Dave Knox over at Hard Knox Life just posted this great slideshow on Content Marketing by Helge Tenno. Although I strongly dislike the addition of “two-dot-oh” to the end of any term, I will admit the Agency2.0 he speaks of at the end of the show sounds pretty appealing!

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The first few slides call out the development of online marketing. “2007 was all about rich media and customer participations”…”but 2008 is ..all about a range of different ideas coming together and forming a new kind of marketing changing the way brands connect to their consumers”.

The ideas are the following:

1. Culture
2. Technology
3. Mobility
4. Activity
5. Ineffective
6. Emotional Research

A few statements worth calling out:

Content isn’t king. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

The application itself is not a goal at all - it’s an obstacle between the user and their goal.

we tend to throw out the most meaningful and most revolutionary if we ask people about their preferences.

Content marketing = participating in activities facilitated by the brand.

Slide 13 states that “most products and services are actually developed by users, who then give ideas to manufacturers”. The premise (and this is one I called out in my recent review of Accidental Branding,) is that the best products are designed to address specific problems. If that’s the case, obviously why not give users the empowerment (and the forum) to help drive innovation for you?

As a developer, I probably shouldn’t like the comment that the application is not the goal. For me, though, effective marketing and strategy is not about jumping to implementation. A client shouldn’t want “a widget”. They should want “a means to drive traffic from the social networking space”. A widget is one way to do this. By assessing what the user goals are, we can work to achieve those goals, and they’ll be satisfied. But unless we determine the rationale behind a decision, we have a hard time assessing its success (and risk having an unhappy client in the end). I maintain that the decision of the best technical solution to a business need should be left in the hands of we web geeks, who have been eating, drinking and sleeping this stuff for a loooong time!

This notion of “don’t tell me what you (think you) want” is raised later in the deck as well. I can only attribute the reason that we ‘throw out the most meaningful information if we ask people their preferences’ to a lack of self-awareness or willingness to be honest. My biggest concern with a blanket statement like this is that some organizations may take this as justification not to solicit or incorporate feedback from users at all.

As someone who espouses user-centered design principles, this whole idea of “content marketing” makes sense. People are doing to “do” stuff and talk about it. Why not facilitate these activities by offering something to talk about? I am currently listening to “The Anatomy of Buzz” and Jeep Jamborees are mentioned. There is a certain demographic that buys Jeeps and has a certain lifestyle. Why not support them in their activities? We are an experiential society, and people who go off on a Jeep Jamboree weekend are your best brand advocates. They will converse among themselves, further establishing that brand loyalty, and also tell others about their experiences.

I love the idea that we are looking at establishing relationships with consumers, as well as between them. It’s no longer about focusing inward on creating that ultimate pitch: it’s about a facilitating a personalized experience for each individual based on his own needs and desired level of interaction.

Today I received a spam-like email:

from {CrypticSN@gmail.com}
{CrypticSN} invited you to be their friend.

Click here to go to My Latest Piece where {CrypticSN} found you.

I looked at the URL for the link, and it did redirect to “mylatestpiece.com”. Being the cynical “don’t click links in email” person that I am, I typed in the address and checked it out.

Lo and behold, it’s one of the google friend connect examples I checked out a few weeks back! {CrypticSN} is listed there under my “new friend requests” in the little iframe.

I haven’t thought too much about google friend connect since the few posts I wrote about it. This generic email has me really surprised, for a few reasons.

1. It’s incredibly generic. Since it’s a friend request, I may or may not know {CrypticSN}. So sending an email from their email address may not prevent the request from a quick trip to the spam filter.
2. There is no mention of the community aspects of the site. Granted, it’s an example, but “My Latest Piece” doesn’t lend itself to being a destination I’ll be making friends at. That being said, if I were really a community member at My Latest Piece, I would probably recognize the site name and the fact that there is a notion of “friending” there.
3. Where do my friend requests go? This is the part that I think still is a major concern for GFC. If I friend {CrypticSN} here, where does that information live? Do I need to invite him to be a friend on other GFC sites, or on other networking sites? Indeed, can I?

The ability to find and request friends is clunky. There doesn’t appear to be an search functionality, so you have to navigate through “previous” and “next” links of current members to find the one you’re looking for. You may then look at their profile, including their friends, and request their friendship. There is no option for a personal note, just a confirmation asking if you’re sure you want to send a request.

I know this is a new service, but come on. The mode for managing contacts and sending messages to people has been done before. There are strategies and models that are tried and tested. What is the goal here, to find people you may know, or generically spam other people and foster a “friendship” in which you can’t even complement someone on their avatar when you “befriend” them.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but I still fail to see the user benefits to this whole deal. While it may be great for My Latest Piece that I just returned to their site, as a user, this whole exchange has been less than satisfying.

I would explain to {CrypticSN} that it’s not him, it’s me, but I clicked “ignore” on the invite, which evidently means “hide this invite and give me no way to retrieve it.” You know, Ignore as in Delete…

Doc Searls (co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto) is speaking at iCitizen about Open Source and Vendor Relationship Management. This is one of only a few sessions I’ve actually been able to attend, and it ended up being quite tech-heavy. Great for me! The idea is about how we can change our perspective on how to manage relationships. Doc (do we call him “The” Doc?) focussed on the role of technology in this matter. We extolled the virtues of open source technology to meet user needs.

He spoke of the VRM (vendor relationship management) work he has been doing at Harvard. The icon or symbol is the relbutton, which looks like two magnets attracted towards each other. The two negotiate a contract based on some as-yet-undefined terms. He mentioned Open Social a few times, and the idea that the user should be in charge of his own data. A good example: when we go to a doctor’s office, we are responsible to manually input our history. Each time we have to regurgitate information, we risk inaccuracies. He gave a statistic of how many people died of “misinformation” every year. So what if this was data we could carry with us?

I was interested in the language we would use to define these relationships - it made me think of established interfaces. There are two parties, how do we negotiate the languge we use to communicate? APIs are getting quite popular, but this is obviously on a much larger scale. He spoke frequently of Open Social, which I will admit I don’t know much about. My thoughts were moreso focused on microformats, the idea of describing our relationships with parties.

After the session I was talking to David Griner, and his thoughts on the matter seemed to be more related to the notion of privacy than openness. Indeed, this entire notion is called “Vendor management”, are we forgetting about the needs and expectations of the consumer? Doc mentioned that the individual was in charge of this data (the whole data portability notion that is de rigueur right now), and then there was also mention of the need for a 3rd party.

Doc is approaching this challenge from a tech standpoint, and I fear that this was a bit of a barrier to many of the folks in the room. It was a good presentation with regards to a potential challenge, but I think the need therefore isn’t entirely established as of yet. I think it’s also an interesting topic in the light of all the social networks data portability announcements that have occured in the past week. Who owns our data, do we really have the power to take it with us, and perhaps most importantly, what is that data? Some of us are experiencing social media fatigue, and I think there was some question from the user perspective if this required an additional level of “data management”. Do I need to define a profile to carry with me to specific sites, or do I establish an online persona that comes with me as I negotiate the web generically? How do we protect that information? Certain services like kaboodle offer us a place to aggregate products related to a certain user task (shopping). Perhaps this needs to be not about data, but about tasks..

I asked David if he had done much with OpenId. I think the model may be similar: there are certain issuers of the IDs, and others that will accept them. As long as we trust the issuers, we could determine our level of comfort with data sharing in other places. Once again, David’s real question was what the benefit was to the consumer. Can I not just go to a site and perform my desired task? Do I need to carry my history/preferences etc with me?

I can see both sides. In a later metrics track, we discussed how it can take several site visits before conversion occurs. Often people want to perform research, establish trust, etc. So I do believe there are merits in the site being aware of some level of the established relationship and history, at least on the site level. But does a system like a generic VSM need to manage that? Or can that stay within the site (as happens now, and as personalization systems like ATG advocate)? This is the same model we see in the brick and mortar stores: the folks at the starbucks start to recognize me, ask me how I’m doing, anticipate my preferences. I think people are comfortable with that level of recognition. It is when behaviour at the starbucks downtown influence how I’m treated at Crimson Cup that people start to be a little concerned.

Plenty of stores accept competitor’s coupons. That’s the level where this sort of universal ID seems to make sense. Let me bring in my deals or specials from someplace else, if I so choose. And perhaps that’s a user opt-in, just like if I choose I want my browser to store my login information. But even if the data lives elsewhere, the control thereof certainly needs to live with the consumer. Do I want to manually write out my health information at each doctor, or do I carry a card that has it all written out, and distribute it. The idea and the infrastructure to support it certainly makes sense, but I don’t know if there is overall value to the forced implementation thereof.

Remember beacon?

My thoughts are premature, because I haven’t actually seen Google Friend Connect (GFC; can I call it GFC?) in action, I’ve only seen the few screenshots that google has released. That being said, I thought I’d respond to my impressions or understandings of the service, before seeing what it really is. That way if I’m wrong, I can claim ignorance

In a press release, it was stated that “Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social.” The idea was that “without requiring coding experience”, GFC (geez, I’m totally hurting my search engine ranking by not spelling that out) would provide site maintainers with a way to tap into the benefits of social networks, attracting and engaging more visitors.

As a developer, implementation is always in my mind. I’m interested in how a series of widgets or wizards magically add “social” to your site. When you’re working on a specific platform (say, facebook or myspace), you can tap into a known architecture and codebase to aid in the integration. (facebook apps, wordpress plugins). When you’re not, well, is it really an integrated solution?

Pluck already does a good job at offering blogs, forums and other social goodies to sites, either via javascript or an API. People have long been able to add polls and forums to their sites via services like bravenet or dreambook (remember when it was all the rage to have a guestbook? Now THAT was engagement!) The functionality may be the basically the same, so what’s the big draw?

It’s the data. Isn’t everything about the data these days? Pluck or any other third-party hosted widget has the data living… somewhere. To a user, it may seem like that blog post or poll is on your site, but if it’s being pulled in using javascript, the good ole Google crawler isn’t going to associate it with your site.

Hm… the google crawler… may not index all the information associated with your site (blog postings, reviews, comments) if it’s hosted by a third party social site, if it gets pulled in dynamically.. but what if google DID? What if google provided the hooks into the social stuff? I will definitely be interested to see if they’ve figured this piece of it out. They wrote the rules, so it will be interesting to see if they get re-written.

Update: an article on ReadWriteWeb states that the social magic will be added in via iframe.. so much for my high hopes of making the social in your site actually seem like your site. I thought we’d all communally agreed back about 5 years ago that iframes were evil?

The other consideration about data is related to personal data. Right now a site implementing third-party software retains control of the data. A site integrating a third party product may or may not have the same control. It appears that one limitation with MySpace’s Data Availability initiative is that MySpace retains the control over the data is makes available. If a site implements GFC, can the user hook into one or more existing social networks, and how are any actions taking place on the host site being tracked? I think of Disqus, which centralizes blog comments. When I respond (after having authenticated) to a blog posting where the author has set up disqus, my comments are stored as part of my disqus profile. Disqus purports to “makes your comments more interactive for readers and easier to manage for you — all while connecting your community with other blogs.” - but it does this largely on its own domain. Will google.com/friendconnect serve as a landing pad for user behaviours online? Currently it appears that that is what is the distinguishing feature between Google’s *connect feature, as opposed to the recent offerings by Facebook and MySpace.
Another consideration with the lack of an existing primary platform is how conflicting information will be resolved. I will admit that I don’t yet have a clear understanding how GFC will tie into the authentication of other sites, if a user will be able to select one platform with which to associate (and from which his friends and preferences will migrate), or if he will be able to pick and choose. Just two days ago there was an article in ReadWriteWeb stating that filtering is the next step for social media. We are at a breaking point with too much duplicating information out there, and now we need to do through the tedious work to de-dupe and validate. I don’t have a clear sense what the GFC strategy is for assigning friends to groups with varying levels of privileges, and how referential integrity across platforms may be ensured (if Melissa de-friends iKeif on facebook, what happens to his access to her data on my site?)

I will be very interested to see how this all plays out.. I’ll be eager to read the full reports from the few whitelisted sites that will be trying things out.

It turns out that the Groundswell Social Profile quiz I blogged about earlier wasn’t an official Forrester creation. Rather, it was created by a fan - and you can read the official Forrester take on this on their blog. This raised an issue I read about earlier this week on ReadWriteWeb: Content is Becoming a Commodity. The concern is that content is “being used, shared and profited from” without the author’s permission, and it is therefore being devalued.

I suppose I feel that any message is going to be altered somewhat from its original intent, just due to the personal experiences of the listener. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”. Personal opinion or bias or expectation will always impact perceptions. Once upon a time we may have felt that a message could be crafted and executed and perfectly delivered, but we cannot anticipate precisely how it will be received.

Both Groundswell and The Open Brand acknowledge different levels of online engagement, and we are all very familiar with all the outlets for personal expression and creation online. I suppose I see the commentary and “remixes” of online content and ideas as an extension of this. It really is the very essence of the Open Brand. It is about a three-way relationship between the individual, the brand and the community. It is not a matter of a brand, or a blogger, pushing a message out, it is about that level of engagement, and allowing individuals to make the message relevant and personal.

I will admit, I’m likely at the far end of the spectrum in terms of my online activities being centered around creating or personalizing. If I read an interesting article or post, I feel compelled to do something with it, be that sharing it with others or storing it away for future reference. I would argue that even my commenting on something I read is having an impact on it, either directly or indirectly.

In an era where we classify individuals based on their behaviours and motivations, we are obviously recognizing differences between them. Should we not aspire to delivering messages that can appeal to members of different classifications? If so, we must acknowledge and welcome the impact the recipient has on the message, that it may be appropriate and effective.

(I mention Schroedinger’s Cat because I long felt it was simply analogy that we cannot know the fate of the cat without acting on the box. I thought that the premise was that our input was required. I’m no longer sure that’s entirely the intent, but this further drives home the idea that a message may be effective and memorable, but for entirely different reasons than were originally intended).

In Jesse’s talk yesterday on Delivering Long-Term Design Value in a Short Term World, he mentioned that typically technology projects are built with data first in mind, then logic, and with UI tacked on top. He stressed the importance of not allowing your thinking to be limited by perceived technological limitations.

For the past few weeks as I’ve sat through ATG training, I’ve tried to be really aware of what ATG has to offer, and how to make its product and feature suite relevant to people in my organization. I’m currently in the business user/management training series, and the needs of this user base are dramatically different than those of the developers. I’ve been trying to think about how to explain ATG and how we can apply it in our work to the different user types.

Last night’s talk had me thinking about this even more. It’s not “ATG” that will sell, it’s what it offers the client. The whole premise of personalization and customization directly contributes to a better user experience, but using ATG for a site doesn’t inherently make for a better experience. It’s a means to an end, and all the tasks associated with determining user needs/wants/motivation still need to take place.

I’ve mentioned before that ATG is a technological platform that really is looking to meet a strategic need. Its standard implementation is rules-based, which is that layer of logic discussed yesterday. I think the challenge is that often from a UX standpoint, we want to achieve a certain result, without too much concern of the “how”. After the talk last night, someone mentioned pandora radio to me as an example of a personalized user experience with that “wow” factor. There is definitely an element of magic involved, which arguably makes the experience even more compelling. The average visitor doesn’t have to know how it works.

I feel that way about training, to some extent. For many of our creative or managerial types, they don’t need to know the intricacies of the platform, they just need to recognize the implications. Like any sort of personalization or customization, it’s about catering the message to the individual and satisfying his needs, to ensure he has a positive perception of what’s in front of him. There’s no need to overwhelm him with too much detail: it’s all about the “beautiful, elegant solution that works”

Last night the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts brought Jesse James Garrett in to speak about “Delivering Long-Term Design Value in a Short Term World”. One of my co-workers is the co-president of the group, and there were quite a few of us from work showed up to hear him speak.

I’m most familiar with Jesse as “the guy who coined the term AJAX” and crafted that picture of the elements of UX (from which actual development is notably absent). I was interested to see how he would cater to his design audience.

I’ve taken courses in “color theory” and “branding and identity” but I still associate design with “making things pretty”. I really enjoyed the talk as it helped me to appreciate that there’s much more that goes into effective design.

We went through the requisite examples of great product design (iPod, Target medicine bottles), but Jesse focussed not solely on the products but on the entire system.

Jesse asked the audience what the greatest complement to receive on a design would be. Evidently, it’s “I can’t live without it”. He talked about revolution, fundamentally changing the user experience. Cameras used to be very complicated, and then kodak came along and dramatically simplified things. It was one of those cases I love to think about: the users didn’t know what they wanted, until it was presented to them.

valuetriangle
Originally uploaded by afhill

He spoke of how to deliver value to clients in terms of a triangle. At the base (initially), it could be achieved via technology. (his example was WordStar). The next level involves adding on new features to offer value (example: Microsoft Word with all toolbars turned on). The last level hinged on the experience offered to the client. In this case, he showed the newer design for MS Word, with the ribbon. The idea was that you didn’t need to clobber the user over the head with everything you had to offer; rather you could design something elegant that simply provided them with what they really needed/wanted. I’ll admit, I wasn’t so sure about this example, since I know the ribbon was met with much skepticism at its introduction. Perhaps that was due to users’ experiences with MS products, it’s hard to say.

dataunderlying
Originally uploaded by afhill

He also suggested that too often we build products with data at the core, with a layer of logic over top, and finally a shell of a UI. But this is not inkeeping with how users see the product, which is “UI” with “magic” underneath. He encouraged designers not to limit themselves on what we’re told the technological limitations are.

He then shared charmr, which was a project they dreamt up just to flex their creativity in the medical field. They prefaced their presentation on this revolutionary tool for people with diabetes by stating that the technology did not yet exist for this to become reality. The ideas were great, and when they shared their ideas on youtube, they were met with great enthusiasm. But my practical side was stuck on the idea that they were limited by technology. I waited until the end of the lecture to ask “at what point do you have to reconcile with the limitations imposed by technology, and give up part of your dream to achieve part of it?”. His thoughtful answer was to first inform yourself as to whether they barriers you’re being told exist truly are barriers, and then to decide what is worth fighting for. A vague answer to be sure, but an acceptable one.

Some other audience members asked about the level of consumer insight to seek out, and I liked his answer that he “doesn’t ask the customer where they want the button, [he] asks what they want to get out of the experience (motivation, feeling)”. I think that’s what makes this fun: it’s about figuring out how to deliver on that, not on how to build a better mousetrap…