I attended the FuturTech conference today at the University of Michigan, which is put on jointly by the Ross School of Business, the School of Information, and the College of Engineering. You don’t often get business, design and tech people all in the same room. I’ve heard all of the topics before, but they were good sparks for some interesting conversations. Here’s some thoughts from the conference:
- Expect most of the mobile apps of the future to be developed for the browser instead of for a particular mobile OS
- In a group of 35 people, only 2 had a phone that was older than a year (may be due to the new types of phones that have been released lately – like iphone)
- Should see more use of the phone for commerce and transactions in the US (this is fairly commonplace in Europe/Asia)
- Enterprises are trying to shift from need to know to need to share because they have large investments in their human capital which is aging/retiring.
- Using social media in Enterprise is not a technology thing, it’s a culture thing (need to get community buy-in and encourage participation).
- Be careful what metrics you use to measure participation or you could get the wrong type of content.
- It’s easier to start with “frictionless participation” – content such as commenting, tagging, etc.
- IT (Information Technology) satisfaction is highly correlated with employee satisfaction. If employees find doing their job to be technologically easy, they are more satisfied.
- In measuring participation in social media, look towards number of conversations. They’ll be less than “hits” or visits but more meaningful because they engage the “right” people.
- A lot of marketing decisions are based on what can be measured (what we know how to measure) and what has been done before (to measure against as a baseline).
- What you say online sticks around. This can be positive because one helpful conversation can be useful to others for months/years after due to search.
- There are a lot of great interface design ideas (HCI) that are shown at conferences, but not as many ideas about how to monetize them.
- When designing, think about the experience you are trying to convey (within your constraints).