interesting

www.dictionaryofsydney.org/

Developing an online strategy for Fuzzbuzz Branding - Part 1

Introduction
In this post I’m helping a good mate to tune up his web strategy. This grew from an initial offer to assist with some SEO. Happy to take comments or detailed critiques! Also Fuzzbuzz Branding is not the real company name.

Step 1. Review your business strategy
This is important because it creates a context for your web activity, tightens your focus and helps to provide rational for how your web strategy is approached. A brief summary of what I think is the Fuzzbuzz Branding business strategy:

• A specialist consultant focusing on branding strategies and graphic design
• Current target market is large Australian not for profit sector organisation
• Key service offering is the design and layout of reports
• Marketing strategy is personal contact via an established personal network, currently focusing on generating more business with existing clients

Relevant constraints include:

• Limited time and money for marketing; servicing existing customers is a higher priority
• A large number of competitors offering the same services with very low barriers to entering this market space. Basically there are 1000’s of graphic designers waiting to take over your clients.

Step 2. Align the your online presence to the business strategy
This probably seems like a motherhood statement but if your going spend anytime (money!) using the web in your business then put the effort into making it work for you. Notice; I’m also broadening the focus from how to ‘SOE your web sites’ to how to use your online activity as a marketing tool. This is an important concept to grapple with because much of your online marketing will be done away from your web site. It will also help you to get more into a Web 2.0 and social media headspace if you chose to. This is where you should assess your comfort level with ‘being online’. A blog is a great online marketing tool but you have feel comfortable operating in space and be willing to commit real effort into making it work. It’s not for everyone.

So in the case of Fuzzbuzz Branding I’m suggesting what I’m calling:

The ‘online business card’ strategy

By this I mean the primary function of your online activity will be to assist people who you’ve already had some form of interaction with to make to contact with you. Just like handing out old skool business card so people have your phone number.

The rational for this is it is;low resource, aligns well with your existing personal approach to marketing, and works well with your current comfort level with things like bloggs. It will also give a sound foundation if you chose to expand your strategy at some later date. So to stay focused I’m recommending you avoid doing any of the following:

• Create an online gallery to show case your funky designs
• Lots of SEO & SEM in an effort to generate a lot of ‘eyeballs’ on your site
• Blogg and twatter to develop a relationship with a community of potential clients
• Use lots of web technology to service existing clients, no payment gateways, online collaboration tools, etc

Step 3. Work out how to execute the strategy
This is where we get in to the nuts ‘n’ bolts and talks specific activities. The key tactic in the online business card strategy is making sure when someone searches for Fuzzbuzz Branding or your name they can easily find your contact details. Key activities:

• Tuning your web site
• Creating links to your site
• Getting your name and contact info out there in other place

End of Part 1
In the next installment I’m going to focus on tuning your web site. With two goals:

1. Making it super easy to find your site and the associate contact information
   
2. Improving your results when customers use a search engine to try and find you contact details

Stay tune...

Elastic lists - a great interface for faceted browsing

Have a look at this neato interface for 'faceted browsing' - Elastic lists

And if you want some Friday afternoon mind bending...

Card Sorts

Some quick resources to get the low down on doing a Card Sort. Remember it is as easy as it seems!

• www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide
• www.usability.gov/design/cardsort.html
• www.markboulton.co.uk/articles/detail/card_sorting_part_1

This article offers a critique of some of the pitfalls with card sorts

• www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2008/10/extending-card-sorting-techniques-to-inform-the-design-of-web-site-hierarchies.php

For me what’s interesting that card sorts are single tool used in part of a larger design process. Also interesting are the alternative activities esp. the findablity testing. These might be a better fit in situation where IA is constrained by other factors such as dealing with the inevitable politics of ‘my business area must have spot on the homepage’ or the existing IA is heavily entrenched.

Behavior Based Taxonomies

Found this interesting post on Behavior Based Taxonomies

This one is somewhat full on: Behavior-Based Taxonomy (BBT)
If you stick with it there is a great summary of BBT – basically a taxonomy based on “the actual list of search terms that people actually use when they search a site”.

Everything you ever wanted to know about “faceted classification”, including how make one!

There are two basic ways to make a faceted classification usable on the web: keyword searching or facet-based navigation.

Simple example of this at work would be an online mobile phone shop with options to view products via different facets: price, brand, features (MP3, Camerra, etc)

What to do with search logs

This is a great on article covering how you should be monitoring search logs – Interpreting Your Search Activity Reports

Also like that it points out the connections between search logs and more general usage logs.

Why old content is like sour milk!

Web content migration: disastrous strategy has a great analogy for the classic strategy “we’ve got to migrate everything into the new CMS”: pouring sour milk into a new jug! Not sure if the reasons for bad content are entirely accurate but still a good read.

Some interesting developments in search engines

www.bing.com
www.crikey.com.au/2009/06/02/microsoft-bing-will-it-fizzle-or-boom/
www.wolframalpha.com/

What are the elements of a well designed web site?

This blog post does a good job of breaking down the design of the two sites and using this to highlight some important aspects of what makes the Apple site ‘well designed’ As a number of the comments point out it is a bit of a Mac lov’ in but the principles are worth considering.

I like point 1 about simplifying the home pages down to navigation and small number of easy to focus on items. And point 2 about the value of flow is also interesting. The classic design flaw in most Intranets is trying to cram a lot of stuff on the homepage because everything is import. The result is often a cluttered mess which leaves many users confused.

Apple vs. Microsoft - A Website Usability Study

Why your intranet looks so dull…

Check out this interesting article around the value of branding intranets; Why Your Intranet Needs Its Own Personality.The article points out that the weak governance most organisations have around their intranets makes developing and applying branding difficult. I found it interesting that the author describes a familiar three way tension for branding:

1. Users don’t really care about corporate branding
2. A lot of managers don't want to follow corporate branding, what they actually want is the ability develop sub-branding for thier division or business unit intranet sites
3. Typically it is ‘only a few lonely soles at the top of food chain’ who seem to be adamant on strong corporate branding being applied internally

Sound familiar? The article goes onto describe various reasons why branding the intranet is of value. For me the key point was keep a strong focus on creating value for staff who use the intranet.
Why can’t the intranet be funky?
How many times have you looked at your corporate intranet and despaired that it is another fine example in all that is dull and lazy in web design? Surely for many large ‘steady as she goes' organisations the internal web space is place where a few more risks can be taken? So why can’t the intranet be funky and engaging or at least well designed and easy on the eye?
Try shifting the focus to users and at all cost avoid branding becoming an expression of the power of the designated cooperate owner. How many times have you heard ‘we need to enforce the branding guidelines developed by marketing/internal communication/corporate affairs’…

Tag clouds, life events and showing relationships between data…

Last week I had a colleague phone me and ask me what I know about tag clouds. He’s had an idea that this might be a good technology for highlighting relationships between services offered by the organisation. A sort of Amazon model of people who brought X may also be interested in Y & Z. This arose from a more general discussion within the org about using a “life events” taxonomy to classify and then combine online services from several agencies.

It strikes me that what all of this is really about is being able to infer and illuminate thematic relationships between discrete pieces of information. In my view this is one of the greatest opportunities afford by the web and more specifically by semantic technologies. So for this post I’m going to try answer the initial question and cover some options and ideas for ‘semantic lite’ web apps.

Starting with Tag clouds…
There are lot of different approaches to generating tag clouds. However for the purpose of this discussion the most interesting is:

1. Classifying or ‘tagging’ content using some form of taxonomy and adding these to the metadata, typically using subject or functional keywords


2. Then displaying these tags in a visual way on the page, with each word being a link to keyword search for each term.

The ABC uses this approach for their hot tags function. For a good overview of tag clouds see Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples And Good Practices.

And now onto inferencing...
Consider the following simple example of an inference:

• If “A is related to B” and “B is related to C”
• Then it is possible to infer “A and C are related in someway”

So how would this work in multi agency Life events approach? If someone is registering the birth of a new born child in Agency A. And this service is part of a group of the ‘becoming a parent’ life event, then this person may eligible for other services in this life event group. Now consider the following list of actual birth related life events from various government service providers:

• Birth (http://www.healthinsite.gov.au/)
• Having a child (Service Tasmania)
• Having a Baby (Connecting NSW)
• Becoming a Parent (Citizen Ireland)
• Starting a family (State of Jersey)

So if these were mapped as meaning the same thing, i.e.

• Birth = Having a child = Having a Baby = Becoming a Parent = Starting a family

Then it would be possible to infer that someone eligible for a service related to ‘having a child’ from Agency A could be eligible for services classified as ‘starting a family’ in Agency B.

Combining this visualisation…
So taking the tagging and the inferencing as foundation and adding some visualisation technology I think it would be possible to create some very useful ‘visual maps’ of services.I’ve done a quick trawl and found some interesting sites to give an idea of how powerful this approach can be.
Live Plasma is really cool as it re-use data from Amazon API and adds a great interface to help users to see relationships between music genres, artist etc. So it is simply representing exiting publicly available data in a visual way!

And have a look at this online thesaurus . This tool searches a number of online thesauri. Look out for the results from the Visual Thesaurus.

A few more sites if you’re interested in visualisation
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/
http://www.orgnet.com/twitter.html
http://www.ivy.fr/revealicious/demo/spacenav.html

How much should an organisation invest improving the intranet search?

Last week I began grappling with the following question:

“How much should the organisation invest improving the intranet search and will this be recouped in timed saved finding information on the internal web channel?”

There is general agreement that poor search cost organisations money in lost time. Quantifying this is tends to be based around simplistic extrapolation. For example: X Staff spending Y seconds each on searching for information equals ten zillion dollars in lost productivity. Therefore we should invest money in a new search application. Sort of fails to discuss the complexity of finding information or recognise that there are plenty of possible approaches in addition to just focusing on improving the search application.

As I ponder this within the context of where I work some thoughts have begun to emerge including:

• Quantifying the performance of an internal search engine is difficult and will probably be based around fuzzy qualities measures


• Without these it could be difficult to establish a benchmark in which to measure the effectiveness of various enhancements or optimisations


• Building a search based around lots of high quality metadata is resource intensive. It could end up costing the organisation more then it returns in productivity improvements.


• Is it more cost effective to rely on the built in power of a good search application and put the resources into improving content, fixing the IA, archiving out of date pages etc?

I’ve found a couple of interesting articles and I'm sure I’ll be posting more on this topic.

• Metadata Schmetadata, Relevance and Reality


• How to Measure Findability in Enterprise Search Solutions