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Designing for the Social Web

By Justin Seeley · Comments (1)

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

This year at WordCamp Raleigh I presented on “Designing for the Social Web.” This is a topic that I’m passionate about and feel that more people in our field should get involved with in order to “stay ahead of the curve.” Here’s a brief summary of the presentation along with the slides. As soon as WordCamp Raleigh posts video of the event we’ll post that here as well.

Today’s Internet has become a social environment. Like it or not, that’s just a fact. As a designer you should be aware of the various social spaces that are available to you and your clients and try to learn as much as you can about them. You need to be able to integrate their various customization schemes into your (or your client’s) brand strategy.

The first thing you’ll need to do is create a plan of attack. By this I mean that you need to research and find the correct networks for you or your clients. Finding the right audience is half the battle when it comes to social media. Don’t waste your time on networks that don’t have relevance for you or your client.

In other words… If you’re a dog… don’t try to be a kangaroo!

Once you’ve determined which networks are right for you, you should study those networks and learn the ins-and-outs of their platform. You’ll need to know the limitations such as screen sizes, customizable area size, level of interactivity, and a host of others. The more you know about your chosen platforms, the better off you will be.

The next phase is creating what we call a “Unified Message” through design. By this I mean that you want to develop your designs (logos, colors, slogans, etc.) and build a core set of graphics that will work across multiple social spaces.

Consistency is key when it comes to the web because consistency creates awareness.

Once you’ve developed your core set of graphics and/or branding materials it’s time to put your plan into action. Go to your chosen networks and use your knowledge of their platform to design some memorable landing pages/profiles.

The final phase focuses on the importance of “social cross pollination.”

The premise of this theory is that by referencing your various social profiles on ALL of your sites, marketing materials, and (seemingly) benign places like email signatures or business cards, you will be able to capture a new segment of users or simply expose your existing user base to a different side of you. By doing this you will constantly give people new ways of interacting with you and keep them “on the hook” by giving them fresh ways to get interesting content from you no matter where they may be on the web.

As you can see, I’m very passionate about this subject and fully believe that the internet is headed down a road that will only become more social. Now is the time to act on this and get up-to-speed with these technologies. If you don’t you run the risk of being left behind, and as we all know… If you’re not at the party, you can’t dance with the pretty girl!

Below are the slides for the “Designing for the Social Web” presentation:

Designing for the Social Web

View more presentations from Justin Seeley

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Categories : Design, Marketing, Social Media

Huge Social Media Numbers Don’t Always Help You

By "Professor" Benjamin · Comments (2)

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

I will be honest. I am sick of the magic bean marketing that some people are pitching in order to help you “grow” your Twitter followers or for winning a large group of “friends” for apps like FaceBook. There are so many things that I see wrong with this approach and why I dislike this idea of selling magic bean stalks to businesses or people willing to listen.

1. Can you really call people friends when you’ve never really met them? I don’t accept ANY friend requests unless I know a person or they come as a recommendation from someone I trust. I think in some ways we’ve made it too easy to connect and I am more interested in “real-ationships” than a body count. Not to mention, people do business with people they trust. How can you do this if you don’t know them?

2. Does having thousands of followers really matter? I think the idea of building a massive follower list is just like those childish, school popularity contests where those with the most friends wins. Where are your friends now? We should be more concerned with building quality friendships over shallow quantity ones. Plus, using trickery to build your list doesn’t equal qualified leads or good friendships…but maybe that’s just my Gen-X cynicism speaking.

3. Can you honestly keep up with them? Many bloggers or books say the proper etiquette is to friend or follow a person who does the same for you (and can also a magic bean tactic). This is a great theory and very kind, but highly impractical. You can only keep up with a limited amount of people. And if you are only doing it as a courtesy, doesn’t that cheapen the deal? I follow people because I care about what they are saying or doing, and at 227, this is very difficult to do!

4. What is the real purpose? I understand the power of reach and that having a large list of people can increase your odds at being heard, but there is a huge difference between earning the right/trust/privilege to be heard (or followed) as compared to marketing tactics to bait you into a relationship. If your reason is to create true community then it has to be done with authenticity.

5. Isn’t Social Media about getting results? I’ve been reading Social Media Metrics by Jim Stern and it’s challenged me to go back to my old school reasoning of the ROI (Return on Investment) of using the social media apps at our disposal. In the Introduction, Jim states that you must measure the effectiveness of social media and that there are “The Big Three Goals” in business:

Increasing Revenue,
Lowering Costs, and
Improving Customer Satisfaction

He writes, “they are all that matters in the long run. If the work you do does not result in an uptick in one or more of those Big Three Goals, then you are wasting your time and spinning your wheels.” Stern also talks about how shallow relationships don’t usually generate good ROI. If we take his information as truth, then we must come to understand that the huge social media numbers game really doesn’t help us out and that smaller, authentic communities do.

Bringing it all together…

Many of us know that trusted relationships with our clients, customers, or community will help us with our business or venture. Most of us, if we are being honest, would admit that we don’t use social media just for the sake of having fun – but for the purpose of business. If these are all valid statements (and I believe they are) then shooting for a mass influx of friends, followers, or buddies will not benefit us and therefore making the magic beanstalk worthless.

My advice is that you build your following organically or because you are remarkable. Then your social media numbers will mean something and have real value.

So how do you feel about these thoughts?

Comments (2)

Categories : Social Media

Tags : credibility, Facebook, relationships, Social Media, Twitter

The Freedom of Expression and Social Media

By "Professor" Benjamin · Comments (0)

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Social media tools have changed the way we communicate. Now instead of getting our information from the news or other broadcasting platforms, we have become the media platform as individuals.

There are pros and cons to this ability and power that we have been given.

On the positive side we can share what we want, when we want and offer breaking news as we see it. The negative can be that our eye-witness accounts may not always be 100% accurate or that we may share our views without restraint. It really is a double edged sword!

The thing that bothers me are the conversations going on about where our freedom of expression stops with tools such as FaceBook and Twitter. Some of us might remember the fallout with ESPN and their newly integrated social media policy or maybe we’ve read the outstanding article by Michael Hyatt and their guidelines at Thomas Nelson Publishers. The truth is, athletes to business people are now under the gun to either not use these tools or if if they can, it must be controlled.

How far will we go in our digital world to keep people from sharing what’s on their minds?

I believe that every person should use their best judgment and act responsibly – in person, in the media or on the web – but wonder if we truly have a right to enforce a set of rules when it could cross the line for our Freedom of Speech, especially if a person is using their own personal account for social media.

There is, without a doubt, a time where strict rules should be in place such as when it relates to trade secrets or privacy policy matters. What if the conversation is not based on sensitive information, and instead, a personal view of an athlete questioning a bad call or worker sharing their religion? Could shutting down these comments be subject to a violation of our Freedom of Speech rights?

I am curious as to where the line will be drawn in the sand. How about you?

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Categories : Social Media

Transparency through Your Blog and Social Media

By "Professor" Benjamin · Comments (0)

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

The Internet is a tremendous tool that can be used for great things. Unfortunately it can also be used for harm.

When you are mentioned on the web, you are there forever. When you write a blog post or upload information and photos, you leave a mark impossible to erase. This is a huge concern for people and for how open they – or you – should be on the Internet.

Safety is an issue for all of us in the post 9/11 world but in all honesty there is no more impenetrable security. We are all open to attack whether in real life or the cyber-world. While it is wise that we should be cautious, we should not and cannot live in fear.

It is important as a business or entrepreneur that we open up and be transparent about our lives and our companies, including the successes and failures. Our clients, customers, friends, and followers want to know they are dealing with a real person. It’s vital that we build true relationships in a technology driven world.

So how open or transparent should you be? As open as you want the world to know about you and your company.

Whatever your write and post about will be a track record. It will follow you. And as long as you understand this, then it’s up to you to decide how transparent you should be with your social media tools or website. Besides, if someone really wants to gain information about your life, past or present, it can be achieved…but if you want to protect anything from being used against you, just don’t make it easier to find.

My takes is that common sense will guide you well in determining what’s in your best interest when it comes to transparency. What do you believe?

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Categories : Blogging, Social Media

Don’t Sellout Your Friends

By "Professor" Benjamin · Comments (0)

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Here’s a disturbing advertising development: Selling out your friends. It’s pretty common in social media spheres to see cutting edge new advertising techniques. A lot interesting ideas are cropping on Facebook, hoping to take advantage of the 300 million unique users.

Intel’s Fan Plan is the latest example. They’re giving discounts on Intel laptops to anyone in the Fan Plan for one day only—Monday, Nov. 30, aka Cyber Monday (the biggest online shopping day of the year, in contrast to Black Friday, the biggest in-real-life shopping day of the year). But the catch is that the more people who join the Fan Plan, the greater the discount will be.

It sounds like a win-win, right? Even Fast Company is wondering if this is the future of advertising.

The problem is that it relies on you turning salesperson on your friends to get a better deal. On the plus side you’re scoring a better deal for everybody, so it could be worse, but that subtle little issue remains. Intel is effectively bribing you to tell all your friends about Intel.

I’ve got a better idea: Create a remarkable product that doesn’t require bribery to get people to spread the word. Go ahead and offer a discount. Incentives are great. But don’t make the size of that discount dependent on how many people I tell.

Swedish furniture brand IKEA also got into the mix of manipulating Facebook with a giveaway to promote the opening of a new store. They posted photos of the new IKEA’s showrooms to Facebook and encouraged people to use a popular photo-tagging feature of Facebook. The feature is supposed to be used to identify people in photos. When you’re identified, your friends will be notified and can check out the fun new picture of you. But IKEA encouraged people to tag products in the photo with their name in order to win them. Tag a product and you can win it!

Sounds great. But what you’re really doing is misusing a useful feature and turning it into a commercial. When photos of you pop up in people’s newsfeed on Facebook, they’re paying attention because they care about you, not some product from IKEA. But if you abuse that feature to win a picture frame, you’re wasting your friends’ time. Facebook has even tightened their guidelines on promotions and this sort of strategy could be a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

Social media is quickly growing and maturing, and people are getting tired of being advertised to by their friends and family. People should advertise for you because they like your product, not because they want a better discount. And in the end, that’s just a better pitch. Who am I going to listen to? My friend telling me about a product he uses and loves, or my friend shilling a product he barely knows just to save a few cents?

Comments (0)

Categories : Marketing, Social Media

Tags : Facebook, IKEA, incentives, Intel

Twitter, Google Search Deal Makes Twitter More Important For Businesses

By "Professor" Benjamin · Comments (0)

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

With the new Google and Twitter search deal, it means it’s more important than ever for your business or organization to be on Twitter.

This quote from the Google blog announcement hits it home on how this affects the Google search we come to love and rely on:

“That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

As I read that quote I thought that a flood of businesses with customers who want that type of real-time, breaking information better RUN to Twitter accounts if they haven’t already.

It’s obvious for ski resorts, of course, and makes a lot of sen. Each and every ski resort better be reporting snow conditions actively on Twitter.

But you can reverse engineer other real-time data people could be wanting … here’s a couple that come to mind:

Weather – (covered in the snow conditions mention) but people want severe weather alerts, temperatures and forecasts
Sports – scores, game schedules, injuries
Stocks – your company’s daily stock price and news that affects it
Travel – city news in particular, especially while traveling or researching
Conferences, Special Event – this is obvious maybe, but we’ve live blogged and tweet conferences like the recent Catalyst Conference; can also apply to major events like the Inauguration of the President
Political – major legislative bills, political candidate announcements
Health – flu outbreaks like H1N1
Seasonal – special holiday dates come to mind, particular Halloween
Entertainment – I’ve personally looked at Twitter search for who got booted off American Idol before; celebrity news is hot on search (see Google Trends for proof)
Any Breaking News – anything that can be considered a breaking new headline (i.e. death of Michael Jackson, who won American Idol, etc)

What else did I miss? And have you signed yourself and your business up for Twitter yet?

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Categories : Searches, Social Media

Tags : Google, Twitter

Make Sure Your Site is Facebook Friendly

By "Professor" Benjamin · Comments (0)

Monday, October 12th, 2009

You don’t necessarily have to be on Facebook to take advantage of the widely popular social networking site. But you should make sure your website is Facebook friendly.

Facebook has a feature where users can share links and post content into their stream of updates. That shared content will then be seen by their friends and fans. Users can post links directly in Facebook or you can add ‘Share on Facebook’ icons to your site. The application works by visiting the site you’re linking to and grabbing a preview of relevant information, including the title, description and any images embedded into the page.

But sometimes the information shared isn’t always helpful. You can change that by checking out what information Facebook grabs. You can make sure your site has a useful meta description in the header (which is also good practice for search engine optimization). If you have a blog you might consider putting an excerpt of the blog entry in the description. That way the excerpt will show up when someone shares the link on Facebook, as opposed to the general description of your blog. More specific details will be more likely to hook people.

Facebook’s share feature will also grab an image from the shared link and give the user an option of picking the thumbnail that fits best. You can override this by pointing to a specific image. This might be helpful if your logo isn’t an isolated file on your site—you can point to the perfect image. This is also incentive to include relevant images with your blog entries and make sure when people share the links they’re sharing relevant and helpful information.

Visit Facebook and try sharing a few links from your site. Check them out and see how the title, description and thumbnail images come up. If they’re not as good as they could be, considering changing them. After all, there are more than 300 million users on Facebook.

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Categories : Blogging, Searches, Social Media

Tags : Facebook