Meg Houston Maker

The New Corporate Website

Even second generation corporate websites are looking pretty stale these days. The broadcast model, where the website was roughly a hyperlinked brochure, lasted about a decade. But now social media has permanently changed the way we communicate with our customers, and changed our customers' expectations of us. Customers expect dialogue. As I've written before, communications can no longer be one-way or even two-way; they have to be multi-way.

It seems we are finally fully awake to the notion that companies are cultures, and since cultures are people, companies are, essentially, communities or ecosystems of people. More enlightened companies realize that this interconnectedness means they must be transparent in their communications, and that it's no longer possible, in a multi-connected landscape, to speak to one constituency one way and to another constituency another way, or to hide conversations behind thick velvet curtains. This suggests that a corporate website should reflect community, too, a community in which each constituency—customers, shareholders, executives, managers, staffers—has a presence and a voice and is able to talk to, and with, each other.

Some might consider this multi-way conversation to be chaos. But it's only as chaotic as any real community is. Healthy communities have policies, rules of engagement, and norms to cope with chaos. In a corporation, there's usually a clear, if collective, agenda that everyone's working toward: better products, better customer satisfaction, better market share, better profitability, better experience. These goals don't need to be in opposition—and when they are, it can be useful to have a structure in place to work it out.

So maybe the corporate website of today should stop being a fancy brochure, and convert into something more like a social network, one that supports varying roles and myriad conversations. Sure, a customer could still download a Features and Benefits sheet if he wanted, or a pricing table. But the real meat of the matter, the real communication, would happen between constituents as a constantly evolving conversation. Meaning is made in the interstices, and the outcome could be a more organic, and more genuine, experience for everyone.

Getting Social Media

A senior executive I know recently returned from a conference on social media. It was his first exposure to social tools and social toys, their range and impact. He's never used Facebook, never Tweeted.

"The conference was great," he told me. Then, leaning forward conspiratorially, he added, "I get it."

But knowing about social media isn't the same as getting social media. If you've never experienced it, you've never been exposed to its joys and pitfalls, never been offended when a friend or follower dumps you, never wondered whether your 140-character status haiku struck gold or a nerve with an important other, never struggled to reveal (or hide) your true character under the avatar, never delicately negotiated the intricate textual landscape of meaning, intent, and tone to reach across the electronic ether and win a new friend for life.

The normative is different in social media. If you use it, you will make mistakes. It will exhilarate you, and it will disappoint you. It will hurt you, and it will also heal you. Social media, in other words, is like sex: if you don't do it, you don't get it.

A More Social Definition of Brand

For years I've thought of a brand as the image of a company in its customer's mind. I still like that definition, but today, thinking about the new corporate communications landscape, it struck me that a brand is more like the ongoing contact between company and customer.

The shift in emphasis from the lasting impression to the act of making the impression has everything to do with social media. Now, these customer-company contacts are made daily in multiple active channels, sometimes simultaneously. Each contact fosters a new impression that's part of the customer's evolving understanding of the company.

The new definition also shifts the focus from permanent identity to a kind of perpetual re-creation of identity. This fits the way we all now communicate about ourselves and our institutions: our image, and its expression, is continually re-created in the public communications landscape, often in short bursts. Each burst contributes to the bigger picture of who we are and how we relate to others.

In other words, the brand isn't an outcome of the chatter; the brand is the chatter, more verb than noun. And it's important that corporations get that chatter right.

Social Media and Social Media Marketing: Revised Definitions

Recently I posted my working definitions of social media and social media marketing and got good reader feedback both on- and offline. I modified the definitions and used them to kick off a social marketing strategy document for review with my VP. This document was one part disquisition, one part tactical plan, and eleven pages overall, so I decided the definitions could be fairly terse.

Here's where I landed. What do you think? 

Social media
A category of communications that let people create, share, and discuss materials online. Social media includes internet-only services like social networks, video sharing sites, and blogging services, but also simpler tools like commenting and polls that can be embedded on regular sites. Social media users share their photos, videos, stories, comments, and perspectives with each other, leading to multi-way online conversations. This engagement builds shared meaning and relationships among participants.

Social media marketing
A category of Internet marketing that leverages the power of social media to connect companies to customers and customers to each other. Social media marketing seeks to build awareness and shared understanding of a company’s brand through multi-way conversation. It relies on word-of-mouth tactics that let constituents create, distribute, and discuss content about a company’s offerings—stories that become available in real-time and remain findable via search engines later. Social media marketing is an indirect method of acquiring leads and customers. It’s not a direct-response approach, but rather one that helps build brand awareness, affinity, and traffic. As a reward for its engagement with social media, a company can enjoy increased exposure; inexpensive, ad-hoc customer feedback; real-time targeted market research; and enhanced customer affinity and trust.

Twitter It How-to

Hacking around, I realized it's so easy to pass arguments to Twitter that even I can do it. Here's a code snip that builds a link labeled "Twitter it!" Substitute your site and directory. (Entities need to be encoded.):

<a href="http://twitter.com/home/?&amp;status=Check%20this%20out%3A%20http%3A%2F%2Fwww.engagingexperience.com%2Fwebtech" target="_blank">Twitter it!</a>

On your web page, it looks like this: Twitter it!

This launches Twitter and pre-fills your text and URL, like this:

 

Social Media and Social Media Marketing: Definitions

I'm currently drafting a social media strategy for my company, laying out the business case and identifying how these tools support our objectives. Since my report audience is executives with limited exposure to social media, I've drafted working definitions to guide discussion. As usual, writing encourages mental discipline, so I've had to think hard about what "social media" and its kin, "social media marketing," really mean: It's not a technology, it's a strategy. It's not two-way conversation, it's multi-way. And it's not purely customer-centric, because the company's in the conversation, too.

Here are my current working definitions. Please tell me what you think:

Social media
A category of communications that let people create, share, and discuss materials online. Social media integrates technology with social interaction to let people construct meaning through shared stories and perspectives. Social media offerings range from internet pure-plays—social networks, photo and video sharing sites, or social bookmarking sites—to simple tools embedded on a traditional site allowing users to engage more deeply with its content. Fundamentally, social media is about multi-way conversation, not one-way broadcast.

Social media marketing
A category of internet marketing that leverages the power of social media to connect companies and customers. Social media marketing seeks to build awareness and shared understanding of a company’s brand and products through multi-way conversation between a company and its core audience. Social media marketing relies on viral, word-of-mouth strategies that let constituents create, distribute, and discuss content about a company’s offerings. In exchange, the company enjoys the benefits of increased exposure, real-time targeted market research, and enhanced customer affinity.

Update, June 24, 2009: See my revised definitions based on your feedback.

What's So "Social" About LinkedIn?

I recently discovered Beth Kanter's blog on using social media for nonprofit strategy. Since the topic's right up my alley, I clicked through to her LinkedIn profile to check out her professional offerings. Her profile indicates she's open to being contacted for consulting opportunities or expertise requests. Since I'm a LinkedIn member, too, I decided to invite her to join my network, and clicked "Add Beth to your network" on her profile page.

This launched LinkedIn's Add Connections screen, below. Since I'm not sure whether Beth and I know anyone in common or are in any of the same groups, I decided to check the option "I don't know Beth" and type a friendly, personalized message in the note box:

Once I'd finished my note, I pressed Send Invitation. But LinkedIn threw this at me:

Clicking the only option in this lightbox returned me to Beth's LinkedIn profile, discarding the note I'd just composed.

LinkedIn violated a couple key UI rules, here:

• They offered the user an option that's not available. If there was no way that clicking "I don't know Beth" was going to get my message sent, LinkedIn shouldn't have showed me that option. I supposed it's possible this option is sometimes available to some users. In that case, it could be grayed and disabled for all other users, but only if there is a possibility of somehow meeting the criteria. For example, if upgrading my account would permit me to contact people I don't know, the option could be grayed-out but with a small note next to it asking for the sale.

• They threw the user's work away. LinkedIn didn't offer me the option of returning to the screen to edit my selections, or even to copy the note I'd so carefully crafted. What if I really knew Beth, but had checked the wrong radio button?

My uncharitable impression is that the rationale behind these UI choices is simply to reinforce LinkedIn's rules: "Don't contact people you don't know. They don't like it, and neither to we." Isn't there a nicer way to teach users "the rules" without scolding them?

As a social media site, LinkedIn needs to get a little more sociable.

The Smiling Whale

I get the Twitter "over capacity" error screen at least once a day:

Why does this whale look so self-satisfied? And why aren't the birds straining on the ropes?

I would be embarrassed to run a web service that was so under-resourced, even if it were free to users, and I would be scrambling to enable additional capacity. Maybe the tweeting peeps at Twitter are scrambling; I don't know. This error screen sure doesn't tell me so. Maybe it should.

Quote of the Day

"The world is now a global place."

— Panelist at UVCIA presentation, 22 March 2006

One Hundred Million Photos

News today that a Flickr member posted the site's 100,000,000th photo. Possibly viewed by some of the web's 1 billion users.

One Billion Users

Jakob Nielson reports the Internet now has 1 billion users.

True to form, Nielsen anticipates the expanding need for usability professionals as web use grows. Equally true to form, I anticipate our expanding need for people who know how to make an interactive, multi-dimensional information space not just usable and useful, but also beautiful and rewarding.

Possible? I'm working on it...