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Web 2.0 Expo – Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business

So you think you should add a social network or blog to your business website. What planning should you do to make this an effective undertaking and one with measurable ROI? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research presented a simple strategy from their book Groundswell: POST.

  • P – People – Access your customer’s social activities. There are different roles people play on your website/community (from Forrester’s social technographics ladder): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
  • O – Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish. Different departments in your company will probably have different objectives (research – listening, marketing – talking, sales – energizing, support – supporting, development – embracing).
  • S – Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change.
  • T – Technology – Decide which social technologies to use. Since you know the objectives these will be measurable.

To create a successful community you’ll need to engage your audience by creating a place they want/need to go regularly – asking them questions, listen to their ideas, create a place they can get advice and help each other. Start with your customers, choose objectives you can measure, line up front-office backing, get the naysayers on your side, and start small, but think big. Adding community to your business website can help you understand your customers and improve your products and services to increase sales.

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Web 2.0 Expo – Real Time Web

Despite what TechCrunch may have said about Blaine Cook, his talk today on Real Time Web wasn’t delivered from under a rock.

He talked with the Web 2.0 expo crowd about how HTTP refreshing isn’t the right protocol for applications that use messaging, such as Twitter. His take is that the best messaging service out there, one that is open, free, web ready, standards based, easy to use, all these thing in one is the Jabber protocol

Jabber’s event driven messaging means that a service like twitter doesn’t have to constantly poll on status of customers when usually the result is ‘nothing new’ Event driven messaging like Jabber allows the service to ‘ping’ the Twitter service to say ‘hey, Im back’ or ‘Hey, I have a message’ Following this on, this means that the Twitter service to then send on that message to you, the subscriber once and only once when its fresh. Jabber is Client-Server not p2p, which is applicable here.

The use of jabber in Twitter makes perfect sense. What you can learn from Blaine’s experience is still a bit muddy, however. Twitter has known scalability issues, but how much of those were HTTP/Jabber problems? We just don’t know. The reality is that for the B2B business, you will likely never face their kind of subscription traffic issues. That means that Jabber should be looked at for the right projects that needs Presence, Subscription, and Messaging. It is XML and looks very much like email in its design. Look at Jabber as a choice for your Web Messaging needs.

Oh, he also laid the gauntlet by saying RSS is good for basic content subscription, but APIs should use ATOM due to parsing being cleaner. Evangelists are still liking RSS, so this was an interesting reveal.

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Web 2.0 Expo – Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design

You may not realize it yet, but the Internet boom has created a global audience for your products and services. How is your website viewed by your potential customers in other countries? Is it annoying? Insulting? Inappropriate? Designing your websites properly for the culture of your audience can increase your traffic and your profits. Aaron Marcus (Aaron Marcus and Associates) presented an overview of these cultural considerations and how they influence the design of a website for different cultures.

Power Distribution (PD) is the extent to which less powerful members expect and accept unequal power distribution. A country with a high PD has centralized power in few hands. Websites designed for countries with high PD (China) have a structured access to information with emphasis on social order and focus on expertise.

Individualism vs Collectivism explores how tied-in an individual is with their family and social status. Countries with high individualism (such as the US) expect websites that maximize personal achievement, focus on consumerism, and activity.

Feminity vs. Masculinity – Men are typically focused on achievement, earnings, recognition, advancement and challenges in their work goals. Women are focused on relations, cooperation, living area and employment security. Websites designed for these audiences need to take these differences into account. If you take a look at a website geared towards women, it typically is designed around community and sharing. Websites which cater to men typically are information-heavy with little interaction.

Uncertainty Avoidance – Certain cultures feel threatened by uncertainty or the unknown. These cultures typically view teachers are experts (who know all) and have high formality in gestures and procedures. Sites designed for low uncertainty avoidance cultures (US) can be fun and whimsical, whereas sites for high uncertainty avoidance cultures need to stick to the point.

Long vs. Short Term Time Orientation – Some societies have been around for a long time and have a different view of what is important to accomplish in a time period. China, which is at the top of long term time orientation, views problems, issues, and tasks from the point of view of what needs to be done this generation whereas Americans try to solve and accomplish tasks in as short of time as possible. A website for China can be fuzzy and focuses on people, but a website for Germany is task-oriented and focuses on function mastery.

These metrics are based on older data and tend to sterotype cultures as one per country. However, these cultural considerations are important to include in your business website design to make sure your global visitors understand your products and services and can find what they need.

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