Extend and Engage

iPod Touch 2.1 Update breaks the New York Times App?

One of the conversations we often have with our clients at StepChange is about the persistent nature of distributed & social applications.

Most widgets don't just "go away", and you can't run around to 100,000 (or 100MM!) user's environments to turn them off.

Which means that you, as the publisher/provider of the widget, have to take care of it - and that long-term "care and feeding" plan is something to think about up front.

I was reminded of all this today when I updated my iPod Touch to the new 2.1 firmware.  Ironically, one of the things I was most hoping might be fixed was the New York Times app, which has been awfully prone to crashes.

No such luck.  Here's the NYTimes iPhone app after the 2.1 update... and there's no update for it in the App Store:

When Social Media Dialog hits Meatspace: SXSW Mayhem

I ran across something today that brought this challenge into stark relief:

What happens when the increasing scale and velocity of online communities runs into the physical limits of the real world?

What I ran across was this, the SXSW '09 Interactive Panel Picker - where people submitted and garnered votes for potential panel topics at next year's SXSW event:

Take at the number of items on the top right: 1317 topics submitted.

What's encouraging is that even here on pg. 39, the submitted speakers and topics still look to be very high-quality (Adaptive Path, Sony, etc.).

What's frustrating is that the vast majority (about 99.7%) of these conversations won't fit into this event. 

They do fit into the daily, roiling boil of social media blogs, sites and discussion forums - but attempting to squeeze a highly distributed market conversation into 5 or so panel slots is an intractable problem.

On one hand - perhaps winnowing down to the most relevant and exciting 0.3% of topics is what conference is all about...

...but I also wonder if/how a physical conference might be structured to accomodate a broader slice of the ongoing conversation in social media?

Help Me Help You - Communities for Collaborative Product Development

The potential for using online community structures to bring customers into the Product Development Cycle is very exciting... but also still very nascent.

I was reminded of this again today, reading a good post over Go Big Always about some companies' tendency to approach online communities as a place to "dump all their crap" and hope that people will "help them make it better".

"Help Make it Better" doesn't just happen

Going back to Forrester's useful delineation of the different types of communities  and their business goals, the "Development"-focused community, which seeks to bring customers into the product design and iteration process, is one of the most valuable - but also the hardest to create.  Oftentimes, companies hope for 'design collaboration' to emerge from support-focused communities... which is relatively rare.

Some early examples of purpose-built product design collaboration are starting to emerge, but I think we're going to see a lot more ramping up over the next couple of years.

photo credit to Rick

Social Media Strategy & Measurement - Was it Worth it?

Aaron Urmacher over at Mashable put up a great post last week on crafting Social Media strategies: "How to Develop a Social Media Plan for your Business in 5 Steps"...definitely recommended reading.

In particular, I think there's a real need in the industry for more discussion on his last step, "Step 5: Measuring Success".  Aaron offers some smart questions to ask and points to tools like Trendpedia for high-level insight, but measuring the impact of different types of Social Media initiatives at a program level can be difficult - for both clients and solution providers.

To that end, I recommend starting with framework that Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li put forth in Groundswell - which includes recognizing the different goals and success metrics of different types of "Groundswell" Community/Social Media efforts, and how they relate to traditional business functions.  For example:

• Social Media efforts related to RESEARCH should focus on LISTENING to what customers have to say
• Social Media efforts related to MARKETING should focus on getting customers TALKING about you
• Social Media efforts related to SALES should focus on ENERGIZING people to buy
• Social Media efforts related to SUPPORT should focus on SUPPORTING customers with what they need
• Social Media efforts related to DEVELOPMENT should focus on EMBRACING customers in the design process

...and each of these should bring with them very different success metrics.  Too often these days, we see companies apply (for example) MARKETING-related success metrics to an effort that was really about RESEARCH in the first place.

I did have the opporunity to see Josh Bernoff speak at the BazaarVoice Summit and was very impressed.

Lively reminds us that engagement is a two-way street: 24-7-365

Today's launch of Google's "Lively", a widget-powered Virtual World (covered here by the good folks at Sexywidget) makes for a potentially very interesting way for companies to engage customers and users on new turf.  In fact, that would seem to be Google's angle - since the focus is on the creation of separate, personalized "rooms", rather than one big world with everyone in it like Second Life.

To me, Lively also serves as another reminder that the accelerating shift toward higher levels of engagement between brands and consumers is going to require those brands to keep the dialog going - constantly.

Keeping the Brand Fires Burning
Just as the spread of forums and communities has created the need for a lot of "community managers", so are these newer market engagement tools (widgets, social networking applications, virtual rooms, etc.) creating the need for "brand stewards" to keep the dialog going.  The MyHipsterShoes.com company room isn't going to feel very "Lively" unless there's someone in it.

As this kind of "distributed brand dialogue" continues to pick up steam, it will be interesting to see what level of regular attention and access consumers come to expect - and whether or not some or all of that can be automated (or at least facilitated) by technology.  Could be an interesting job for our friends at iWantSandy down the road... 

Picking Your Widgets Wisely

Owing largely to the degree to which "widget" has become an over-used term in the industry, I talk to a lot of companies and potential clients who aren't sure what kind of "widget" they need (or if they need one at all).

As with all online marketing and application development efforts, realistic goals and success metrics are key... which are hard to come by if you're not sure what you're what/why you're building in the first place.

So, based on the work we've done over the past year at StepChange, I offer the following (slightly over-simplified) chart of the main types of widgets out there today, and what they do:

Having seen each of these types through their lifecycles of design, development, launch and adoption - I think the most important guidelines to follow are these:

• Match your widget investment to your strategy and budget.  No one in their right might would spend $10,000 putting an RSS feed in a square box.  But $10,000 probably won't get you an entire affiliate network solution.  Make sure your business ROI lines up.


• Expect surprises, but not magic.  Distributing your content and engaging your audience will undoubted tell you a lot about your market and likely open up new business opportunities.  However... if you put your weekly 10%-off coupon in a widget, it's not likely that a million people will send it to their friends


• Think outside the mothership.  A shocking number of clients come to us for widgets that, ultimately, are focused on dragging users out of wherever they are and back to their current destination site.  It works (sometimes), but the power and promise of widgets lies in taking the content/service/value to them... wherever they are.

Hi & Why

Welcome to Extend and Engage.

This is a new blog about the opportunities and challenges facing companies who seek to extend their platforms and engage their audiences online - using emerging web technology.

In short, it's about what shifts like these...

Sites --> Widget Applications
Banners --> Relevant Content
Personalization --> Socialization
Desktop --> Ubiquitous Access

...mean for online marketers, who are constantly trying figure out how best to spend money to acquire and retain customers.

I'm creating it because we work on this problem all day long at StepChange, and I'd like to share what we're learning.  I hope you find it useful.