I got to attend MSU's World Usability Day 2011 training event/celebration yesterday, focused on social media.
One central idea came from Dr. Coursaris's talk: People's decisions about whether to use your products/services are only 30% about facts and meeting a minimum benchmark; 70% is about how they feel about you.This is why humanizing your brand via social media is so important.
That said, what were the big learning points of the event?
Kamaria Campbell: Identifying Usability Best Practices for Social Media Work
Are your web visitors social? With which networks? Can you make it easy for them to share in those ways?
What does a good product share tool on a website look like? You want to include product name, its source (your company), a shortened URL, and a call to action (even as simple as "check this out"). You also need to come in under character limits—a character counter is great help. Keep it to 120 characters and make it easy to retweet, if folks want to.
Allowing website users to authenticate with a social network they already use can benefit usability. (No one really wants 2000 different site accounts that they may or may not use again.)
Watch what legal language comes up when your visitors go to share—you don't want to scare them out of sharing by making it look like permissions to a sharing app will be more extensive than they are.
Automatic responses to sharing can be helpful—or not. Automatically recommending that someone who used your "tweet this" tool follow you on Twitter? Great. Automatically publishing all tweets about your company on your webpage? Could be damaging if they are negative. Be sure you're willing to let it all hang out before you set up this kind of automatic feature!
Compare your social media practices with competitors and those you admire. Is there something you can learn?
Terence McKinney: GM in OverDrive
Continual interface changes are problematic, especially for those who use assistive technology (and may need to re-learn navigation schemes over and over).
An internal social network can be a great tool for communication within an organization: getting questions answered, locating resources, quick usability checks, polling others for advice—and accomplishing these things quickly. You just need to balance openness and honesty with keeping company secrets secret.
It's possible for items "below the fold" to be wildly popular; this is where you find the most popular items on GM's worldwide internal site.
An easy way to move from a closed, limited beta test to a more open test is to ask the beta groups to tell their friends.
Julian Bond: The Adventures of @DMC_Julian: How a Hospital System Uses Social Media to Reach People
Social media is a great way to humanize your brand. Consider pictures of you at work, funny videos, and heartwarming media that shows how you make a difference in the world. Use what you do to promote your brand. What stories do you have to share? How do you make a difference in the world?
Live tweeting scary things is one way of making them less scary / more safe. Detroit Medical Center used this strategy effectively for surgeries!
Don't discount the value of funny videos in promotion. They spread around the Internet—you know they do.
Stories are powerful. For example: attempt not to cry at this story of a paralyzed bride enduring physical therapy to be able to walk down the aisle.
Daniel Foster: Blowing Up the Suggestion Box
People remember how you make them feel. How do your products make users feel? How does your website make people feel?
How do you collect feedback from your users/customers? How hard do you make it for them to get through to you? Do you ask for a lot of data from them for the privilege of telling you what they think? Do you do anything to reward your customers for sharing feedback (so they will do so more than once)? Do they get any response? Is it a canned auto-response, or written as from a real person? Most importantly: how does all this make your customers feel? (See below about 70%/30%.) Thank and acknowledge them in a conversational way.
Quick responses to angry people can create wonderful turnaround stories. How can you do this? Monitor social media for mentions of your products and connect angry people with tech support (or even product managers!). This is a great opportunity to build relationships with customers and show your commitment to responsive customer service and high quality.
Happy customers are a great opportunity, too. Do you ever ask people posting praise if they have any ideas of how to make things better? Or willingness to share a case story?
If you have a feedback forum (like GetSatisfaction.com), use it to respond to tech support requests on Twitter. This allows you to save answers for others who have the same questions.
Seeing real people's responses to a product (praise or complaints) is motivating for those working on the product. Everyone wants to know that their work can make a difference.
Four big questions about handling customer feedback: Are we creating the right internal culture? Are we hiring the right people? Have we equipped people to engage? Can we afford the risk of NOT being customer obsessed?
When you're picking a product name, check it on Twitter first. You don't want to make it impossible to track comments about your products by picking something that turns out to be too common, perhaps in another culture.
Dylan Barrell: Mobile and Accessibility in a Multimillion-Dollar Social Media Campaign
It's possible to make Flash apps accessible to those who use assistive technology, but firms usually don't do this.
It's possible to make an app in HTML5 and JavaScript that looks and functions like a Flash app and will display on any platform, including assistive technology and mobile, though some platform-specific style sheet tweaks are needed. IE support is likely to be a headache.
Constantinos Coursaris: Usable Social Media Analytics: Making Sense of Metrics
"You can't manage what you can't measure." This applies to social media, too. The big question is what measures are available—and meaningful!—for your particular context.
Keep your social media monitoring plan simple. People try to assign dollar values to specific social media acts, but this doesn't lead to good outcomes. Look at the relationships that have developed.
Active participation (sharing, commenting) is better than passive involvement (liking). Active participation shows willingness to identify with your brand, which requires some vulnerability and risk to their reputation. You will generally get more "likes" than comments, and more comments than shares.
What content builds engagement for your brand? Engagement often precedes sales (and other useful action).
1% engagement is a good benchmark. How is that calculated? For Facebook, it's (likes + comments + shares) / followers. For Twitter, it's (mentions + replies + retweets) / followers.
Do this engagement research (as above) for each type of content you post to see what inspires the most engagement. "Community building" content—connecting in a real, human way around something that can be as simple as "What do you love about fall?"—often comes out surprisingly high in this research.
Research your direct and indirect competitors' social media pages to see how their branding and engagement compares to yours. In a given week, what categories generate the most engagement? Can you produce similar but differentiated content?
Tools for researching sentiment & insight include socialmention.com, hashtags.org, twittersentiment.appspot.com, twapperkeeper.com and its tool summarizr.
Want to hear more? You might enjoy reviewing the Twitter streams for Michigan's WUD event and the worldwide WUD event—or check out these curated tweets for each talk at Michigan's WUD event:
Many thanks to MSU's Usability / Accessibility Research and Consulting division for planning World Usability Day!