I’ve yet to see anyone get particularly excited about the launch of Google+ from an SEO perspective but believe me they will… I’ve been wondering if Google+ will feed into the organic search results and how that would work. Looking at some of the guidelines and help files shows that Google+ updates ‘may’ be fed into organic results and Google have put terms in their content policy to cover SEO’s trying to game this.

The Google+ User Content and Conduct Policy says the following:

8. Ranking Manipulation
Do not manipulate ranking or relevancy using techniques like repetitive or misleading keywords or metadata.

Meanwhile the Google+ support pages say:

When you share something publicly, it may appear in search results.

So, some updates from Google+ can be fed into the organic search results and Google are nervous about how this will be used by the less reputable SEO’s out there and expecting it to get gamed (at least to begin with). It’s likely there will be some level of gaming going on as people try to take advantage of another way to dominate the first page of organic results and while Google work out how best to deal with this new feed into search.

It will be interesting to see how they fit into search results, whether Google puts them with the Twitter or Realtime results, or whether they are properly integrated. Personally, I hope they keep them separated slightly, at least to start with, while they get to grips with the way people use Google+.

I was drawn to a tweet by Steve Rubel, from Edelman Digital, earlier:



The tweet sucked me in and so I read the blog post (great reading!).

It got me thinking:



Would it ever be possible to create a sentiment index capable of measuring the value or popularity of a web page based on multiple signal factors.

There are so many factors to consider. Not only are there Links (in the traditional sense) and Likes (in the Facebook sense) there’s also Tweets and Retweets, Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious or Diigo and semantic relevance (the actual relevance of the textual, or other, content) of course. Semantic relevance in fact is key and one of the problems with search and SEO in general is that relevance has been gamed to death by Links and black-hat SEO practices. When we’re trying to discover content relevance is possibly the most important signal, even more so (or at least as important) than how popular a web page is in a lot of cases.

If I’m really trying to discover the best content I can though there is another signal which can act as a really powerful sign of positive sentiment, actual user engagement with a piece of content. High engagement with a web page suggests people like it and find it interesting or useful, to me that’s a powerful signal that indicates I might want to read it or interact with it too.

If you could combine semantic relevance with Links with popularity (from Likes etc) with actual level of user engagement you could have a very powerful sentiment based approach to discovering content relevance. I love the way Steve Rubel says in his blog post that with Likes ‘this new network of signals allows content to find you, rather than you having to go find it’. That’s the key to good information discovery, reversing the trend from being the content hunter to being hunted by content that is relevant, popular and (in my opinion) has high levels of engagement.

Content which is Liked a lot isn’t necessarily relevant, linked to a lot or engaging…

How would you measure engagement across the whole web? I hear you say. Good question. Obviously most web pages and pieces of content have analytics which have data that suggests a level of engagement from its users, but that’s never going to be opened up to make it a useful signal for information discovery (or maybe Google could use Analytics data?). Could a company like Hitwise (provider of analysis and data on website usage), who has access to web users click stream data at the ISP level, use data on engagement to create a new form of signal to add to the mix? Unlikely as it’s not their business model and also privacy laws could get in the way.

I don’t know the answer but I have had fun thinking about it today. Love to hear your thoughts! Do you think we’re moving to a web of Likes (we may well be in the near term) or are we more likely to move to a web of Sentiment where multiple signals of relevance, usage, popularity and actual user engagement are key?

Photo by retinafunk on Flickr.

I’ve held senior roles and run projects at major brands where I’ve been responsible for a large part of a web or ecommerce strategy and as a result responsible for a lot of the staff who make that strategy come to life. Every time I’ve taken on a new role or project at a large organisation I’ve been disappointed to see the lack of knowledge sharing that goes on both within the web team and between departments like tech, marketing and web.

It pains me every time I meet a web designer or developer who has no appreciation of how their work can affect a sites SEO, or a marketer who has no appreciation of how important content is and how users like to consume content online or a content producer with no appreciation of how users like to search on Google and how content affects your ranking.

I’m not saying that your designers should be SEO experts, far from it, I just believe that your website would be more effective if the people in charge of certain disciplines had an appreciation and understanding of how that discpline affects and complements the others. This goes for agencies too; personally I wouldn’t hire an SEO agency who didn’t at least understand the relationship between SEO and content and code and how getting all of them right is (generally) going to deliver better results for the business than just getting one of them right (or performing all three activities in total isolation).

In my experience, brands with internal web teams benefit more if there is a mutual understanding of what each area does and how they can impact each other. This can foster better relationships, improve personal development opportunities for staff and result in better results and ROI from all of your web activities. Let your teams share knowledge, present to each other what it is they do and why they need help and understanding from other disciplines and try to encourage a passion for the wider web and digital world in general (believe me, enthused staff are happy and productive staff).

Once you foster a culture of learning and sharing in your organisation you will soon begin to see the benefits. Nothing is more pleasing than seeing developer staff get up from their seats and head down to marketing because they have an idea that will improve a social media campaign landing page or for a content writer to go and talk to your search staff before writing copy for some new pages.

Building and managing websites requires ongoing input and understanding from all disciplines otherwise your website will never perform as well as it could have.

Someone I follow tweeted a link to the Notcot.com design & aesthetics blog which showed their Operation Window Seat series of posts containing photos taken from the window of planes. I love photos which show features of the earth from above so thought I’d dig around in my Flickr sets to see what I could find from my collections.

I could only find two decent shots which were both taken over Siberia en route to Japan (on separate trips). That could be something to do with the amazing scenery and frozen landscape but more likely it’s because I get incredibly bored on longhaul flights. Enjoy!

The Siberian landscape is incredible particularly the snaking, winding frozen rivers

Guess the airline?

I’m always amazed by the way some brands and even some whole industries still seem to ignore the web as a viable channel for communication, content, sales, PR or even advertising. What does it take to persuade them that they can’t just ignore the online medium and at the very least they need to take steps to engage with their online audience (because they’ll have an online audience even if they haven’t got a website)? So I like to highlight statistics that will help to make this clear. The three charts below are from FEED: The 2009 Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report. It’s a great report produced by a great agency and in my opinion these stats are very persuasive!

So, how a user experiences your brand online can have positive or negative bearings on how they feel about you. This is going on even if you don’t have a website, don’t do social media or don’t actively do any online PR or advertising. Your potential customers are still having experiences that are linked to your brand in their own conversations and online journey whether you are actively involved or not. Wouldn’t it be better to establish your own presence so you can increase the positive sentiment and work to address the negative?

Now the above is a powerful chart! If 97% of web users could have their purchase decisions positively (or negatively) influenced by your online presence doesn’t that make it something worth investing in?

Again, the above is hugely powerful. If an online experience can turn someone into a new customer then why aren’t you working your digital assets to your advantage?

As I said I aim this at those industries and brands who seem to lag behind the adoption curve when it comes to the web (I’m thinking of a lot of the financial services industry, a surprising amount of the FMCG sector and some service industries). The general message here is that you have a lot to gain by improving your presence on the internet, making it easy to interact with, useful to those you’re trying to attract and engaging so people want to interact.

Suggest you read the report which is available online here.

Social media and social networks are a part of our daily lives. They’ve now been accepted as more than just entertainment. It’s taken a while but the world of business has now realised that it can no longer ignore them (or the web) as a channel of communication to reach its customers and interact with them. Businesses are all rushing to find a way to utilise Twitter and Facebook, some are doing it well others are failing, but most industries are at least trying. One industry who’s finding it more difficult though is financial services.

Financial services companies such as banks, analysts, brokers, traders and insurers all have a duty under various laws to keep copies of all communications with clients, customers and counterparties (particularly when it comes to discussions giving advice). This paper trail is required to ensure there’s no bias, insider dealing, dodgy advice or plain lying going on. The problem is, social networks like Twitter and Facebook don’t allow these companies to archive and store their communications making it very difficult for them to become meaningfully involved in actual two-way conversations.

This is a recognised issue now in the industry and even regulators recognise the potential benefits of being able to properly engage online. FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) in the U.S. has set up a Social Networking Task Force (discussed at their annual meeting recently) to explore how regulation can embrace these of technological advancements rather than hinder their adoption.

Now, while I can understand the need for due diligence, archiving, transparency and regulation around financial services, surely the industry needs to grow up and realise it’s time to ease these shackles and allow the conversation to flow. The conversation is happening anyway; in phone calls, cafes, restaurants and bars financial industry execs meet with clients, colleagues and competitors and discuss exactly the kind of issues that generally should be on the record (this has been happening for ever). At least if these types of conversations happen online they will be archived by Google if nothing else. Surely the regulators need to accept that their industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the sociable world of online media whether they like it or not? Time to adapt in order to adopt modern methods of social business communication! The benefits of allowing the conversation to happen far outweigh the negatives.

Of course the other way this could play out is that Twitter and Facebook provide a way for these types of companies to engage through special accounts which allow for archiving and provide regulatory compliance. Personally I don’t think that would be a good thing as it would place restrictions on their interactions and mould financial services use of social media rather than letting it grow and adapt organically. I’ve had many conversations with people from financial services on just this topic and they agree, they don’t want to be restricted and want to use social media as any other business would.

What’s that? Traditional news media is having a tough time? So everyone keeps saying and yet still (and this happens often) information emerges which seems to demonstrate that they are trying as hard as they can to destroy themselves with very little help from anyone else.

The main problem facing the news media industry right now is how to keep their coffers full (Times paywall anyone?) when their advertising revenue has slipped considerably and print circulation has dropped. So you’d think that they’d be trying to engage users, keep them on their websites for as long as they can to get as many eyeballs (and clicks) on their adverts as possible? So that would mean having a site which is heavily user centric, easy to use, engaging and provides a great experience that makes people want to stick around, right?

Wrong I’m afraid. This article from the Guardian demonstrates just how broken the news industries approach to the online experience is. It seems that news websites are guilty of something the big portals used to suffer from (going back 7 or 8 years here and thinking of Yahoo, Excite and Lycos in particular), linkitis (an overwhelming urge to shoe-horn as many self-referencing links as possible into your homepage). News sites average 450 links on their homepage and some have as many as 5,447 words (The Daily Mail) on a single page. The worst offender it seems in the Mirror which has 94% of the total words on its homepage (1,182) as part of a link. That’s utterly ridiculous!

That’s an astounding amount of linkage. I have no idea how humans are supposed to comprehend or make use of that level of information overload. Visually it looks a mess, hierarchically it makes little sense and usability wise it’s plain madness. How on earth is a user supposed to find what they are looking for in that maze of links and references? Perhaps they’re not. Maybe the people who run these websites believe that by populating pages with self-referential (internal) links they are helping entice (trick) users into clicking just one more page and thus increasing the chances of getting more ad revenue. The value to a user of some of these links is questionable.

Roll on engagement ads. The sooner we get away from page-view and click metrics and start to make publishers accept being paid on engagement (or at least more meaningful metrics) the sooner these sites will have to address their user experience and stop practices such as this. Swamping a page with links helps nobody. It lowers engagement in your site, dilutes traffic down routes you maybe don’t even really want them to go, cheapens your content and destroys the user experience. Stop eating yourself news and start thinking about your users and what they might actually want! Otherwise you’re going to end up losing more of those valuable eyeballs as your users increasingly prefer consuming news through other methods (readers, desktop apps, social networks).

I got inspired to write my own personal social media policy after reading various brands policies via this link on the Social Media Governance site (thanks to @jasonryan for sharing it on Twitter). Companies and brands feel the need to publicise the rules they expect their employees to follow when they use social media, or in reality if they choose to publish anything online. I see the benefits of having a policy and trying to keep some level of coherence in the conversations your brands ambassadors (yes, your employees are brand ambassadors), although most seem to be rules rather than guidelines and don’t actually encourage conversation at all. Social media policies or guidelines should encourage participation and conversation and be there to ensure brand values are upheld and continuity is upheld.

Anyway, this is a work in progress so liable to change and will end up on my ‘about’ page soon.

1. I will engage
   On Twitter, my blogs, by commenting on other blogs, on Facebook (although not that often anymore), on forums and anywhere else I feel the need, I will engage and converse with those I find interesting, I choose to engage with, who want to listen and want to converse with me.
2. I will share
   On Delicious, Flickr, Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Dopplr (where I am at least as fast as a duck) and many more places. I like to share stuff I find interesting and would love it if you share your interesting stuff with me too. Discovering other peoples interesting content is really important and a great way to find new information.
3. I will tell the truth
   Everything you read/hear from me will be the truth, at least it will be the truth to me at the time I say it, should it become less true as facts emerge please don’t blame me I was only acting on the information at hand. At times I may say something that isn’t strictly true; usually, and if you are so skilled, you will be able to spot this as sarcasm or an attempt at humour.
4. I will not feed the trolls
   Spam, troll comments, purveyors of hate and negativity; I will ignore and most likely delete you where possible.
5. It’s my opinion
   No one elses. Not my clients, my employers, nor my friends, nor my families. This is me, and you get the option to take me or leave me. If at any time I do broadcast someone else’s opinion I will be sure to let you know.
6. I will debate
   At times I may disagree with you. That’s healthy, don’t be upset, I expect you’ll agree or disagree with something I write at some point too. Discussion and debate is good!
7. I might follow you
   If I find you particularly interesting I might elect to follow you around, subscribe to your feeds, check out the stuff you share or connect with you on professional networks. Don’t panic, I’m not a stalker it’s a compliment!
8. If you follow me
   Please play nicely. I welcome all to follow me but please try to ensure we have at least something in common, it could be pretty futile trying to converse with me otherwise. This point goes mainly to brands and sales people; don’t spam me its a conversation I’m looking for not a barrage of brand heavy waffle or a sales pitch.
9. I might unfollow you
   Don’t get offended. Chances are that you either haven’t got enough in common with my interests or that I can’t take the volume of content you produce. If you think neither of these is the case and you don’t spot something in number 8 that sets alarm bells ringing then try talking to me, perhaps I missed something or you never tried to really connect…
10. I may bore you
    I reserve the right to be boring and mundane at times and there’s a good possibility that sometimes you might not like the content I produce or share. That’s fine, just move along, I won’t take offence.

I dug out and dusted off an old set of slides recently to present to some colleagues on the benefits of taking a truly user centered approach to design and development. The slide below in it’s original form dated from a presentation I gave to a small conference back in 1998 (in ’98 it was Photoshop drawn). Brilliant to dust it off and find it’s still totally relevant (would it ever not be?). It describes the end game, where I strive to get to by adopting a user centered approach.

I get really unhappy with business people who want me to help them deliver business goals with no regard for the UX! I’ve come across this in almost every business I’ve worked in, often from the product owners (which is why this slide get’s dusted off every now and then and I talk them through the benefits of UX).

It’s also a great way to get clients or the business to understand that taking a UX centered approach and delivering a top user experience doesn’t have to compromise their business objectives and is often the best way to deliver them!

Of course, everyone’s approach is different and their aim may differ from mine, so what does your UX end game look like?

Usability refers to the ease with which an interface (be that a screen, device, object or website; basically anything you can interact with) can be used by its intended audience. Usability takes into account how easy or efficient something is to use, how easy it is for a newbie to learn to use it and even how satisfying that experience is for users. I’m passionate about it, anyone working in online industries has to be (in my opinion). The ROI that results from getting usability right is huge and can be the difference between success and failure if you’re designing or creating anything.

Brands as interfaces

Every time a consumer comes into contact with a brand be that online, by walking into a shop, reading about them in a newspaper, receiving a piece of marketing or any one of the myriad other ways you can encounter a brand, an interaction takes place. The places where this contact occurs is the interface, the way that contact manifests itself is the interaction. An interaction can be physical, verbal, mental or social in nature and each interaction can result in success or failure for your brand. What you’re looking for, of course, is for each interaction to be a satisfying experience for the consumer where they go away with a positive impression of your brand. For that impression to be a good one, as a brand you’re going to have to be usable, accessible, communicative and sociable.

Your customers come first

I’m a big fan of getting customer service right. As a consumer myself I get so frustrated when I’m let down by a brand but can easily see how they could have avoided or fixed the issue. As a consumer there’s a journey you embark on with a brand and touchpoints where you interact with them, those touchpoints are the interfaces between you and the brand. Customer journey mapping is a great tool which allows an organisation to document all the touchpoints they have with their customers and audience, measure their success or failure at each touchpoint and then work to improve or optimise the journey. Undertaking this exercise can be eye opening and really shows where you need to focus to make customers interactions with you more enjoyable and successful both for them and for you. In these days where brands are seeking to expose themselves to their audience through social media this seems particularly relevant, it also sounds very much like usability at work to me. Mapping out and optimising a customer journey seems very much like an effort to improve usability.

In this sociable world

We’re seeing a lot of talk about business design lately with a lot of buzz around ‘social business design’ in particular. This new trend of brands trying to be engaging, communicative and open requires the customer (user) experience to be spot on. Given the fact your audience can now discuss you across multiple platforms and media it’s more important than ever that you remove the pain points in your interface to make the customers experience as smooth and hassle free as possible.

Brand usability

So, brand usability. The practice of measuring and optimising a brands user interfaces. It’s a practice that already exists (under many other names) and there are specialists out there who can help you with certain interfaces you want to optimise. However, people who can offer to give a holistic service to help you make your brand more usable are few and far between right now. I think that’ll change. As social becomes the norm and the customer comes back into focus, brands are going to be crying out for help in these areas as they realise they’ve brought all the focus onto their service through trying to run before they can walk in this new sociable world.

Brand usability, social business design or customer relationship optimisation; whatever you want to call it the future seems bright for those who understand these topics and it maybe even brighter for brands who understand the importance of practising them.