Hello!
Just wanted to take a quick moment to introduce myself. My name is David Murray and I am the Director for Social Web Communications here at re:group.
Okay, enough shop.
Time to get personal, because that is what social media is all about. Getting personal. Believe it or not, social media isn’t new. Oh sure, the tools are, but they are just that.. tools. Social media isn’t Twitter. It’s not Facebook either. It’s about communication and building relationships. Maybe you’ve heard that before, maybe not. The point is, don’t think of the social web as just another way to advertise. There are more appropriate channels for that.
Want a quick tip? The more time you spend using the digital landscape as a place to cultivate relationships and be human, the better. Why? People now have the option to tune you out.. and they will. Unless they get to know you, not your product.
What I hope to do is to show you how this can be done while sharing some of the things I’ve learned along this social media discovery. I’ll also provide some examples that I find, and point you to some people who are way smarter than me.
Whoops! I forgot to get personal!!
Well, you can find me on Twitter (where I spend most of my time), at most offline social functions, or around the internets. I’m also the founder of Social Media Club Detroit. When I’m not doing the social media thing, I like to play the occasional video game, cook, and watch movies.
I look forward to learning with you, so feel free to reach out to me anytime!
~David Murray
Posted in
press Tags:
brands,
business,
communication,
facebook,
marketing,
realtionships,
social media,
social web,
twitter
We don’t really have a blog policy. We let our team weigh in on topics relevant to our business in their own words, with their own opinions. Sure, we check to make sure there isn’t anything slanderous or mean, licentious or libelous. But if one of us wants to say they like or don’t like something, that’s okay. If we didn’t have strong opinions individually, we’d be a lousy communications partner all together.
Unfortunately, some people take offense very, very easily. So if we do offend, we do apologize. But we do not tell our people they can’t have a viewpoint of their own.
Discomfort can be a catalyst for change, or it can be a reason to hide. What makes blogs valuable is that they are written by real people with real thoughts and opinions. How you make use of the insights they offer is up to you.
Posted in
new media,
press Tags:
blog policy,
blogging,
blogs,
opinion
No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Unfortunately, I’m referring to something a little more prosaic. Specifically, website structure and usability.
Whenever I sit down to start designing a site, one of my biggest rules is that the user must always understand where they are within the site. Not that they need to see the Site Map, just that they immediately understand which section they are in so they can more easily choose their next destination. For example, if you are reading something in the ubiquitous ‘About us’ section and click a contextual link that takes you to a press release, you immediately know you have changed sections. And if you want to continue reading case studies for awhile and then go back to a particular page in the About Us section, you can easily go back and pick up where you left off without having to click a back button. I happen to be a firm believer in the philosophy that if you have to click a back button, the site wasn’t designed very well.
Now this seems fairly obvious. But I’m not really just talking about a clear and concise navigation bar, because it’s much more than that. I’m talking everything from about how the content is organized, using breadcrumbs or visual indicators in the navigation bar, to design changes to the layout between sections. Even a great nav bar can’t save a crappy information architecture. I believe I must always give you, the user, ways to help orient yourself.
My assumption has always been that everybody is just like me and everyone needs some kind of mental model when they are interacting with a website. Cut and dry, black and white, if the user doesn’t know where they are, the site has failed.
Well, it recently occurred to me that maybe not everyone feels this way. If you are able to find what you were looking for, find something interesting, or complete your objective (ie. buy the product, contact the person, etc.), then what difference does it make if you don’t know where you are? You didn’t really miss anything, right?
My background is in the print world where you often times assume that the experience of a reader looking at a physical document is a fairly linear path. The reader starts at the front and reads (or skims) most everything on the way to the end. I tend to navigate websites in a similar way. Although not necessarily in a linear method, I usually read a little from the page that got me there, then a little from a different section, then a little from another, and so on. I rarely just stop at one page, and I like to feel like I’ve seen everything that might be important or useful. I know it’s not possible to read everything on a site, but I like to think I’ve read most everything. With this approach, understanding where I am is really important.
But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just old. I didn’t think 38 made me out of touch, but it might be time to at least accept that the world is changing. Just about everyone under 30 has grown up with the internet. To them, jumping around from site to site getting snippets of info from various sources and ingesting a constant stream of input is par for the course. There is absolutely no illusion that it’s even possible to read everything out there, nor do you even want to. You just take what you need and move on.
So that brings me back to my original question. Do you need a mental model? Is having a clear understanding of where you are in the structure of a web site a key element of your user experience? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Posted in
interactive Tags:
Information architecture,
website design
There are a lot of girls out there (like myself) who know a thing or two about sports. I could tell you that the Tigers are 16 and 10 in the Central League, with Verlander dominating the mound. The Wings goalie, Jimmy Howard is a finalist for the Calder Trophy. And the Pistons, well, let’s just say they didn’t make it to the “40 days/40 nights win or go home playoffs” this year – they just went home.
I enjoy watching the game with my girlfriends, and proudly wear my team jersey and drink my favorite cold (light) beer. It’s the perfect situation until I see one of those annoying beer commercials, ahem, Labatt Blue, with a half naked, ditzy chic trying desperately to sell beer to us sports fans. Let me be the first, but certainly not the last, to tell you that I am one girl who will never buy a beer product from a company that continues to believe sports fans are men only.
You would think after thirty years of women whacking at that glass ceiling as professional athletes - thank you Billie Jean King - beer advocates would give up already and acknowledge the other half of us sports fans. Sadly, we are still fighting those misconceptions that girls aren’t really sports fans, but more like “accessories” to the game, i.e., cheerleaders.
I don’t understand the lack of appreciation for girls paired with beer and sports. When will beer commercials realize that girls, too, like a good cold beer while watching the game? Serving up a half naked, buff man could quite possibly entice us to buy your beer. Who knows?! But until then, stop pandering to those sports fans who can grow a beard and think “Slap Shot” is the greatest movie ever.
Sports – it’s a girl thing, too!
Posted in
general Tags:
advertising,
beer,
marketing,
sports,
stereotypes,
women
Hello!