Author Archives: David

Social Value

Posted on by David
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Kevin Holland doesn’t care about your Twitter tweats. I’m with ya Kevin. I posted last year that the only interesting use I saw of twitter was as a mini travelogue posted by a friend traveling Cuba, using SMS to get around limited and heavily filtered internet access in the country. Now that was some compelling text written for the medium.

Any online media you publish has to provide value. The same goes for social media, where you are hoping to facilitate connections and collaboration among people. The value may be personal, professional or some mix of the two but it has to be there to maintain audience and participation.

Focusing on value is a cornerstone of how I work with clients and Kevin’s post shows very well why that is critical. It is too easy to chase after the shiny new toy instead of making a realistic assessment of the value you can create with it.

Fear of litigation is the mind killer.

Posted on by David
7

Hullabaloo over social media legal issues rears its head yet again in the association world.

Here is the deal folks: if your association tends to get sued or investigated over the comments of your members or staff every few years, then sponsoring participatory media activities may enhance that risk. For everyone else, get over it.

I am not a lawyer, therefore I can actually offer common sense advice about the online world.

Measuring 'Completeness' to Encourage Action

Posted on by David
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LinkedIn has been doing this for a while and I just noticed it on Slideshare as well: alerting users to the completeness of their profile.


LinkedIn

This strikes me as a very subtle yet effective way to get your users to provide more information about themselves in their profile. Who doesn’t want to get to 100%? If there is underlying value to the user, it should really accelerate completion of user profiles by raising awareness and granting some Pavlovian eye candy as well.


SlideShare

If your site invites your members to submit profile type data, you could do worse things than to add a percent complete status bar to your interface.

Going Global by Going Small?

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Data from the end of 2007 show that about 20% of the world’s population have access to the Internet while around 50% have cell phones.

What does this imply for how potential customers will be viewing your site, especially in the developing part of the world where cellular networks leapfrog land lines? Checked your site in a cell phone browser lately?

Relatedly, below are the slides from the presentation on global web strategy I gave last week at ASAE’s International Conference. Thanks to the 100+ people in the session. Great audience with very good questions. Also, my thanks to the SHRM contingent for playing along in a surprise case study of their efforts!

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about addressing international audiences with your web presence.

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=making-your-web-world-wide-1205162320870437-3

Your Global Web Site

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Ever since a Brit invented it in Switzerland as part of a European scientific organization, the Web has been intended as a global medium.

Once your site is live, you immediately have access to a global audience that is only going to grow and diversify further in the future. I remember being amazed by the immediate flow of e-mail from around the globe that I started receiving once my name and address were listed as a resource on a new site that launched in 1995.

Yet, most organizations completely ignore the potential for addressing global audiences and their unique needs. The web is an often efficient way to grow your customer base around the world but it will only work effectively in that role if you develop a strategy for why those audiences will receive value from you.

I am speaking on this very issue Thursday at ASAE & the Center’s International Conference in Washington, DC. You can see the program agenda on their site and I have posted my session description below.

If you have any questions you would like addressed during the event, be sure to post them here or send me an e-mail at david@highcontext.com.

(As an aside, with all of its global initiatives, why does ASAE give the International Conference short shrift with an anemic web presence? Seems rather short sighted to me.)

Making your Web Go World Wide: Global Web Site Strategy

The Web is a powerful vehicle for establishing and enhancing your global presence. Maximizing the contribution of your web site to your international strategy takes much more than translating a few pages of content. This session will zero in on these key issues:

  • Defining global strategy in terms of the Web
  • Common strategies and design patterns for global web sites
  • A decision framework for evaluating which approach best supports your goals

Leave this session with a clear understanding of how the Web can support your association’s international goals and how to make it happen.

Nickels and Dimes

Posted on by David
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The Washington Post wrote on Sunday that most banks hide the total list of all fees that they charge customers. All fees are not listed on most sites and agents were unable to get a full list of fees when they requested one in person at a branch.

Since the advent of ATM fees, many, many banks have realized they can nickel and dime (or dollar and twenty) their customers without losing many of them if they make the fees non-obvious or hard to avoid. This added millions to the bottom line but what a way to treat your customers. It leaves a huge opportunity to differentiate your company by treating your customers as valued business instead of cash trees to be shaken for spare change.

Even the cellular companies are starting to clue into this. Most of the major players have rolled out unlimited talk plans for around $99/month. AT&T even offers a truly unlimited data plan to go with it (most others charge extra fees over a certain amount of bandwidth used). These plans only make sense for people who talk a LOT on their phones. These are also some of the most profitable customers they have as well. Why not treat them well with a plan that eases their mind about no additional fees while also making good money for the company. That’s the kind of dynamic you should look for.

Amazon’s Prime membership is another example of this virtuous circle. Prime members receive free 2-day shipping on their purchases: the more they buy from Amazon the more valuable the membership. Nice dynamic!

Look for those virtuous circles in your own company or organization when considering pricing strategy. Money given to you should be in exchange for value, not as an involuntary ransom or tithe.

Early Adopters Have Been Social Networking The Whole Time

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A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey of early Internet adopters showed that the most common reason they got online was to connect with colleagues. Granted, they were social networking through BBS’s and mainframe shared time, but it was social nonetheless. (You other early adopters can probably cite the appropriate quote from The Breakfast Club. A fabulous prize will be awarded to the first to cite it in the comments of this post.)

The pre-2000 buzzword for people connecting online with each other was virtual community. This term was put out with the dot com bubble trash and is now covered under Web 2.0/social media/etc. What is different now is the greater scope of people connecting online and the greater diversity of easy-to-use tools for doing so (and lots of money being made by putting advertising on all of it). These are not insignificant changes but it is all rooted in a common desire of many internet users, then and now.

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes, social networking is simply more evenly distributed these days.

Wiki Markup: What You See is Hard to Do

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James Robertson has point out the obvious weakness of wiki tools: Wiki markup has no future:

The lack of WYSIWYG editing is a big barrier to adoption within organisations, and on the wider web. There are only a limited number of users that have the time, skills and inclination to learn wiki markup. It’s a fundamental usability problem, and the spread of wikis will always be niche as long as wiki markup remains.

This is a rather heretical point of view among wiki aficionados, however it is right on the money. If the outcome of using a wiki is to make content creation easy for a distributed group, wiki markup gets in the way of achieving that outcome. Most people can use a WYSIWYG editor if they have used a word processor in the past. This covers most Web users, especially in a corporate environment. Using obscure text code is an unnecessary and anachronistic hurdle to put wiki users through.

The First Web Server

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Robert Scoble recently posted this photo of the first web server. This was Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s computer that he used to invent and deploy the first web site.

I love that there is a sticker on it to prevent the entire world wide web being turned off inadvertently!

Personal trivia: I once missed a tour of the CERN facility by about 30 minutes when I was an exchange student in Switzerland. I sat for an hour outside the birthplace of the web, waiting for my bus ride home. This was about two years before Berners-Lee had set up this server.

Quoted in Article on Effective Web Site Measurement

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I was quoted in an article published by Microsoft Office Oline titled Deciphering your Web site traffic reports: 5 tips. I was interviewed by Christopher Elliott for the article, who does quite a bit of writing on travel and business issues.

Here is the section with my input, discussing how too much data can often be a bad thing:

Focus on the numbers that really matter. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with data, much of which doesn’t apply to your company. “Identify the top two or three statistics that actually allow you to make decisions about your site,” says C. David Gammel, an online media consultant and president of High Context Consulting in Salisbury, Md. “Ignore all the other data.”

Why disregard this wealth of information? Because poring over all the data will create what Gammel calls “analysis paralysis.” And that can detract you from your goal. His advice is to focus only on the metrics that are relevant to your business. For example, rather than obsessing over page views, look at the clicks to your online store and compare them with sales.

You are far more likely to make progress if you measure completion of specific, value producing goals, than simply trying to increase your overall page views and unique visitors.