Bridging the gap between creativity and usability.

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For the creative person working in marketing and design, ‘be different’ is important. From day one, creatives are trained and usually rewarded for thinking outside the box, pushing limits and breaking new ground. As a result, when a creative person perceives a pattern in an industry, category, approach, etc. their natural reaction is to zag when others zig. In advertising this is often the difference between breaking through work and being lost in the noise.

The agenda of the user-experience designer is different. Someone tasked with managing usability needs to make sure the person engaging with their interface can quickly and easily navigate the system, accomplish their tasks and find their way to the next logical place. This has much to do with leveraging existing paradigms and conventions as appropriate. So where the creative person sees ‘different’ as an advantage. The UX designer sees it as a potential barrier to usability.

Much of the interface design work that goes into websites and apps falls on the shoulders of people who are classified as ‘creatives’. While a digitally native designer might snap to the needs of usability quicker, there is still an overwhelming urge among most creative people to substitute in the ‘new and different’ whenever possible. That could be in anything from the placement of navigation to the use of icons instead of words.

I recently stumbled upon a useful analogy for helping creative people understand where and how creativity and usability should meet and merge. I thought I would share it with you as you might find it helpful too.

My analogy is the automobile. There is all sorts of creativity in automobile design. From aesthetics, to the placement of cup holders, to the shape and position of taillights. However, every car manufactured has some common elements. A steering wheel on the left side is one (for cars in the U.S.). the gas pedal on the right and brake on the left, is another. The shape of those pedals (vertical vs. horizontal orientation) is yet another.

It’s fair to assume that car designers have entertained other replacements for the steering wheel. Joysticks, video-game like controllers, etc. And certainly, some modifications have been made (like adding buttons to the steering wheel for controlling the sound and climate systems). But by and large the steering wheel looks the same now as it did 20 years ago. That’s because the steering wheel is directly related to the utility of the car. If you can’t steer you can’t drive. And if every time you get into a new car, you need to learn to steer again there’d be many, many more accidents on the road.

In fact, when you think about it, if a car’s usability is compromised it can be immediately frustrating. Most of us have rented a car where the lights and windshield wipers are on different sides. Imagine you’re driving. In comes a flash rain shower. You quickly reach for the wipers and accidentally turn on your high beams. Think about what that does as you’re trying to keep your car in its lane and dealing with rapidly diminishing visibility. In a addition to frustrating, it’s also dangerous. Fortunately, digital design usability issues aren’t usually lethal (though they may lead to products being killed).

With web and app designs, it can be tempting to move the navigation or treat buttons in creative ways. Though one should exercise extreme caution in doing so as it can be the equivalent of swapping the wipers for the headlights on the steering column of a car.

Now, you could dig in here and call up the iPod as an example. The now iconic spinner wheel was a huge shift in interface. It was very different, very new and ultimately very successful.  That said, I have two thoughts on the spinner. One, Apple probably spent a small fortune testing usability before it released the product. I don’t know that for sure, but I’m guessing they did. Second, the spinner found its home in a whole new device without a prior paradigm to reference. MP3 players were far different from the mechanical needs of portable CD players. If you’re creating a new product category, the opportunity might arise for a complete break from convention. But if you’re designing for a device with a history – like computers and I would argue even by similarity, tablets (which still rely heavily on the visual concept of buttons) – you’ll likely get better usability by keeping critical aspects of the interface familiar.

By the way, the car analogy is also useful for clients. An agency’s clients often seek to be new and different just like their creative teams. Marketers know that sameness in advertising rarely lead to gains in marketshare. However, websites and apps are not really advertisements. Sure it helps a brand, but by the time someone is on your website or using your app, the goal has changed. No longer are you looking to ‘break through’ or ‘stand out’ in the advertising sense. The job instead is to deliver on a promise and experience. Good experiences can have a degree of novelty, true, but they also should be efficient and easy. They should feel satisfying and never be confusing. Navigating the experience should be quickly familiar even if the screens loaded are full of new information, ideas, games, videos, tools or whatever. This is precisely why designing a website or app is like designing a car. You’re getting into it to go somewhere and do something. Anything that makes that harder in turn makes the vehicle less useful, no matter how sexy it is on the surface.

Pulling The Plug on Your Social Media Strategy

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Today your business has dozens of choices for measuring social media. Platforms exist for evaluating everything from influence to engagement using various counters and algorithms. I recommend you begin with something simpler though. I think you should ask yourself one simple, illuminating question…

“If I pulled the plug on my social media efforts – closed it all down starting tomorrow – what would my business lose?”

To answer that question, first clear the playing field. Set aside for now the industry pressure of having all your competitors in social, therefore you have to be. Set aside too any mandate coming from the corner office.

Instead, ask yourself what your company would be like next week without your Facebooking, Twittering, YouTube channel, Foursquare badges, Tumblrs, etc. etc.

Draw two columns on a sheet of paper. In column A, add up everything you’d save by shutting it all down; the man-hours internally, the cost of content creation, the meetings, the analytics software licenses, the agency retainer fees. This all amounts to the true cost of what you’re doing now and its a good thing to have in mind.

Now in column B write down all the things you’d lose as a business without your social media campaign in place. What would happen if all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers simply went away?

Take a cold, hard look. If closing your social media campaign means losing a few coupon redemptions, the occasional mention among the bazillions of tweets happening daily, and the bragging rights to some six-figure ‘fan’ count you’ve yet to figure out how to make use of, then your social media strategy is probably in need of some refinement.

On the other hand, maybe closing down your social media stuff would mean you’d know less about your customers. Maybe it would mean you’d not have that convenient focus group for getting feedback on new product ideas. Maybe it would mean you couldn’t service your customers as efficiently, or detect and address their concerns as quickly. Maybe it would mean your brand awareness would drop because your name wouldn’t circulate as much on the blogs your customers frequent. If any of that’s the case, then your investment in social media is probably paying off even if you still haven’t been able to attribute sales to it, let alone define what an ‘engagement’ really is. (That’s okay, by the way, the entire social media industry is struggling to agree on terms like ‘engagement’, ‘activate’, and ‘influencer’.)

If you’re using social media to distribute coupons you’re essentially treating it like an online FSI or DRTV spot. That may provide some sales, but the cost of maintaining that program almost always comes out of profit margins as you continue to give away coupons in return for nothing more than a click count.

For a real return on your social media investment, your column B should be full of words like ‘insights’, ‘higher satisfaction’, ‘feedback’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘quicker’. These are the things social media can do that FSIs, DRTV, and advertising simply can’t.

Most companies are looking at 2012 and asking themselves what to do with social media. Everyone is going to invest in it, true, because no one wants to be the Luddite in their competitive set. But how much do you invest? And where?

Look down again at column B on your sheet of paper. What’s missing from that list that social media could do for you? Whatever it is, that’s where you should aim your strategy and make your investment this year.

Thoughts on Influencer Strategies in Social Media

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Just as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are famous for being… well… famous, so an increasing number of people are becoming influential today because they continually discuss being influential. Set aside the irony of a space where simply talking about influence can lead to you being labelled influential. The term ‘influence’, as used in today’s discussion of social media, is too generalized in my opinion.

Is conversation, sharing and retweeting a measure of influence? Sometimes.
If a blogger puts out an opinion that is well received and results in numerous retweets and shares, does it mean this blogger has influenced all those retweeters?

By today’s measurement methodology the assumption is yes, but I’m not so sure.

In the world of editorial, someone who agrees with your post enough to retweet it immediately is most likely to have already been in your camp to begin with. The political gridlock in our nation demonstrates this well. Democrats rarely influence Republicans and vice versa. Yet all of the candidates, when they publish perspectives, see them shared rampantly. That’s because the vast majority of this sharing happens among their pre-existing supporters. In this sense, what we today call ‘influence’ may in some instances be more a measure of the general acceptability level of an idea rather than of the influence of the blogger. It’s important to remember that social media networks tend to connect us by commonalities not differences.

Leveraging networks organized by commonality is very powerful for certain strategies like rallying a support base or solidifying brand loyalty. There are more challenges, however, when approaching new markets as one would with a growth strategy.

Influence and Growth Strategies
When it comes down to actually influencing people to the point of persuasion, where they change brands, opinions, preferences, etc. leveraging an influencer is trickier. True influence between people sits squarely in the domain of those qualitative human dynamics that semantic keyword analysis is still not very good at accurately recording.

There is more at play when influencers are seeking to succeed at persuasion. Two additional factors, beyond the influencer, play an equal if not greater role. They are the influencee (person being influenced) and the product or idea being decided upon.

For example, if you aspire to be like Katy Perry and Katy Perry drinks fruit juice X, you can probably afford to indulge your desire to be like Katy and buy that fruit juice. Here Katy Perry is very influential on your choice because the barrier to adopting Katy’s preference is low. The same holds true for bloggers who vouch for low-cost, impulse item type purchases.

But if Katy Perry drives a Porsche and you want to be like Katy it’s harder to realize your dream. You can’t necessarily go out and buy a Porsche right? True, Katy is still influential on your desire to have a Porsche but her value as an influencer is compromised by the socio-economic situation of the fan and the high-price of the product.

If you’re targeting people who can afford Porsche’s and those people are not generally influenced by the likes of Katy Perry, well then she’s not the right influencer. Conversely, if you’re targeting people who like Katy Perry and trying to sell them a Porsche but as a group they can’t afford a Porsche (or aren’t old enough to drive yet!), then your strategy (and target) are misaligned with your influencer.

Anyone in marketing will recognize this as the exact same dynamics that play out in traditional celebrity endorsement strategies, which is of course what social media influencers are within their circles of influence.

Higher involvement decisions bring challenges to influencer strategies.
Generally speaking, as products become more expensive they become a higher-involvement choice. Higher involvement decisions tend to mean that the ability of any single influencer is mitigated by the alignment of the influencee and the nature of the product. Other factors come into play beyond simply being influenced.

  • Can I afford the product? Are there sacrifices involved in purchasing it?
  • Does purchasing it lock me into a platform or brand at the expense of others?
  • What is the cost of ownership?
  • Is it compatible with other interacting devices?

These types of questions come up when you buy things like cars, electronics or appliances.

I explored this in a prior post called the Persuasion Paradox.

The original info graphic from The Persuasion Paradox. Click to enlarge.

Of course, this is a moving measure which is dependent upon the community being targeted: A $600 iPad might be an impulse item to some people and a very special treat requiring disciplined saving for others. The person you’d choose as an influencer for the former might be very different than the one chosen for the latter. Especially since the authenticity of the influencer is so important to their influence on a community or group. Someone who can easily drop $600 on an iPad probably is not an authentic voice to the disciplined saver.

Getting down to brass tacs.
Because of the importance of these nuances on the topic of ‘influence’, generalized definitions without context are insufficient for strategic planning purposes. In fact generalized thinking can lead to assumptions that waste resources (say, like signing a Katy Perry as a spokesperson to blog on behalf of an $85K sports car). An influencer’s impact should be considered against at least two factors.

  1. Does the strategy seek to communicate with an existing community who have already accepted the general premise or ideas the influencer will put forth. If so, traditional quantitative measures of influence are a decent starting point for identifying an influencer.
  2. For growth strategies that seek to infiltrate a new constituency, care must be taken to ensure the sponsoring entity/brand, desired influencee and the prospective influencer are aligned to meet the overall strategic goal. This is easier with low-involvement decisions than it is with high involvement decisions.

As social media continue to mature it is time to take a more nuanced look at how we approach and measure the worth of these new tools and the new generation of celebrities/influencers they are creating.

Facebook brings social (media) Darwinism to brand pages

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As a pragmatist it was with great joy that I read of Facebook’s new metrics for brand pages. Hailed as giving brands new tools to measure engagement and word of mouth, I think these new metrics will be game changing in the Thunderdome of marketing.

Among the new batch of stats are a few sizzly big number metrics to make myopic brand managers dewey eyed. Measures like ‘friends of fans’ will have some folks salivating at the huge aggregate numbers of people that *could* be reached. That’s been social media’s big selling point for the past three years – the potential of the cumulative network effect – and no doubt it will continue to sell. Plus, these new numbers will make it personal – now your brand will be able to see its very own potential Facebook reach.

But the really useful numbers, in my opinion, lie outside the big potential reach values and are the ones that help contextualize measurements like fan counts.

Up until now trying to get a bead on what ‘engagement’ really means has been tricky. While terms such as ‘like’, ‘fan’ and ‘follow’ imply a certain level of conscious attention toward the liked/fanned/followed brand, there’s been scant real proof as to just how active those fans really are.

Facebook is starting to change that.

They like you, but do they really like you?
Soon a brand will be able to look at the proportion of its ‘fans’ who actually talk about and share the pages and content they’ve ‘liked’. They’ll be able to see the “weekly total reach” too, which will help indicate how many people (and news channels) spread the brand’s content across those delicious networks of potential reach.

These new metrics will be helpful in contextualizing the actual engagement of one’s fan count. For example, one very well-fanned Facebook page had wall postings averaging 4000-7000 ‘likes’. At first blush, that sounds awesome. Then I looked and saw they have 22MM ‘fans’. Taken as a proportion of the overall fanbase, that’s a response rate of three hundredths of a percent. By contrast email open rates seem to hover in the area of at least single percentage points (more here, and here too). Even FSI’s seem to score in a similar neighborhood (also, here) in terms of their redemption rates.

Now, before you get all disgruntled and start calling me a hater, I am not saying social media don’t work. Far from it. Social media are extremely powerful. More direct and intimate than any other media channel today.

I am also acknowledging that comparing comments on a wall post to FSI redemption rates is apples-to-oranges. The point is not the percentages. I am simply calling attention to the fact that that social media statistics are often served up without context. When context is provided – as above – it can at least give us reason to stop and think. (And that is never a bad thing.)

Yes, yes, I agree that using social media is not all about getting ‘likes’ and comments to posts. And yes, it’s true, you might be getting a lot of impressions with those posts and may be building some good brand perceptions along the way. All of this is very important and should not be dismissed.

But a big premise of social media is ‘engagement’ and ‘earned impressions’. As noted before, social media has been selling against these terms since its commercialization. But ‘engagement’ implies people DOING SOMETHING, not just observing a wall post as they would a banner ad. You can’t call yourself an engagement medium and then measure yourself by impressions and perception building alone. Social media is growing up, it’s time to ditch the kid gloves and raise our expectations.

Asking better from brands and agencies.
Facebook is raising the bar and doing so in a way that is truly authentic to the spirit of social media – right out in the open for everyone to see and share. By including the “people talking about” metric in public view, right on a brand’s page, visitors and page administrators alike will know whether the page is popular. That’s dropping the glove in a big way. No more can brands quickly claim victory simply by accruing six figure fan bases. A quarter of a million fans won’t matter as much if right below that head count is another number saying that only a few are bothering to talk about the page and its contents.

Moving forward, engagement will move from theory to practice and agencies and brands are going to have to do something to earn the attention and interaction of Facebook fans. The numbers won’t let us hide behind vapid claims.

Facebook has issued a challenge and client and agency will have to work together to be truly remarkable now. It’s a brilliant move on Facebook’s part (they’re on a roll) because they’re essentially guaranteeing their advertising partners will have to up their game and provide a better Facebook experience.

In some ways, it will be survival of the fittest. Then again, as my college mentor once said, “Nothing motivates like the fear of extinction.”

On narcissism & outgrowing influencers.

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Facebook is a funny company. At first blush today’s update looked as though they were playing catch up in trying to integrate/imitate features of Twitter and G+ (just like they did with Foursquare some months ago). Worse, they seem to dash these updates off, ambushing their customers with seemingly disorienting features that quickly lead to bad buzz among the Mashables, Techcrunches and Twitters of the world.

On the other hand, Facebook is a mature enterprise now. In addition to 750MM users, it has 750MM users’ data. It’s by leaps and bounds the most popular social networking tool on the planet. It has deep pockets and deep resources and let’s face it, there are some smart folks working there. While they’re undoubtedly watching their competitors, I’d be shocked if Facebook felt so threatened by Twitter or G+ – which lag behind in membership by wide, wide margins – to just willy-nilly copy what those two do out of some sense of reactionary fear.

What if instead they were more Machiavellian. What if they were watching their competitors test new ideas and then moving quickly to replicate those that showed promise. This is the second-mover advantage and it has worked before.

Too far fetched? Okay.

What if, instead, Facebook made the changes it made because the opinion of influencers didn’t matter as much? What if Facebook realized its most valuable customers were not influencers?

Facebook today serves two audiences – its membership and its advertisers. (It has certainly erred a few times in helping the latter at the expense of the former.) With 65+% of the Internet using public in America holding accounts and significantly more user participation than other competitor platforms, the importance of social media power users is somewhat diminished in Facebook’s current business model.

To grow, Facebook needs to keep the masses happy, not the influencers (who, realistically, it probably can’t keep happy even if it wants to).

What if Facebook’s latest updates were aimed solely at its most valuable customer – the mass user? In this sense you could say the updates delivered a few benefits:

  • They automatically improve the news stream with algorithmic intelligence without requiring the user to fiddle with settings.
  • They deliver twitter-like friend streams and updates without requiring the user to join Twitter (and hope their friends are there).
  • They deliver circle-like friend handling without requiring the user to join Google+ (though I’m guessing with an average 150-odd friends, most Facebook users don’t have a need for ‘circles’ anyhow).

Forget whether or not we as power users find any of the above to be true. The important question, from Facebook’s perspective, is will the average user? Maybe Facebook’s version of circles and Twitter is good enough for most people. Going to market with ‘good enough’ is a proven tactic for dominating a marketplace.

Admittedly I am hypothesizing here but if the knowledge of what the average Facebook user will find useful exists, you can bet Facebook has it and is putting its top minds to work on making the best use of it.

I sometimes feel we working so closely in and with social media are a little too focused on our own worldview. We say we are advocates for the user, but which user – the average user or the power user? Like Narcissus, we might be talking so much to our conclave of other early adopters and power users that we wind up seeing only the reflection of our own opinions coming back at us. To read Twitter today, you’d have to believe Facebook’s latest update is a massive failure.

Less than 12 hours after the updates hit, my own Facebook newsstream seems pretty quiet. Nary a mention. Instead, people went right back to Facebooking. Were they initially shocked? Some were, yes. Was it truly so disruptive a change that it earned all the ‘hate it’ comments? Not really. Or at least if so, that hate was pretty fleeting.

Who knows, maybe most the masses are happy with the updates, even if we power users are a little outraged. It’s possible.

Social Media Marketers are not normal people.

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I found myself really pouring over the details in the Sysmos ‘Inside Twitter’ report I first discovered during my last post. Given how big a splash Twitter has made culturally – it’s little blue ‘T’ now a ubiquitous bug on everything from advertising to T-shirts – I have followed its growth and found myself curiously conflicted about the mass uptake reported in the media and pushed by social media marketers vs. the seemingly less zealous use by the people I observed around me who were not working in the social media industry.

As it turns out, Sysmos did me the favor of breaking out social media marketers and comparing them to average users (scroll down to the bottom of the report to see this subsection). Here are some revealing highlights:

“65.5% of social media marketers post less than one update a day, compared with 85.3% of the general Twitter population. In addition, 6.3% post two updates a day (vs. 2.8% overall), while 4.3% post at least nine updates a day (vs. 0.17% overall). This suggests social media marketers are far more active than overall users.”

(Shocking, I know.)

In addition 35% of those who identify themselves as social media marketers tweet at least daily. That’s more than twice the overall Twitter population (of which 15% do).

In fact, most Twitter users (92.4%) follow fewer than 100 people and 93.6% have fewer than 100 followers. That means on top of there not being as many Twitter users as media headlines might have us believe (see my prior post), the majority of active Twitter users are not ‘power users’ per se. In fact, compare the behavior of social media marketers to average users per below:

% of social media marketers % of all Twitter users in aggregate
Follow more than 500 people 9.23% less than 1%
Follow more than 1000 people 10.7% less than 0.1%
Have more than 500 followers 10% less than 0.5%
Have more than 1000 followers 11.8% less than 0.1%

If you consider that among the regular Twitter users in the column on the right would be included celebrities and such, who make a good business of following and having many followers, the number of rank and file citizens who are power users is really quite small as a proportion of the whole.

The key takeaway here is that we in social media marketing are not the norm and do not represent the way most people use social media. In the case of Twitter we consistently over index by anywhere from 2x to 10x on power user behaviors.

Yet it is a well known aspect of the human condition that we all assume others think, understand and behave in ways similar to how we do. This is a cognitive bias of sorts. We working in social media are eager adopters of technology. Our circles of professional peers are too. We can easily become surrounded by observational evidence that the whole world is tweeting and following and checking in endlessly throughout the day. Yet the server logs often tell a different story.

All of this is not to say that Twitter is not a powerful force today. It is. It has changed much about our culture from how we discover news to how we put our finger to the wind to measure prevailing trends. Twitter’s membership, because it is popular among social media marketers who are themselves very connected, also has a higher concentration of influencers (though they may have the most influence on people who are already like them, a.k.a. social media marketers and power users).

The high concentration of social media power users that makes up a significant chunk of the Twitter community is an important constituency to be sure. Yet, It is equally important that we, as representatives of the interest of the brands we serve and the customer groups we engage with, do no deceive ourselves into believing everyone is as infatuated with Twitter and some of these other new tools to the same degree we are.

We social media marketers are not like normal people which means its critical we look outside our circles to gauge which tools are most appropriate to achieve our goals and engage other constituencies.

The Real Reach: A Context Exercise for Thinking About Twitter

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This article in Business Insider underscores something I’ve long suspected (and blogged about before): That Twitter, despite all the hype and sensationalism, isn’t quite as big as the boastful numbers that splash across headlines. For instance, the article notes that of Twitter’s claimed 175MM registered accounts, 56MM (approaching 1 in 3 users) are following zero other accounts. 90MM accounts (over half the total membership!) have zero followers.

The graph above is a nice counterpoint to what was published as Twitter’s ‘hockey stick growth‘ in 2009. The inverse hockey stick above should give everyone (especially those investors whose due diligence valued Twitter up in the billions of dollars!) a moment’s pause.

This finding synchs with a piece of research I saw a while back from Edison Research which stated that the United States had about 17MM ‘active’ Twitter users in 2010. (‘Active’ was defined as those survey participants answering ‘yes’ to the statement, “Do you currently ever use Twitter?” – which is a pretty generous question in my opinion.) Compound the above with the revelation that 22.5% of Twitter users post 90% of Tweets. Net, net, it seems that a very small niche of Twitter users are responsible for almost all of the activity that might be defined as ‘engagement’ with the service.

Now, If you’re trying to communicate with this niche group – which I suspect is largely comprised of brands, marketers, social media people, self-promoters and celebrities, then Twitter might be a great tool. For reaching any other target group – soccer moms, accountants, car aficionados, sports fans, etc. etc., its efficacy to reach significant numbers of these people is called into question by these findings.

Here are a few other interesting figures that support my belief that Twitter is a micro-niche community with minimal broad audience relevance (or participation). These items come from Sysmos’ Inside Twitter findings.

  • 85.3% of users tweet less than once/day.
  • 92.4% of users follow less than 100 people.
  • 93.6% have less than 100 followers.
Okay, but numbers and stats, as succinct and persuasive as they can be in PowerPoint decks, often make it hard to contextualize a situation. Numbers can be too abstract. In the world of social media – which I maintain still has something of an echo chamber issue to sort out – that abstraction can be problematic, leading to bad recommendations and wasted resources. Something struck me today that helped contextualize the reality of Twitter usage penetration – The United States Unemployement Rate.

With about 14MM unemployed Americas today, there are slightly more ‘active’ Twitter users than there are people out of work. So, if you work in social media as I do – where we and all our friends and peers are part of the 1.5MM people who follow more than 500 people on Twitter – we might want some outside context to balance any industry-insider biases we might have.

I have an exercise for doing just that.

I recommend taking a walk down the street and looking around. Walk into grocery stores, restaurants, parks and coffee shops. Take in the sum of all the people you see. Then ask yourself how many of them you think are unemployed (fully unemployed, not temps, because temps aren’t counted in the U.S. unemployment stat either).

If you’re being honest with yourself you should be overwhelmed by the sense that the vast majority of the people you see on the street probably are employed. The minority that aren’t, those represent the equivalent of your ‘active’ Twitter users. You know, the people you have any real chance of reaching on Twitter. (And that is if you set aside the other issues like Dunbar’s number, attention span and the short life cycle of a tweet.)

Oh… and Twitter 175MM members is a global number, the U.S. unemployment is of course national. So we’re being generous with this exercise.

I found the exercise sobering and useful. Maybe you will too.