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Designing for Mobile Engagement
Mobile consumption is steadily on the rise and according to Quantcast it still only accounts for less than 5% of all global web consumption, with slightly less in the U.S. With that being said, community designers seem to be making one of two mistakes when thinking through their approach and rationale for developing a new social tool or online community.
The first mistake is to completely ignore mobile altogether. Granted, the overall consumption of mobile is not a staggering amount, but it is on the rise (keep in mind these numbers do not take into account app usage). The second mistake is getting app happy. Not every website or brand needs to have an app, people!
Before your brand ventures into the “mobile design phase,” be sure to ask yourself two questions:
- Should I ignore 5 to 10 percent of my customers at any given time?
- Can I tailor a very specific experience through a mobile app that is different from the mobile version of my website?
The answer to question one should always be, “no!” Let’s look at a real life example. Blockbuster has recently closed all of its brick and mortar locations and opted to go head-to-head with Netflix and only offer a service that provides online/home delivery rentals. I have no affiliation with Blockbuster, but for the sake of this blog post, let’s pretend that I was an integral part.
- Should Blockbuster ignore 5 to 10 percent of their customers given they aren’t the customers using mobile devices? Hells no! In fact, Blockbuster needs to be sure that each and every customer can rent a movie anytime they choose.
- Can Blockbuster tailor a very specific experience through a mobile app? Hells yeah! Oh, wait. Blockbuster can’t really do that, can they? They have already fulfilled a promise to develop a mobile website that fulfills the brand’s promise.
Blockbuster then created http://blockbuster.com/mobile. Here anyone with an internet connected mobile device can have a very straightforward and most importantly, an easy-to-rent movie experience without having to first download an app. Notice how it almost looks like an app?
The big takeaway is that Blockbuster decided not to release an app for the sake of releasing an app. They waited until they had a very specific reason to do so—to stream movies directly to selected Verizon Wireless devices. Obviously Blockbuster needs to offer the ability to rent from their mobile device to everyone that is a paying customer, but the thought process behind developing an app vs. a mobile website remains sound.
Blockbuster definitely followed ComBlu’s two rules on engaging mobile users:
- Create a very solid mobile website experience that fulfills your brand’s promise. Remember, every touchpoint you have with a customer is another chance to build loyalty.
- Only develop an app when there is a targeted need for it. An app is not a replacement for a mobile website and you will find that it is extremely more time consuming and expensive to develop an app than a really great mobile site.
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My personal SXSW glossary
SXSW is an alternate universe with a unique culture. The native SXSW language is dude-speak. For example, right now I’m sitting in the lobby of the Hyatt, and a crew is taping an “unboxing” video of some cool camera gear. Ever other utterance is “super geeked out ”or “sweet” or “that’s soooo awesome” or “that’s super, super awesome”.
But there’s another language used by the experts and participants at the workshops and panels. I started collecting some wonderful phrases throughout my visit to SXSW-land. And, of course, I contributed some myself. A few are legacy terms that just made me smile to hear them again.
My favs:
Phrase
Definition
Random acts of connection
This phrase was used by Jim Storer from Community Roundtable during the session about the importance of lurkers in your online community. The concept is a riff on “surprise and delight” except you reach out to a non-performer instead of one of your community super stars. The desired outcome is to turn them into an engaged, contributing community member.
Signal strength of the brand
This describes the power of big brands to drive messaging and deliver content across multiple channels. It was used specifically to compare the imbalance between brands as publishers as they adopt more and more owned channels to traditional media outlets, whose voice has become diminished as both readers or viewers flee along with advertisers.
Earth worms to break up the earth
Refers to the leaders inside of online communities who prepare the ground so the community can grow and thrive.
Iceberg effect of community management
This was attributed to Rachel Happe of Community Roundtable. It describes the “under water” actions of the community manager, which are never seen by the community. The activities and presence that are visible are just a fraction of what is needed to successful guide and nurture a healthy community.
Snack-able content
OK, I heard this one a few months ago and still love it. It references how we need to create content that is as approachable and addictive as snack food. Do not confuse this with junk food, but rather content that can quickly be consumed and goes down easy, but still satisfies.
Review Roadmap
Guilty: I invented this term and used it during a session. It signals that brands need more than a product review engine; they need a crawl, walk, run strategy of how they will generate, syndicate, amplify and measure ROI of recommendations and product reviews.
“leave them alone to fester among each other”
A very funny woman from AOL used this phrase when describing a dysfunctional customer service model.
Collaborative consensus
I cannot decide if this is an oxymoron or not. The context is that in gaining consensus you have to include your detractors or those who automatically say NO in the process of getting buy-in. Could be a cluster you know what, but an interesting concept.
Viral like yeast
The lady that used this phrase was expressing a need to be more thoughtful about engagement than simply hoping a growth culture takes over.
Flash mob community
Is a flash mob a community? Or just a crowd that will disband later?
I’m going to keep adding to my glossary. What phrases would you add?
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SXSW Interactive Highlights – March 13th
After an all-day marathon of sessions and all-night parties, I must admit that it was hard to get up and get motivated for another full day of activities. Fortunately, I was able to get myself together because the SXSW panels on Sunday were just as great as the ones on Saturday. Here are my top three takeaways from day two:
- Level Up: No matter your industry, activating your community members is key to maintaining an engaging any social program. It’s essential to track and reward your members to take them to the next level of participation. However, don’t forget, while badging and rewards are a great motivator, you want to keep your core messages and conversations in the forefront of the program and don’t let your reputation management system turn into the star. Always remember, your members are the real stars.
- Metrics kill bad designs: Let’s face it. All of us give our clients options when it comes to rolling out a new app, online community or blog. Without fail, clients always seem to pick the one option that you think is the worst. By investing time up front to test different architectures and copy, you can better bolster your recommendations to clients on site design with a solid set of metrics that prove your point. And let’s face it…clients LOVE metrics.
- Gaming in your own backyard: Oh man. Talk about taking gaming to a whole new level. There are several new mobile apps that leverage check-in technology to make your everyday surroundings a “real life” gaming environment. My favorite was Seek’n Spell, where players can play a real life game of scrabble by starting an app, we’ll say while sitting in a park, and the app downloads your surroundings to your device and drops letter tiles on the map. Players then have to run around the “map” or in this case, the park, and grab the letters to check them in to spell out the words. My mouth is still salivating thinking about the opportunity to write a proposal for a brand to integrate this into their community strategy. Did I mention I am excited about this one?! Definitely expect me to elaborate on this concept soon.
As a side note, things are also getting stranger as the days go by. Below are some of my favorites that definitely fall into the “keep Austin weird” category.
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SXSW Interactive Highlights – March 12th
Being a newbie to SXSW I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. Don’t get me wrong, I was fully prepared for all of the crazy parties, hoards of people and all of the weirdness that Austin has to offer. It was the interactive panels, breakout groups and sessions that I was slightly concerned with. I quickly learned that while the sessions aren’t directly related to social engagement, the trick is identifying what the useful nuggets of information are, and then deciphering how to apply those technologies and disciplines to the ComBlu craft.
I have been compiling a list of interesting takeaways that I have gathered while at SXSW Interactive. Over the next few days I will be posting my takeaways and diving deeper into each topic in the coming weeks. My first three are:
- Mobile Engagement: The devil is in the details. Using surprise and delight and cliffhanger tactics when developing a mobile app or website is crucial to properly engage your audience.
- Engagement Mapping: If you are struggling to get your online community out of lurker-mode and instead more active, reverse engineer the experience that your most active members have on your site and figure out how to apply that experience more generally.
- Referring New Members: In order to be truly successful at running a referral campaign or program, you must incent both the referrer and referee. Think out of the box when deciding what to reward your members with; most often intrinsic rewards are more powerful than extrinsic rewards.
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Heading to Social Central!
Austin is the “Silicon Valley” of social media. It is a hub of thought leadership, venture capital and resources for the burgeoning social marketing industry. It’s not surprising then that the interactive conference at Austin’s hugely popular SXSW festival has become a “must-go” for both social marketing experts and those who want to learn more.
This year, the Council of Public Relations Firms (CPRF) invited ComBlu to lead a panel they are sponsoring at “SouthBY.”
Marketing Budgets Have Gone Social—Is It Working?
Wisdom has it that the smart money is going social. To add impact to their communications programs, brands are moving dollars into socially-focused campaigns. But is it working? Has the transfer translated into bigger and/or better campaigns? How and with whom? Have we reached a saturation point? Panelists will assess the impact inside and outside their organizations by this shift in priorities—and budget.
This will be an interesting and timely discussion. According to a recent study by FedEx and Ketchum, marketers spent between five and 15 percent of their overall external communications budgets on social media. Most companies predict budget increases for social media in 2011. A recent study by eMarketer predicts that social budgets will increase by 60 percent in 2011. And, during a recent presentation, Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group stated that budgets for formalized and mature social organizations peak at $1.3 million per year; more if you add online community budgets to the mix. In addition, investments in talent with social media skills are growing on both the corporate and agency sides.
Yet, while budgets are growing, marketers are still struggling to figure out the impact of social marketing. A recent study of 2,100 marketing executives by Harvard Business Review Analytics (for SAS) uncovered that just 12 percent feel they are effectively using social media. In addition, 75 percent said they didn’t know where their customers were talking about them online; 31 percent claimed they do not know how to effectively measure social programs; and just 23 percent said they are using social media analytics tools.
Measuring true social ROI is on the top ten list of almost every post of predictions and trends for 2011 that I have seen. As marketers, we have an obligation to help our organization or clients understand how to be savvy users of social tools. We need to be the experts in calculating and driving true social ROI. We need to go beyond a campaign orientation and deeply engage with customers and other stakeholders in meaningful ways. According to a recent survey by Alterian, 51 percent of respondents are placing a significant amount of effort and budget on moving from a campaign orientation toward a multi-channel customer engagement model. Many programs today are still tactically focused and lack the tools, analytics and faceted approach to engagement necessary for true ROI.
The opportunity is here for all of us, but it takes commitment to a continuous learning approach, as the industry is evolving very quickly. And, it takes more than hiring “kids” who grew up on Facebook. The panel that the Council is sponsoring at SXSW is a great opportunity to hear from brands about their expectations for the role of social and how their investments in this area are changing. The panel includes David Witt from General Mills, Julie Hamp from PepsiCo and Kris Narayanan from Samsung.
If you’re going to be in Austin for SXSW, please join us. The panel is on Friday, March 11, 2011 at 2:00 p.m. at the Hyatt Hotel. Come get your social groove in gear! I’ll report after the panel any interesting insights gleaned from this savvy group of marketers.
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Measuring Social Media is Dangerous
This is a late but timely second installment of Measuring Social Media is Dangerous.
The other day I logged onto Venture Beat. Low and behold the number of funded companies engaged in or developing social analytics tools has exploded. There is a company to measure, well anything and everything.
Sort of reminds me of the Tower of Babble. Lots of noise in a zillion different dialects. A confusing mess.
While the innovation, ideas and desire to bring order to what could otherwise be the chaotic space of online human interaction is something I in fact applaud, I want to be the wet blanket for a moment.
Here is why. Who knows what IEEE 802.11 is? Yes, you in the third row on the left. That’s right. It is the standard for developing, implementing and connecting to a LAN. Local Area Network. From what I hear, developing and agreeing on this standard was a battle. Everybody had a point of view and a vested interest in having their little corner of the world included in 802.11. Sound familiar (Congress Earmarks maybe)?
In the end, without IEEE 802.11 and the recognition by the engineers developing it that this standard was needed an absolute necessity for the industry to grow, flourish and be successful. You see, there can’t be two standards.
Without this single standard and all that is behind it, you might not be able to read this blog post unless you were tethered to your computer by a CAT-5 cable and what fun is that?
You see, we don’t yet have standards for measuring social? What’s important? Why? What’s not? Why? Worse, unlike the engineering industry that has IEEE (a governing body), marketing and social has no such thing, so achieve anything close to a standard, we are going to have to self organize and self police and agree collectively to a standard, which ladders in and organizes all of the metrics these newly funded companies, as well as, the old guard like Omniture, Google Analytics, the platform companies, the listening engines and social networks agree upon, or the clients themselves; namely the corporations (which is more likely) to state what they want to measure, as well as, how and why.
Easy to say, difficult to do.
I’d suggest a simple laddering structure to begin with as a framework and fill the metric feeds that deliverable verifiable and empirical data which either support, pay off or feed upon the other metrics. Think cause and effect here. One action impacts another. Focus on the actions that drive commerce. If you can measure it, you can figure out the cause and effect and repeat it. Don’t try and be so prescriptive that you try and build an algorithm to track and predict all online human behavior. You’ll never get there. But, like a Myers-Briggs test, you can segment and predict categorically what people are likely to do or how they are likely to act in general. This should be your focus.
So onto a laddering structure.
Remember also you are measuring for a number of audiences.
First, your users. You want to optimize their experience.
Second for your team. You want to create a clear order and priority to tasks that pay off.
Third for your management team. Remember, many of them don’t give a rip about uniques or sentiment or earned content. They care about what drives the P&L.
In each of these groups, you need to understand and pay off the buying agendas of each audience and be able to speak their language. Clear and defined measurement standards will make this immensely easier.
Focus on adopting and institutionalizing this process incrementally and share your approach with colleagues at conferences.
Let’s work together to establish some general yet focused standards that prove results. Only then will social marketing get a permanent seat at the management table.
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