Sharing Ownership of UX

Posted on 26-07-2010 | By: gia |

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Category : User Experience

The Multidisciplinary Nature of Product Teams

So, who owns UX? An entire product team must consciously share responsibility for UX, because the members of a multidisciplinary product team impact the success of a product’s user experience in different ways. Three different disciplines that play key roles are:

product management — It’s the role of the product manager to ensure that the product team develops a viable product; the right product for the right market. This accompanied with a business model that can lead to success in the marketplace. The product manager prioritises marketing requirements and features, according to business goals and user needs. Today, user research, Web or other usage statistics, and usability testing ideally play a major part in defining digital products. User research helps us understand who our users are and how they work, as well as their wants and needs. Recording and analysing usage statistics lets us better understand what users are doing with our products. Usability testing identifies problems users are encountering with our existing products. The product manager must also take into account technical considerations that impact either the cost of development or the likelihood of the product’s adoption by users. So the product manager’s success in defining the product customers or users need depends to a great extent on leveraging the knowledge of and working collaboratively with other members of the product team—particularly, the UX architect and system architect. Even so, the product manager is responsible for the product vision.
user experience — UX is itself multidisciplinary. UX designers, interaction designers, industrial designers, information architects, information designers, visual designers, user researchers, usability specialists, accessibility specialists, technical communicators, and in some cases, packaging designers all play roles in creating successful user experiences for digital products. Once the product manager has defined the marketing requirements for the product, the UX professionals on the product team work collaboratively to conceptualise, design, specify, and prototype a digital product. Ideally, the UX architect involves all members of the product team in the process of conceiving a UX design solution—particularly the product manager, system architect, and user interface developers. Doing so ensures the UX team designs the right product for the market, engineering can build the product as designed and specified, the engineering team buys into the UX design solution, and the design gets built. However, the UX architect is responsible for all design decisions and the UX vision.
development — The system architect and engineers keep the other members of the product team aware of technical factors that constrain the definition and design of the digital product. Software engineering also implements and tests features that facilitate the gathering of usage statistics, which will inform the definition and design of future versions of the product. The system architect develops a software design that optimally satisfies the marketing requirements. The engineering team develops a feature or product, according to the marketing requirements and UX specifications for that feature or product. Quality assurance plays an important role in ensuring defects that would mar the user experience are discovered and fixed before a product launches. If a product is not robust or its performance is poor, everything the product team has done to provide a good user experience will be for naught. It doesn’t matter that a product has the right features and is well designed if it just doesn’t work. Thus, it’s the responsibility of engineering to develop a sound system architecture and high-quality code for the product.

By defining product requirements, product management provides the input the UX team needs to design products that are usable, useful, and desirable. UX design specifications provide the input engineering needs to create real products. Engineering both constrains and realises product requirements and UX design—what is possible and what’s not.

Two UX gurus have written about what a multidisciplinary product team must accomplish to provide the best possible user experience to customers:

“Too many companies believe that all they must do is provide a ‘neat’ technology or some ‘cool’ product or, sometimes, just good, solid engineering. Nope. All of those are desirable (and solid engineering is a must), but there is much more to a successful product than that: understanding how the product is to be used, design, engineering, positioning, marketing, branding—all matter. It requires designing the Total User Experience.”—Don Norman

“Key objectives always seem to focus on the big three: usability, usefulness, and appeal (or desire, delight, or other approved words of emotional rapport). Key concerns revolve around including all possible stakeholders; merging design with business and marketing, not just engineering; showing return-on-investment (ROI) value; valuing storytelling and story ‘selling’; and looking for very innovative or radically creative or disruptive (in a good sense) solutions.”—Aaron Marcus

Barriers to Shared Ownership of UX

“If a particular discipline such as marketing or engineering dominates a product development corporation, the other disciplines often suffer.” I’ve described a well-balanced, smoothly functioning product team in a healthy corporate culture. But what happens when the dynamics on a product team or between functional groups within a company are less than ideal or even dysfunctional? In those cases, teamwork and collaboration among disciplines suffers, sometimes to the point where using the term product team seems oxymoronic, creating barriers to the shared ownership of UX.

According to Don Norman, “Thinking that one’s own discipline is the most important of all gets in the way of teamwork.” And if a particular discipline such as marketing or engineering dominates a product development corporation, the other disciplines often suffer. I’ve never encountered a company where UX dominated the culture to the detriment of other disciplines, but marketing-driven and engineering-driven cultures are common. In such cultures, a problem of balance that a company should solve organisation wide affects every product team, and UX professionals must wage the same battles over and over again.

The Dominance of Marketing

“In marketing-driven cultures where marketing, product management, and sales concerns dominate, there is often a desire to satisfy the wants and needs of customers.” In marketing-driven cultures where marketing, product management, and sales concerns dominate, there is often a desire to satisfy the wants and needs of customers. In a company that does the user research and analysis that is necessary to truly understand users’ needs, this can create a culture that is sympathetic to and supportive of UX.

Unfortunately, marketing-driven cultures often engage in feature wars with competitors. Sales demands the addition of features that will help them to close specific sales deals—perhaps to satisfy the demands of just one customer. Some product managers prioritise adding new features above all else, and the user experiences of their products fall prey to featuritis. Such forces are hard to resist, but it is incumbent on UX teams to do everything they can to dissuade product teams from creating products that are bloated with features most users won’t find useful.

Kim Goodwin of Cooper once said, “Features are meaningless. They mean nothing to users. A coherent product user interface is the product to users.” She compared the results of developing products to satisfy lists of required features to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, which grew by accretion and has stairways that go nowhere and unexpected precipices.

A dictatorial product manager can destroy all sense of the teamwork that would result in shared ownership of UX. On one occasion, I saw an all-powerful product manager refuse to have UX involved in a project at all, because his only concern was adding new features. His product was one of the most poorly designed products the company ever produced.

The Dominance of Engineering

“In engineering-driven cultures, engineers have the ultimate power as the final arbiters of what goes into a digital product.” In engineering-driven cultures, engineers have the ultimate power as the final arbiters of what goes into a digital product. After all, they’re the ones who actually build software products. In such cultures, products are commonly not implemented to spec. Engineers often feel free to “cherry pick a spec”—as Kim Goodwin has described this phenomenon—and implement only the parts of a specification they choose to follow.

Or perhaps, as Luke Wroblewski described in his column on UXmatters, “Developing the Invisible,” what you “get back is half of the design. By half of the design I mean that all of the features, content, and functions are there, and they are working as designed. … What’s missing is what’s invisible: alignment and whitespace.” These are subtleties that some engineers do not appreciate or care to bother about.

In such cases, UX designers are often forced to persuade individual engineering teams or even individual engineers to implement their user interface designs as specified. This can be a time-consuming process, so things may fall by the wayside when deadlines are tight. When designers do not succeed in getting their designs implemented to spec, the product user experience usually suffers, because, generally, engineers who think they know better what a user interface should be actually do not.

The best one can hope for in an engineering-driven culture is that engineers are savvy about user experience, care about usability, and believe in user-centred design (UCD). If this isn’t the case, the UX team will have a lot of evangelising to do.

No C-Level UX Management

“When UX has no representation on an executive management team, the unavoidable consequence is that UX will be subordinate to product management, engineering, or some other functional group within a company.” When UX has no representation on an executive management team, the unavoidable consequence is that UX will be subordinate to product management, engineering, or some other functional group within a company. In such a case, the very existence of the UX organisation within the company is dependent on the goodwill and sponsorship of another functional group. For any of a number of reasons—financial, political, or just a change in management—such a UX organisation can lose its sponsorship and perhaps even cease to exist.

Even if such dire consequences don’t ensue, UX is subordinate to a function with which it should be equal. This can make it more difficult for UX professionals to represent the best interests of users when conflicts arise on a product team between UX and the function to which it is subordinate—whether product management, marketing, or engineering. It might be difficult to get budget for staff or user research or usability testing. The concerns of both product management and engineering might overshadow those of user experience — simply because UX is the only functional group that plays a key role in product development, but has no representation on the executive management team. Perhaps no one at the table can effectively make the case for UX.

When the management of a sponsoring group highly values UX, usability, and UCD and understands the need for the UX teams’ autonomy, UX architects usually have parity with product managers and system architects on product teams. The UX team might get all the staff it needs and budget for usability labs and UCD activities. Even so, a situation in which UX is subordinate to another group is less than ideal, because over time, things might change for the worse.

Communication Breakdowns

In corporate cultures that are antithetical to the shared ownership of UX, some of the most egregious communication problems are so common that well-known metaphors exist for them:

“throwing documents over walls”—Rather than working collaboratively and iteratively on true product teams, product management throws a Marketing Requirements Document over the wall to UX, then UX throws a UX Specification over the wall to engineering. This is waterfall development at its worst.

“information silos” — Rather than sharing information across all members of product teams with the goal of creating the best possible products, a competitive or even adversarial relationship exists between different functional groups, which silo information in a misguided attempt to create political advantage for their own groups.

All of the problems I’ve described are likely to result in user experiences that are less usable, useful, and desirable. While product teams can overcome the cultural barriers that impede their ability to share responsibility for UX, product teams within a corporate culture that fosters shared ownership of UX are much more likely to achieve this ideal and create great user experiences.

Working With Multidisciplinary Product Teams

Creating great product user experiences takes a village—a smoothly functioning multidisciplinary product team that shares ownership of UX. This is the ideal.

“Our goal is to work in multidisciplinary teams to produce effective, pleasurable designs rapidly and efficiently. … Let the programming and marketing teams know how the product will look and behave at the very start of the project. … Become an essential part of the team, so our input is provided simultaneously with everyone else’s.”—Don Norman

Characteristics of a Multidisciplinary Product Team

Ideally, a multidisciplinary product team has the following characteristics:

It is a team of equals, on which the product manager, UX architect, and system architect — who represent the three key disciplines on a product team — have equal voices.

Balance exists between these three key roles, which together; like the legs of the three-legged stool — provide the greatest stability and balance.

The product manager, UX architect, and system architect make decisions pertaining to their own roles, but receive input from one another and from other team members in their disciplines, enabling them to make the best decisions possible.

The members of the product team:

communicate effectively with one another
work closely, collaboratively, and cooperatively with one another to achieve their common goals
trust and share information with one another
develop effective processes that help ensure their success

Product management, UX, and development share responsibility or ownership of UX.

Collaboration on Multidisciplinary Product Teams

“The three key members of a multidisciplinary product team, the product manager, UX architect, and system architect, work together collaboratively to define a product’s vision, functionality, and form.” These three key members of a multidisciplinary product team work together collaboratively to define a product’s vision, functionality, and form.

Each key member of the product team has primary responsibility and decision-making authority for a specific aspect of the product vision. Additionally, these key disciplines on the product team play an important role in defining the product’s functionality.

The product manager has primary responsibility for defining what the product can do and the scope of the product’s feature set, which to some extent determines what users can do with the product.

UX is primarily responsible for the product’s interaction design, which determines the workflows for specific tasks, how users can perform specific tasks using the product, the product’s behaviours in response to user interactions, and at a more fine-grained level, what users can do with the product.

Development is responsible for informing designers of technical constraints, implementing the product’s functionality as specified by UX, and ensuring that the product’s implementation has few defects.

A UX designer, is the member of a product team who is primarily responsible for ensuring all aspects of a digital product that users experience directly — including its form, behaviour, and content. This digital product must be learnable, usable, useful, and aesthetically pleasing. Thus, a UX designer has an important role to play from a product’s conception to its launch. But creating truly great products requires an entire product team to place the needs of users foremost when making product decisions — or even better, a user-centred corporate culture. If you find yourself in a less enlightened company or on a product team that just doesn’t get how creating great user experiences contributes to a company’s success, you should take every opportunity to evangelise the value of UX to people in your company—from the executive management team to your peers in other disciplines on product teams.By defining product requirements, product management provides the input the UX team needs to design products that are usable, useful, and desirable. UX design specifications provide the input engineering needs to create real products. Engineering both constrains and realises product requirements and UX design—what is possible and what’s not.“Too many companies believe that all they must do is provide a ‘neat’ technology or some ‘cool’ product or, sometimes, just good, solid engineering. Nope. All of those are desirable (and solid engineering is a must), but there is much more to a successful product than that: understanding how the product is to be used, design, engineering, positioning, marketing, branding—all matter. It requires designing the Total User Experience.”—Don Norman“Key objectives always seem to focus on the big three: usability, usefulness, and appeal (or desire, delight, or other approved words of emotional rapport). Key concerns revolve around including all possible stakeholders; merging design with business and marketing, not just engineering; showing return-on-investment (ROI) value; valuing storytelling and story ‘selling’; and looking for very innovative or radically creative or disruptive (in a good sense) solutions.”—Aaron MarcusBarriers to Shared Ownership of UX“If a particular discipline such as marketing or engineering dominates a product development corporation, the other disciplines often suffer.” I’ve described a well-balanced, smoothly functioning product team in a healthy corporate culture. But what happens when the dynamics on a product team or between functional groups within a company are less than ideal or even dysfunctional? In those cases, teamwork and collaboration among disciplines suffers, sometimes to the point where using the term product team seems oxymoronic, creating barriers to the shared ownership of UX.According to Don Norman, “Thinking that one’s own discipline is the most important of all gets in the way of teamwork.” And if a particular discipline such as marketing or engineering dominates a product development corporation, the other disciplines often suffer. I’ve never encountered a company where UX dominated the culture to the detriment of other disciplines, but marketing-driven and engineering-driven cultures are common. In such cultures, a problem of balance that a company should solve organisation wide affects every product team, and UX professionals must wage the same battles over and over again.The Dominance of Marketing“In marketing-driven cultures where marketing, product management, and sales concerns dominate, there is often a desire to satisfy the wants and needs of customers.” In marketing-driven cultures where marketing, product management, and sales concerns dominate, there is often a desire to satisfy the wants and needs of customers. In a company that does the user research and analysis that is necessary to truly understand users’ needs, this can create a culture that is sympathetic to and supportive of UX.Unfortunately, marketing-driven cultures often engage in feature wars with competitors. Sales demands the addition of features that will help them to close specific sales deals—perhaps to satisfy the demands of just one customer. Some product managers prioritise adding new features above all else, and the user experiences of their products fall prey to featuritis. Such forces are hard to resist, but it is incumbent on UX teams to do everything they can to dissuade product teams from creating products that are bloated with features most users won’t find useful.Kim Goodwin of Cooper once said, “Features are meaningless. They mean nothing to users. A coherent product user interface is the product to users.” She compared the results of developing products to satisfy lists of required features to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, which grew by accretion and has stairways that go nowhere and unexpected precipices.A dictatorial product manager can destroy all sense of the teamwork that would result in shared ownership of UX. On one occasion, I saw an all-powerful product manager refuse to have UX involved in a project at all, because his only concern was adding new features. His product was one of the most poorly designed products the company ever produced.The Dominance of Engineering“In engineering-driven cultures, engineers have the ultimate power as the final arbiters of what goes into a digital product.” In engineering-driven cultures, engineers have the ultimate power as the final arbiters of what goes into a digital product. After all, they’re the ones who actually build software products. In such cultures, products are commonly not implemented to spec. Engineers often feel free to “cherry pick a spec”—as Kim Goodwin has described this phenomenon—and implement only the parts of a specification they choose to follow.Or perhaps, as Luke Wroblewski described in his column on UXmatters, “Developing the Invisible,” what you “get back is half of the design. By half of the design I mean that all of the features, content, and functions are there, and they are working as designed. … What’s missing is what’s invisible: alignment and whitespace.” These are subtleties that some engineers do not appreciate or care to bother about.In such cases, UX designers are often forced to persuade individual engineering teams or even individual engineers to implement their user interface designs as specified. This can be a time-consuming process, so things may fall by the wayside when deadlines are tight. When designers do not succeed in getting their designs implemented to spec, the product user experience usually suffers, because, generally, engineers who think they know better what a user interface should be actually do not.The best one can hope for in an engineering-driven culture is that engineers are savvy about user experience, care about usability, and believe in user-centred design (UCD). If this isn’t the case, the UX team will have a lot of evangelising to do.No C-Level UX Management“When UX has no representation on an executive management team, the unavoidable consequence is that UX will be subordinate to product management, engineering, or some other functional group within a company.” When UX has no representation on an executive management team, the unavoidable consequence is that UX will be subordinate to product management, engineering, or some other functional group within a company. In such a case, the very existence of the UX organisation within the company is dependent on the goodwill and sponsorship of another functional group. For any of a number of reasons—financial, political, or just a change in management—such a UX organisation can lose its sponsorship and perhaps even cease to exist.Even if such dire consequences don’t ensue, UX is subordinate to a function with which it should be equal. This can make it more difficult for UX professionals to represent the best interests of users when conflicts arise on a product team between UX and the function to which it is subordinate—whether product management, marketing, or engineering. It might be difficult to get budget for staff or user research or usability testing. The concerns of both product management and engineering might overshadow those of user experience — simply because UX is the only functional group that plays a key role in product development, but has no representation on the executive management team. Perhaps no one at the table can effectively make the case for UX.When the management of a sponsoring group highly values UX, usability, and UCD and understands the need for the UX teams’ autonomy, UX architects usually have parity with product managers and system architects on product teams. The UX team might get all the staff it needs and budget for usability labs and UCD activities. Even so, a situation in which UX is subordinate to another group is less than ideal, because over time, things might change for the worse.Communication BreakdownsIn corporate cultures that are antithetical to the shared ownership of UX, some of the most egregious communication problems are so common that well-known metaphors exist for them:“throwing documents over walls”—Rather than working collaboratively and iteratively on true product teams, product management throws a Marketing Requirements Document over the wall to UX, then UX throws a UX Specification over the wall to engineering. This is waterfall development at its worst.“information silos” — Rather than sharing information across all members of product teams with the goal of creating the best possible products, a competitive or even adversarial relationship exists between different functional groups, which silo information in a misguided attempt to create political advantage for their own groups.All of the problems I’ve described are likely to result in user experiences that are less usable, useful, and desirable. While product teams can overcome the cultural barriers that impede their ability to share responsibility for UX, product teams within a corporate culture that fosters shared ownership of UX are much more likely to achieve this ideal and create great user experiences.Working With Multidisciplinary Product TeamsCreating great product user experiences takes a village—a smoothly functioning multidisciplinary product team that shares ownership of UX. This is the ideal.“Our goal is to work in multidisciplinary teams to produce effective, pleasurable designs rapidly and efficiently. … Let the programming and marketing teams know how the product will look and behave at the very start of the project. … Become an essential part of the team, so our input is provided simultaneously with everyone else’s.”—Don NormanCharacteristics of a Multidisciplinary Product TeamIdeally, a multidisciplinary product team has the following characteristics:It is a team of equals, on which the product manager, UX architect, and system architect — who represent the three key disciplines on a product team — have equal voices.Balance exists between these three key roles, which together; like the legs of the three-legged stool — provide the greatest stability and balance.The product manager, UX architect, and system architect make decisions pertaining to their own roles, but receive input from one another and from other team members in their disciplines, enabling them to make the best decisions possible.The members of the product team:

communicate effectively with one another
work closely, collaboratively, and cooperatively with one another to achieve their common goals
trust and share information with one another
develop effective processes that help ensure their success

Product management, UX, and development share responsibility or ownership of UX.Collaboration on Multidisciplinary Product Teams“The three key members of a multidisciplinary product team, the product manager, UX architect, and system architect, work together collaboratively to define a product’s vision, functionality, and form.” These three key members of a multidisciplinary product team work together collaboratively to define a product’s vision, functionality, and form.

Social Media Not Performing?

Posted on 23-07-2010 | By: gia |

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Category : Social Marketing

Tags: Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking

I am hearing a lot of frustration from companies because their social media presence isn’t large or benefiting their bottom line. Most companies start using social media without a clear strategy or plan – thinking it’s an easy win. In reality, it takes quite a bit of time, effort, planning and resources before this new media will have an impact on your brand. Here are a few tips businesses should consider.

1. Are You Using the Right Platform?

There are many social media platforms to consider when designing an online campaign. Twitter, Facebook, blogs and YouTube are some of the biggest and most important. While all the social sites should be examined, blindly signing up for accounts can be a mistake. To start, educate yourself on each platform and how they can enhance your brand.

When launching a Facebook presence, consider the various platforms within this medium; Pages, Groups and now Communities. Each have different purposes, tools and limitations. Do some research before making the commitment.

Twitter is a quick and easy way for brands to share updates and ideas with their consumers, and it’s also a good place to watch trends and listen to what your demographic is excited about. Because Twitter is always growing and evolving, it’s important to keep apprised of the latest changes.

Blogging can be a powerful tool for any brand. Unlike static websites, daily blog posts improve search engine optimisation and provide a constant source of up-to-date information for consumers. Whether you use Blogger, WordPress or Tumblr, your customers will enjoy reading about your company so long as you make it interesting and current.

Video might seem intimidating, but it’s an extraordinarily powerful social medium. YouTube is one of the largest sources of search traffic, but most companies fail to include it in their social media plan. Video sites essentially operate as a brand’s personal channel and can be viewed by millions.

2. Provide Messages Your Audience Wants

Consider your brand’s demographic, who they are, and what information they want to receive. In traditional marketing there is a tendency to manipulate the consumer directly, while in social media it’s the audience who truly dictates the message. Successful social media marketing begins and ends with respect to your audience. Understanding what your audience wants to hear is key.

Discounts and giveaways can be useful but shouldn’t be all you do. Consider providing interesting facts on topics that coincide with your brand.

3. Listen To Your Audience

Listening to consumers is as important as sharing messages with them. Consider that there are different ways for brands to monitor what people are saying in each platform.

For Twitter, try TweetDeck which allows multiple columns to be viewed simultaneously. Creating a search column for your brand is easy. Simply create a column for @mentions. This will make it easier to keep track of chatter revolving around your brand.

Facebook platforms can be monitored by watching the wall to see what people are posting, and e-mail notifications can be customised for important alerts when new messages are posted.

YouTube and blogs should also be watched closely for comments and questions. Like Facebook, there are settings that, when enabled, will create e-mail alerts when there is a new comment or connection.

4. Give Your Supporters a Voice

Consumers help define your brand and they want to feel valued. Make sure to ask questions and listen to opinions. When appropriate, implement and share your community’s ideas. This can result in not only great content but even stronger brand loyalty. Popular brands do this regularly and with much success.

5. Be Fun

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in — people want to be entertained. Find fun and fresh ways to keep your audience engaged. And If you take a quick look around the social sites, you will see fun marketing is happening everywhere.

Brands put a lot of time and consideration into their offline media campaigns and this should also be done with online media. It’s important to have the right people with authority and creativity running these platforms to assure the voice of your brand isn’t off mark. Following the lead of brands who use social media effectively is a good start to informing yourself. If you’re using social media platforms effectively it won’t be long before you start seeing results.

User Experience Balance Scorecard

Posted on 05-07-2010 | By: gia |

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Category : User Experience

Tags: User Experience

Customers have experiences with an organisation’s products and services regardless of whether the organisation is consciously managing them. A good user experience delights customers—increasing adoption, retention, loyalty, and, most important, revenue. And a poor user experience discourages customers from using a product or service and drives them to the competition—eventually, making a product offering unviable.

Smart organisations recognise that providing a good user experience for a product is an essential competitive advantage. They know it is the product’s user experience that forms their customers’ impression of the product—by both attracting and delighting customers and differentiating their product from its competitors. Just look at the user experiences consumer companies like Apple provide. Even government organisations know this is important. Check out Usability.Gov.

Because user experience has become so important to organisations’ success in the marketplace and, thus, their revenue, it is now part of their overall business strategy. Organisations should plan how to manage and measure user experience. Therefore, most organisations have some system for managing their strategy and measuring their progress toward achieving their goals. One popular system for managing and measuring strategy is Balanced Scorecard.

Balanced Scorecard

Balanced Scorecard is a system that aligns specific business activities to an organisation’s vision and strategy. [1] Using a scorecard helps organisations balance their strategic objectives across four perspectives:

Financial—The Financial Perspective examines the contribution of an organisation’s strategy to the bottom line. It represents the strategic objectives of an organisation in terms of increasing revenue and reducing cost.
Customer—The Customer Perspective focuses on customers’ satisfaction, which contributes to the organisation’s revenue. It represents the value an organisation delivers to customers, the value proposition, and the resulting customer satisfaction.
Internal Business Processes—The Internal Process Perspective is concerned with requirements for products and services that deliver the customer value proposition. It focuses on activities and key processes that are necessary for an organisation to excel at providing the value customers expect.
Learning and Growth—The Learning and Growth Perspective focuses on the internal skills and capabilities an organisation requires to support value-creating internal processes. This perspective includes employee training, the development of corporate cultural attitudes relating to both individual and corporate self-improvement, and the technological tools that support these activities.

By understanding the basics of Balanced Scorecard, you can marry your user experience activities to your organisation’s overall strategy. One popular user experience design process that can help you do that is activity-centred design.

Activity-Centred Design

Solutions work best when we develop them with a deep understanding of the activities we must perform to meet all of these needs. This approach is called activity-centred design (ACD). [2] ACD puts the activities in which organisations engage at the centre of the experience design process. It is essential to put your design solutions into the context of the market problems they solve, the business objectives they support, and the customer and user needs they meet.

In ACD, an activity is a coordinated, integrated set of tasks. Activities comprise tasks, which themselves comprise actions, and actions are made up of operations, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1—Activity-centred design bridges people and technology

The User Experience Balanced Scorecard

With the Balanced Scorecard system, an organisation can align and manage its key corporate objectives. The User Experience Balanced Scorecard maps the user experience process and skills to customer satisfaction and financial growth. At a high level, a User Experience Balanced Scorecard might look something like that shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2—A high-level User Experience Balanced Scorecard

Notice that the customer objectives of increasing conversions, retention, and wallet share map to increasing revenue and reduced cycle time; reducing training and support costs maps to the financial objectives of reducing costs. Depending on an organization’s overall strategy, you could break down the User Experience Balanced Scorecard like that shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3—Objectives in a User Experience Balanced Scorecard

Objectives, Measures, Targets, and Initiatives

Each perspective of the Balanced Scorecard includes objectives, measures of those objectives, target values for those measures, and initiatives, as follows:

objectives—the major objectives a company must achieve—for example, profitable growth
measures—the observable parameters a company uses to measure its progress toward reaching its objectives. For example, a company might measure its progress toward the objective of profitable growth by growth in net margin.
targets—the specific target values for the measures—for example, +2% growth in net margin
initiatives—action programs a company initiates to meet its objectives

For a User Experience Balanced Scorecard, the objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives might look like those shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4—Objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives in a User Experience Balanced Scorecard

For each perspective there might be many objectives. Objectives for user experience could include user research, design reviews, and usability evaluation among other user experience activities.

Conclusion

As user experience becomes more established as part of an organisation’s overall strategy, a comprehensive Balanced Scorecard must include user experience. It would be beneficial for UX leaders within organisations to understand the Balanced Scorecard system and how to map their UX groups’ objectives to their organisations’ business strategies.

Notes

1. Balanced Scorecard was developed in the early 1990s by Dr. Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School and Dr. David Norton.

2. Norman, Donald. “Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful.” Interactions, July + August, 2005.

References

Van Tyne, Sean. “Corporate UX Maturity: A Model for Organizations.” UX Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 1, 1st Quarter 2010.

“Defining and Designing Technology for People.” Pragmatic Marketing, May 2010.

Task Analysis Grid

Posted on 19-04-2010 | By: gia |

(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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Category : User Experience

Tags: User Experience

One of the greatest challenges we face in the design field is communicating design decisions to other stakeholders (e.g. Business & Product Management, Marketing, Developers). We’re often forced to attempt this through a requirements document which undoubtedly puts most to sleep. I’ve yet to come across a requirements document that is usable and doesn’t take a couple of days to get everyone on the same page. So, I use something different – a task analysis grid.

The top of the grid is a synopsis of the person derived from the persona.

Immediately following this is the task table. Each column starts out with a scenario, describes a task and is followed by all the sub-tasks necessary to complete the task. The sub tasks are colour-coded and prioritized from 1 (must haves) to 4 (some day in the future).

This is one of my most successful artifacts during the design process (next to personas and wireframes). It has been praised by many stakeholders because it takes the 60 page requirements document and distills it down to one page.

This single document allows anyone looking at it to see the entire scope of a project, figure out what’s in this release (1) as well as what can be planned for future releases (2, 3, and 4). It’s an extremely effective artifact for getting everyone on the same page.

Integrating SEM and Social Media

Posted on 05-04-2010 | By: gia |

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Category : Social Marketing

Tags: SEM, Social Media

There is no silver bullet for integrating search and social, but there are several concrete strategies every marketer can use to start bringing the two disciplines together. Here are a few tips to help you optimize social and paid search programs to work in a complimentary way to boost overall ROI.

Make your social campaigns search-friendly. Make sure your social media programs (Facebook, Twitter, viral video, etc.) are appropriately tagged and indexed, and that metadata for pages includes your top keywords. This will allow people searching for your brand content to not only find your paid search ads and natural search results, but to find your social media content as well. The first step to building brand engagement through social activities is to enable consumers to easily find your content.
Experiment with keyword advertising on social media sites. Facebook and YouTube both allow for keyword targeted advertising, but the way that these ads work is vastly different from how advertising works on Google or the Content Network. Facebook ads allow you to target users based on preferences they list on their profile. For example, a retailer selling DVDs would create ads that target interests such as “action movies,” “horror,” or “funny movies.” YouTube’s advertising system allows you to target specific user queries. However, remember the queries that occur on YouTube are different than those on Google, because users on YouTube are searching for content, not products. For example, people may be trying to find “Avatar trailer” or “car scene from Modern Family,” rather than searching for a particular DVD, so make sure to target your ads to these more specific types of search queries.
Create social media-influenced paid search campaigns. Closely analyze the topics and discussions taking place around your social media campaigns, and then mine these discussions for new keywords you can use in paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whatever people are talking about, bid on keywords that reflect these conversations. As always, you should measure the performance of these campaigns to prune non-performing ads and increase investment on terms that are more likely to capture downstream conversions. In addition, consider running controlled experiments with social media advertising turned off and on, so you can measure the impact these campaigns have on your paid search programs by observing changes in your paid search click-through and conversion rates.

By quantifying the uplift that social media delivers to your paid search programs, you can gain insights into your marketing programs that search marketers who limit their view to just one channel do not –- and improve the performance of both your paid search and social programs.

Beginners Guide – How to Conduct Keyword Research

Posted on 29-03-2010 | By: gia |

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Category : SEO

Tags: SEO

Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO. Without this component, your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be mis-directed to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see. The process of keyword research involves several phases:

Brainstorming – Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc).
Surveying Customers – Surveying past or potential customers is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible. It can also give you a good idea of what’s likely to be the biggest traffic drivers and produce the highest conversion rates.
Applying Data from KW Research Tools – Several tools online (including Wordtracker & Overture – both described below) offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using these tools can offer concrete data about trends in keyword selection.
Term Selection – The next step is to create a matrix or chart that analyzes the terms you believe are valuable and compares traffic, relevancy, and the likelihood of conversions for each. This will allow you to make the best informed decisions about which terms to target. SEOmoz’s KW Difficulty Tool can also aid in choosing terms that will be achievable for the site.
Performance Testing and Analytics – After keyword selection and implementation of targeting, analytics programs (like Indextools and ClickTracks) that measure web traffic, activity, and conversions can be used to further refine keyword selection.

Wordtracker & Overture

Overture Keyword Selection Tool

Overture Screenshot

Wordtracker Simple Search Utility

Wordtracker Screenshot

Currently, the two most popular sources of keyword data are Wordtracker, whose statistics come primarily from use of the meta-search engine Dogpile (which has ~1% of the share of searches performed online) and Overture (recently re-branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing), which offers data collected from searches performed on Yahoo!’s engine (with a 22-28% share). While neither’s data is flawless or entirely accurate, both provide good methods for measuring comparative numbers. For example, while Overture and Wordtracker may disagree on numbers and say that “red bicycles” gets 240 vs. 380 searches per day (across all engines), both will generally indicate that this is a more popular term than “scarlet bicycles”, “maroon bicycles”, or even “blue bicycles.”

In Wordtracker, which provides more detail but has a considerably smaller share of data, terms and phrases are separated by capitalization, plurality, and word ordering. In the Overture tool, multiple search phrases are combined. For example, Wordtracker would independently show numbers for “car loans”, “Car Loans”, “car loan”, and “cars Loan”, whereas Overture would give a single number that encompasses all of these. The granularity of data can be more useful for analyzing searches that may result in unique results pages (plurals often do and different word orders almost always do), but capitalization is of less consequence as the search engines don’t deliver different results based on capitalization.

Remember that Wordtracker and Overture are both useful tools for relative keyword data, but can be highly inaccurate when compared to the actual number of searches performed. In other words, use the tools to select which terms to target, but don’t rely on them for predicting the amount of traffic you can achieve. If your goal is estimating traffic numbers, use programs like Google’s Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing to test the number of impressions a particular term/phrase gets.

Targeting the Right Terms

Targeting the best possible terms is of critical importance. This encompasses more than merely measuring traffic levels and choosing the highest trafficked terms. An intelligent process for keyword selection will measure each of the following:

Conversion Rate – the percent of users searching with the term/phrase that converts (click an ad, buy a product, complete a transaction, etc.)

Predicted Traffic – An estimate of how many users will be searching for the given term/phrase each month

Value per Customer – An average amount of revenue earned per customer using the term or phrase to search – comparing big-ticket search terms vs. smaller ones.

Keyword Competition – A rough measurement of the competitive environment and the level of difficulty for the given term/phrase. This is typically measured by metrics that include the number of competitors, the strength of those competitors’ links, and the financial motivation to be in the sector. SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool can assist in this process.

Once you’ve analyzed each of these elements, you can make effective decisions about the terms and phrases to target. When starting a new site, it’s highly recommended to target only one or possibly two unique phrases on a single page. Although it is possible to optimize for more phrases and terms, it’s generally best to keep separate terms on separate pages, as you can provide individualized information for each in this manner. As websites grow and mature, gaining links and legitimacy with the engines, targeting multiple terms per page becomes more feasible.

The Long Tail of Search

The “long tail” is a concept pioneered by Chris Anderson (the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, who runs the Long Tail blog). From Chris’s description:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

This concept relates exceptionally well to keyword search terms in the major engines. Although the largest traffic numbers are typically for broad terms at the “head” of the keyword curve, great value lies in the thousands of unique, rarely used, niche terms in the “tail.” These terms can provide higher conversion rates and more interested and valuable visitors to a site, as these specific terms can relate to exactly the topics, products, and services your site provides.

For example:

Keyword Term/Phrase	# of Searches per Month
men’s suit	27,770
armani men’s suit	723
italian men’s suit	615
Jones New York Men’s Suit	424
Men’s 39S Suit	310
Gucci Men’s Suit	222
Versace Men’s Suit	178
Hugo Boss Men’s Suit	138
Men’s Custom Made Suit	126
*Source - Overture Keyword Selection Tool (Sept. ’05 data)

In the scenario in the table above, the traffic for the term “men’s suit” may be far greater, but the value of more specific terms is greater. A searcher for “Hugo Boss Men’s Suit” is more likely to make a purchase decision than one searching for simply a “men’s suit.” There are also thousands of other terms, garnering far fewer monthly searches, that, when taken together, have a value greater than the terms garnering the most searches. Thus, targeting many dozens or hundreds of smaller terms individually can be both easier (on a competitive level) and more profitable.

Sample Keyword Research Chart

The following chart diagrams how we conduct basic keyword research at SEOmoz. You are welcome to copy and use this format for your own keywords:

Term/Phrase	KW Difficulty	Top 3 OV Bids	OV Mthly Pred. Traf.	WT Mthly Pred. Traf.	Relevance Score
San Diego Zoo	63%	$0.41 $0.41 $0.40	116,229	42,360	25%
Joe Dimaggio	51%	$0.28 $0.19 $0.11	5,847	7,590	10%
Starsky and Hutch	53%	$0.16 $0.00 $0.00	19,769	16,950	30%
Art Museum	77%	$0.51 $0.50 $0.25	19,244	7,410	5%
DUI Attorney	52%	$1.63 $1.62 $1.60	13,923	3,960	60%
Search Engine Marketing	83%	$4.99 $3.26 $3.25	1,183,633	74,430	40%
Microsoft	89%	$0.69 $0.51 $0.32	1,525,265	256,620	10%
Interest Only Mortgage Loan	50%	$4.60 $4.39 $4.39	3,745	8,910	75%

Key

KW Difficulty – The score from SEOmoz’s tool

Top 3 OV Bids – The bid amount from the top 3 listings in Yahoo!’s PPC results

Overture Monthly Predicted Traffic – The amount of traffic estimated via Overture for the previous month’s data

Wordtracker Monthly Predicted Traffic – The amount of traffic estimated via Wordtracker (note that you must add up all terms in their database that match and multiply by the number of days in the month – the “exact/precise search” function can help make this easier)

Relevance Score – The % of searchers using this term/phrase that you feel are likely to be interested in your site’s products/services/offerings. Although this is a subjective number, you can use conversion rates or click-through rates from previous campaigns to more accurately estimate this in the future.

In selecting final terms, those with lower difficulty, higher relevance, and more traffic will offer the greatest value.

Is Social Media a New Addiction?

Posted on 18-03-2010 | By: gia |

(2 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)

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Category : Social Marketing

Tags: Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking

What is it about social media that causes people to spend so much of their precious time trading information with friends, family and even giant corporations? Of course, we already know the answer; it’s fun and can be rewarding both socially and financially. The latest Retrevo Gadgetology study asked social media users questions such as when, where, and how much time they spend on sites and services like FaceBook and Twitter. I was not surprised to learn how many people appear to be obsessed with checking in with their social media circles throughout the day, the night and even on the toilet!

Not only do social media fanatics check Facebook and Twitter throughout theday, almost half of the respondents said they check in on the social media scene in bed, during the night or as soon as they wake up in the morning. Naturally, younger social media users said they tweet by night more than those over 25.

Among social media users, it appears almost half are so involved with FaceBook and Twitter that they check in the first thing in the morning. With 16% of social media users saying this is how they get their morning “news” – could we be witnessing the first signs of social media services beginning to replace the TV as the source for whats going on in the world? ;

I don’t know if it’s the device or the personality of an iPhone owner but these particular owners stand out in this study as more involved with social media; they use FaceBook and Twitter more often and in more places.

The fact that 56% of social media users need to check FaceBook at least once a day or the 12% who check in every couple of hours shows an addiction is plausible.

The study asked consumers how they felt about being interrupted at various times and occasions for an electronic message. With everyone texting away on their phones these days, we werent surprised to see over 40% of respondents saying they didn’t mind being interrupted for a message. In fact, 32% said a meal was not off limits while 7% said they’d even check out a message during an intimate moment.

From this study, it appears that social media may have begun to replace more conventional sources for news with many social media users saying tweets trump TV for that morning cup of news.

via Retrevo

Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?

Posted on 09-03-2010 | By: gia |

(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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Category : SEO, Social Marketing

Tags: SEO, Social Marketing, Social Networking

“Should I create a group or launch a Page?” It’s the eternal question. Ever since Facebook launched their Pages product as part of their larger advertising strategy (along with the ill-fated Beacon) in November 2007, there has been confusion over which to use. Because Groups and Pages have an overlapping feature set, even senior social media marketing consultants are sometimes stumped as to what to tell their clients. And Facebook continues to make changes to how Pages function, complicating the matter even further.

What is a Page on Facebook?

In their own words, “Facebook created Pages when we noticed that people were trying to connect with brands and famous artists in ways that didn’t quite work on Facebook… Not only can you connect with your favorite artists and businesses, but now you also can show your friends what you care about and recommend by adding Pages to your personal profile.”

So, when you become a fan of a brand, a band, a movie, or a person, that information is posted on your wall, and your friends might see it too. You can see which Pages your friends are fans of via the “Info” tab on their profile.

To create a fan page, one simply has to go to facebook.com/pages/create.php and create a new page.

Of course, a single fan doesn’t make a fan page very valuable.

Value of Fan Pages

Facebook Pages can be thought of in much the same way as normal profiles on the site – brand or celebrity Pages have the ability to have friends, they can add pictures, and they have walls that fans can post on. Pages communicate by “updates” which show on the update tab or a person’s wall if they’re a fan and have allowed the page to show updates. Pages can have applications as well.

Pages have two walls, one of what the Page owner writes, and one just for fans to write their own messages. Like a normal Facebook profile, Pages have tabs that uncover more information.

What’s a Group?

Groups are a bit different than Pages. To create a group you go to facebook.com/groups/create.php and then fill in information about the type of group, and decide if it is open to a particular network (such as a University network) or all of Facebook. You can set join permissions on groups so that they are either open to anyone, closed (where users must get administrator approval to join) or secret (invite only). Groups have administrators that manage the group, approve applicants or invite others to join. Administrators can also appoint “officers” who are nominally in charge – however, being an officer doesn’t mean the person has the ability to administer the group.

Because of these privacy settings, Facebook’s groups are analogous to clubs in the offline world. Administrators can invite members to join via Facebook mail and email, and public groups can be found via Facebook search.

Pages vs. Groups: How to know which to use

There are a number of factors you need to consider when choosing which is right for your project, a Page or a group.

Personal vs. Corporate:

Due to their security features, and size limitations (only groups under 5,000 members can send email blasts), Facebook Groups are set up for more personal interaction. Groups are also directly connected to the people who administer them, meaning that activities that go on there could reflect on you personally. Pages, on the other hand, don’t list the names of administrators, and are thought of as a person, almost like a corporate entity is considered a ‘person’ under the law.

Facebook considers groups to be an extension of your personal actions. When you post something as a group administrator, it appears to be coming from you and is attached to your personal profile. Alternately, Pages can create content that comes from the Page itself, so that content doesn’t have to be linked to you personally. Also one key difference is that Pages are indexed by external search engines such as Google, just like a public profile while Groups are not.

Email vs. Updates:

As long as a group is under 5,000 members, group admins can send messages to the group members that will appear in their inboxes. Page admins can send updates to fans through the Page, and these updates will appear in the “Updates” section of fans’ inboxes. There is no limit on how many fans you may send an update to, or how many total fans a Page can have.

User Control:

Groups offer far more control over who gets to participate. Permissions settings make it possible for group admins to restrict access to a group, so that new members have to be approved. Access to a Page, however, can only be restricted by certain ages and locations. Again, this makes groups more like a private club.

Applications

Pages can host applications, so a Page can essentially be more personalized and show more content. Groups can’t do this.

Moderation

Neither Groups nor Pages have great moderation features. They can both be a little granular as to how things get posted, who can post, and what kind of media can be posted, but that’s about it.

If someone posts spam on your Group or your Page, you have to remove it manually, and you can also remove specific members.

Ability to Create Events

Both Groups and Pages allow you to create related Events, which show up under the users’ Request (and later in the upcoming events page on the sidebar of their dashboard if they’ve RSVP’ed). Neither have any added functionality beyond the generally available Facebook Events application.

Advertise

Ads can be purchased to promote either groups or Pages, but Pages can benefit from social ads that publicize the fan connection between a Page and a specific user.

The Bottom Line

Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.

The value of SEO maintenance

Posted on 08-03-2010 | By: gia |

(1 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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Category : SEO

Tags: SEO

Just imagine, you’ve completed your site’s optimisation, and everything is going swimmingly and you leave your site alone for a couple of weeks to get everything else you’ve ignored while optimising your site sorted out. Suddenly you remember it’s important to keep copy up to date and start rapidly posting fresh content and add a couple of links to some partners and providers, because they’ve promised to link to you. After just a few months, your entire site is a mess.

You must remember to heed to a regular maintenance schedule because it is imperative for the long-term success of your site. Most companies already have a site maintenance routine before they optimise for SEO. It may involve checking code and backing up files regularly, a very simple routine should be easy to slot into your regular maintenance schedule. There’s no need to check on your optimisation every day, the important thing is that you maintain it on a regular basis.

This routine will depend on what you’ve done to optimise your site. Usually it involves checking or updating your keywords, looking at what competitors are doing and analysing your traffic. It should include posting a fresh and relevant content to keep search engine spiders hungry. SEO tactics change over time, so part of your routine should involve analysing trends to detect when changed are necessary.

Strategic Internet Marketing Plan – Asking the Right Questions!

Posted on 04-03-2010 | By: gia |

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Category : SEO, Social Marketing

Tags: SEO, Social Marketing

March 1st, 2010 | by Peter Cullen

What makes an internet marketing strategy strategic? What are the key elements that will set your business apart from your online competitors?

This post is for anyone with responsibility for their company’s marketing strategy and for evolving their company’s marketing tactics from traditional strategies to implementing a strategic internet marketing plan.

As the person responsible for marketing your company’s business, are you sticking to what has always worked? Are you starting to dabble with online marketing, maybe Google Adwords, maybe some Social Media forays. Perhaps your hand is being forced or you’ve already run an unsuccessful internet marketing campaign.

Probably one of the biggest indications that your internet marketing plan is not strategic is if your company is implementing your online and off-line marketing campaigns separately. This may manifest itself by different departments being responsible for key elements of your online strategy, or the online marketing part of the marketing plan being given lip service.

Does the marketing manager/executive feel comfortable with their new responsibilities? Have they developed/owned an internet marketing plan before? Have they successfully implemented a cross department/cross organisational strategic plan? Does something like this even exist in your company, i.e. do different departments traditionally work well on collaboration projects?

You may have the IT department responsible for the hosting and architecture of the website, the marketing department responsible for content, the sales department looking after the leads generated from your website – do they all work together towards a common goal?

Strategic Internet Marketing Mix

This series of articles looks at how you can align all elements of your marketing activities, both off-line and online so that they are all focused on delivering one message and delivering real results for your company.

I have broken down the marketing landscape into four areas. For some businesses online advertising may be more important than for others and others still will find that off-line promotion is still their primary engagement marketing medium.

When you come to evaluate your current marketing position it’s important to at least look at all four segments and cross reference with your target market. If your company’s research indicates that social media is not going to drive engagement then maybe your activities in that space will be limited – at least for the moment.

Thinking About Your Strategic Internet Marketing Plan

When evaluating each of the four quadrants I suggest you use a structured approach to your thinking. You want to ensure that any bias, personal or cultural within your organisation does not unduly influence the results of your strategic analysis.

I suggest you use something along the lines of Edward de Bono’s Five Stages of Thinking. I use some of his techniques below to summarise one approach to developing your strategic internet marketing plan, but I highly recommend you get his book, Teach Yourself to Think and read it for yourself.

TO: Where do we want to go to? Your answer, in our context, may be to say, ‘We want to develop a strategic internet marketing plan so that 40% of our revenues are being generated from online activities.

This is quite a large definition so let’s break it down in the context of the strategic marketing mix in the image above.

We want to set goals that are driven by metrics and are measurable against the overall purpose. The purpose is very important element of your overall thinking. As k yourself the question, “Why does our company want to move our marketing strategy more online?”

Are your customers more likely to be buying online? Has your product range evolved so that it can now be bought online? Are you doing it because all your competitors are moving online? Are your traditional marketing efforts proving too expensive?

Some metrics you may be considering might include the following..

We want to reduce our off-line marketing costs by 20% (e.g. marketing spend on newspapers and magazines ads, radio, TV)

We currently generate 20% of our revenues from online activities, we want to double this to 40%

We want to reduce our overall marketing budget from 100,000 pa to 60,000 pa.

We want to reduce our traditional marketing head count by 2

We want to develop an in house competence in online marketing

We want to build our online unique visitor traffic from 500 unique visitors per month to 5000 per month

We want to ensure that all departments are aware of and aligned to the achievement of our online marketing goals. Each departments KPI’s will be measured against their contribution to these goals.

Warning!

Don’t be tempted to just say, er we want more traffic, or we want more authority in our website. Woolly goals lead to failure.

LO: This stage is about gathering information, as much information as you can, from whatever sources you can that will make your task of making a decision at the next stage easier.

The classic way of obtaining information is to ask questions and there are two types of questions that you should be thinking about asking;

Fishing Questions are opened ended and explore areas where we’re not sure what answer we’ll get back.In the context of our Strategic Internet Marketing Plan you’ll need to be asking yourself the following type of questions:-How do we start building in house competence-
What is the best online ‘channel to market’ that we should be using to to promote our product/services? E.g. Social Media, Organic listings, Pay Per Click…etc
Shooting Questions will illicit a quantitative answer…

- How much money is being spent by our target market online?

- How much will it cost us to target our selected keywords using Google Adwords?

- What areas need to be cut to to reach our target of a €20,000 savings pa ?

- What areas of Organic Search do we need a strategy for? This last question may be helped by exploring the diagram below:

The additional types of shooting questions you need to ask of your internet marketing plan are:

1. What is our strategy to get listed in the organic website listings?

Data Feeds Google SERPs

2. Are we listed in Google Local Search?

3. Do we optimise our images and with what keywords? Does each of our images have a unique name that contains a keyword, or is it named something like 1245homepage.jpg?

4. Do we have a Twitter account? Who’s responsible for it? Do we have a set of guidelines for it’s use? What content can we promote?

5. What social media accounts does our company have? What type of content is published on these accounts? Do we manage these account in house or have we outsourced to an agency? Are marketing and sales coming their activities on these channels to market?

6. Do we have a policy for online press releases? Who writes them?

7. What websites do we syndicate our content to? Do we have a content syndication strategy? Do we have a content development strategy?

8. Have we ever developed a video to promote our products/services? Do we have a YouTube channel? Should we have one?

Strategic Internet Marketing Plan – Overview

Your goal after going through the TO and LO stages is to be in a position where you can answer the following questions;

We know what goals we are working towards i.e. we have defined and developed our company’s Strategic Internet Marketing Plan
We have looked at many sources of information that will help us to define the possible solutions and approaches to achieve our stated goals.

What we have now is that foundation for your Strategic Internet Marketing Plan;

Strategic Internet Marketing Plan Process

Sharing Ownership of UX

User Experience Balance Scorecard

Task Analysis Grid

Beginners Guide – How to Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO. Without this component, your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be mis-directed to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see. The process of keyword research involves several phases:

Wordtracker & Overture

Targeting the Right Terms

The Long Tail of Search

Sample Keyword Research Chart

The value of SEO maintenance

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