Marko Hurst

Your visitors have evolved, have you?

Introduction

Not since the emergence of television fifty years ago have we seen such a metamorphosis in consumer behavior. The good-’ol-days when all that was needed to reach your audience was a product, a strong message, and enough money to keep them both in front of as many eyeballs as possible is a thing of the past. For years, people “behaved” the way they were supposed to and everything was going along just fine. Then all of a sudden, people’s behavior began to change overnight. They stopped “wanting” to listen to you, they stopped “wanting” to read what you wrote, and stopped “wanting” to look at your ads, they simply stopped paying attention to you. I mean seriously, how rude! So, what happened?

Well, in the 1980’s came the first transition with the introduction of cable & satellite TV. The unforeseen result was the beginning of the end – the fragmentation of mass media. Then in the mid-90’s the Internet arrived on the scene and in a short time established itself as something more than just a fad. And just like that, almost overnight the traditional advertising & marketing model was shattered beyond repair. The Internet now competed for the same attention that the other media channels were vying for, but unlike any other media channel in history the Internet was the first channel that was “push & pull”, or a two-way medium that allowed consumer’s to interact directly with systems, companies, other consumers, etc. and the system would react back. To add to this, the low cost of content publishing technologies allowed anyone with an Internet connection and a voice to stand up and be heard around the world, effectively changing Mass Media, into Media of the Masses.

Here Boy! Sit. Good Dog

In 1904, the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in physiology for his work on digestive glands. Prior to winning the Nobel, Pavlov discovered a physiological phenomenon that his legacy is probably more famous for and remembered by most for today, “conditioned reflexes”, a.k.a. Pavlov’s Dog.

The story goes a little something like this… One day a inside of Pavlov’s lab a colleague noticed that a dog would salivate as soon as it saw or heard the assistant that fed him, before ever seeing or smelling his food. At first Pavlov found this very frustrating, as it disrupted the results of his test. But after a while he be began to wonder why this was happening. So, Pavlov conducted an experiment to see if one could learn to associate a natural stimulus, such as a food, with an unrelated stimulus, this eliciting a response by the unrelated stimulus alone.

Fast forward a couple of decades to the early 1920’s when a man whose resume includes experimenting on infants, leaving the academia world under suspicious circumstances, and established the first psychological school of behavioralism unleashed his brilliance and knowledge of behavior upon the world of advertising. His name was John Watson, 1878 – 1958. And still today, nearly ninety years later, the world of marketing, advertising, and branding are still following his techniques of behavioralism –Brand Association.

Effectively what brand association attempts to do is manipulate the response to a stimulus, e.g. brand name or logo, which initially provides a neutral feeling or response with the objective to train people to make a “false” connection between the a positive emotion, e.g. happiness or feeling attractive, and the particular brand being advertised.

If one lesson was learned from the dot.com era, it is that it takes more than a brilliant mind and money to make your brainchild to come to life and survive. So, how did mass media evolve and survive for so many years? Like primordial stew, the right time, right place, and maybe a Ouija board under the pale moon light contributed, but some very specific criteria are essential to breathing the long lasting life cycle and impact of mass media.

1. Society: People lived in localized communities. The number of people in a certain area was relatively small this allowed them interact with each other more often since they went to the same church, shopped at the same stores, went to the same schools, and often worked together as well.
2. Technology: People had limited access to the same media channels. There were at best only a couple of newspapers, three major TV networks, and not many more radio stations.
3. Market: People had limited choices in brand options.

The result: people were “salivating” for the next greatest product. For nearly eighty years this model of mass media and brand association would thrive, but the Internet would change all of this almost overnight.

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Yesterday I spoke on a panel at the 2008 Clickability User Conference : The Failure of Great Design – Learning To Adapt To Audience Need. My other esteemed panelists included: John Broady, Executive Director, Omniture; Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora; Clare Munn, CEO, The Communications Group.

Good riddance to the days of Render once, repent forever! Today’s cutting edge design is informed by user feedback delivered through real-time analytics built into the Web Content Management platform. From A and B versioning to pages instantly revised by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, our panelists are experts at the art of responsive (ahem) intelligent design. Learn how these design firms manipulate the subliminal for measurable results.

The choice of panelists was to have four very distinct views about how analytics affects “design”. Coming from and working for four distinct types of companies you would imagine that it would have been a street brawl up on stage. But, it was actually quite the opposite. While we approached a problem based upon our primary discipline, on every question and topic we were given we simply built upon and added to the previous panelists answer. At first I thought it might have been boring for the audience, but afterwards (much to my delight) I found it was quite the opposite. Here you had someone from one of the world’s largest analytic providers, a Web 2.0 concept company, a design company, and myself from a UX & analytic background all agreeing on the shortcomings of analytic platforms and how analytics can and should be used to improve every design. A true ‘merging’ if you will of technology, business, design, & analytics to create the ultimate user experience.

Announced today at the Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions summit in Boston was a project that I was the UX Lead on – the Go! Network – affectionately called a “Blikinet” (not my choice, but you can’t win them), which is a combination of a blog, wiki, & intranet rolled into one.

This was a groundbreaking engagement for may reasons at Ford & for Avenue A | Razorfish, as it was a worldwide effort having traveled across the globe to meet with Ford Motor Company subsidiaries – Ford, Land Rover, Lincoln, Jaguar, Mercury, Mazda, & Volvo. The overall initiative was under the order of Alan Mulally, to change the way FMC does business both internally & externally, this in particular was under the effort of “communication” across brand and region.

THE BREAKDOWN

RSS
Our research showed that (not to any big surprise) that people were very pressed for time, so managers and above actually spent 5+ hours in email management a day! Another point captured was how many different places people go for sources of information and how they obtain than. We found that as much as nearly 1/3 of email for some people was from newsletters & feeds they subscribed to. Now what if anything these people did with it is another story that ends tragically as you can imagine. At best it was sent on to a few team members, at worst it was great knowledge that was never even looked at and lost completely. What was needed was a single point of “knowledge” that was diverse enough for a global audience / background, yet simple enough to navigate and find, or in this case be delivered, relevant information.

At the end of the day, what we (myself, Rob Zand, & Erin Scime) designed was a blog system that “subscribed” to all feeds so they would be available to all members in one location. Each feed and article when possible with tags that members were assigned to (see profile below) based upon their role, region, & language within the company. Each member has total control over their “feed tags” to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to any they chose.

Wiki
Knowledge management in most companies is difficult, now image a global company with seven global brands and has been in business for more than one hundred years. While we could tackle every issue, and was trying to limit IT interaction, we discovered it was more an issue of finding & sharing information than it was posting information. Our solution was a wiki.

All information when it is uploaded is categorized and is tagged, & assigned a language. Then it is no only stored in a central location, but everyone who is subscribed to those “tags” receives an RSS update, where they can view a summary or entire piece of content.

Intranet
Technically it’s an extranet, since agencies and other outsiders have access to this as well. One thing we did NOT want to do was re-invent the wheel as far as moving other content that already existed in our data repositories onto this one. But, what about all that other content that was useful to this effort? Well, we simply let you link to it and create a (wiki) page with a summary, category, & tags so it would become as useful as if it were an asset within the Go! network.

Profiles
This was my personal favorite section of the application to design. What we did here was create “rich user profiles” for every member. These profiles were as intelligent as they could be by pulling all personal & contact info we could from LDAP and populating as much information as we could before any use ever got into the application. Upon first login we “forced” the user through the rest of the profile creation process. We limited the required fields to as little as possible, but more than what I would say I would normally recommend for public sites to ensure that we had enough info to start doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes that would be able to provide true social value much quicker. Some of the things we included were you personal history – places you’ve lived, traveled, and worked. A ‘mini-resume’ that included projects internally or other companies/external you’ve worked. Favorite foods, hotels, etc.

The strategy behind these was multifaceted. Remember our main goal for this to be successful was to break down the walls between regions & brands, and share/leverage global knowledge from those regions & brands. Daunting in any situation, but add in the 100 year company history in a secretive industry with lots of territorial lines, at a company that (at this time) isn’t doing the greatest and it’s a challenge. So, our goal became a social one. And to that end we used all the personal info, data, and tags to align, share, and promote “like-minded” people in the company across the brands, and across all the regions to each other. We called it the “Ford Dating Service”. In addition to profile build outs, we included the profiles as part of search results, so when you did a search for “green technology”, not only did all the tech specs, RSS feeds, documents, etc come up, but so did Go! members that shared “green technology” as a tag on their profile which could have been from their resume, current/previous internal project, or just a loving interest.

As user’s moved through the system we tracked user actions, which then informed our “dating service”, as well as some social features such as most popular, top rated, most active, did you know, etc. Ultimately this will be used to enhance content, navigation, metadata, etc. and on the pure analytics side our user segmentation and dynamic content targeting.

Governance
No good site/application could be complete without governance. The basic model we chose was one of low moderation, with basic constraints as to what a user could do – not say. To get over the corporate culture of being afraid to speak your mind and whatever my boss says I agree with we allowed included anonymous posting on the blog.

Blog
Now, you might be thinking, “how often would a company like Ford, or most, really use an internal blog?” And you’d be right to think that it may not be very often, but the solution itself we felt was the right one over time, they just needed to get not worry about what a “blog” is and use a tool that allowed them to communicate as effortlessly as possible. So, as uses took various actions through the site, such as post a document, comment, rate something, etc we would capture those and show them on the blog so it looked liked the blog was very active. In addition, the FMC Governance team would “seed” content by highlighting products, campaigns, projects, people, feeds, etc. that they felt was interesting and could draw people into a conversation.

This is a major step for FMC, I think this and similar applications in the enterprise are leaps and bounds in the right direction.