Social sites bombard users with information
Most social media sites throw so much information out at the users that they are bombarded; we are being asked to look at a hell of a lot of ‘stuff’ all at once and we frequently have to scroll long pages of conversations and content. Some sites manage their huge amount of information quite well, like the Guardian site for example, where the content at least looks considered. Tools are available to better manage our social media information, like Tweetdeck. Some sites do it very badly like, in my opinion, Facebook. I still can’t get over how very messy facebook is – it is ugly to look at and highly difficult to navigate, yet it is still so successful! It seems to be me to break all the basic principles of good web design, but literally millions and millions of people use it. So, that prompts the question: how good does corporate website design need to be when Facebook is so badly laid out yet still so popular?

Design is no longer limited by technical restraints
There was a time when designing a website that you always placed the logo top left of the design, because it was the only space that could guaranteed to be seen on most of the browsers; so it became a convention. Visual design had to work around a lot of technical restraints. Today we still try to design sites where the main focus is ‘above the fold’ – seen instantly on the screen of most users' computers in most browsers. But in a social media world where written and video content is so plentiful it almost always scrolls down the page, how important is this principal now? When it is technically possible to build a whole site on one page, should you? How important is key messaging and visual design now?

Emotional response to the content compensates for poor design
To me the main difference between a company’s website and a social network site like Facebook is the motivation of the audience. Spending time on Facebook has high emotional rewards; you see snapshots of people's lives who you know and are already interested in. You are highly rewarded with satisfying insights and participate because you want to be part of the tribe, that is after all a basic human instinct. You will tolerate the disorganisation and overload of superfluous information because some of the information presented means something to you (negative or positive) and the emotional gratification is high.

Emotionally driven people are more motivated to sift through lots of rubbish
Now let’s contrast the emotions of someone tasked to improve their company’s IT system with someone who is surfing Facebook: this person will have to research several sites before he finds the right company to help him and let’s face it, there is nothing like the IT system to generate a lot of emotion. But it is a different sort of emotion right? It is not ‘don’t Johnnie’s kids look cute’ or ‘I’m gonna kill him for posting that picture of me like that!’ - it's more like ‘I am going to lose my job if we don’t reduce our IT downtime’ or ‘I don’t want another day of everyone complaining the server is slow’ ... he is less likely to want to sift through piles of content on your site, isn't he?

The lack of a personal emotional attachment means they will be quick to leave
Now consider you are the company offering services that can help the IT man and you don’t have the benefit of being an internationally renowned brand. You might be a known name, but it is quite likely there will very little emotional attachment at all between you and your prospective customer at this point. So what do you do? You could produce a one page site that presents an encyclopedia of information, all of which demonstrates your expert knowledge and wisdom on the subject at hand and why your services are so brilliant etc. You could flood the page all your staff’s latest twitter feeds (most of which will be irrelevant to the subject), tag clouds, blog updates, newsfeeds and document downloads, because technically that is possible. But what good would that do? The audience is not likely to be emotively motivated to wade through this social content. They are much more likely to feel time pressured now and so a likely response is ‘Whoa – I haven’t got time for all that' and they go back to the search results and find a competitor who makes their site design simpler and the messaging clearer instead.

Don't try and mirror social site design
In summary, the social sites are successful at what they do despite poor layout design because the user is emotionally invested in the content they are being asked to skim through. A visitor to your site on the other hand is looking to gauge whether or not you can help them quickly and easily. Whilst they may be personally invested in what they are doing, it is not comparable to the emotional investment when using social media sites. We can learn a lot from social media sites about communicating with people, but we certainly don't advise emulating social media site design.

Twitter and Facebook are compared all the time; yet essentially they are two very different beasts. Twitter is a microblogging site where posts are 140 characters long; whereas Facebook is a multifaceted social network which allows status updates, photo upload, event posting and much more.

The main comparison between them as far as I can see is that they are probably the two most popular social media sites. But how do they compare in terms of using them for buzz monitoring?
Because of Facebook's privacy settings, it isn't possible to search for mentions of your business and see all the users that have mentioned you recently; you will only see the ones that have their settings as such that anyone can see their wall postings and updates. However most fan pages will not be set to private so you will be able to see any updates from these.

On Twitter you can see everyone's updates so in this sense it is better for searching for mentions of your brand. However, it isn't as popular or widely used as Facebook, so despite the Twitter results yielding more mentions in the same time frame, this alone won't give you a very accurate representation of the type of people talking about your brand.

Nike created a great campaign recently surrounding the Tour de France. People submitted messages of hope and inspiration to a website before the race. Then a so called 'Chalkbot', a huge machine not dissimilar to one they use to spray paint roads, wrote these messages onto the roads so the participants could read them as they raced.

This created excitement for the audience as they felt included in the event. It also generated buzz, and positioned Nike as a caring and forward thinking brand that is heavily involved with the best sporting events.

What we liked about this is the idea of an activity online that had physical, real world impact. It is a great idea to generate excitement and encourage participation online for an activity that will become apparent at an event. We think it could work really well for technology and telecommunication brands. One idea we had was for event delegates to have a conversation online via Twitter on related subject prior to or during an event (as is happening all the time), the difference being that this could be projected onto a building in which the event is taking place. This type of crowd interactivity can really enhance an event.

If you're interested in finding out more about our bright ideas to bring interactivity to events contact the team.

The word blog comes from the phrase 'web log'. Blogs started as online journals for people to note down their feelings and thoughts, like a diary. There are millions of blogs that exist nowadays that aren't personal diaries, and blogs can offer businesses a great, informal way of communicating with their audience. Instead of websites being just formal presentations of a business, a blog adds an element of conviviality and a chance to publish fresh and regular content on a given subject.

Blogging is not suitable for all businesses. But, if you like writing (and are good at it, or a member of your team is); if you genuinely know your stuff and are passionate about your product or service; if what you are blogging about is genuinely interesting and useful; if you are prepared to blog fairly regularly (once a week is fine) - then I would say that it will help grow your business to begin blogging.

Here are a few of the main benefits of blogging:

Increase natural search traffic with your blog
We all know that content is key when it comes to getting indexed regularly by search engines and being ranked highly for popular search phrases pertaining to what you offer. So it makes sense that if you produce a weekly blog on related subjects you will start to be regarded by Google et al as a more important resource than when you had a 5 page website with very little written content on there. When you write a blog, think about how it could attract traffic: try and write the title so it is similar in its phraseology to what someone may type in if they were searching for information on that subject (the title of this blog is a good example; someone may well type in "How to use blogs to grow your business" or something similar, and in time this page will begin to attract traffic on that subject). Remember though, good copywriting and blogging should never at the expense of SEO. As with all content a blog should first and foremost serve to improve the user experience.

Open a dialogue with customers and to show the human side of your company
When writing a blog, if you can, try to end with questions and encourage comments so people start to become engaged in a conversation rather than it being one way. Especially if you are someone they wouldn't normally get to talk to, this is quite an exciting and empowering concept for an end consumer - to talk the the top people in such an accessible setting. It's OK to be yourself when writing a blog; it's a good opportunity to build yours and other team members' profiles and show the human face of the company rather than The Brand.

Increase the perception of yourself as an expert with your blog
By blogging on a subject regularly and building up a following, you are telling the world about your expertise on the subject. People want to buy products and services from other people who know their stuff; it instils a sense of trust in them and they are more likely to purchase. There is no better place to show how knowledgeable you are, as well as communicate your personality a bit too.

Extend the reach of your communications
Offer an RSS feed of the blog titles that people can subscribe to and read via their preferred reader, with a link to read more. Set up a Twitter account and Tweet your blog headlines (I will be blogging about some simple ways to use Twitter effectively soon too). By distributing the content like this you are leveraging your communication and enabling a potentially much bigger audience to see it.