Dr. Howard's chapter on "belonging" is all about how to get a user of your site to feel that sense of belonging and community that keeps them coming back. People want to feel included and influential and both of these play into this idea of belonging. To create this, the user has to feel like they can identify with the site, the people behind it, and the others using it. They have to feel as though they are part of a community that gets them and they can interact with.
There are several techniques Dr. Howard explores as to how this can be accomplished. One that I found most interesting was that of using mythologies. I think this goes back to how we read earlier in Made to Stick that people relate to stories. People like to feel as though they know about things they are involved in and the people behind them. They want that sense of relationship and being able to identify with them. So the use of mythologies, things like creating an origin story for how the site got started, give the users that feeling of knowing the original purpose for the site and knowing the motivations of the creators. This gives them a personality to identify with and connect to.
It's important for people to feel like they belong because it gives them a reason to return. Creating these back stories and other mythologies that give the site and its creators a persona to identify with helps to accomplish this. People feel connected with them, and thus like they have formed a sort of relationship with the site. This aspect of RIBS is so essential because it gets to the heart of why people get so addicted to certain sites, but forget all about others. It's all about which sites give them a purpose for being there and a community to be a member of.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Reading for 9/24
Howard's chapter on remuneration in Design to Thrive explains why the concept is so important to the success of any social media site. Remuneration means having the consumer believe that spending time on this site is worth their while, that the investment of their time will reap some sort of benefit for them. The best way to insure a consumer believes his time is being spent in a worthwhile fashion is to make the site user-friendly. A site that is brilliantly designed and coded, that is efficiently functional and effective, can only appeal so much to the user if it is not also easy to use for them. It's easy for the designers of these sites to get caught up in the behind-the-scenes aspect and forget about what it looks like from an ordinary user's perspective. When this happens, user-friendliness gets lost and the consumer along with it.
Two examples that Howard uses to illustrate the importance of remuneration are Google and Wikipedia. Both of these sites came late in the game of their respective markets, but they sailed away with all of the clientele. Why is this? Because they understood the importance of remuneration. Google, unlike the foremost search engine directly prior to it, AltaVista, was simple, direct, and easy to use. Rather than cluttering the home page with many words and options for how to search or what to search for, Google kept it simple with one place to start your user experience. Wikipedia, too, appeals to the user far more than its competitors because of its user-driven nature. Consumers like to feel in control of their experience as opposed to feeling lost in it. Wikipedia goes to show that this is true for more than just social media sites. Remuneration should always be kept in mind when building a social media site because it's what the consumers will keep in mind as they are using it.
Two examples that Howard uses to illustrate the importance of remuneration are Google and Wikipedia. Both of these sites came late in the game of their respective markets, but they sailed away with all of the clientele. Why is this? Because they understood the importance of remuneration. Google, unlike the foremost search engine directly prior to it, AltaVista, was simple, direct, and easy to use. Rather than cluttering the home page with many words and options for how to search or what to search for, Google kept it simple with one place to start your user experience. Wikipedia, too, appeals to the user far more than its competitors because of its user-driven nature. Consumers like to feel in control of their experience as opposed to feeling lost in it. Wikipedia goes to show that this is true for more than just social media sites. Remuneration should always be kept in mind when building a social media site because it's what the consumers will keep in mind as they are using it.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Reading for 9/17
As the title of Chapter 8 of Design to Thrive suggests, the most important takeaway from this part of Dr. Howard's book is the notion "that while technologies may change rapidly, human beings don't" (207). I took this to be the key message of the chapter not only because it is the title, but also because the rest of the assertions put forward build off of this notion. Why are experts able to predict technological advances decades before hand? How can they know what will survive and what won't? How can we even "Design to Thrive" if technology is so unpredictably ever-changing and unstable? It's because people aren't. No matter how quickly our technology changes or advances, no matter how quickly new things surface and old ones die out, people will fundamentally always want the same things they've always wanted. And this is how we can guess what technology will thrive, by knowing what people will, and always will continue to, want.
This ties back to the idea of "RIBS" and why it is a sound plan to follow. It's because it speaks to human nature and knowing what will and won't work with the human race. People are always going to need "Remuneration." They will always only dedicate their time to something they believe to be worthwhile and worth the investment of time and energy. People will always feel the need to be heard, to have an "Influence" in whatever they are doing. It is human nature to want to feel a sense of "Belonging," that you're connecting with others and not involving yourself in something no one else cares about. And finally, people don't want to waste their time on something that isn't "Significant." RIBS is based on basic human wants and desires and these fundamental elements of human nature will never change. And so, in the end, it is always the dependency of the human condition that will allow technology, and anything else for that matter, to be a predictable venture in an otherwise unpredictable world. Dr. Howard highlights this notion in Chapter 8, putting a new spin to the importance of RIBS (7-8).
This ties back to the idea of "RIBS" and why it is a sound plan to follow. It's because it speaks to human nature and knowing what will and won't work with the human race. People are always going to need "Remuneration." They will always only dedicate their time to something they believe to be worthwhile and worth the investment of time and energy. People will always feel the need to be heard, to have an "Influence" in whatever they are doing. It is human nature to want to feel a sense of "Belonging," that you're connecting with others and not involving yourself in something no one else cares about. And finally, people don't want to waste their time on something that isn't "Significant." RIBS is based on basic human wants and desires and these fundamental elements of human nature will never change. And so, in the end, it is always the dependency of the human condition that will allow technology, and anything else for that matter, to be a predictable venture in an otherwise unpredictable world. Dr. Howard highlights this notion in Chapter 8, putting a new spin to the importance of RIBS (7-8).
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Reading for 9/10
Dan and Chip Heath's Made to Stick is a book about why some ideas thrive while others fail. What makes something a sensation? In Chapter 6, entitled "Stories," they delve into the potential for success when stories are utilized in campaigns. The one in particular that jumped out for me was the one of Jared and his "Subway diet." Most of us remember Jared and his extreme weight loss through eating Subway's line of healthy sandwiches and the tremendous amount of success it brought the company. Jared became a national sensation and everyone knew his story. What I didn't know was how it came to light. Jared didn't set out to became a weight loss icon and Subway didn't set out to find create one, but through the grace of chance and people sticking by a good idea when they find one, Jared's story beat the odds. It was his tale that inspired people to write about him, then to relate to him, and then to care about him. All Jared ever wanted was to lose weight.
I think the reason this story is included in this chapter is not only because it was such a success, but also because it demonstrates perfectly the Heath brother's recipe for "SUCCESs" (p 222). The tale is "Simple," "Unexpected," "Concrete," "Credible," "Emotional," and a "Story" (p 222-223). It showcases every point the authors have been making about what makes something "stick." It's a story like Jared's that has all the appeal and potential to reach millions of people, and that's why it did. This is so important to the Heath brother's point that you will get much farther in a campaign or marketing idea if you keep in mind that people relate to other people, not to checklists. This is why the "7 under 6" campaign before Jared didn't take off, but he did. No one cares about a set of numbers, they care about an ordinary person who did an extraordinary thing.
I think the reason this story is included in this chapter is not only because it was such a success, but also because it demonstrates perfectly the Heath brother's recipe for "SUCCESs" (p 222). The tale is "Simple," "Unexpected," "Concrete," "Credible," "Emotional," and a "Story" (p 222-223). It showcases every point the authors have been making about what makes something "stick." It's a story like Jared's that has all the appeal and potential to reach millions of people, and that's why it did. This is so important to the Heath brother's point that you will get much farther in a campaign or marketing idea if you keep in mind that people relate to other people, not to checklists. This is why the "7 under 6" campaign before Jared didn't take off, but he did. No one cares about a set of numbers, they care about an ordinary person who did an extraordinary thing.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Reading for 9/3
In Paul Gillin’s third chapter of Secrets
to Social Media Marketing he begins the discussion by stressing the importance of
companies being able to “tap into the conversation” (p 41). I think this idea is absolutely essential to the success of social media marketing because there is a plethora of free tools at their disposal, if only they know how to find and use them. The internet is full of consumer feedback and conversation just waiting to be found and used by the service providers. What companies seem to be failing to capitalize on is this abundance of commentary, suggestions, and criticisms. While certainly not everything written on the internet is necessarily constructive or helpful, a great deal of it is. And the best part is that there's so much of it you can easily find what the majority of your consumers do actually agree upon. There's so much potential to what social media has to offer companies in the way of immediate and superfluous feedback.
In addition to the tremendous amount of consumer feedback, social media also offers this direct interaction with the individual consumer. If companies can find a way to work into this aspect of the market, then they can cut out all of the negative aspects of broad range campaigning and appeal to smaller, more similar groups of people. By tapping into the potential of targeting groups and their shared interests, companies now have the opportunity to campaign to the individual as opposed to the whole. People tend to ignore mass marketing and generic ads, but advertisement that targets their personal likes and peaks their interest is something that has much more potential to grab attention and appeal to the consumer. I think the focus Gillin places on the importance of companies realizing this and utilizing it to their fullest potential is extremely important for social media marketing and a key component that must be fully realized.
In addition to the tremendous amount of consumer feedback, social media also offers this direct interaction with the individual consumer. If companies can find a way to work into this aspect of the market, then they can cut out all of the negative aspects of broad range campaigning and appeal to smaller, more similar groups of people. By tapping into the potential of targeting groups and their shared interests, companies now have the opportunity to campaign to the individual as opposed to the whole. People tend to ignore mass marketing and generic ads, but advertisement that targets their personal likes and peaks their interest is something that has much more potential to grab attention and appeal to the consumer. I think the focus Gillin places on the importance of companies realizing this and utilizing it to their fullest potential is extremely important for social media marketing and a key component that must be fully realized.
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