charlene li

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What is the opposite of UX?

July 15, 2010 in Marketing | 0 Comments

Thanks to the Web, more and more we are hearing the acronym UX (User Experience) in marketing discussions, referring to how one experiences and navigates a website, game or other interactive property. In the print world, UX was tied solely to art direction – things like reading from top to bottom, left to right, or where an eye fixates first on a page.  But with so much to see, read and do on a webpage the science of UX has become legion.

Metrics and Tools

So what’s the opposite of user experience?  When users experience a website and engage with a company via the web, what do we call the resulting intelligence?  What’s the short hand term? Mostly it’s called metrics: hits, clicks, time on site, referring site, bounce, etc. Over and above metrics, thanks to social media monitoring and measurement tools from Radian Six and (freebie company) Social Mention, are more behavioral quantitative views: sentiment, passion and affinity.

Indirect Benefits

In her new book Open Leadership, Charlene Li talks about some harder-to-measure things that engagement and dialogue can accomplish for a brand, referred to as “indirect benefits.” When a non-employee in a brand community answers a help question it reduces customer care cost and gives that helper a sense of brand accomplishment – both direct and indirect benefit.

All of these inbound forms of market intelligence or user intelligence are valuable. Business changing valuable.  So what shall we call the opposite of UX? What a company experiences when mining intelligence.  It needs a name. Involvement tracking? User forensics?  What is your top-of-mind thought? Peace?

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Some of My Favorite Bloggers.

June 28, 2010 in Marketing | 0 Comments

I follow lots of people but a couple of my favorites are Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang, Peter Kim and Noah Brier. Charlene is just smart. She has morphed from a tech analyst to a social media expert to a management consultant, all within 3 years.  She’s a media darling who reinvents herself almost annually. Jeremiah Owyang, who works with Charlene at the Altimeter Group is also another schmarty pants.  He loves grids and quadrants, he loves to write, share and listen – and he loves to use technology.  Analytical with a capital A.

Peter Kim is cut from the same cloth as Charlene and Jeremiah (all three are Forrester Research alums) but landed at the Dachis Group – a company filled with doers.  Dachis will crack the code on bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise and make a banana boat of bucks doing so. Peter likes to mix it up a bit.  A proud man.  Then there’s Noah Brier — chief strategist at the Barbarian Group.  Like a racehorse in the paddock who you know will win the Derby someday, he’s exciting to watch.  The beauty about Noah is you just don’t know what’s next. He’s random, brilliant, a doer and he loves bounding about in that paddock.

I wish these four blogged every day.  If they would just give me a 100-150 words (no more Jeremiah), I’d be satisfied and so, so nourished. Please hit those keys.  Peace!

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Listen and Lead.

June 10, 2010 in Marketing | 0 Comments

In Charlene Li’s new book Open Leadership (which I have not yet read, but will), one of the premises is that leaders who really listen to customers are the most informed and prepared to deal with business issues. Because of social media’s prevalence and importance, this notion suggests that leaders who use the new listening channel (the web) are better leaders.  Good advice, for sure.  Those who know the name Andy Grove may remember that the first thing he did every morning upon hitting the office was to listen in on random customer service calls to his 800 number.   It was old school technology, but it was listening.  That’s why Intel succeeded.

General Motors (GM) brand managers and its ad agency strategists at Goodby Silverstein and Partners have decided to stop using the word Chevy in favor of the full, formal name Chevrolet.  This is a strong brand management move. I yike it, as my daughter used to say. I don’t know the Chevrolet strategy, but can imagine this nomenclature move is intended to imbue the brand with a little more up-market sensibility. As GM nameplates are jettisoned, Chevrolet will be attempting to win over consumers who once bought pricier Oldsmobiles, Hummers, Pontiacs and such. Consumers will still say Chevy, but the people managing the brand will polish it with a finer cloth. They are exercising control. They are leading.

Pop marketing pundits are telling us consumers own the brand.  Even the youthfully exuberant at P&G and others wielding great budget power are saying so. But if we cede control of marketing, strategy and leadership to the masses, we are being lazy. Listen yes…but lead. Peace!

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RFPs Tweet Tweet.

November 19, 2009 in Marketing | 0 Comments

rfp

Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group posted last night about Salesforce.com’s intent to integrate Chatter into its platform. Salesforce.com is an enterprise application that helps organizations collaborate, schedule, organize and track workflow. The addition of Chatter, allows for social networking behind the firewall which is very smart. I’ve used free competitors of Salesforce.com in this CRM space and they have a ways to go.

Ms. Li makes a couple of thought-provoking points in her post:

“This is more than merely integrating Twitter-like functionality into CRM and creating ‘social CRM.’  This is a rethink and elevation of how information flows around an organization, and where it lives. The elevation of deals to be on the same level as people is significant — in every other social platform, people reign supreme and the world pivots around them.”

“It’s one thing to use Twitter for customer support. It’s quite another to integrate it into the workflow of the organization.”

Charlene’s talk about deals and Twitter helped me mash-up this idea, related to the heinous business practice called “the RFP.” Imagine issuing an RFP along with a hashtag twitter follow subject (e.g., #widgetRFP1) that allows all RFP participants (and others) to chat in real time about the RFP. Yeahhhhhh. Think about it. Good info. Misinfo. Misdirection. Redirection.  Potential business partners. Quick answers from the RFP issuer. As my kids used to say “I yike it.”

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Curing Cancer on the Weekends.

September 16, 2009 in Marketing | 0 Comments

lab equipment

I attended a free webinar sponsored by the Altimeter Group (thank you Charlene Li and crew) and Ray Wang said something that really stuck. He said all the innovation in technology over the last couple of years , certainly on the Web, has come on the consumer or user side – not from the enterprise. With the exception of Apple, this is pretty dead on. I’m no Faith Popcorn, but in my view this is due to something I call the webertarian ethos – the need for people and in this case developers, to be free of corporate chains when they create.

I’ve written before that I think the Dachis Corporation and its Social Business Design concept will accelerate the cure for cancer. When we get a world of scientists and physicians working together on a project we are likely to get some serious innovation, logic disruption, and progress. Even if they work together only on weekends. Social Business Design products and their free cousins will provide a webertarian-like platform over which meaningful global change will happen. And on that happy note, I bid you… Peace!

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We are…So-cial.

August 19, 2009 in Marketing | 0 Comments

 

Pic by NY TImes Photog.
Charlene Li is writing a book targeted for May publication on the topic of leadership. The overall thesis seems to be that good corporate leaders give up control and allow consumers to make more product and service decisions. Her first book The Groundswell, co-authored with Josh Bernoff, got the ball rolling. There is no doubt social media is the haps in marketing today and that lots of smart people are on board. Social media marketing can teach us a lot.  

 

An interesting article appeared in The New York Times today discussing how college tours are taking more of a conversational approach to selling — even to the point where tour leaders are asked to not walk backwards or recite school statistics.  This is a nice analogue for what’s going on in social media marketing today and one that sidles up to the premise of Ms. Li’s new book.

 

All too often in marketing today companies decide what’s important to consumers by mining statistics – then they use media to face customers and walking backwards reciting the selling benefits. It’s a one-way exercise that does not engage consumers and doesn’t encourage easy interaction. It’s hard to listen when you are reciting from a script.

 

Social media marketing is about listening. Understanding patterns of behavior, needs, and then acting upon them.  By packaging the learning into a story, not a recitation, the selling becomes more palatable. And memorable. Oh yeah, and when you are walking backwards you can’t see what is before you. Scuffing your shoes is the least iof your worries. Peace!  

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Posters and Pasters

April 9, 2008 in Marketing | 0 Comments

I really like Charlene Li of Forrester Research. She’s smart, has immersed herself in the social networking/social media category and she is the “go to” analyst in the business. But if “to a hammer everything looks like a nail,” then to a research analyst everything requires a segmentation study.

 
Charlene’s new thing is Social Technographics. It’s a nice branded name for a segmentation study identifying people in their different levels of social networking adoption. Buy the book Groundswell or employ Forrester and learn how to market your product to consumers anywhere along this adoption curve. The six segments are: Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors, Critics and Creators.
 
Here’s my segmentation study. Posters and Pasters. This is the Ying and Yang of social media. The Mutt and Jeff. The Perez and Paris. Posters are the creators of new and original content. Pasters are the organizers and repurposes of that content. Pretty simple really. Short book. And free. 
 
 

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