Tonight, OHO Interactive picked up the MITX award in the Educational Institutions category for its design and development of the Uncommon Schools family of websites. OHO worked with Uncommon on the relaunch of its online brand. The MITX awards were held at the Boston Sheraton and attended by over 900 interactive, development and advertising professionals.
Congratulations to our client partners and to the OHO design and development team.
Last night nearly 100 people gathered at Microsoft's NERD Center to celebrate World Usability Day. The event in Boston/Cambridge was one of 172 events that happened in 40+ countries.
Jason Smith from OHO Interactive spoke on making web application people love to use in his talk: "From Usability to Lovability." A group of researchers from Bentley University presented new research on using iPads in education.
Yesterday, I spoke in a webinar on how colleges can retool their websites to reach more students, encourage admitted students to enroll, and attract graduate students who have more options than ever. If you'd like to see the recorded version of this webinar, we've just posted the video.
Are you attending the Gilbane conference this fall? I hope you'll sit in on the panel I'll be speaking on, talking about usability in B2B. I'll be exploring how B2B expectations are changing, converging more and more with B2C practices, at the leading web and content management conference on November 30. B2B marketing and usability are changing. The recent explosion of mobile devices and apps, combined with the 
evolution of Web 2.0 have quickly raised the bar on usability expectations within the Enterprise. Corporate users of web sites and apps today compare their experiences to consumer products and services such as iPhone/iPad, Kayak, and Google. Today's marketers are scrambling to meet these growing user expectations. Join me, World Usability Day founder Elizabeth Rosenzweig, as well as other leading industry experts, for this interactive session on how to turn your B2B website or app into a a truly lovable "consumer"-like experience.
Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on how listening for levels and types of engagement on your mainstream social media channels, from Facebook to Twitter, can help you determine whether there’s enough social traction to make building your own community worthwhile.
If you’ve listened and the answer is yes, then it’s time to take your social listening strategy to the next level. Because once you determine that your existing community is engaged enough that they’ll contribute to an online space devoted to your brand, your listening job is not over. In fact, the crucial part has just begun.
Social listening not only helps you gauge the level of engagement among your social consumers, but it also helps determine the direction of that engagement.
For instance:
Take for example an online retailer that finds that, every time they post something on their Facebook fan page about their garden supplies line, they have 75 comments and over 1,000 likes, while people respond with only 24 comments and 300 likes to most postings on, say, office supplies. This can be an indicator that their customers want to engage around garden products much more than around office products. Taking that a step further to refine the types of engagement, say that:
It looks like engaging around gardening, with an emphasis on contests and offers, is the strategy that makes sense for this retailer. This information can be invaluable when planning an online community, because it gives us an idea of what consumers are looking for from this brand when they connect with them on social media. It can help determine:
Building a site around an offer-driven community is very different from building one around a support-driven one. Knowing what your community wants lets you build a site structured to meet their needs, rather than a cookie-cutter solution.
Does this mean our retailer should only build a community for their gardening customers? Of course not! One of the joys of building a community from scratch is that it allows for different types of interactions to emerge than the ones you can have on other social media channels. But it does provide guidance on what is working now, helping to build a community that meets consumer needs from the beginning.
Last week, we talked about the engagement trajectory, and how customers have a tendency to move along a predictable path from noticing your social media presence to becoming true advocates for your brand on social media, actively participating in your online community.
Let’s look some more at how to move folks along that trajectory. The first step is to determine whether your brand has enough potential advocates out there to make the time right to build a community. Although community can be a great driver of awareness, loyalty, and ROI, not every brand has the brand equity needed to build a community around it. If you do, community makes sense as a strategy. If you don’t, you’ll best spend you time and efforts on other, more fruitful web efforts.
Listening is the key in determining if your brand has enough folks out there passionate enough about your brand that, if you build an online community, not only will they flock to it, but they’ll use it as a platform to engage with your company and other consumers.
The first place to look is your existing social media efforts. Look on your Facebook page:
If you’re answering yes to a lot of these questions, your customers are already engaged richly with your brand.
Of course, it’s a big step from having an engaged blog readership or Facebook fan page to having a fully-functioning online community. It’s fortunately feasible to test whether you can expand the boundaries of your existing levels of engagement to something more along the levels you’ll need to sustain community: ramp up the calls to engagement on existing channels:
If consumers respond enthusiastically to this new level of engagement, chances are, your brand may be ready for a branded community.
Last week, I presented at a webinar hosted by Acquia: “B2C Branded Communities: Delivering ROI, Making Customers Happy.” In it, we looked at ways that consumer companies are using online communities to drive stronger engagement with their customers, leading to higher customer loyalty and, along the way, greater revenue.
What we’ve seen when we build communities is that there’s a predictable trajectory that people follow when becoming more engaged with your brand:
A select few of these community members will grow into advocates for your brand, the final step on the engagement trajectory:
One of the challenges we’ve seen for any community engagement strategy is getting customers over the “dividing line” between a lurker and a true community member. And it’s crucial to get people over that line, because that’s where you can start to really understand your customers, segment them for targeted, relevant messages, and build a solid relationship with your customer base.
Next Week: Part 2: Determining if customers are ready to move over the engagement line
We're really excited about a new project we're working on right now: a new website for Roger Williams University, complete with another installation of our popular UniversityNOW media and communications center. The Bristol, R.I. school, ranked one of the top 10 comprehensive universities in the North by U.S. News & World Report, tapped OHO earlier this year to build them a new site, one that brings more social interactivity and fresh new look and feel.
Existing RWU website
On Saturday April 2nd, I’ll be presenting at Product Camp Boston at the Microsoft NERD Center, talking to product managers about how to make their web applications as easy and seamless to use as popular consumer web applications.
As we’ve seen in our work with the publisher Elsevier, there can be resistance within an organization to using a new app if there’s a perception that it’s going to be clunky and unfriendly —and, let’s face it, there are a lot of B2B apps that are just that. Today, B2B users now have higher expectations for web applications, more in line with what they’re seeing in their consumer applications and products, with brands like Apple and Amazon setting a reference point of great quality and functionality.
So how do you provide your end-users with an experience that’s more akin to Apple’s than to the typical B2B web application? Lessons from our project for Elsevier provide important insights. We focused on what Apple does right—anticipating consumer and user needs – and developed a system that solves a few key pain points with grace and simplicity. By anticipating end users’ real needs, we provided them with a solution that has only the features they need to get their jobs done. The result is a highly functional, easy-to-use app that is streamlining the book authoring process.
Designing great, usable apps is a mindset that requires thinking about apps as a user experience, not just a final product. Some other ways we create apps that your people look forward to using:
Did you miss ProductCamp this year? Join us on May 5 for a webinar based on this talk.
Boston Society for Architects (BSA) launched the completely revamped architects.org website this evening. The site was developed by Design&Co and OHO Interactive. The site is built upon Acquia Drupal and includes integration with the association management tool produced by ACGI.
Congratulations to the team at BSA – Adam, John, Jon, and Dan!
