This joke (after the jump) that my Dad sent to me has been around the Internet a few times, so it's not clear to me who wrote it, but it's worth a laugh. More importantly, what it shows is that sometimes we can get caught up in jargon and stop actually communicating with our markets. Much of what I do is help clients to think through how to cater to today's behaviors and speak in relevant language that engages rather than alienates their audience. After all, what you want to do is start a welcome dialog with your market, not impose your way of thinking on them. However, it is equally important to know when using evolving terms and tools are important to receptiveness of your audience.

Regardless of what methods you use to connect with your audiences, are you using the words that they will understand and will resonate with them, per audience?

Are you using industry terms that some of your market doesn't know? If this is necessary, then explain the terms to those who might not know them.  As an example, a company a few years ago called their blogging tools "online journals" because they felt that their market wouldn't understand "blog". However, "blog" was defining a new experience that much of the target audience picked up quickly. The company appeared out of step with the market. Could they have used the word "blog" effectively?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about relevance between what you do, what you say that you do and the terms that your target audience searches with to find what you do. Are you optimizing around their words or only your own? Does your site obviously reinforce the words that helped someone find you to validate relevance?

Read more...

How often have you seen a prototype design offered without really exploring carefully to whom it speaks, how they will actually use it and what they will expect from it? Instead, many prototypes are based on what I would call "prespectations" (preconceived expectations) of what will be desired without probing behind the overt. Often we get so familiar with something that we can’t separate what we “know” from what is really happening in the market. We get so used to filtering information through our own lenses that we can miss new opportunities to better serve our audiences or to attack a new opportunity. How can we achieve knowing without showing? Understand what users want before they even know it themselves. If you show them a proposed design without underlying understanding, then they may unconsciously "lie" about what they truly need.

A few years ago, two colleagues of mine and I had the pleasure of spending a few hours alone with Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO and brother to founder David Kelley. Tom wrote a fascinating book called "Ten Faces of Innovation" and he was working with us to rethink innovation. He asked us to develop our ability to "see with new eyes". He called this "Vuja De". It's the sense that you have never seen something before in your life. Quite the opposite of Deja Vu. This is at the core of their process of innovation. Over the years I have worked with IDEO more than most people can afford to do in a career (6 projects at various levels - online video twice, photos, communications, networking, and home media) and it has been an honor each time. They have been the top design firm in the world and featured on the cover of Time Magazine's issue on innovation. Their process includes design ethnography followed by top notch creative thinking to derive what are called "frameworks" (maps of understanding) that turn into concepts and eventually into design prototypes.

Read more...

I'll start out by admitting that this is a spoof video. I know. That was a spoiler comment, but I actually think that this hilarious video makes a great point.

For those of you who are not very familiar with Twitter, it's original purpose was to enable short quick updates similar to a blog, but not intended to be as lengthy, i.e. "microblogging". Users liked it because they could make quick statements about what they were doing or thinking without the pressure to write full paragraphs like this one. Twitter "tweets" are limited to 140 characters. As a result, numerous tricks were invented to stay within that space such as shortening URLs with TinyURL.com or Adjix.com and others. You can "follow" those that you find interesting and see all of their tweets (please follow me at http://twitter.com/vivosity) and you can be followed.

When I worked at AOL, I always imagined being able to start and visualize an international conversation about "Green Energy" for example where all the tweets were communicating together like a global town hall. We did not do this. My model was Twittervision, but users would actively join the topic and you would be simultaneously viewing a single topic stream. Today, you can see what tweets are being said about a particular subject by searching on a topic at Twitter.com, but it is not a unified conversation really. It's more like simultaneous, independent statements.

Read more...

"Hey Peter," the ad said. "Hot singles are waiting for you!!" He might have dismissed the advertisement, which appeared on his Facebook page, but for one thing.

The woman pictured in the ad was his wife.

Source: http://bit.ly/WLlVC

In an earlier post, I discussed the important role of honoring the trusted relationship that we create with our guests online. Facebook's change of policy regarding the use of my uploaded photos for advertisements has now bit them in a very public way as shown above. Facebook claims that the ads were created by partners who didn't follow their policy. But does that matter? Facebook ran fast and loose with member content and ended up hurting someone, albeit only slightly in this case since the husband had a sense of humor and his wife did not lose her job or similar.

What mistakes did they make? Facebook didn't follow the premise of "permission marketing" popularized by Seth Godin. If they believed that the policy change was a good idea for both users and Facebook, Facebook should have made the change, but set the option to "off" and invite members to enable it for some yet to be discovered end user benefit. Instead they decided what was best for us and put us at risk of their sometimes "rogue" partner behaviors. Perhaps Facebook was struggling with the belief that users would not opt-in because the value proposition was hard to convey, so they imposed the change instead. If that is the case, and I've been in businesses where that was the crux of it, then they undervalue their members and the respect that they deserve.

If you are fortunate enough to build a passionate audience, honor it. Respect it and it will honor and respect you right back with loyalty.