User Experience #1 - Image by Paul Veugen

A recent study from Forester found that emotional and engagement is the key to gaining and keeping customers.  Now has any well versed marketer will tell you this is marketing 101 but once you dive a little bit deeper into the report it reveals some interesting findings.

First it the report concluded that companies are investing 58% more in web design than last year, and 37% of these companies are investing in behavioral analytics.  One shocking number is that 90% of companies fail when it comes to site experience.

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Download Special Report (PDF)

The internet exists mainly because we are social animals. Social media is just the latest form of groups of people sitting around the campfire.

One such example of this comes from Groupon a group buying service who attributes much of its success and growth to the ability for users to easily share the daily deal with their social circle.

We see this happen often when we login into Facebook. Someone sharing the latest GroupOn or LivingSocial deal and enticing their friends to join them in purchasing. You could argue that GroupOn wouldn’t even have had a chance if it wasn’t for the popularity of social media.

There have been other attempts of similar services in the past but those have not grown as fast or as big. We’ve watched the rise of GroupOn and would argue the main reason for this is the usage of social networks.

When developing a social network what are the key elements you want in place?

People are getting sick of registering and declaring their friends on each and every site. Lost passwords, multiple logins, and entering the same information over and over is one of the reasons why new networks fail to grow to their full potential.

We have include more within our special report titled How To Build Social Media into Your Social Networking Website

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect is Facebook’s latest addition to its development platform. It enables developers to leverage the power of Facebook’s social context in existing, third-party Web sites. The platform features seamless, one-click authentication, Facebook friend account linking, distribution back into Facebook streams, and the full power of the Facebook REST-like API and FQL. Utilizing Facebook Connect for authentication has proven to dramatically increase site exposure and new user registrations.

OpenID

You may choose to associate information with your OpenID that can be shared with the websites you visit, such as a name or email address. With OpenID, you control how much of that information is shared with the websites you visit.

OpenID is rapidly gaining adoption on the web, with over one billion OpenID enabled user accounts and over 50,000 websites accepting OpenID for logins. Several large organizations either issue or accept OpenIDs, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace, Sears, Universal Music Group, France Telecom, Novell, Sun, Telecom Italia, and many more.

ALLOW EASY OF SHARING CONTENT

One key element you want to design within a social network is the ability for content to be shared with other social platforms. A great example of this is a recent change by YouTube. You’ll notice that when you watch a video from YouTube you get these options:

That is just the beginning, to learn more about what elements your custom social network should include visit this page to download our special report on How To Build Social Media into Your Social Networking Website.

Integrating Social media in Ecommerce Report (PDF)

Social media undoubtedly has a presence in eCommerce. If you spent any amount of time in social media you will find that conversations around brands, companies, and services happen all the time.

New research indicates that more than 75% of consumers trust peer recommendations of products and services, while less than 15% trust paid advertising. The opportunity to tap into this trusted form of communication to market your e-commerce business is huge, so it’s important to think beyond your immediate network and find creative ways to encourage fans to spread the message about your business.

One important aspect of integrating social media into eCommerce is giving your customer or potential customer the ability to easily share your products. We recommend the below services for all eCommerce driven websites:

• Integrate Facebook Like button into each product page and category
• Provide easy way for someone to share via email
• Integrate Twitter share
• Integrate Facebook share button
• If your target market is younger integrate MySpace
• Integrate social bookmarking sites such as De.Lecious.us

While integrating social media with your e-commerce presence may be free, it may still come at a price: your valuable time. Maintaining multiple online presences, pages and feeds can be extremely time consuming. Fortunately, with the right e-commerce platform, you can easily integrate—and automate—these efforts to save time.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Social media has made your average user sophisticated enough to know the difference between “customer care” and PR. Corporations that try to confuse the two could confuse customers, and potentially suffer even more in the long run.
Customer service isn’t a silo; it requires excellence across multiple channels and still excludes non-social media consumers. (Shayon, 2010)

Some American companies that have been early adopters in the space have witnessed measurable benefits. One such case is Frank Eliason’s turnaround at Comcast. Another example is at the end of FY 2009-2010, Dell’s ‘chief blogger’ Lionel Menchaca announced that Dell is not only servicing customers through social media but made revenues of the tune of $6.5 million, double the preceding year. (Nandi, 2010).

If you are considering building an eCommerce website one element of your plan should include how you will provide customer relations within social media.

Special Report

We’ve put together a special report on the social media and eCommerce. You can find the report and a quick video presentation here at eCommerce Social Media Web Design.

Does social media have a place in corporate web design? This question is one we get asked often and we have put together not only this post but a great special report that you can find here: Social Media and Corporate Web Design.

So does social media have a place in a company’s website or is just for blogs? The short answer is yes. Social media has worked it’s way into every element of the web. Twitter itself was recently inducted into the library of congress and Facebook is working on taking over the internet with Like buttons. If this reason wasn’t enough then we move onto the generational issue.

The younger generation really does expect a corporation to be participating in some form of social media. Social media into corporate web designs should be completely embraced. The one thing it shows above all else is that the organization can be reached, cares, and wants to engage with their customers.

Expectations

When the web first hit mainstream it became obvious that if you didn’t have a website you weren’t considered “in business”. Many consumers simply didn’t trust companies that did not have a website.

This same paradigm of thought is starting to come to social media. Increasingly the younger generations are expecting that a responsible organization will engage within social media.

Social Elements of Corporate Web Design

Social Media and Corp Web Design (PDF)

I’ll summarize here what we have put in our report. These are the top elements that you should have within your corporate web design. I should mention that each industry and vertical market will have it’s own networks and interaction points but we can generalize on the concepts:

• Follow Us Buttons. These are the buttons or icons that link to your social presence, these should be prominent and be on 95% of your web pages.
  Share Buttons. These allow your users to easily share your content within their own social circle. We also suggest these show up on the majority of your web pages.
• Widgets. Widgets allow you to pull content from the social networks themselves. These can be powerful as well. These create a element of social proof but also allow for another interaction point for your user.
• The About Us Page. Studies have shown that one of the most visited page of a website is the about us page. We recommend that you make the about us page a business accelerator page–think about copy, headlines, and calls to action.
• The Team Page. If your company embraces social media include these connections on the team page.
• Social Media Page. We also suggest that you put together a roundup page of all your social media efforts. The users that care about social media will find this page helpful.

In Conclusion

Social media has a seat at the table of corporate web design. It’s an important element of any modern corporate website. Generally the more that you participate within social media the more that the ROI becomes apparent. The key is just to make sure that you are not just putting in social connections just to check off a box– you have to mean it and spend the time and effort with the engagement.

This is part 4 of a 4 part series from WebBizIdeas on the core steps you need to take to engage social media.

We also have a great report that you can download with each step and examples of these steps in action. You can find that report here Social Media Engagement.

Monetization -How You Make ROI on Time and Resources

It’s important to note here that monetization in social media is vastly different for each company or individual. For some companies it will be very apparent—such as a T-Shirt company it would be acceptable to put a store on Facebook page.

Also we mentioned this before but understanding how your product, brand, or service falls in relation to intent. Remember that people do not fire up a social network with the intent on purchasing something.  Will your followers tolerate your monetization strategy?

The good news is that for certain verticals special offers and coupons (one of the best monetization strategies) is the number one reason people follow a company or brand.

Key Questions for Monetization:

Examples of Monetization

Remember more than one department owns social media and when we give examples of specific monetization items the first two steps of acquisition and engagement came first.

Rite Aid Video to Coupon

At the same time, Rite Aid unveiled its Video Values program, featuring informative, educational and, in some cases, entertaining videos. By watching videos, customers earn video credits for savings on products.

For example, viewers of a clip for a Brita Water Filtration product earn a $2 coupon off one of the Brita items offered. They must print the coupon and present it at the store.

When they rack up 20 video credits, they receive a $5 Rite Aid Bonus Coupon. Rite Aid reports that it is averaging between 500,000 and 600,000 video views each month. Redemption rates average nearly 20%, depending on the coupon. (Fredricksen, 2010)

Social Coupons for a Mexican Grill

Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill, a West Coast chain of 195 restaurants, started placing coupons on Yowza this summer to reach people searching for a lunch spot. Larry Rusinko, the chain’s senior vice president of marketing and product development, saw a 4 percent redemption rate on coupons offered through Yowza, four times what he was getting through direct mail or ads in the Sunday paper. (Tiku, 2009)

Create a store right on Facebook

Storefront with Payvment: Payvment is an e-commerce application that allows for the development of a retail store on Facebook. Using the PayPal X global open payments platform, customers can shop from multiple vendors in a single shopper cart, turning FB into what could be considered the ultimate shopping mall.

The application uses PayPal’s new Adaptive Payments APIs and is built on the company’s existing shopping cart Web service that turns any online page into an e-commerce page with a single line of code. Another e-commerce app that lets users post products on FB is My Merch Store from Zazzle. Create and post products for sale on Zazzle and share them with people visiting your pages on FB.

Target On Tea

Organic tea brand Steaz needed to generate nation-wide awareness and drive sales at Target stores — and quickly. The brand felt that if it could get moms talking about Steaz in social media, the sales would follow. The campaign generated interest and results above expectations, thanks to blogs, email, and social media activity.

We were confident that we would generate 50,000 coupon downloads, 1,000 new fans/followers. Our goal was to get Target to notice the little tea brand it had just adopted.

Actual results were 250,000 coupon downloads (with a 20+ percent redemption rate), 6,000 blog and social network mentions, and more than 3,000 new fans/followers. Steaz’s December sales were double its previous best month ever. And Steaz shelves in Target stores nationwide were emptied. (Magnani, 2010)

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Social Media Principals special report [pdf

This is part 3 of a 4 part series from WebBizIdeas on the core steps you need to take to engage social media.

We also have a great report that you can download with each step and examples of these steps in action. You can find that report here Social Media Engagement.

Engagement – the things you do once you have an audience.

This is actually the step where you get permission to move to the next step. First and foremost you must ensure that you deliver on what you promised in your acquisition strategy. If once someone has started to engage with you and they do not get what they expected they will leave or worse yet tune out. Just as the advent of timeshifted TV has allowed consumers to skip commercials if you don’t deliver value your audience will abandon you as well.

Key Questions for Engagement

• How can I add value to people that follow me or the audience that I gain in the permission marketing space? (email in addition to social is permission based)
• What are the acceptable forms of engagement in this channel?
• What is my engagement schedule?
• Who is responsible for engagement items?
• What are the unique ways I can engagement this channel that will set me or my company apart?
• What does my target market expect from me?
• What are my competitors doing?

Engagement Examples

Engagement can arguably be the most important step. Without proper engagement you simply would not be effective when moving onto the next element—monetization. The people and companies that successfully engage can then prime their audience towards offers, purchasing, and other elements of the sales funnel. Below I’ve included a few great examples of companies that are engaging within social media.

Steel Buildings are Social?

SteelMaster a manufacturer of prefabricated steel buildings engages Facebook in an unusual way. You wouldn’t guess that there would be much affinity to a steel building. First they found that Facebook is a great place to post pictures of customer’s buildings.

These pictures not only engage existing customers—they also tell a story to potential customers what is possible. Since the backbone of Facebook is pictures this plays well in this platform.

They also use Twitter to get exposure and create demand in vertical markets they had little traction in, such as chicken farmers and woodworkers.

Watch a Video Get a Free Night

Rogers Smith Hotel uses twitter to give away free nights of stay (click to see tweet below).

Even Paint Can Engage?

IdeaPaint does a great job with their blog. This is the launching pad of their engagement plan. IdeaPaint turns virtually anything you can paint into a high-performance dry-erase surface—every 3 year olds fantasy.

Their outreach typically starts with a great video post that shows the product in action. Telling a story each time it also gives potential customers what is possible with their unique product.  From there they engage within YouTube, Twitter and Facebook connecting with their core market.

Wait a Refrigerator?

Subzero (maker of appliances and high end refrigerators) whose core customer is a woman age 45 or older focuses on the essential element of adding value to its affluent customers’ busy lives. They do this by sharing seasonal recipes, wine pairings, and cooking tips. They also spotlight hot kitchen designers. Facebook is the third-top-referring site to SubZero.com.

Sub-Zero then engages their audience rewarding their affluent followers with exclusive news, discounts, videos, and pictures. This gave the follower the feeling of being on the inside. One recent question posed by SubZero has garnered over 200 responses or close to a hundred for the simply question what’s for dinner tonight?

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Social Media Principals special report [pdf

This is part 2 of a 4 part series from WebBizIdeas on the core steps you need to take to engage social media. You can download this special report that covers Acquisition Techniques in social media.

Acquisition – The things you do to acquire a fan, follower, subscriber, reader, etc.

It’s important to define what you acquisition strategy per social channel. Your acquisition strategy for Facebook, Your Blog, Twitter, or LinkedIn will each have its own strategy and pull points.

When amassing fans I always say go with quality over quantity. Your social presence should be an extension of your brand’s voice. To build that foundation, establish and invite your core customers.

Begin by communicating to your existing database and announcing your brand’s places of contact (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Etc.) via e-mail. In addition, link to your profiles and pages on your website at every opportunity.

At retail, include the URL on receipts and checkout counter cards. Provide an incentive for your current customers to “follow” your brand, such as exclusive content, discounts or sweepstakes.

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