Minneapolis and St Paul have become a hotbed of social media so it’s no small feat to make it into a list of top innovators. Although TaulPaul comes by his interest sincerely, he is lucky to have clients who are savvy enough to recognize the opportunities he brings to them. Congrats Paul!
Here is the official list of Top 20 Social Media Innovators:
http://tinyurl.com/lq7neq
Last night I had the fortunate opportunity to attend the local UPA MN lecture where Susan Dray and David Siegel talked about some of the myths of user research. Without getting into the details of the presentation, their main message was basically don’t always trust research outcomes, no matter how massive or sophisticated they appear.
We work hard to never stop questioning our approaches to defining customer or user experience problems, in addition to our methods in answering them. But as experience design strategists and designers in agency or consultancy settings like Bolin Digital, we often don’t have the luxury of large budgets to help us inform our design decisions for many projects.
In the methods of our work, we rely heavily upon activity-, user-, and system-centered approaches as models to guide us through the forest of decisions. We hope that one of them or a combination of them gets us to the answer quickly. Paul and I have also chatted about the common sense approach to design: should we sometimes rely on our own experience or instinct to guide decision making (also referred to as Dan Saffer’s “genius” centered design approach)? It seems like even this cost-efficient “gut” check, however, can get us into deep water.
As we continue to grow up in a world of increasingly sophisticated interactions and product experiences, it’s important to understand how we arrive at conclusions about which design paths to take.
All this recent thinking provoked me to ask these questions about design research methods and tools: Wwhat’s the best mix of data and methods? How much of it is driven by common sense? How do we know when we arrive at the best possible solution?
Social Email Campaigns Expected to Increase Nearly 400 Percent in 2009
A record number of email marketers plan to bridge the gap between online social networks and their email marketing campaigns in 2009, according to new research from Ball State University, the Email Marketer’s Club and ExactTarget.
The study surveyed 351 email marketers in March and found that while only 13 percent leveraged the power of online networks last year to grow their email subscriber list, more than 46 percent plan to use social media and email in tandem in 2009.
“While the global reach, rapid adoption and high engagement found in social media have email marketers salivating at the potential these environments offer to engage with customers and prospects, the real challenge is how best to facilitate meaningful interactions,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy.
Although the demand for the integration between social sites and email is surging, the success with the integration remains largely uncharted, according to the study featured in ExactTarget’s newest whitepaper entitled, “Expanding the Reach of Email Through Social Networks”.
“Consumers are reluctant to invite marketers into social environments, and this is because they don’t want to see the channel overrun with irrelevant commercial messages,” Stewart said. “However, marketers who are able to align their messaging with the distinct mindset of consumers engaging in social networks are posting positive results and building a quality following in these environments.”
The whitepaper features research that highlights how brands such as Carmex, TripAdvisor and Papa John’s have scored success by broadening their communications to include social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg and others to their traditional email-based efforts.
“We want visitors to share the experience with their friends, but we don’t want to force them to use a channel they are uncomfortable with,” said Paul Woelbing, president of Carma Labs, the maker of Carmex (a Bolin Digital client). “By offering visitors choices, we are learning a lot about the dynamics of integrating email, social media and text messaging – namely that they complement each other very well.”
The release of the whitepaper follows Tuesday’s launch of ExactTarget’s Social Forward, its new flexible metrics-driven social sharing solution for email. Debuted at ad:tech San Francisco, the new functionality gives marketers the industry’s first social media integration for email that allows multiple ways to leverage sharing and provides the industry’s most complete solution to enable and track sharing through its Direct to Social capability and through a partnership with social media syndication powerhouse ShareThis.
ExactTarget’s Social Forward will be available to users through its online Innovations Lab starting May 1 and will become an integrated solution for all ExactTarget users worldwide as part of the company’s Summer release.
The whitepaper and an overview of ExactTarget’s Social Forward technology are featured in ExactTarget’s Social Media Kit for Email Marketers. Marketers may download the kit free of charge at www.exacttarget.com/socialmediakit.
Following is a Twitter overview presentation Bolin’s Paul Saarinen did almost two years ago. Still a very good reference for understanding Twitter. The presenatation covers:
Aside from all the news about Apple’s withdrawal from Macworld and tradeshows in general, as well as the questions surrounding the health of Steve Jobs, there’s been a lot of speculation about what Apple’s next Big Deal is.
How about an enhanced, more evolved, touch screen iMac? This is not a stretch. HP has it. Or maybe you just call it the iPhone. Will Apple will roll out some application that is more intuitive, more useful, more sexy, more capable of complex interactions than current devices out there? How quickly will non-keyboard gestural interfaces become part of the lexicon of computer interaction? We’ve seen how the iphone technology works with current ergonomics of human movement. Here are some foreseeable extensions of the idea:
These applications are not only forseeable, but require sophisticated new devices to handle enhanced human interaction. The moment of truth: How will a company like Apple strike out on this front? The pressure is on.
We’ve been talking about Motrin’s issues with Mom’s who found their new ad condescending, patronizing and disrespectful. Our armchair quarterback response is that J&J should have engaged moms online about this approach beforehand rather than lobbing it over the fence the way they did. Several of us felt Motrin can get past this if they keep the moms engaged while they now have their attention. The worst thing they could do is to retreat and pretend like it never happened.
This also acts as a word of warning to brands. Brands may think they don’t need a social media strategy but they may be dragged into it kicking and screaming like J&J. Also, the old rules of PR and crisis management may not hold up too well online. Other conclusions or learnings?
(caption: The movie Minority Report helped us all catch a vision for a world that requires physical movement in our daily interactions.)
If I had one wish for our user experience and design team here at Bolin Marketing, it would be to spend the rest of the year (and quite possibly the next) focusing on how we could extend beneficial online customer experiences that extend beyond the norm: text, image and video content. Smart navigation and interaction design are also (of course) imperative in this equation. But the real silver bullet will lie in smart interaction design that builds a friendly relationship between customers and a company’s products and services.
While working on my draft for part two of my last post on Customer Experience Strategy, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our interactions with products and services have been changing. Then I read Adrian Ho’s post about the psychology of human movement and what this means for companies and their relationships with their customers. Of course, we all think Apple (iphone) and Nintendo (Wii) are leading the charge, with the way they involve natural human gestures as an essential element in how we experience their products. This is the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s pretty safe to say that gesture, movement, and even ritual are becoming part of the lexicon for the design of future customer interactions.
Our Team at Bolin Marketing is always trying to come up with a thoughtful and holistic approach to how we solve marketing problems for our clients. Beyond internet marketing, we’d like to think we’re making big strides in how we can integrate a smart user experience practice as part of the design process for all our clients. But the real challenge is putting this thinking into practice. If ritual, gesture, and nonverbal communication in the physical and digital world are the next frontier for brand/customer strategy, what is the next best way to integrate this thinking into a design process?
There’s a Chinese proverb that states something to the effect of, “If you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.” I think that’s a good conceptual framework through which to analyze content management needs. Content management rhetoric drips of promises of “marketing empowerment”, implying that changing anything on a site through CMS is as easy as rekeying text, and this is the rationale for CMS existence.
Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t often answer the promise. Rekeying text may be one of the steps involved in making a content edit through a CMS, but the promise fails to address the flexibility limitations of an object oriented data model, the complexity associated with a multi tiered, role based workflow of approvals, and the CMS interface complexity that tends to grow in indirect proportion to functional capability.
Bolin Digital’s president, Dane Hartzell, cites surveys he took part in during his participation in the eBusiness Executive council comprised of interactive directors for many of the largest consumer brands in North America. When asked if they would recommend their current CMS, whether they be home grown solutions, enterprise level big-players, or otherwise, 0% said they would.
How can each be so dissatisfied across the myriad of solution providers, technology platforms, and broad ranging internal support/administration capabilities? I personally believe the answer lies within the failure to acknowledge specific needs of each interactive property, and match the solution to that need. If XYZ corporation has entered a license agreement with a big player CMS, even short lived marketing properties are expected to sit atop that CMS. High fidelity design and highly interaction oriented web applications tend not to play well with CMS solutions. At the other end of the spectrum, if I were developing an online property whose purpose was provide access to tens of thousands of content pages, each with shared components, I sure as hell wouldn’t want the entire site hard coded and static (no CMS), especially if there were tiered regulatory approvals required prior to publish.
CMS needs often find their way into a project requirements checklist as a single decision point- does the property need a CMS, or doesn’t it? How can we better scale the solution to the actual lifespan of the property, the dynamic realities of its existence, the needs of the folks who manage it, and a long list of other considerations? And in the case of simple web applications, how can we simplify management as much as possible?
We don’t claim that our content admin tool (we don’t refer to it as a CMS) is the end-all, be-all, as we don’t believe there is such a solution. The point being the solution is scalable, and we will tend toward starting simple. Marketers need to weigh the CMS needs of a web app on a case by case basis. On a continuum of simple (think WordPress, Drupal, Joomla) to complex (Microsoft, Oracle/Stellent ECM), know that if you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other. A long list of functional features tends to come along with complexity, lack of flexibility once implemented, high cost, training, and ongoing support. Whether you’re an agency, an IT manager, or a client side marketer, are you scaling your content management approach appropriately?
McDonalds Corp at American Dietetic Association Show
At the American Dietetic Association’s Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo, McDonalds Corporation had a booth. At the booth was a wheel that attendees could spin. On the wheel were a number of McDonalds menu items. Based on the menu item you landed on, you would guess what the calories were. It is one of those type of tradeshow “games” to get attendees to your booth …
However, what the real point of this post is this: McDonalds is a huge corporation with thousands of restaurants in over 100 countries worldwide. They do millions of dollars in sales every quarter. Their market cap is $64B — that is nine zeros! Worldwide, they have over 390,000 employees. It isn’t a company; it is a global powerhouse. A machine.
Despite its sheer size and worldwide dominance, McDonalds Corporation is concerned with talking directly to food and nutrition professionals. I think it illustrates what is happening with healthy living through food and nutrition. A corporation the size of McDonalds wants to establish a presence with food and nutrition professionals. These professionals work directly with patients to help establish eating and nutritional habits for people. It is admirable.
In my years working in marketing in the health care arena, I’ve heard it is restaurants like McDonalds’s fault the majority of Americans are obese. About two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight, and almost one-third are obese, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) … we are talking 200,000,000 Americans.
Fast food restaurants like McDonalds are getting into the game. They want to be part of the solution and not be exclusively labeled as part of the problem. McDonalds still has a way to go, but they should be applauded.
I must admit, I’m sometimes a late adopter when it comes to the newest online trends, tools or chatter about technology. I see this as a strength: it’s good to be skeptical and somewhat critical before jumping on any technology bandwagon. I wasn’t among the first to use twitter, facebook, or myspace, and I JUST finished organizing my personal financial outlook on Mint.
Mint is the perfect tool for people (like me) who have spent an inordinate portion of their lives talking about getting their financial housekeeping in order. It’s amazing. Initially offered as a great personal savings-and-expense management tool, Mint now allows users to track investments and custom categorize individual expense items in a simple, easy-to-use interface. It make suggestions on maximizing savings and indicates if and when expenses are outside my usual spending trends. And as an interactive designer, I appreciate the elegant interface and crisp, clean identity. Centralized self-administered personal finance management for the first time. Talk about exceptional customer experience.
Mint - the revolutionary personal finance organizer.
Granted, I still have to go to each account to move money around. Hmm, another great concept. Is Mint headed in that direction?
Next,
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