Strategy Blog: Post

Stephanie Hay - Project Manager :

A simple "Contact Us" page makes me happy. There's nothing I find more frustrating when I need help from a provider than to find no phone numbers anywhere. OR, only finding a phone number when my issue isn't pressing and I'd rather just drop them an email.

An example of one I love is DirecTV's. A couple times I've had random questions about programming and equipment, so I drop an email. They've always responded within 24 hours. The handful of times I've needed immediate attention, I easily find a phone number (or many), and, luckily, I haven't spent more than a few minutes on hold before speaking to a human. 

Cox attempts to do the same under "Customer Support," but I have to click a few times to get where I want, which isn't necessarily a bad thing as much as it's just not as straightforward.  Same with Verizon, which has me choose which category my specific problem falls into; thankfully, they offer a "none of the above" option, which seems to always be my choice.

Apple clearly prefers that I call, plus I have to jump through some diagnostic hoops before I'm allowed to submit an email.  Dell is the same way, except they won't let me email or join in a 24/7 chat unless I have a service tag.  Sure, these are both logical requests of me, but I'd argue that they don't necessarily equate to a frustrated user as the most friendly or efficient. 

Anyway, I've noticed that more behemeth companies are straying from what seemingly used to be the "Contact Us on Our Terms" pages, which had a choose-your-adventure style process that may or may not end with actually contacting the company.  Maybe I'm just getting to be a more patient user, but as big businesses like CNN and Starbucks start making attempts to interact with their direct users, I'm betting that I wasn't the only person who found convoluted "Contact Us" pages maddening.

Laura Dec - Project Manager :

Facebook and the Facebook Application Platform are receiving more and more buzz everyday.  So, should you join in on the craze if you’re an existing “Web 2.0” site or still in the planning phases of a start-up?

The answer, of course, depends on what your business objectives and goals are, but there is no doubt that becoming part of the Facebook community holds tremendous potential.

If you’re a Facebook newbie, here are a few stats:

• Facebook has more than 67 million active members, with an average weekly growth of 3 percent since January 2007.
• More than half of Facebook’s members are beyond college; the fastest growing demographic is 25 years old and older.
• More than half of Facebook’s active members return daily to spend, on average, 20 minutes on the site.
• More than 18,000 applications have been built on the Facebook platform, with 40 new applications being added every day.
• An astounding rate of more than 95 percent of Facebook members have used at least one application built on the Facebook platform.
• (For more information and up-to-date statistics, please see http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)

Aside from the readily available large network of users, other benefits of building a Facebook application for your business include:

Continue reading "Should I Build a Facebook Application?"

Ken Yarmosh - Former Staffer :

Read this sentence. You just used the left hemisphere of your brain. That’s because our brains are contralateral, which means the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice-versa. In case you are still trying to figure that out, in the West, we read left to right.

Left-brain thinking has traditionally been associated with traits like order, analysis, and logic and jobs in accounting, engineering, and the medical field. But the future, according to Daniel Pink, is in right-brain thinking or at least in it playing a much more significant role.

Pink’s A Whole New Mind provides a compelling argument for the impending transition of society’s influencers to be right-brain thinkers. These thinkers are aesthetic, contextual, and metaphorical and typically have been artists, inventors, or storytellers. In Pink’s future, many left-brain jobs, products, and activities will be outsourced, automated, or less valued due to globalization and incredible efficiencies created by none other than left-brain thinkers (in particular Pink’s three agents of change are Abundance, Asia, and Automation).

The conclusion is simple: whip your right-brain into shape. Start exercising those right-brain muscles. Pink outlines the “whole new mind” he believes is critical in this coming era, indicating the need to complement function with design, argument with story, focus with symphony, logic with empathy, seriousness with play, and accumulation with meaning. The whole new mind is not the absence of the first; it is the inclusion of the second.

Should Pink truly be prophetic, his conclusions would have significant implications on how businesses and organizations interact and communicate with clients, customers, and constituents on the web (you saw this coming, didn’t you?). Perhaps elements of his whole new mind are already here.

Blogs have created a more conversational ("play") tone than the traditional corporate web site. Simply having a web site ("function") is no longer a competitive advantage; successful sites have great design. Good sites don’t just have copy that sells people ("argument"); they tell a story.

Pink’s vision of the future, while still untested, doesn’t seem unrealistic. We definitely see the need for a “whole new web site” with many of our clients and more generally, in our industry. Web agencies or web groups within organizations won’t succeed with left-brainers alone. They’ll need right-brain thinkers to help integrate and synthesize web presence ("symphony") , to craft narrative content ("story"), and create meaningful web experiences ("empathy," “design,” and “meaning").

Get ready for a whole new web site.

p.s. - We’re actually already pretty good at those.

Ken Yarmosh - Former Staffer :

Mahalo is serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis‘ latest project. The goal of Mahalo is to create a human powered search engine for the most commonly searched terms of the web.

In a time in which everyone is starting a business by trying to take advantage of the long tail—that is, attempting to profit on the niche nature of the infinitely niche web—Calacanis and Mahalo buck that trend. Calacanis says the “big fat part of the tail are the searches that people do over and over again.” When people search for ”Lindsey Lohan” or ”digital camera,” he wants them to think of Mahalo.

Mahalo has been compared to Wikipedia and About.com. Wikipedia, however, leverages the wisdom of the crowds and is a collaboration of groups of interested individuals crafting and editing the entries of the world’s largest encyclopedia. About.com and Mahalo are similar but the former focuses on subjects and topics (e.g., Money Planning) versus search terms. The commonality of the two is that they are written by guides.

Calacanis recognizes that his human-powered search cannot compete with the likes of Google when it comes to the extensiveness of its results. But he’s not trying to dethrone Google. He wants to “hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs [search engine results page] available today.”

In an interview with Loic Le Meur, Calacanis talks about his problems with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and its experts, some of whom toyed with Mahalo.
Jason advocates for a different idea that he calls “Site Experience Optimization,” which focuses on making sites better for people.  SEO, by contrast, is all about optimizing a site for a machine—a computer algorithm.

SEO and Site Experience Optimization are not conflicting ideas. Blackhat SEO, determined to create SPAM results and game search engines, care nothing about Site Experience Optimization. But any intelligently designed web site considers both computers (algorithms) and humans. They are designed to ensure that sites are found by search engine robots and, ultimately, are useful for visitors.