If your cell phone surprisingly disappears, this video may explain where it went. Our Behavioral Research Department just loves conducting user experience tests on cell phones, PDAs, and touch screen iPhones. Check it out!
P.S. We promise to take good care of your devices! =)
First it was blogs, and then it was social networks. But that was so yesterday – today you need an open platform if you want to be hip. If you don’t believe me, just check out how Digg, MySpace, LinkedIn (sort of), and Google (yep, their platform is not open enough) have all joining Facebook in making their platforms more accessible for developers. While the idea of openness (or near openness) sounds good in theory, there are two recent cases that have proven the “wisdom of the crowd will make this site more relevant” pill is not so magical.
Alexaholics vs. Alexa
In February 2006, Ron Hornbaker created a tool that used the Alexa engine (owned by Amazon) that compared and ranked the traffic patterns of up to 5 different websites . The site was called Alexaholics.com and it became an overnight sensation among people that practiced Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While the initial relationship was warm, the situation turned sour in March 2007 when Alexa tried to shutdown Ron’s tool by demanding back the domain name through ICANN and blocking the graphs from appearing on his website. At the end of the day, Amazon/Alexa won and Alexaholics (now known as Statsaholics.com) shifted to using the graphing engine of alternate companies.
Photobucket vs. MySpace
In 2003, a photo and video sharing service called Photobucket was founded. The service was used on many sites, including Facebook, eBay and MySpace. On April 10 2007, reports surfaced on Techcrunch that MySpace started to block videos originating from Photobucket. It seems that MySpace decided that the service was so good that they rather own it, and about a month later Photobucket was owned by MySpace for $250M in cash. (Credit goes to Webb Alert for recently bringing this example to our attention).
Conclusion
The fact of the matter is that opening your platform too much can change your business model. One must strike a balance between what information you expose through your interface (aka API) and what information you keep to yourself. Otherwise, you may find that someone else is either doing it better than you or has a superior product is generating significant revenue.
In both cases, this signals time to go back to the “how to monetize this website” drawing board.
In a week where I was about to pounce on Nielsen’s thin-skinned, backbone-less reversal of a rule intended to alleviate appointment only television ratings (basically, they were measuring multiple viewings of a single show as a count, but NBC, Heroes and Nissan tricked the subsystem and made them look foolish), I am making a reversal myself and lauding them. A little.
“Hey! Nielsen” is, wouldn’t you know, a social network. But the fabric and this model is interesting and completely in line with their brand and how technological shifts in the marketplace are influencing it. First some basics:
Nielsen is widely known for their measurement systems, particularly the TV audience analysis that drives the entire media economy. A dusty old model itself, there are basically a few thousand sample households nationwide that use a clunky, television set-top box to record how many family members are in a room watching a particular broadcast. This data is used to set ratings that guide commercial costs, which steers which shows (and types of shows) get to live, die, or be put on “Hiatus”.
That covered, they also have an interesting product called Buzz-Metrics, which measures chatter densities and positive/negative spin for any number of products or topics, trolling the blogs and chatter spheres throughout the web to figure out what people are talking about and how. Dove has a new “Real Beauty” campaign? Buzz Metrics helps them figure out if people are talking about it, how, where/when etalk rises and falls, as well as how the campaign affected the chatter levels of their competitors.
Hey! Nielsen is kind of a blending of those two systems – a social network where contributors talk about, rank, dis, opinionate or just basically fight over Movies, TV Shows, websites , and personalities (Jensen Ackles, it seems, is going to be the next that guy who was Dawson on Dawson’s creek, you know, with the forehead). It then layers on data from Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, and Blogpulse – other Nielsen products - to create a score. You can also track the score over time. Pretty neat.
The good news is that Nielsen’s stated goal is to eventually use these scores to help drive and influence their primary products, namely TV ratings and panel data, but not until they have enough user mass and a foolproof methodology. How will they get there? By enticing enthusiasts with exclusive screenings and invite only events.
It’s an interesting start, but back to Nielsen’s feeble cowering before the media community … it would be great if they had a category for scoring ads themselves.
Being the Creative Director for one of Atlanta’s top 5 largest web design and development company certainly has its challenges, but nothing could prepare Wade Forst for the barrage of mishaps he has faced in the past weeks. The first incident took place at his fiancé’s backyard where 3 of their dogs decided to share a meal of rat carcass and ended up getting poisoned. Next, he was at a local gas station fueling up when he thought that his fiancé was throwing water on him but quickly discovered that the hose actually came off from the pump and was shooting about 4 gallons of gasoline on him.
After a short period of normalcy, the third calamity dawned upon him like an inferno, literally speaking. A nearby tree suddenly broke in half and took down a power line, causing a fiery chain-effect that sent part of his house in flames. He caught a break of good luck because no one was hurt during the incident.
Now we’ll just top everything off with a stolen laptop and just call it quits, right? Not so fast. A few days after the stolen laptop, we heard him talking over the phone with the dentist and he’s scheduled for a root canal sometime this month. Ouch!
With all that has happened I cannot think of a more appropriate movie poster to describe it. I took the poster of Just My Luck starring Lindsay Lohan and Chris Pine and doctored Wade’s face into it. You can view the original version here.
Thinking back to the days of taking the SAT (did you hear they allow calculators now?!), I remember the analogy questions and I could imagine seeing this one:
Cat is to Dog as
Interactive is to…
a) Digital
b) Online
c) Print
d) Al Gore
The obvious answer would be c), right? Not so fast. I just read about a company called Structural Graphics that creates what they call “interactive print”. In an article by Mediaweek, the author writes about pitches that Structural Graphics has recently made on the concept of print ads with animation, sound and video to Time Inc. and other major publishers. The printed page would even have a coin-sized battery!
Although they say the product is about two years away from execution, you have to start thinking that we’re not too far off from having conversion-enabled (I just made that word up) print ads that connect to the web, possibly through bluetooth on your phone or a wireless network. Or I could see ads change based on when a person is reading that magazine (i.e. if there is an NFL ad for an upcoming game and you read the magazine two weeks later, the ad could refresh to the game that weekend).
This kind of technology leads me to believe that soon all marketing will be “interactive”. I was at a dinner the other night and someone high up on the interactive side at one of the largest companies in town made the comment that interactive marketing is now traditional marketing. And I think she’s right.
Forget having to have a multi-million dollar budget to make it onto the big screens. For a mere $20,000 and 3 years, you can land yourself in movie premier at the Sundance festival. Did I also mention that you can do this in the comfort of your own room? That is exactly what former Web Designer Michael Belmont did.
The outcome is a 1hr26min hypnotic and berzerk film called “We Are the Strange”, which utilizes a technique that Belmont dubs Str8nime, which is a combination of strange + 8-bit + anime. Wired.com recently wrote an article about him and even listed the steps to making a DIY Str8nime movie on your own. Check out the trailer for We Are the Strange.
Many user experience professionals shy away from marketing. In many ways, who can blame them? We’ve observed customers ignore banner ads, watched pop-up ads annoy and confuse customers, and read rants by usability pioneers about the evil that ads wield on web design. We have seen attempts at applying a traditional “broadcast” model of marketing fail in interactive mediums.
But good marketing is more than ads—a whole lot more. Several concepts in marketing jive quite well with user experience.
The Good: The Communication Experience Is the Marketing By emphasizing consistency, customization, and credibility, these concepts echo a few characteristics of what I’ve described as customer-centered communication.
These concepts additionally
Lead us to view a customer’s interaction with a brand holistically instead of isolated in certain channels.
Challenge us to effectively apply customer data such as demographics and buying history to improve communications.
Encourage us to think about building long-term relationships with customers.
The Potentially Bad: User Experience Opportunities The potentially bad side of these concepts is, of course, their execution. (Remember those banner ads.) Here are a few ways user experience professionals can help avoid the bad.
Don’t Interrupt Me: Placement and Content Because user experience professionals understand how and why customers actually use the channels, we know when and where marketing communication is most appropriate. We also can inform its content.
Example: A well-placed, relevant, and undisruptive BP banner ad on CNN.com that engaged even a skeptic like me. It shares a similar topic with the article, visually stands out on the simple page, and expands instead of taking the user away from the page.
Don’t Just Tell Me—Show Me Telling is reporting that you hiked 25 miles on the Appalachian Trail last weekend. Showing is describing the weather, the scenery, the sounds, the animals you encountered, the soreness in your muscles. Telling makes you aware of what happened. Showing engages you in the experience. I think showing is critical to making brand attributes clear and to developing trusting, long-term relationships with customers. User experience professionals can help brands “show” in interactive mediums.
Example: Betty Crocker has been demonstrating brand attributes such as practical, friendly cooking expertise since the 1920s through recipes, cooking tips, cooking shows, promotions for discounted cookware, and more. (Below is a 1951 print ad with tips and a recipe.) These efforts continue successfully today on the Betty Crocker website and its RSS feeds.
Help Me Help Myself: Applying Customer Data User experience professionals can make the most of customer data across customer self-service channels and applications such as store kiosks, web applications, automated phone systems, and more. We know how to leverage that data to make self-service customized and therefore more valuable and easier to use.
The recent news that Facebook has hit the 3 million user mark inspired me to sign up for an account. While I have a LinkedIn account, I heard that Facebook was different so I had to check it out. The cool part of this “experiment” was that (unbeknown to me) I was the perfect candidate for Facebook, because according to InformationWeek people over the age of 24 are its fastest-growing demographic on Facebook.
As a newcomer - and because I wanted to get it right - I sought guidance from the folks at Spunlogic who are Facebook veterans. Below are my ten simple things to do/be aware of if you decide to the take the plunge.
The registration process is open to all users. All you need is an email address. NOTE: Your date of birth is a required field. Since I found this a bit too personal, I got slightly creative with the date.
Easily connect to those you already know by granting Facebook temporary access to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! or Gmail email accounts. Facebook can easily add existing friends to your profile from these accounts during the setup process.
Search for friends from work, school, or social groups; but be selective. Unlike MySpace, Facebook is not about how many friends you know – it is about connecting to those that you want to keep in touch with, so don’t add every person that you find.
Let the crowd guide you in application selection. Similar to MySpace, you can add applications, or widgets, to your Facebook page based on your interests. Facebook posts alerts to your page whenever a friend adds an application, and I found this to be the perfect way to discover new widgets that I hadn’t considered.
Be careful who you poke! Yep, you are reading this correctly – you can poke another person. “Poking” grants to the person that you poked temporary access to your profile, so “don’t poke the bear!”
Send an email notification to your friend without copying all of their addresses. A big frustration with email is that people have multiple accounts so you have to copy each account to make sure that they get it. One of the hallmarks of social networking sites is that you can send a message to a friend (without even knowing their email address) and they will get notified. It’s just that simple.
Put a name with a face - on a picture. One of the coolest features in Facebook is the ability to identify who’s who in a picture by tagging them.
Update your Facebook “status” without a computer. Once you add your cell phone, you can send use SMS messages to update both your Facebook profile and send messages to your friends. In fact, by entering ‘@ changing his status using his phone.’ and sending it to FBOOK (32665) I discovered that my new status displayed “Tomer is changing his status using his phone.”
You can limit what you share with others. The availability of personal information has raised some privacy concerns on Facebook. To combat this, you simply can tweak your privacy settings, where you can block users or limit what personal information a specific user has access to. To learn more, you should check out the Privacy page on the Facebook blog.
Write on someone’s “wall.” As you would in the real world, you’re expected to check in with friends … in the case of Facebook, it’s posting messages on other friend’s “walls” (their Facebook page).
After a couple of weeks on Facebook, I’m finding that I really enjoy the experience. I’ve actually started to reconnect with high school friends that I lost touch with or wasn’t able to connect with through other social networking sites (ie: Linked-in). Since I’ve still got a ways to go, I would love to get your thoughts on “newcomer “ tips for getting more out of Facebook.
Just when I was about to go after Steve Ballmer for his inability to say anything intelligent about the web, Marc Andreessen beats me to it. I’ve mentioned Marc’s blog as one of my favorites a while back, and he very succinctly nails why Microsoft continues to lack an understanding of the importance (and staying power) of social networking. And for a while there I thought Microsoft might be trying when the reports were coming out that they are interested in buying 10% of Facebook, but then Steve says something like this to the UK Times Online:
“I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
He also compares Facebook to Geocities saying that it had “most of what Facebook has.” No, it didn’t. But we don’t have time to get into that. Suffice it to say, I’m guessing Steve’s not getting many Facebook friend requests as he clearly doesn’t really understand what the site even does.
But back to the point. I could try to make fun of Ballmer but as I said, Marc did a much better job in this blog post, which you now see below. Enjoy
Ballmer subsequently added:
“I think these things [talking motion pictures] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [televisions] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [rock and roll music] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [hip hop music] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [fast food restaurants] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [bikinis] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [cars] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [typewriters] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [digital music players] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [mobile phones] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [video games] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think these things [search engines] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
“I think this thing [the web] is going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
And then finally, “I think these things [personal computers] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”
Google has been taking market share from Yahoo!, the second most popular search engine according to Nielsen NetRatings (PDF format), so Yahoo! has fired their first salvo at Google. This week, Yahoo! introduced a new search utility, called the Search Assistant, to help guide visitors through a search (see image below). In essence, the Search Assistant is a drop-down menu that appears below the search bar on the Yahoo! home page whenever a user types in search terms (aka search query). The purpose of this utility is to improve the search results by either:
Adding words to the search query. This functionality narrows the search results into a more targeted set.
Suggesting alternate search terms. This functionality shifts the search results to related terms that may be lesser known, yet more relevant to the search query.
This tool could potentially have a significant impact on the search engine world. Why?
1. The Search Assistant will increase searches to well targeted sites. Most search queries are composed of only two to three terms. By adding terms to the existing query, the results will shift to sites that match more terms and are more focused.
2. The Search Assistant will improve the quality of search results. Since search engines are often used as the starting point to conduct online research on a specific topic, users may not be aware of industry-related terms. By introducing the user to related terms, the utility improves the quality of the results.
3. The Search Assistant will “level” the search engine marketing field. Webmasters are often focused on improving results for terms that receive significant traffic. By displaying results for lesser known terms, the search engine traffic will “shift” to lesser known sites, and in turn it will force webmasters of sites that have more generic terms to also optimize for more targeted terms.
4. The Search Assistant will eventually attract more visitors. Google beat out Yahoo! because of their clean search results page AND more relevant search results. Since search results pages virtually follow the same design, the improved search results will renew interest in Yahoo!.
Conclusion
According to internal tests, Yahoo! has discovered that 61% of users were more successful in their search when they used the Search Assistant. While that’s impressive by any measure, Yahoo! still lags in developing a competitive search engine spider (or, program that the search engine sends to collect information about each website). Google has one of the best spiders around, so if Yahoo! wants to regain market share it will have to focus their developers on that effort next.
At Spunlogic, we have a lot of great experience and unique ideas to share. From work with clients to new approaches and trends, in this award winning blog you'll find Spunlogic experts sharing their opinions and ideas on all aspects of interactive marketing.
