Recently Kate blogged about the often overloaded design layouts of social media sites like Facebook. Kate summarised that they are hugely overloaded with information but get away with it because people are prepared to invest more time skimming and digging through piles of extraneous information because of the emotional attachment to the material presented. Following on from that I would like to add that the social media world and its gurus are especially guilty of poor design consideration when creating web pages about events or information about social media. I, as someone who advises brands on social media, frequent these sites and it is quite frustrating to be searching for basic information for 15 minutes through masses of wikis, threads, updates and so on. It reinforces in my mind the importance of good clear, simple design and simple usability - something that ALL site creators, within social media or not, should remember when producing content for the web.

These web site usability / design principles are especially true when it comes to technology companies as they more than others need to convey clarity, due to the often potentially confusing and inherently technical nature of the products or services.

1. Who are you and what do you do?
It should be immediately clear who you are and what you do from just seconds of landing on your site. What you do can be conveyed simply in a sentence or two and who you are can be conveyed by a strong sense of brand through imagery and visuals.

2. Key facts at the fore.
Make sure your key information is either on the homepage or very clearly labelled in the navigation. Dates, relevant news, phone numbers, key products etc.

3. Avoid jargon.
Jargon is only useful for those who know what the terminology actually means! Why on earth would you want to risk alienating half the audience of people who visit your site? Beats me, but many people seem to miss this point.

4. Less is more.
In copy and also in imagery, logos etc, try to hold back and just include what is necessary so the page is uncluttered and simple to scan read.

5. Encourage them to get in touch.
Contact links, email addresses, snail mail, Twitter links and phone numbers: as much as possible encourage them to get in touch for more information. If they need help be clear about where they can go to get it.

There are lots of other, more complex and intricate considerations to expert web design, but if these basic points are covered (and you'd be surprised how many big companies don't manage to cover them) then you will convert more visitors - and more importantly people won't get frustrated and click away with a bad impression of your business.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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One of the most common reasons people are hesitant to integrate social media into their marketing plan is that they don't understand what the basic benefits are, or know where to start. I find it helpful sometimes to get back to basics when thinking about such things, so that's what I want to do today. Let's start with so called buzz monitoring, which is what I often recommend when someone asks me where they should start...

"Buzz monitoring" as a term has entered the social media vernacular to describe listening to what is going on out there in relation to your company. In the main this refers to looking into any mentions of your brand on blogs, in social networks, in forums etc and, if appropriate, responding to them or taking some sort of action, even if it is just to make a note of it. It isn't just about mentions of your brand though; look at what your competitiors are doing; see what hot topics are being discussed; and look at what is going on in your industry.

Before you can start blogging, Twittering, a group on Facebook or whatever, you have to know what is going on around you; you have to start to listen. I recommend starting a buzz meeting once a week, invite relevant people in your company to it. Task each person with looking at a different area, ideally an area they specialise in for example, whether that's a product, service or an area of expertise such as PR. Set up a netvibes dashboard (a free page where you can add and organise your RSS feeds) with each tab representing an area of interest, for example: competitors, mentions etc. Ask everyone to bring at least two things to the meeting to discuss. As well as being subjects for discussion these meetings also provide subjects for blog posts, seed ideas for future campaigns, bring previously buried problems to the fore...

You can buy automated software to crawl the web and flag up mentions of your brand (or anything else you are tracking mentions of) but it is also possible to do it without software tools, just using RSS feeds and blog search and feeding this all into one page, such as netvibes.

Spend two hours a week doing this and you will soon reap the rewards in terms of being more aware of what is going on around you. Do it for two or three months and then maybe you will feel more confident to move to the next stage... blogging (which I will post about soon)!

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At the recent D&AD student awards Christian Söderholm & Dennis Rosenqvist of Hyper Island in Sweden won a First prize for their Tag iPlayer idea for the BBC. The concept is to allow users to watch media on the iPlayer as normal, but with the help of a widget they can get related, additional content through tags which can also be shared with friends. The idea is that users can find out instant information about actors, recipes and other related content.

Great idea! So how could technology companies use this type of deep video tagging concept to sell more products?

Tagging from within the video would allow technology companies to promote their products in more depth by offering links to further resources as 'asides' to the main content; in product demos for example, by adding things like user reviews, related products, more in depth information, gallery of images etc the user gets a clearer picture of the product than they would have if the video were viewed without tags. You could address the fact that people have differing levels of technical understanding by offering explanation if required. If not, great, skip the tag and go ahead with the video. As video is used more and more on e-commerce sites to show products, this type of thing is sure to become more of a requirement.

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The YouTube generation are changing the face of video production. They create video content with no knowledge of video production skills, without 'proper' kit and publish it online for free. Some brands and companies, particularly in the technology sector, are following suit and also publishing videos seemingly shot on cheap camcorders by the student intern onto their own sites as well as on the same video channels. So is this the end of the road for quality video communications with the high production standards, where the UK has arguably led the world for a generation? Or are brands merely trying to fit into the Everyman Internet where we're all potential publishers?

Desktop Publishing (DTP) changed the face of print publishing 25 years ago. Did it herald the downfall of professionally produced publications with talented writers that spend their hours being paid to create interesting content (like many forecasted)? No, it didn't. Before DTP came about, the only 'proper printed' publications were professionally and painstakingly typset affairs produced by the big publishing houses. This type of printing was beyond the budget of the masses.

When DTP software became widely available many predicted that the availability of these tools would cripple the publishing industry, however it had the opposite effect once all the hype died down. The technology made it cheaper and faster for professionals to produce content – as we can see by the proliferation of magazines and books available today. It also paved the way for a younger generation to have access to new ways of expressing their creative talents and became the base for many of today's digital professionals.

The same has been happening with video over the last 5-10 years; many of the facilities previously only available in expensive edit suites became easily available on a low budget home PC. The element that was missing previously was the costly nature of distributing the video. The explosion of video sharing sites (Vimeo, YouTube) has of course changed that. However we seem to be going through a similar transition to the publishing world, as naysayers announce that user generated videos threatens the work of the professional film/video producer. In my view what we will find at the end of this rainbow is an industry of creative video professionals who have never known anything different who will have injected a new lease of life into a tired industry. This YouTube phenomenon creates new ways of doing things and a much easier way of delivering high quality moving images so that more effort can be spent on the quality of the content that is being delivered - and that can only be a good thing!

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I read a blog post recently that reflected what we had been talking about in the office for a while now: how brands (the ones we look at most closely is technology brands because that’s what we specialise in) are using Twitter in different ways. Specifically, how some brands are using it purely as a tool to distribute content, and others are using it as a way of talking to their customers.

Twitter is similar to RSS feeds, a well known broadcast medium, in that you use it to put your headline (limited character) content out there, with many posts containing links to read more. However, the Twitter interface allows you to view all your favourite ‘feeds’ in one place; it enables you to view who is receiving your ‘feeds’; and most importantly, it facilitates conversation between Twitterers. These are the main differences between Twitter and RSS feeds. Some brands are anonymously (the Twitterer is not named) sending out links to blog posts, news, offers etc without encouraging feedback or being conversational in delivery. I don’t think there is anything wrong with using Twitter as a broadcast medium; however I think brands are potentially missing out on some valuable insight and brand building as a result.

In my opinion it is fine to use Twitter as a broadcast medium, but I would advise brands doing this to think about adding another Twitter channel to use for conversational and customer relationship building purposes. Or maybe consider introducing more conversational tweets at a later time to your current broadcast account, once you have decided on your style and approach to conversational Twittering.

To get the most out of Twitter I think a brand should take advantage of all the different ‘hats’ a Twitter account can wear: customer service tool; broadcast medium; opinion tool; brand builder. You may choose to do this using several different accounts, as many of the larger brands do (be careful to track activity of all your different Twitter accounts though to retain consistency and work together in the best way possible) or in one account.

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Josh Bernoff comments in this recent Groundswell blog post that social media is simply another communication channel. It sounds obvious, but his point is a good one: stop freaking people, social media is really just about communicating with others; sharing and connecting with folk! It's not THAT different to what we were all doing before. So why are people panicking? Well, he's right to suggest that it's the emphasis on conversational reciprocity of this communication channel that sends shivers down the spine of many a marketing person. That makes us all sounds like anti-social freaks though. But really what freaks people is just that it is new. Talk to customers, you say, but isn't that what our PR firm / customer services team is for?!

As Josh always says, what is key to successful engagement using social media is for brands to listen - and talk back - as corporate employees. Yes, you do work for this company, but yes, you are a human too aren't you? When conversing with people via social media as an employee it is, of course, important that you filter what are saying in the same way you would if you were at an event in the same capacity, but that doesn't mean that you have to be a robot.

Technology companies should be ahead of the game when it comes to social marketing because their customers will be, that much is clear, but their customers will also be the first to get annoyed if they ask for help or reach out and don't get a reply. So keep your ears peeled.

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BabelWithMe is a real time multilingual conversation tool that is free to use. I think it will take off in some form; it certainly has lots of potential. One of the main problems we encounter when helping international technology brands communicate in a social sense is doing it in multiple languages.

Too often this holds companies back when they are thinking about how they can embrace digital communications within the social space. Take Twitter for example: shall we translate one Twitter feed into many different languages? Sometimes the time it takes to translate kills the spontaneity of the message. The other alternative, having lots of different Twitter accounts for all different languages isn't always possible, for many reasons. Besides, sometimes when using Twitter as a broadcast tool you want to have unity over the messages you are sending and this is harder if 20 different people are Twittering for you.

If BabelWithMe worked alongside Twitter somehow, then this would be real progress. Similarly if you could embed it, it would be even more useful. For now, I think you could utilise this BabelWithMe tool to continue the conversation in one place. You could encourage people to use it as a neutral site to send users to, after a webinar perhaps, or during an event to have a multilingual conversation. Let's wait and see what becomes of BabelWithMe; we predict big things!

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Zunavision, created by Stanford University researchers studying artificial intelligence, is a new piece of software that can easily embed adverts into any video. This technology could be utilised to great effect as a reseller tool, allowing a vendor to create high quality promotional videos about the latest products and services. Resellers could then easily co-brand the video incorporating their logo or other content directly with the clip and embed it on their own website. We are looking at the possibilities so watch this space.

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Ten years ago agencies urged clients “you must have a website”. Then five years later the message was “it’s no use just having a website if no-one is looking at it – optimise, optimise, optimise” The most important thing became optimising your website so the search engines could work out what it was about and rank it highly for relevant and popular search phrases. And rank it highly they would! I have worked on many a campaign where the site gained top 5 positions for massively popular phrases in very competitive industries. What halcyon days they were!

Optimise your site for search – but make it social too
In the current world of web, SEO is still very important. Ensuring your site is accessible by the most important search engine crawlers; creating the right amount of clearly tagged content to inform and attract; and encouraging related external links are all still essential parts of creating a successful online presence. But with so many gazillions of websites competing for a place in the first few SERPs (search engine results pages), something had to give. What happened was people started exploring the web through recommendations from people they know instead of just relying on Google to find great websites. Thus, other ways of getting traffic to your site have come to the fore. So what is this other avenue of natural traffic? It’s social media of course.

Create content that attracts natural search traffic - and then encourage sharing via social media
Just as in SEO, we recommend creating content that attracts people to your site. Whether this is a blog, WIKI, videos, or white papers – implement a sharing facility so people CAN distribute your article, video etc if they think it’s something that will be of interest to other people. This way you are extending the reach of your marketing and getting more bangs for your buck. Even if you don’t add a Share button or similar (they are free, just search for Share button), people can discover your site and promote it using social media by tagging your site of their own accord – however, if you provide the facility you are enabling them to share with even greater ease.

Put your content out there where your customers are
It’s fantastic to create content and then encourage sharing. But what about doing more to encourage engagement via social media? How about going where your customers spend time rather than waiting for them to come to you? Create channels on appropriate social media sites where you think your customers might spend time. Facebook generally is more consumer focused, whilst LinkedIn is great for business audiences. You’d be surprised at how many professionals are on Twitter too so consider using that for conversations with potential and existing customers.

Engage people first and then you can concentrate on converting them…
So what is our overriding message to clients now, ten years after the web exploded? It would be something like this: “Create communication materials that attract people to your site and that you can place elsewhere to engage people and drive enquiries to your site. Then when they arrive at your site make sure they can find what they want easily so you can convert them into customers”. It’s not as short and snappy a message as ten years ago but then, it’s not as easy as it once was to get people to your site and make them want to become a customer as it was back then. That’s why you need the right people to help you achieve your online business objectives! Feel free to talk to me on Twitter, email or phone about using social media to grow web traffic.

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