Hello Goat: The Blog

Gorilla Usability

March 8th, 2010, 9:18 am - by Mike

“Wait… if I read the title correctly… are you talking about how people should go about using a gorilla?!?” No silly… it’s a play on words. What I am talking about is a usability study that @michaelseidel and I conducted recently @AJBombers. I want to share how you can do usability studies without breaking the bank.

Traditionally, I have participated in usability studies that have been conducted in a lab. We recruit about 10-15 users and pay them about $100 each to come in and test a website in a lab while designers, developers and business owners sit behind 2-way mirrors and watch the subjects interact with a website. We double book each time slot to make sure we get a participant in every slot and we still pay the people we don’t use. We write scenarios for the users to walk though and we have a couple of usability specialists walking the users though the scenarios and taking copious notes. We analyse the results after each user and compile all the information into a recommendation document.

These type of sessions were the status quo in the past. Unfortunately, these sessions were expensive and time consuming. They were necessary at the time, but the 800 lb. Gorilla in the room (see what I did there) was the cost of these sessions. There may still be a very limited place for this type of testing; however, there is another way…

So here is what we did… We are working on a section of a website that has a search mechanism and refinement tools that help the user narrow the results based on criteria they select. The refinement tools could be placed in 2 different spots on the results page. We wanted to test what position gave the best user experience for these tools.

We didn’t have a lot of time to plan a full blown (gorilla) usability lab and we didn’t have the budget for it either. So what we did is turn to social media and offered free lunch.

We started kicking around ideas on how to get good user testing without breaking the bank when it hit us; we could turn to Twitter to recruit users for this and we need to set up the testing somewhere that is convenient for our local networks to meet. We also need some sort of compensation for these users time. We came up with the perfect spot – AJBombers.

I decided to contact Joe from AJbombers and bounce the idea off him. I told him that we were going to conduct a user study and test some options of a website. I also mentioned that we were planning on buying all our participants lunch at his place. He was more than happy to help us out, in fact, he was excited about it.

We started out by broadcasting via Twitter what we were planning to do and when. Joe helped us out by Re-tweeting it to his loyal following which spurred a good response. The great thing about this entire approach was we planned it on a Friday for the following Wednesday and we filled all the spots we were looking for with very little effort. A few tweets and some re-tweets and we were good to go.

On the day of the testing Joe gave us a prime location to set up so we could funnel users through during the time slots we had set aside and we had a great system for getting food and drink orders started with our awesome waitress “B the Tweetless.” while the testing was going on. I was completely amazed how smoothly the entire session went seeing as this was our first attempt at doing anything like this.

The test went great; we noticed that the atmosphere is more realistic in a setting like that compared to a lab environment. The lab comes off as clinical and stiff. This was relaxed and the users seemed more comfortable in this enviroment… less spotlighty. People were willing to have a conversation about what we were testing; it didn’t come across as a rigid question and answer session. The feedback we gathered was genuine and gave us insight into things about the site we weren’t even testing. It also seemed like people were more grateful with receiving lunch than paying them cash to come out to our lab. “This is it? This is all I need to do? I feel like I need to do more to receive a free lunch.”

The test was a major success. We were able to test 10 users over 3 hours and under $200 total. This method of testing is completely viable, portable, and cost effective. This will now become our preferred method of testing moving forward. Granted, there will still be times where we have to bring people into a lab because we are testing something bigger that takes longer to run users through, but I think those sessions will be fewer and further between.

Finally, I would like to extend a huge Thank You to Joe and his staff @AJBombers! They really helped us out and that place is truly the best usability lab on the planet.

Tags: Usability
Posted in Social Media, User Experience | 2 Comments »

Proper Deadlines

March 2nd, 2010, 9:13 pm - by Mike

The ideal project would not have a deadline for my taste. I would love to have all the time in the world to design and develop a website nirvana that all users could navigate through effortlessly. This utopia, however, is unrealistic. First and foremost, the client would like to have a web presence sometime this century. Secondly, they have a budget and can’t afford the bottomless well of development a project like that would have.

The flip side to this is having a deadline before the entire scope of the project is realized and before proper expectations are set. These types of projects are far more dangerous than the scenario above. These types of projects are rife with problems.

What does one of these deadline first projects look like? Follow me kids… I’ll show you. (I promise no Oompa-Loompas or a trippy boat rides. Gene Wilder rocks by the way… wow – tangent – sorry.)

Most likely these projects start out with a client who has a great idea. They have thought a lot about this idea and have put a lot into the business plan to make this new idea come to life. Secondly, they have identified that they need a web presence, and because they are far from experts in this area, they come to you.

They go through their business plan at a high level with you and tell you some of the objectives they have for their website. You walk them through a very thorough questionnaire (put together by a very smart design company ) and get as many answers as you can to provide a few mock-ups and a high level cost estimate.

What’s that noise… sounds like a loose wheel. Anyway, the client flips over one of the designs you made and wants to start immediately. You are excited, you won the work and you are moving into development.

So you create an outline and calendar to make sure you have the proper time built in to do an Information Architecture (IA) study, a card sorting activity and a wireframe of the rest of the site so you have a better handle of the scope of the project. You also want to make sure this new site is usable and helps your new client achieve their business objectives.

Before you have the ability to share this outline and calendar with your client they come to you and tell you that they shared your designs with their marketing team and they started creating campaigns around the new site. Whoa… did you feel that shimmy? What is that noise?!?

You start asking the client to participate in some of the IA studies you want to conduct and they tell you that there is a lot of things moving right now and there might not be time to do any IA studies at this time. “We can always get to that later. Why don’t you start building out the home page so we can see what it looks like in a browser.”

You start constructing your home page and you get a message from your client… “Good news we got our booth graphics done! Did I forget to tell you we are going to a trade show in 30 days and we need the site done before we leave?” OMG the wheels just fell off. Hold on this is going to be a messy ride!

Well… choice time… do you swing the door open, jump, tuck, and roll? Or do you press on and try to help your new client land this thing? (for the purposes of this post we are going with option B)

Now you are staring at a deadline that is going to take every waking minute of your time to reach. In order to get some reality around this news you just received, you set up a meeting with the client to see where you can shave some scope. This first meeting is what I like to call the denial meeting.

Your client will tell you that it is no big deal; there should be plenty of time to get this done by the show. You make some suggestions on where they can cut some scope – they are reluctant to do it because the site needs to be next to perfect for the show. Again, they tell you not to worry about it. They are going to get you help with content and they have a plan where they can get more.

Do you smell that? It smells like something is burning. So you press on. The work becomes a grind. Curve balls are coming at you left and right. Instead of shrinking scope, your client tries to increase it… “Can we hook the site up to a Content Management System?” “How about some Flash that streams our mission statement video?”

The work you are doing is now taking twice as long as expected because you client keeps changing their mind as you make your way to the trade show date. You promise yourself that all the short cuts and hacks you needed to put in will get fixed after the show is over (not really believing that will happen). You get this website mess to a point of acceptability for your client and you push it live. It doesn’t really work the way you wanted it, the information flow is a bit slap-dash, and there are some errors that still linger.

But it’s out there in time for the show. Your client is more happy that the website is out there when they needed it than what the result of the site is. They spin it to their partners that there is going to be a lot of improvements coming. They pat you on the back and say that after the show they want to talk about the next phase of the site. With a wink they say that big things are coming.

This, my friends, is not that far from actual events a lot of us in this field have experienced. These fire drill type projects zap the life out of any good UX-designers/developers. It is vitally important that you communicate the importance of realistic and proper deadlines. Sometimes it is difficult to explain the amount of time it takes to do something right. A lot of times your clients won’t understand what it takes to build an online presence that is usable and friendly to their customers. They most likely will try to minimize your role and effort to get what they want sooner and cheaper. They don’t understand that “someone else has done it so it can’t be that hard; you just put it there like that” is easier said than done.

Our jobs in these situations is to explain, in terms they will understand, what it takes to build their awesome website. We need to show them how the process of our job works. We also need to show our clients why proper deadlines help them out as well. We need to communicate what there role is going to be in the development of their website. We need to show them what deliverables they have on their plates and how the timeliness of those deliverables affect our progress. If you can, show your client an example of what happens to projects with rushed deadlines. Show them the original mock-ups and the finished result. Explain all the corners that were cut how those shortcuts effect the performance of that site.

Before you get headlong into a project set up some realistic time lines. Use a calender to show when deliverables are needed and when milestones are going to be met. This way your client has a visual timeline. You have the ability to show them what happens to that timeline when new scope is introduced or when new deadlines are introduced.

In the end, your client may not like what you are saying at the time, but they will appreciate it in the long run. And if they don’t, maybe they aren’t the type of client you want to work for.

Posted in Clients, Design | No Comments »

It Might Get Loud and a Little Random

February 24th, 2010, 3:43 pm - by Mike

Inspiration comes in many forms. I was watching a documentary the other night on the electric guitar called It Might Get Loud. The film says it’s about the electric guitar, but it isn’t… It’s about leaving a mark. The film followed 3 guitar players and talked about their lives, inspiration and drive. You may have heard of these people – Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White.

As I was watching this film, I started thinking about where I am in my life. I started thinking about what I do for a living and what I am currently doing in my job. I started wonder how I’m leaving a mark or, more to the point, if I’m leaving a mark.

At one point in the film Jack White is talking about some of the guitars that he has and how they are a little bit warped or out of tune. He points out that he likes to leave them like that because he does his best work when it is a struggle; when he has to conquer the guitar to get what he is looking for out of it.

That really got to me. Too often, I feel like I am hoping that something will just comes to me. If I do the same thing over and over again something new and exciting will come out of that. Now, I am probably my toughest critic and I am probably over simplifying things, but there is still some truth to that.

It is really easy for me to get caught up in my daily routine and to let the little obstacles trip me up on a daily basis and zap some of my energy. It’s simple to just grind out the week focusing on one task at a time and not really pick up my head to look around at what is going on.

That, however, is not leaving a mark… that is just getting by.

I have done a bit of soul searching lately and I decided that I need to focus on things that I am good at and things I can conquer with a little bit of struggle. I need to get back to the things that charge my batteries. I have been distracted as of late and I miss doing things that matter to me; things that I can leave my mark on and things I can be proud of.

Greatness is in the eye of the beholder. I think all often people associate greatness with what everyone else thinks. I am not searching for fame or greatness in the eyes of others. I am looking to define greatness for me.

I found a place where I want to funnel some of this new found energy and drive – MKEUX. I will be talking a lot more about what this is going to be. I am very excited about the possibilities of this new idea and I am working with @michaelseidel; one of the best Information Architects (IAs) in Milwaukee. I am also looking forward to the rest of the Milwaukee UX community contributing to this.

We are working out the details of this and will have more to share soon.

Tags: User Experience, UX
Posted in Content, Design, User Experience | 1 Comment »

25 Sites That Inspire Great Design

February 10th, 2010, 11:23 am - by Mike

A while back a friend (@AquinasWI) and I were talking about design inspiration. It is pretty easy to get heads-down in our daily jobs and life and now stop to smell the roses. Working where we work there is a lot of design that comes through and we just take it as it comes.

We decided to do a little exercise. We decided to find 25 sites that inspire us to want to design better websites, that inspire us to go the extra mile for a better user experience below is my list of 25… I know everyone’s tastes are different, but these are the designs that charge my design battery.

1. Charles Elena design

2. Morphix

3. Square Eye

4. Mutant Labs

5. Mail Chimp

6. Work Awesome

7. Ride Oregon

8. Second & Park

9. Artua

10. Tea Round

11. SMS Parking

12. webdesigner Depot

13. Ernest Hemingway Collection

14. Take the Walk

15. Jeff Sarmiento

16. 2pitch

17. Dean Oakley

18. Viget Labs

19. Mayflower Brewing

20. The New York Moon

21. Team Green

22. Silverback

23. Pottery Barn

24. Matt Mullenweg

25. Giraffe Restaurants

Tags: Design, Inspire, WebDesign
Posted in Design, User Experience | 1 Comment »

Think you’re ready for a website?

February 3rd, 2010, 11:18 am - by Mike

There are a lot of small businesses out there that believe they need a website; or an internet presence. Unfortunately they have no idea what to do with it… they just know they need it.

So what do they do?

They contact a company like Hello Goat and ask what it costs to make a website. They have no idea what they are asking for, they just know that they need a website and it’s going to cost them money.

So what does Hello Goat do?

We send them a list of questions we want them to answer before we start talking about how much this website is going to cost. We do this to prepare them for the reality of owning a website. We do this to prepare them for having an online presence.

The list of questions and categories looks like this:

General

What are the objectives you want your users to complete on this site?
If information gathering is a goal, what would you like your users to do with the information gathered?
What is the most important message you want your gateway page (home page) to communicate?
What is the overall visual tone you are looking for?
Who is your competition? What distinguishes your business from them?
Are there any urls that you feel communicate in a similar fashion that you what this site to communicate?

Audience

Why is the site needed?
Who is the audience? What is the major demographic of potential site visitors?
How will this major demographic use this site?
What are the key reasons users may have for visiting the site?
What should visitors of the site come away with?
What knowledge level of your products and services do your users come in with? Novice? Intermediate? Expert?

Content

What content will be needed for the site?
What sections and features will need to be included?
What already exists and what needs to be developed?
Is the content on your site an overview/marketing level or is more of a research/wiki level?

Communication

What should the site communicate?
What are the primary objectives and goals (long and short term) for the site?
Are there any actionable messages on your site? If so, what do you want your users do with them?
What methods do you see your users contacting you?

You will notice that some of the questions are asked more than once… we do that because we are trying to get at different parts of the same question. The questions themselves fall into different categories and require slightly different answers depending on the category.

Let’s take the cover off these questions to understand why we ask them.

General Questions – these questions are used to get you in the proper mindset about your new website.

What are the objectives you want your users to complete on this site?

Plain and simple… we need to understand what your users are suppose to be doing on your site so we can get the information architecture right.

If information gathering is a goal, what would you like your users to do with the information gathered?
What is the most important message you want your gateway page (home page) to communicate?

These two questions go hand-in-hand. We are looking to see if you have put any thought into what tone you want to strike with your audience and what first impression you want to give visitors of your site.

What is the overall visual tone you are looking for?

This question tries to uncover any visual direction you may have in your mind. It also is meant to spur some investigation on your part. We want to you to look at any creative you have for your company like, brochures, logos, product packaging, etc. We also want you to think of your audience when it comes to this question – what visuals will be helpful and appeal to them.

Who is your competition? What distinguishes your business from them?
Are there any urls that you feel communicate in a similar fashion that you what this site to communicate?

These two questions are very important for a new website. They are meant to get you to think about your competition, look at their sites – not from a design standpoint, but from an information standpoint. You need to look at and understand the level of content and the messaging they are providing to connect with their audiences. You can learn from them – good or bad… what to do and what not to do.

Audience Questions – these questions are specifically meant to get you to think about your audience and how successful you want them to be on your site. You want to make sure your visitors can accomplish their goals on your site in a easy and efficient manner.

Why is the site needed?
Who is the audience? What is the major demographic of potential site visitors?
How will this major demographic use this site?
What are the key reasons users may have for visiting the site?
What should visitors of the site come away with?
What knowledge level of your products and services do your users come in with? Novice? Intermediate? Expert?

All of these questions are related. We are really trying to get into your head and see how you see your audience. We need to understand how you segment your potential clients and visitors to understand how the information architecture works on the site. We re-ask some questions like “What should visitors of the site come away with?” We do that to make sure you are thinking in context of your audience.

Content Questions – these questions may seem redundant, but are very necessary to answer. These questions get at the heart of the messaging for the site. These questions are so we can understand why someone would come to your site and use it.

What content will be needed for the site?
What sections and features will need to be included?

These questions may feel like you have answered them already, but they are really meant to get you thinking about the structure of your site and the information flow. How will your users move though the site to accomplish their goals?

What already exists and what needs to be developed?
Is the content on your site an overview/marketing level or is more of a research/wiki level?

These questions are to get a sense of what materials you have or have in mind that will help you communicate to your audience or what will you need to produce in order to make a successful website.

Communication Questions – these questions really wrap up the vision of what you want to accomplish with this new site. What would make this site successful for your business?

What should the site communicate?

This question is the final question on what you want your site to do for you. This should be answered in context of everything you have answered so far.

What are the primary objectives and goals (long and short term) for the site?

This question gets to the overall vision of the site… Are you launching a marketing site to educate new users who you are and what services you provide? Is there a long term vision you have to turn this site from and informational site to a transactional site?

Are there any actionable messages on your site? If so, what do you want your users do with them?
What methods do you see your users contacting you?

These two questions really sum up what you want your users to come away with from your site and what are the next steps to retain these people as customers.

As you can see, there are very few questions that talk about the design… The reason is we know how to design a site, we know how to put together creative ideas that will appeal to you and your audience. What we want to do is to give you more than just a pretty design, we want to give you a website that you can use to help you sell your goods and services, educate your users or inform them of your mission.

Jeffery Zeldman said it best when he said, “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

This is the tenant that Hello Goat lives by. You don’t just need a pretty design… you need a website that works.

Tags: Content Architecture
Posted in Clients, Content, Design | No Comments »

Social Media’s Short Attention Span

January 21st, 2010, 2:57 pm - by Mike

The term OFN (Old Effing News) gets thrown around a lot on social media circles. Don’t come late to the party on things like celebrity news; people will be all over you — “that was so 9:30am.”

The funny thing about that is more people are getting gun-shy to share things for fear of being tagged with the dreaded OFN from their more sarcastic social media friends. The outcome of this behavior is the premature death of some topics that may need more of our collective attention then they receive.

Twitter has turned us into roving reporters and there is a sport in breaking the latest news. Unfortunately if you are the second or third person to tweet something, you have basically lost the game. (By the way I just lost the game.) So the natural reaction for some is to hold back the post they were originally going to send and hunt for a new, more recent tidbit to post, or just sit back and see the news roll in from others and not engage at all.

The other side of this effect is how this short attention span affects businesses. Good and bad. Take for example United Breaks Guitars. This thing hit You Tube and exploded all over every social media outlet. The video was played 3.5 million out of the gate and has been viewed 7.4 million times since it aired 6 months ago.

How did this affect United’s bottom line? There were reports at first that the airline’s stock price dropped 10% in the first 4 days of the song’s airing. But we came to find out that those numbers were greatly exaggerated.

Did United do anything to fix the problem? Not really… they addressed the problem with public statements and PR spin, but aside from that they made no “sweeping changes” to how they operate their business.

Do people still use United to fly? Absolutely… in fact, United barely saw a ripple in their overall lift because of this incident. One contributing factor to this is people moved on as fast as they jumped on this event.

The collective attention span of social media rivals that of mainstream media. Right now the biggest thing is the horrible earthquakes in Haiti. It was awesome to see the support and response via social media. At the same time lets hope the next “Tiger Woods” type incident doesn’t take over the collective social media conscious too soon… (I’m not holding my breath on that.)

By the way… please donate to the Red Cross for the Haitian earthquake victims.

Tags: Social Media
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

The True Cost of User Experience

January 14th, 2010, 9:28 pm - by Mike

In some schools of thought, user experience (UX) and usability testing are a box to be checked somewhere in the development life cycle. As long as you, at some point in development, talk to someone about the UX of your product things should move smoothly ahead. Usually these UX talks happen near or at the end of development and any feedback given is taken with a grain of salt.

The problem with this thought pattern is all the hidden costs of overlooking or short selling UX.

Password Reset Form For instance this very real example shows a very confusing UX while trying to change a password for a login to an online application. (I am not going to reveal the company that had this experience. They have since come to the light side and now embrace usability and user testing.)

As you can see the form is pretty straight forward until you have to select what button to press to complete the task. The form is asking you if would like to reset your password. If you do, you fill out the form and then… Do I hit OK? Maybe that seems like I am giving the form permission to reset my password. Do I hit RESET? I think so… The form is asking me to “reset” my password so “RESET” must be the right button.

Wrong.

The RESET button clears the fields above and doesn’t give you any feedback as to what just happened. Oh, by the way, the OK button does the same thing. There is no feedback telling you that your password has been reset. Now the user can only assume that their task is complete.

So, how do we break down the overall cost of this terrible user experience?

First we take a look at it from the user side. They now assume that their password has been changed. The next time they come to use the application; they put in their user name and their newly changed password. The application tells them that “The username and/or password are incorrect. Please try again.” So thinking they misspelled something they try again… same error. Fumbling around with this several times is taking precious time and patience away from the user. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cost.

Next that user then calls customer support to get some help. In walks the cost to the proprietor of the application. They are paying for every call that comes into their call center to troubleshoot this issue. They have thousands of users and are now funneling hundreds of calls through their call center on this one issue (Especially because this particular application requires users to change their password every 90 days.).

Some users even go as far as dropping the service and using a competitor’s application. “If it’s this hard to change your password, I can only imagine how difficult the rest of the application is.” Now, this may be an extreme viewpoint, but there were still some customers who felt that way. Hidden cost number 3 — loss of users.

Fed up with all the issue troubleshooting, the company decides that they need to get to the bottom of all the problems their users are having and perform some user testing. They go through several sessions of usability, take the finding and come up with a plan to implement the necessary changes to make the UX better for their customers.

The final cost of that is taking part of the development staff off their current tasks, getting them to crawl back through all the code to fix all the troubled spots of the application, retesting the application to make sure the changes haven’t caused any additional issues elsewhere in the application and finally rerolling that application out to a production environment where the users can take advantage of the new improved UX.

Had this company taken the mock-ups through user testing prior to one line of code being written, they would have discovered this issue (among others) and could have resolved it prior to launch. This would have prevented all the hidden costs of aggravated customers, larger call center volumes, troubleshooting time with each customer, lost customers and a ton of rework getting in the way of new enhancements and pushing back future releases.

The cost of that simple change up front would have been minor compared to what actually occurred.

Tags: Usability, User Experience, UX
Posted in Design, User Experience | 2 Comments »

Social Media Contests – Participation is Not Always Easy to Come By

January 12th, 2010, 10:16 am - by Mike

Give away something for nothing and people will say “yes please.” Give away something for almost nothing and people will say “what’s the catch.” By nature, people do not want to do a whole lot to get something especially if the activity will step outside the bounds of their normal daily routine.

A month ago I had the privilege of helping Funjet Vacations execute a Social Media giveaway. Some of you will probably remember me badgering you to go outside and make Snow Angels. If not, the premise behind the contest was simple – Funjet was giving away 10 all inclusive 4 night/5 day air and hotel trips for 2. All people had to do was go outside, make a snow angel, take a picture of it and post it to a special contest page. If they did that they were entered… pretty simple right?

Not really. In fact, it seemed extraordinarily difficult to get people to participate at all.

We decided at the onset of the contest to post the photos we received as soon as we could get them approved. The thought was two-fold: 1) People could use others photos as inspiration and motivation to do their own. 2) People could see how many participants there are and gage their odds of winning.

We blasted out messages, posts and updates for 5 days on the Funjet Facebook and Twitter accounts along with several of us using our personal accounts to do the same.

Our network reach on Facebook was roughly 2400 people with a multiplier of 160. (Multiplier = average number of followers owned by the original 2400 person network.)

On Twitter it was 3100 people with a multiplier of 340.

Doing the math… on the 1st level market reach Funjet was at 384,000 individuals for Facebook and 1.05 million for Twitter.

What do you think our total participation was? Wait for it…

313 total submissions over 5 days. Insert record skipping noise here. That’s right… a whopping 313. The odds of winning the contest at that participation rate were 1 in 30. Whoa! What happened? Was our messaging too obscure? Did we somehow make Snow Angels to difficult?

Unfortunately it wasn’t that simple. Of the people who participated, one reason for not sharing with their networks was they didn’t want the competition. They wanted their odds to be as good as possible. This one I understand. I can see keeping the odds in your favor. I get that.

I surveyed some people in my network that didn’t participate to find out why, and what I found out baffled me. The main reason I got was that they had to do something to be entered. They weren’t just entered for becoming a fan or following Funjet. “It was too hard to enter the drawing.”

Really? Lying down in the snow for 5 seconds and flailing was too much to ask for? Taking a picture and uploading it was just too much heavy lifting?

Apparently yes. And, apparently if they weren’t going to do it themselves, they weren’t going to share it with their own networks and they were just going to ignore the rest of the messages coming though for the duration of the contest. This surprised me… maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did. I didn’t think asking people to make snow angels for the chance to win 1 of 20 all inclusive trips was too much to ask.

I was a bit disappointed, but on the flip side I learned a lot. It helped me tweak Funjet’s engagement and retention strategy to account for future promotions. I learned what type of promotions we should run depending on what is the end goal of the promotion.

Running social promotions are a good thing for your brand to do; you just have to have realistic expectations.

If you are running a promotion to gain additional followers and more brand awareness, use contests that keep people in their daily routine as much as possible. Have a “ReTweet” or a “Hashtag” contest that enters individuals into drawings for something as simple as ReTweeting a message and following you on Twitter or Hashtagging a phrase and tweeting it to be entered.

You can still run participatory contests and promotions. I do believe there is still a place for those types of engagements. If you already have a loyal following, you can use these types of promotions to roll out new products and services. Or perhaps use them to get people to use your products and services on a base level and upgrade in the near future.

Understanding your audience and their participation threshold is vital for planning social media promotions. These contests and promotions can be powerful brand loyalty and advocacy builders if you have realistic goals and expectations.

Tags: Social Media
Posted in Social Media | 3 Comments »

Taking a Stand

January 8th, 2010, 12:13 pm - by Mike

I’m addicted to RSS feeds. I read roughly 300 feeds a week from all realms of nerdom, design, online marketing, social media – you get the point.

Of all of these feeds, the one thing that really bothers me — to the point of un-following some feeds — is when a writer gives an opinion article a controversial title, but within the article itself takes no stance on the subjects at hand.

One example of this is the “Smart phone OS showdown: iPhone vs Android vs Palm Pre” article on CNet’s UK site. The title suggests that the writer is pitting these mobile operating systems against each other. I assumed that they’d give a thorough breakdown of which one is best and why. The author even ends the first page with two questions “But will there be a winner? Will one phone – and it’s OS – reign supreme?

As I read this first page, I thought… Ooh, I want to know which one is definitively better than the rest because I am in the market for a smart phone and want to make an educated choice; I trust CNet, so maybe they can help me with my decision.

Then what happens? I have to read though 11 individual pages of various amounts of tech, design, user experience and interface jargon which I have to wait for each individual page to load because who really wants to read a blog post all on one page (note sarcasm and… I’ll digress). Don’t get me wrong the article does offer up some very good insight on each of the devices and their respective OSs (Is that how you make that plural???). Page 12 is titled Conclusion — I see that title and I immediately think ok Mike, here comes the pay-off… This summary will lend itself to your decision making…

What do I see…? The first sentence says — “It’s truly hard to pick a ‘winner’ here.” What??? I just waded through 12 pages of article and ads to get to this???

Then there’s a milquetoast summary of the entire review and an apology – “We’re sorry to wimp out, be we can’t decide this for you.” – ???

I wanted to punch something.

I wasn’t looking for them to decide for me, but I was looking for their opinion. They’d done tons of research and I wanted the recommendation to validate or negate the direction I was leaning.

So, what’s my point…? My point is; take a stand. Let me say that again… TAKE A STAND. Seriously. It’s your job as a blogger to offer an opinion; provide your readers some value whether they agree with you or not. Let them challenge you in the comments if they don’t agree. Open up some dialog on the topics you are writing about. That’s far more interesting than writing a review on something that offers no insight or opinion and then letting the “fanboys” slug it out in the comments.

Trust me when I say this…you will gain a far better and larger following on your blog if you offer up your professional and personal opinions. You will start better and more engaging conversations about subjects that interest your followers. You will offer more value and gain credibility for taking a stand. (See how I wrapped that up with the title in the last line. Pretty clever huh?!?)

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Practicing What I Preach

January 4th, 2010, 9:49 am - by Mike

Happy new year everyone! 2009 was an interesting year for Hello Goat Designs. We got some new clients that we are very excited about and we lost one of our major ones. That lose has been a challenge heading into the New Year, but we are taking on new opportunities as they come. When one door closes, another one opens; funny how that works.

The other interesting thing that has happened in 2009 is my new role at my day job. Over the last 6 months I’ve been transitioning into a Social Computing Strategist role for Funjet Vacations and the other brands the The Mark Travel Corporation owns and manages. It has truly been an exciting 6 months.

The first duty I performed in this new role was traveling around the Midwest for Funjet Vacations giving Social Media overview presentations to travel agents at Funjet’s annual tradeshows. These presentations were surface level talks about Twitter and Facebook mainly. They also briefly touched on the other Social Media avenues such as blogs, social bookmarking and social multimedia to name a few.

These presentations were such a big hit that shortly after the tradeshows; I started giving bi-monthly webinars for Funjet that covered more detailed information about using these social media tools for business and marketing purposes and the benefits of doing so.

In conjunction with these webinars, Funjet sent me to Cancun (I know, I know… poor me) to give one on one social media training sessions to their top travel agents and agencies. These “pool side” sessions (ok, I’ll stop rubbing it in) went into specific examples and covered everything from practical first steps into social media to more advanced marketing campaigns useful to agencies with established social media presences.

One of the main topics I covered with agents who had a firm grasp on things like Twitter and Facebook was the power of blogging. I talked about being experts in the travel space and using that expertise to build a loyal following and recruiting brand advocates. I gave them advice on using blogs to show the niche expertise to the general public to build credibility and trust. For example, one agency I talked to specialized in destination wedding travel. I showed them how having a good blog with great content could build a following, improve word of mouth and build credibility in their brand. I also showed them how powerful it is to write a blog about a niche product and how marketing that blog via other social channels can reach an audience that is looking for that exact product.

The whole time I was giving this training – especially the blogging parts, I was using the “do as I say not as I do” method of teaching. That really got me thinking… If I am truly going into the Social Computing Strategy field I need to make some adjustments to my online and social media life. I need to start blogging; I need to start communicating on a larger level with my network of friends and fans. I need to, just as I told the travel agents, share my expertise to gain credibility and to build trust in my personal brand.

So, here I am… far from an expert, but trying to build some credibility (sometimes I do know what I’m talking about… sometimes). I have made the choice to start blogging on a regular basis. I have even talked Angela (@hellogoat) into contributing a blog entry once a week. Moving forward, we will be sharing some topics with a little more meat. We want to share our experiences in design, web development and running a small business. Hopefully you will learn some things about Hello Goat Designs, share a few laughs, and relate to some of our experiences.

Thanks for the support and stay tuned…

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