Last week I gave a presentation at the Internet User Experience conference on Social Networking, Permission Boundaries and User Adoption. Based on the many requests for it, the presentation is now available online.
The presentation introduces a framework for deciding which social media components to include in your company or in any software you run.
Given the tremendous growth of Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks, many companies and organizations are rushing to add social media components to their software or marketing mix. However, there is little in the way of how to decide on what to implement nor how to figure out if people will use it or interact with it.
The presentation takes a classic user adoption approach (the user’s cost/benefit calculation on whether some is a pain to do or not) and applies it Social Media components.
It introduces the concept of PERMISSION BOUNDARIES as a way of capturing the cost side of the equation.
It recommends identifying and describing specific SOCIAL TRANSACTIONS to capture the target benefit the user is going for.
This should provide a robust way to help make decisions on what will likely work or not, to think about whether people will interact with your company or not before you invest in the social media tools they could engage with.
I’ll have the pleasure of speaking at the Charlotte, North Carolina Adobe Users’ Group (Adobe Charlotte) on Thursday, September 20th.
The topic will be on how design, technology and feature choices affect usability -using examples and feedback from Vertabase project management.
The meeting will take place at 6PM at Lodestone Digital, 5605 Seventy-Seven Center Dr., Suite 285, Charlotte, NC. For more information, please visit http://www.adobecharlotte.com.
Search engines may be stifling the success of software companies. How? By assuming all searchers are the same.
In general, a software company writes for a target audience, its intended customer base. That audience may or may not be people who spend a lot of time on the internet or in the blogosphere. (For brevity, let’s call those who do spend a lot of time on the internet and blogosphere netizens.)
However, it seems that search engine rankings are determined, in large part, by the amount of presence a specific url has on the general internet and blogosphere. The more a particular software is talked about by netizens, on net-based outlets like blogs, websites and forums, the higher the likely ranking of that particular software on a search engine.
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I’ve found that a lot innovation floating around is cool, but doesn’t necessarily solve any problems or help make people’s worklife easier. This is nothing new. Useless innovation has been around forever. But it seems that the pace has picked up on software being released that doesn’t bring anything new to the table.
Wonder if it has anything to do with more developers spending time on blogs, reading the latest success stories or latest technologies and trying to hop on the wave without understanding the fundamental problems being solved or the thinking that goes on behind the design of the functionality?
How has software already changed now that so many developers get input directly from the blogosphere? Is it creating software that solves problems better? Or, does it just increase the tempation to create something that rides latest, greatest tech buzz?
