experience matters

Content is king, but it’s not the only connecting tissue on the web. Increasingly, the situational context of others is influencing how people interact online. New types of web experiences are enabling people to go beyond just creating content; they’re allowing them to broadcast their personal context too. These “situational lifestreams” are a realtime flow of personal metadata, and it’s time to start thinking about how to design great experiences with them.

Revisting Cluetrain

It’s been over eight years since the Cluetrain Manifesto proclaimed: “Markets are Conversations”. Today, blogs are mainstream, your parents are on Facebook, and everyone has a mobile phone. Successful companies realize the value of listening to their customers, and are opening up to the fact that increasingly, their brands are partially owned by communities and conversations.

One of the interesting points that Cluetrain made was that markets were self-organizing faster the companies that served them. With the explosion in tools that allow people to self-organize, this point is more critical then ever. What’s making this an even thornier issue is that the explosion no longer includes only content, it also includes situational context, and it’s able to influence people in realtime. Markets are increasingly “situations” that may emerge and disappear before companies can react.

Situational Lifestreams

Facebook, Twitter and Pownce are all examples of applications that include some form of situational lifestreaming as a central part of the experience. With Twitter, you create an account, and start sending out short messages – an activity often referred to as “microblogging”. While you can still regard an individual’s lifestream as “microblogging”, when you aggregate a group of Twitter streams together, you get something completely new and different. When you have groups of individuals all “following” each other’s streams, an interesting influence system begins to take effect.

These “groups of groups” are chock full of contextual nuggets about people’s lives that seem to feed back on each in a very subtle but consistent flow of situational context. This situational context, while low key, is extremely powerful. I’ve never seen a Virgin America ad on the web or otherwise but I’m extremely interested in trying the service, and only because of the aggregated influence of people I follow on my Twitterstream. No brand evangelism took place, it was just people describing what they were doing within the confines of a 140 character text message. I was never consciously looking for a better airline experience; it’s not a critical consideration when I travel. But being privy to other people’s experiences with the brand was powerful. Now I’ll be comparing my next airline flight experience to something that I’ve only vicariously experienced through other people as patterns in a stream of metadata.

Thinking Situationally

Some companies have tried using Twitter to communicate with their customers, but I think they’re missing the real opportunity. It’s not the content on services like Twitter or Pownce that captivates people; it’s the context, and the strange new ability to see the emerging distributed situations in the groups that they follow. Everyone is both watching and watched in this scenario – nobody is in control.

When it comes to brand communication, services like Twitter are a frightening mix of risk and opportunity. The ability to influence is definitely there, but the ability to control that influence is very low.

What companies should do is look at services like Twitter not as a way to communicate with their customers, but as a way to leverage the value of situational context. The way to engage these influence networks is not by talking in them, but by putting them in contexts that frame the situational information. For example, a Twitter-like service could be used to drive impulse buying behavior on a social shopping site, leveraging the combined context of individual purchaser situations.

As a marketer or designer, there are a number of ways to get involved with situational lifestreams:

• Start simple: get an account on a service like Twitter or Pownce and start using it. We’d love to be part of your lifestream
• Link your stream to your website or blog using a widget or plug-in to broaden the reach of your lifestream.
• Experiment with adding a lifestream to your site in places where context is important – search results, product reviews, etc.

From a design perspective, it’s time to start iterating on the lifestream concept to see where they really work, and to get comfortable in dealing with situational information. In the near future your brand may be owned not just by conversations, but by situations, and your ability to influence them will not lie in how you participate in the conversation, but how you shape the context.

Update:

Looks like Google just purchased Jaiku, another lifestreaming-ish system. Link to the obligatory TechCrunch blurb.

A colleague mentioned a few weeks back that services like Twitter were ripe for pickup by larger companies, and I couldn’t agree more. It will be interesting to see whether Twitter goes soon or continues to stay independent. One thing is for sure, this space will continue to heat up in the near future.

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