“The goal was not to sell units, but to increase favorability about the two brands among younger consumers,”?
What do you think? The visual imagery, the soundtrack, it’s just done right and yet, where is the product? Created for Intel, does this have to make sense to be good or effective? Do you think the 55 million people who viewed it felt that they have been marketed to?
Everything seems hard the first time we do it doesn’t it? Until it no longer ceases to be difficult and then it becomes innate, routine and sometimes mundane. On the web, we as digital marketers and change agents, worry that the sites, applications and networks that we build, share and promote aren’t intuitive enough. Yet even the toughest of sites to navigate seem to succeed with massive amounts of traffic and uniques. Why is that?
Because people want to go there. People want to use that site. No matter how difficult it is. Sites that are providing some type of payoff to be there, can overcome design inefficiencies on large scales. Be it a utility like email, a social network like Facebook, or a site where we buy stuff like Amazon or sell stuff like Ebay, people who want to, neigh need to use that site, will figure out how to use that site, no matter how difficult is it.
What does this mean?
Besides the fact that those that create web content and applications have a tremendous opportunity to deliver to users who have been inundated with a plethora of bad web stuff, great content and deliverables- What it really means is that when building for a Web 3.0 world… Less is more, more is not better, better doesn’t mean simple, simple doesn’t mean good, good can be bad, bad can be worse, simple can be bad, assuming can be bad, knowing is good, asking is better, change is good, change is bad and change is constant.
So is it a good thing to change? Who’s more comfortable with bad, you or your users?
I was asked the other day via a tweet what was my biggest challenge when managing social media. I shot back, “It’s the people not the platform”.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Was it the right answer?
You see, there are thousands of companies out there right now that are wanting to tap into all that makes social business sexy right now-Finding new customers, tightening the relationships with existing ones, discovering new channels of business oh and making money.
There’s just one problem. The platforms where social business may take place i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Blogs-They’re solid and the people that flock to them? Well, sometimes they are not. Which means if the employees can’t grasp the nuances of connecting on Facebook, can’t figure out how to leverage social relationships on Twitter or can’t figure out how to write a compelling blog post that will be shared and commented on-then invariably the problem isn’t the technology as much as it is the people using it.
The reality is that the barriers of social media adoption are so low that anyone in 5 minutes could, 1) create a blog and a blog post, 2) a Twitter account and a tweet, and 3) a company Facebook fan page. It’s too easy to start and it’s too easy to fail-which invariably leads to social efforts that fall flat. Largely it fails because the expectations are so huge and because they are measured against other companies that invested time, resources, and people first strategies and the platform last.
Start with your people first and build from there. People define platforms.
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