experience matters

Richard Tseng | Critical Mass Toronto

There’s an old statistic my dad used to say to me. “The Saturday edition of the Toronto Star contains more knowledge than a person living in the 16^th Century got in their entire lifetime.” It made no sense to me why anyone would want this much information. The funnies were about the only section useful to my sixth-grade self. Everything else just seemed to get in the way.

Today you can access the Saturday editions of every major newspaper in the world online. You can also get near-instantaneous Wikipedia entries, tweets, blogs, RSS updates, and tons more, all of which makes it even harder to separate information you want from information you don’t. Enter Web 3.0, a.k.a. Semantic Web.

Web info overload and why Web 3.0

This iteration of the web promises to better serve users with a smarter search system. In addition to 2.0’s content creation and 1.0’s system of content delivery, 3.0 aims to manage content as well.

What are the implications of 3.0? Read More

Mo Goltz | Critical Mass Chicago

I recently had the opportunity to attend a seminar with the Insight & Planning team to learn about creating authentic personas. The seminar’s focus was around creating personas that are more like real people rather than the flat, somewhat contrived versions that’s aren’t entirely uncommon. Byron Stewart, an actor and co-owner of Dramatic Diversity showed us how we can use techniques from the world of theater to create personas.

This may sound strange, but he had some excellent points that hit a nerve with professionals who have been seeing a troubling trend amidst persona design. Many of us are aware of the theoretical value behind personas, but let me take a minute to illustrate how a robust, well-defined persona can make scenarios come alive.

Let’s take a well-known character from the annals of American Pop culture… Homer Simpson. Imagine him walking from the Quickie Mart to Moe’s Tavern in the town of Springfield. Now imagine him using whatever design you’re working on now. No, seriously, stop reading for a second and imagine it.

— Insert your daydream sequence —

The point of this little exercise is that since Homer’s character has been so well developed we can actually see him in our mind’s eye with a strong sense of his perspective on the world. Complete with imperfections and personality quirks that you’ve likely observed in various situations throughout the years, it isn’t so difficult to imagine what he might do using your design. Dare I say it could even be fun and helpful?
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Celia Jones | Critical Mass Chicago

If you’re in the working world, you’ve probably sat through a 401(k) benefits meeting and heard the spiel:

“Saving for retirement is really important. And if you just set aside a little bit per day, you won’t even feel the contributions coming out of your paycheck. For example: think about how many times you go for that morning coffee at Starbucks. Now do the math. $5 per day x 7 days a week x 52 weeks in a year…”

When it’s framed like that, it’s hard to argue that a daily Starbucks fix can add up to a pretty hefty dent in your bank account. Yet interestingly, roughly a week ago, Starbucks became the first brand to surpass the 10-million-fan mark.

From a Luxury Brand to a Listening Brand

In these tight, recessionary times, with unemployment rampant and people everywhere feeling the financial pinch, Starbucks, once an icon of edible luxury, has emerged as a winner, warming consumers’ hearts like a peppermint latte on cold winter day.

It wasn’t too long ago that Starbucks was dubbed a brand in crisis with eroding sales, rampant store closings and plummeting stock prices. But now, in August of 2010, they are firmly on the rebound and own boasting rights as part an elite group: the 10 million fan club, which includes such social media superstars as Lady Gaga and President Obama. So how did they do it?

Continue to Starbucks’ 6 Tips to Inspire Action with Social Media.

Cindy Nelson | Critical Mass Executive

Last Thursday I attended the WWD Forum on Mastering Mobile Marketing, part three of WWD’s series on digital media http://www.wwd.com/wwd-summits/wwd-series-on-digital-media-2443804/. Over the course of the day, I listened to marketers from across the retail sector share how mobile fits into their marketing strategies, and how they’re integrating mobile into their overall marketing mix. The key takeaways for me were: 1) Mobile is truly changing the way that brands interact with consumers, and this change is largely being driven from the bottom up (consumers are challenging brands to evolve, not the other way around), and 2) The success of any mobile brand initiative can often be boiled down to a single, simple (yet all too frequently overlooked) principle: “know thy customer”.

Consumers are challenging brands to evolve

Consumers are using their phone as a device to gain confirmation from peers prior to purchase. I recently learned that today’s “second opinion” involves taking pictures in the dressing room, sending the photos to a friend, and if the response from that “trusted personal stylist” is positive, then (and only then) the credit card comes out. Smart brands are recognizing this trend towards buddy-shopping and co-browsing, and building parts of the shopping experience (both in-store, and online) around this new set of digitally-enabled social behaviors; they’re using their mobile initiatives to connect prospects and customers with their brands and with each other. But are they doing enough?

Ever heard of GotryIton.com? http://www.gotryiton.com/ An Accelerator Finalist at this year’s SXSW, Gotryiton is an online community that allows users to upload digital photos of themselves wearing outfits they’re thinking about buying. So the next time you buy an expensive pair of jeans, you have someone to blame!

Panelists agreed that as consumer needs evolve, so too must brand experiences. This is especially true of mobile. And especially now.  At Critical Mass, we’ve become adept at recognizing the types of bottom-up changes that force evolution, and turning observations into insights that lead to extraordinary work for our clients.

Know thy customer

Deep knowledge of the customer was a consistent theme throughout the day. These marketers understand their customers! They understand the purchase process their customer segments go through and they’re using this knowledge to find unique opportunities for engagement. They’re monitoring usage of their mobile sites to understand changing behaviors. They’re building apps and developing content, and watching where and when the content is consumed.

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Jeana Anderson | Critical Mass Chicago

Going viral: For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to define that as an idea, phrase or a piece of rich media being replicated and shared, spreading with the speed and intensity of a viral infection. A very popular meme.

Memes are an insanely interesting characteristic of the social media, especially for those who are in the business of harnessing the power of social for brands. These viral fads go through the same cycles as fashion and music. The unique kids adopt the meme or trend first; they feel a sense of ownership or that they’ve discovered this piece of content. The masses sniff this out and start adopting the meme; they forward it to all of their gchat buddies. A member of the masses sends said piece of content onto one of the early adopters who replies with “I saw that like a month ago.” The masses overplay and click-by- click kill this trend, bringing it to “viral” status. The cool kids move onto the next thing.

As a rule, it’s difficult for large brands to grab a hold of these large-scale trends and insert themselves in a relevant way while the trends are still hot. On the flip side, content creators have been attaching their inevitably viral blogs, tweets and videos to brands in ways that stick and get forwarded down the chain-of-cool. A notable example is Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. This serves as a terrific case study, so please bear with me as I do not wish to imply that you, dear reader, have not seen this video or heard this song. After the original song was posted to YouTube, several video iterations emerged as users adopted it and tweaked it to their own tastes. The combined total views of these videos mention Pizza Hut and Taco Bell thousands of times. However, as the meme reaches the main stream, its status as “cool” has effectively been killed.

It’s fairly safe to say that starting a viral movement requires the leader, or brand, to have the guts to stand out as different. More important than that, however, is a well educated community that collectively feels listened to by a humanized brand. Advocates. With processes in place to address concerns and praise positive contributions to a movement, the principles of Derek Siver’s TED talk apply. Siver outlines the importance of nurturing the first few followers of any movement. Without the first advocate or follower, the brand isn’t leading a movement; it’s just a “lone nut.”

Aside from the initial idea and execution, the entire movement is on the shoulders of the advocates. Creating the type of content that most brands are comfortable with requires a production budget and “talent,” but devoting a spend on something that may or may not be adopted by the community is risky. I would guess that Ford went through a similar thought process as it inevitably put a huge volume of its social content creation for the Ford Fiesta in the hands of its advocates. The brand acted as a leader, posing its community with challenges that required creating cool content with the Ford Fiesta in the background.

As far as going viral is concerned, this model is ideal: be the kind of inspiring leader that isn’t rigid about ideas for content. Allow the first follower to have the creative license to be just as inspiring as the brand itself.

Jeana is a Community Manager in our Chicago office.

Image compliments of www.seekyledraw.com.

Alex Clemmons | Critical Mass Chicago

It often takes months to develop a website or digital program.  After tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, persona development, creative reviews, usability testing and some long nights, launch date is a huge milestone.  But often times after a site goes live the client is ready to move on to the next project.  However, it is in the post launch period that we can actually have the most impact and ensure that all the time and money we spent is paying off.  Website optimization, the process of making continual improvements to the site in order to increase performance, can help make our clients, and ourselves, look like rock stars.

Part of website optimization comes from reporting.  Every marketing initiative should have goals, and it is the Marketing Science Department’s job to define and track progress against these goals.  Through reporting, we can identify underperforming areas and make recommendations for improvement.  When we combine reporting with testing we can start to understand not only what is working, but why it is working as well.

Almost every aspect of a digital program can come under debate; page layouts, calls to action, image size and page colors are just a few things that can be contested.

A testing program could help settle these debates and optimize the experience to meet our marketing objectives and more importantly our customer’s goals.

In a nut shell, testing is the process by which we test different versions of a web page on the live site environment and then, through scientific methods, declare a winner of the test (the page that has best shown the ability to best convert visitors to do the actions that we want them to do).

The simplest form of testing is an A/B test.  We pick a site goal, like conversion from a landing page, and then measure how different versions of this page perform against our goal.  With tools like Omniture’s Test & Target or Google’s Website Optimizer we can serve up pages that have different images, copy or other treatments in real time and measure the results against a control page.

Page A is our control; it has not had any changes made to it.  On page B, we can start to swap things out; it could be a new image or a different call to action.  We run our test and find that visitors who saw page B had a 300% higher conversion rate than those who saw page A!

Ready to try something trickier? Keep Reading.

Inspiration often comes from strange places.

†Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, author Scott McCloud examines how we receive different types of information and that process relates directly to design, information architecture, copywriting and content strategy.

Image compliments of Scott McCloud.

“Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous.

Writing is perceived information. It takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols of language.” (page 49)

Anyone who’s ever sat through a client review will understand this. It’s not that images or art are less important; in fact, it’s the art that usually solicits “ohhs” and “ahhs” from the clients, right?

McCloud is speaking more about our intrinsic speed of understanding. We get a feeling from a picture right away.

But we need to process words – to piece together abstract ideas. With words, it’s incumbent that we create the images ourselves, in our own consciousness; we ponder meaning, ideas and symbols. Anyone who has read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies knows that this process ain’t easy.

What’s This Got To Do With Agency Life?

Comics and literary theory? Why should marketers care?

In the same way that images are understood before words in the human brain, so too has the planning and creative process developed in marketing agencies. The halcyon days of 1997 were critical for information architecture. IAs became a staple of the creative agency, a bridge between the client’s objectives and the designer’s creative vision.

The same thing didn’t happen for words. It was easy to understand why you’d want to plot out images. But it took another decade for us to plot out what was written on the page and why. (True, maybe astute IAs and copywriters filled this role until content strategy bloomed in recent years.)

So what’s changed? Well, SEO (based on keyWORDS) has blossomed into the main way we find content online. Search engines are ever more refining the way they surface the most relevant content. Our tastes have matured: the internet is no longer the shiny new object – it helps us complete tasks in everyday life. We now use many, many channels to access information and communicate with brands. Findable, useful, contextual, and consistent across channels…online content is more important to our lives than ever before!

It then makes sense that content strategy – a plan for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, relevant content – would guide many important choices we make as digital marketers.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Neil Clemmons | Critical Mass Chicago

There’s a lot being written about the iPad – reviews, new applications, the ongoing debate on Flash, what the device does and what it doesn’t do.

Beyond the device, however, there are some implications and the longer-term impact it will have as we create digital experiences.  New devices and interfaces have a profound impact on consumer expectations, competitive moves, and the evolution of digital interfaces.  The Wii ushered in new interface concepts and ideas.  Same with xBox and xBox Live.  The iPad will do the same in its influence on the conventions and expectations of our industry.

We have several of the Wifi iPads in our offices and have had a number of discussions with our team about its implications.  Some see immediate opportunities for the iPad to ‘fit in’ to their lifestyles.  Others are still debating if it replaces something or is a supplemental access and consumption device.  It’s bigger than a phone with no ability to do more than SKYPE calls.  But it’s not quite a notebook with all the file access and productivity tools – so the iPad makes compromises in both directions.  The limitations will change in time as new applications, new peripherals, an updated OS, and improved connectivity come.

One thing the smartphone and iPad do is to force a focus on ‘what’s important’ versus ‘what’s possible.’  As sites or applications evolve, they become more bloated, more confusing, and lose the punch they can have.  Redesigns of a site or an application can be liberating, in removing the old conventions.  But invariably we worry about ‘moving the cheese’ of the habituated consumer and thus add rather than subtract in making experience design tradeoffs.  This is where Apple and the developers of iPad apps demonstrated tremendous courage in leaving behind the conventional interfaces and tools.  We need more courage to advance the customer experience.

What’s the take away after a week of using the iPad from an experience standpoint?

Here are the 7 Areas of Implications for digital marketers:

#1 – Fragmentation.

Josh Bernoff (Forrester) wrote about the Splinternet earlier this year.  That theme is in full force on the iPad.  Media and content fragmentation continue as new devices enable content consumption in new and different formats.  Information ubiquity that started with the smartphone is further exacerbated with a new form factor.  iPhone apps that are played on the iPad look OK, but you’re much more engaged by an iPad native app.   The need for liquid experiences that adapt to the screen become even more important as we look at alternative form factors.

#2 – Development Challenges.

We have to think differently about how content and experiences are created, disseminated and maintained.  Monolithic frameworks start to break down when there are hundreds of thousands of developers creating new experiences.  And with Apple changing their developer terms and conditions, it looks like Apple will expect you to use their tools and frameworks, rather than many of the cross-platform frameworks.  We have several clients working with Android, iPhone, Blackberry and other instances for applications.  The iPad and follow-on products from other vendors based on Windows 7, Chrome, or Android tablets will further exacerbate the challenge of consistency and maintainability.

#3 – Personalization.

We’re at the early stages of more personal (and relevant) consumption of media – that means the customer is even more in control of the experience.  Most will seek out an application rather than a web browser to consume their content where possible. Android, the iPhone OS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry are all targeting what Mary Meeker with Morgan Stanley says will be a bigger market than the desktop PC market by 2014.  The browser lives on at the desktop, but many of these new devices will take a very different approach to content and experience access. Remixing content from feeds, apps, alerts, and personalized experiences will become even more important.  Add in the intersection of social to these experiences and you quickly see that use cases with these new devices will become even more personal.

Read on for 4 more Implications of the iPad

By Alan Dodaro | Critical Mass Chicago

Photo by diebmx

3D’s popularity exploded in theatres last December with Avatar, the $600 million blockbuster filmed with new cameras and production technology developed specifically for the movie. TV manufacturers are now looking to cash in on the popularity with 3D-HDTVs that require special glasses ranging from $55-$150 per pair for the full 3D effect. Most sets are only bundled with two pairs, making for an expensive 3D Super Bowl party unless it’s BYO3D. Companies like Intel are working on glasses-free 3D but the technology is facing challenges in image quality and narrow viewing angles to see the effect.

A surprise play was recently made by Nintendo with the announcement of a new portable system that’s 3D-capable without the need for special glasses. The Nintendo 3DS will replace the DSi and DSi XL before March of next year. We don’t know how the 3DS displays image depth without glasses, but a puzzle game released for their current DSi system may give users a preview of what to expect. The game uses the built-in camera to track head movement adapting the angle based on user motion and giving the impression of peeking inside the game’s environment without the need for expensive display technology. If this is the technology behind the 3DS, it would be interesting to see this carried over to the world of 3D HDTV. Sony already has sets loaded with face- and motion-detecting technology and this could be an interesting feature as TVs become more aware of their environments.

Nintendo has pioneered “cheap tech” solutions that made the Wii a huge success, despite the lack of multimedia capabilities and HD video included with other systems. If Nintendo’s portable 3D solution is equally successful, we may see TV manufacturers borrow their process to ditch the dorky glasses necessary with today’s 3D TVs. I see current 3D sets as transitional, temporary solutions until more refined 3D technologies are perfected and the costs come down.

My antiquated 6-month-old Bravia won’t be going anywhere until 3D sets forego glasses. By then, I’m sure I’ll hold out for a hologram TVs that will be “a few months away.” As for the Nintendo 3DS, I’m considering one of these to hold me over until next March.

Alan is the business development/marketing coordinator from our Chicago office.

By Nicole Armstrong | Critical Mass Calgary
Last year, the ENGAGEMENTdb Report came out proving the more socially engaged a brand is the better it performs in both conversations (building consistent brand perceptions) and financial performance. And last month, eMarketer came out with a report finding that people who follow brands on social platforms have an increased intent to purchase that brand. In addition, 60% of respondents claim their Facebook fandom for brands increases their chance of recommending that brand to a friend–this is almost 80% for people following brands on Twitter.

So, this makes it very clear that online brand engagement leads to positive business results: increased purchase intent, positive word of mouth & brand affinity. However, if not approached from the appropriate angle, things can turn very sour, as bad news travels faster than ever because of social platforms. More importantly, if a brand is not being honest & genuine in its actions, consumers will discover its falsities just as fast.

So, when a brand engages with its customers, it must do so genuinely and with purpose.

The other day, one of my colleagues mentioned that his dentist sent him a Happy Birthday email. He explained how out of place it felt, as it was a generic, insert-name-here kind of email, plus he doesn’t have that kind of relationship with his dentist – a person he sees once, maybe twice, a year. Now, if he sent a Happy Anniversary: Thank you for being a valued patient for ‘X’ number of years, that would have made more sense, because it would have been in context with his brand relationship.

This got me thinking: if engaging with customers can lead to such fantastic results, yet becoming too buddy-buddy can sour that relationship, where is the line for appropriate brand engagement? Because, really, there is a fine line between treating customers like revenue generating units and going too far in trying to “friend” customers.

So, I began looking into how customers want to engage with brands online. What I found was 4 key things customers want from an online brand relationship – they want to:

1. Ask questions / make suggestions and be answered / heard
2. Be “in the know” with exclusive content about new products, features, services, etc.
3. Be rewarded for showing their support with exclusive offers & promotions
4. Be introduced to others who are associated with the brand as well

In essence, customers don’t want to become friends with their favorite brands; rather, they want to form a utilitarian relationship with brands. This helps them get the most out of their brand experience, whether it be insider tips & tricks, deals on the next hot thing, recognition for being a valued customer, etc.

So, in the end, social media should be leveraged to enable brands to reach the middle ground, between treating customers like numbers and close friends, and, instead, treating them like people, who want to get the most out of their brand experience, beyond the product and/or service.

Nicole is an associate planner from our Calgary office.