, this group reveals the most intimate aspects of their life on Youtube and Flickr, for the whole world to see.

We do so in the hopes that only the “right” people are looking at it. That it’s all done in good faith and no one will use that information for harm. And we just figure we can’t control it all and continue to form our networks and share with them.

Will something we did when we were a kid be held against us later in life? Can we ever escape the history that we’re creating and publishing for all to see. Doubtful.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for our small-town life.

I bought last month’s Atlantic magazine while I was wasting some time in the airport a few weeks ago. The cover caught my attention: Is Google Making us Stoopid?

I read through the article and couldn’t help sympathizing with the author, Nicholas Carr, who is experiencing weaker and weaker concentration and finding that he can’t read more than 3 paragraphs of anything anymore without being overwhelmingly distracted, wanting to jump to the next thing. Of course, he contends, this epidemic of distraction (can anyone say Attention-Deficit Syndrome?) plaguing our modern world is partly due to the distraction-friendly behavior that the Web induces. “Hyper”-linking, after all, is the very nature of the web.

As of now, all of this is just anecdotal. No scientific studies are confirming our decrease in intellect. Friends are asking each other “Hey is it harder for you to stay focused on single piece of writing for any length of time.” Friends are sharing their experiences.

Carr says,

“Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. ‘I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,’ he wrote. ‘What happened?’ He speculates on the answer: ‘What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?’”

It’s not new to understand the relationship between human thought/behavior and technology. The two are linked. The way that humans processed information prior to the printing press was very different than after the widespread dissemination of the printed word.

Today, I caught myself in the act of surfing the web. Mid-stream I spontaneously thought, “This would be a great example of our HYPER-linking behavior.” What does it look like? Here’s only about 15 minutes of my day:

• Scanning nytimes.com
• Article entitled “Advertising: Woman to Woman, Online” catches my eye
• Intrigued by the title and the relevance to my work in online marketing, I read the first 3 paragraphs of the article. The journalist begins by describing Dooce, a blog created by Heather Armstrong, who eventually could quit her day job because marketers began paying her to advertise there.
• Curious, I stop reading the nytimes article and skip over to Dooce.com
• Check out Daily Photo, Daily Chuck, and the FAQs
• Read the HA-larious “About this Site” section (which I read in full, mind you)
• Then look at a section called Mastheads, which are banner-esque monthly musings of language and design by Armstrong.
• This led me to google “A Pacific Ocean of Crap”, which happens to be Armstrong’s August masthead. (And the design for which looks uncannily like the new United Airlines television campaign. If you haven’t seen it, you must not be watching the Olympics.)
• In googling “A Pacific Ocean of Crap”, I see in the results an article called, “Our Oceans are Turning into Plastic…are we”
• After reading about 4-5 paragraphs, when I couldn’t find the answer to the title question, I scanned through the article. There was a nice graph that helped me a bit and big caption that read, “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contribuing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world.”
• Becoming disheartened with this topic, I used the back button (twice) to get back to the funny and irreverent Dooce.com

At this point, I stop dead in my tracks. Nicholas Carr was correct. We don’t read anything longer than a few lines anymore. Are you still reading this blog???? Congratulations.

In the Atlantic magazine article Richard Foreman, a modern playwright who is documenting his own cognitive and intellectual changes as information becomes ubiquitous, says “[As we are drained of our] inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, we risk turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Which leads me to the last click (the Back button) in my 15 minutes of surfing the web, “Pull a chair up with the hyrup”, Amstrong’s latest blog post on Dooce.com, which describes how she can’t serve her daughter pancakes because she doesn’t know how to make them. This blog post includes a funny youtube video about making pancakes, which I spent a good 3 minutes watching.

I think I’m stoopider than I was 15 minutes ago.

In a recent alert on Jakob Nielsen’s site, the “guru of usability” helps us understand the really important website analytics and how to interpret them better. He then helps us understand the ways in which to improve our analytics, particularly the dreaded Bounce Rate.

The bounce rate of a site is measured by calculating those who enter through any page and leave from the same page versus those who enter through any page and click-through to another page.

Recent research has shown that an increasing number of people are entering sites not though the home page, but through some deeper, interior page. This can be due to the increase of social bookmark sites like Digg and Del.icio.us, which points the web user to particular content. As a result, the bounce rate of most sites is going up.

To better understand one’s own bounce rate and how to reduce it, Nielsen recommends understanding the bounce rates of particular visitors. Alas, not all bounce rates are equal, just as not all visitors are equal.

There are basically 4 categories of visitors:

1. Those entering from the likes of Digg. These are the least important to you because they are a fickle bunch and will have unusually high bounce rates.

2. Those who enter from direct links from other websites. These visitors are in essence receiving a recommendation from some other site. People who follow these recommendations may not have been looking for your site or product directly. They have some degree of interest, but if the usability of the site is poor or does not match their expectation, the bounce rate will be high.

3. Those entering from search engine traffic (whether it be SEO or paid links) will have a specific interest in your brand and your product. They are actively searching and wanting to engage with your company. Nielsen state, “If they leave immediately, there is something wrong with your landing pages.” Check your usability, your copywriting, and don’t forget to modify keywords.

4. Loyal users are those that return repeatedly to your site. This is your core consumer audience. If they return repeatedly, they may only be checking for new content on the site. Upon finding it, they will engage longer with your site than many other visitors. As long as they keep coming back, it’s okay if this user has a low page count.

All in all, Nielsen recommends shifting your attention from the “unique visitor” as the gold standard for a site’s success. Because the majority of unique visitors will be of the #1 and #2 variety above. Instead, count loyal customers and convert them with new content, new products, new special offers just for them. And try your best to convert the unique visitor into a repeat visitor.

Make sure the site doesn’t have confusing navaigation and is light on the copywriting. Insure that there is a clear path for the visitor to follow and provide them with next steps. Don’t force them to guess where the special product or offer is, expose it.