I’m tweeting! Twitter’s growth and possible fall…

Twitter – what is it all about? I’ve been thinking that for the past year. Why waste time sending 140 words or less!

Actually its more of a social notification tool. A great way to receive up to the minute thoughts and opinions on anything out there!

http://search.twitter.com is probably the most useful part of it, since you can search for ‘real-time’ discussions.

If you wanted to search the news as it was written or recorded at a particular point in time, you could search ‘Obama Iraq’ in a search engine to see what was written.

Alternatively you can search Twitter and find out what is being discussed, RIGHT NOW. That’s right now as in your time, as you’re sitting there reading this, not my time, at the time I’m actually writing this. Great thing is the last post I just read is going to be different to the one you will see on the same topic. They are the latest in the long list of discussions (following his speech today on withdrawing from Iraq). A discussion is dynamic.

In summary, Twitter is fantastic for leveraging the here and now, what the online world is thinking or writing about any one thing. Can’t fit it into 140 characters? Not a problem, Twitter compresses long URLs into shorter ones to fit! Google sees the value of this…

For me the next big platform is how Twitter turns this profitable. A subscription service would no doubt alienate most users, advertising may annoy many but who knows? Is Twitter about to take on Google to some level? Google did, after all, make a bid on Twitter which was rejected. A wise decision? Perhaps. One thing is for sure, Google thinks it is important enough to spend time on! Is Google about to launch an app which is the same, but better? Will it try another takeover bid?

For all that’s great about Twitter, I think it needs a big injection of Google (that is, Google’s technology):

We’re sorry, but something went wrong.

We’ve been notified about this issue and we’ll take a look at it shortly.

Sorry? You have probably 10m users and you’re sorry? A simple search repeatedly brought up this error, it is not the first. Twitter just cannot cope with the amount of traffic it generates. This is where Google really could add value. Many don’t think it is right for Google to monopolise, but for me, the simple Web user, I love Google! iGoogle, Google Maps (and mobile), Google Analytics, Trends, Web Optimiser – the list of useful apps Google provides is vast. Yes competition is healthy but if Google continues to provide such fantastic services whilst being arguably number one then I’m all for it!

Depesh

WordPress Multiple Tag Concatenation

Having used WordPress for over a year now I feel the time is right to share some tips I’ve found when creating pages, blog posts and mini-websites using WordPress . Some if not most are probably already being blogged but if not this may be of some use to you.

Combining Multiple WordPress Blog Tags for ‘Hybrid Pages’

I recently encountered the need to be able to segment my posts, to make them easier to categorise and hence link to allow visitors the ability to view relevant posts. Ever landed on a blog website and not known where to start when confronted by a long list of blog posts? Not very user friendly. Now if I create a post tagged ‘Customer Journey’ and another one called ‘Information Architecture’, someone visiting the website may want to filter out anything irrelevant aside from anything to do with ‘User Experience’ lets say.

There are a few options.

1. Let the user conduct a search (though we all know WordPress search is not the greatest…)

2. Add the tag ‘User Experience’ to your posts

3. Categorise your posts into ‘User Experience’

All 3 are viable options. However, with WordPress I discovered you can link to tags using

/tag/[TAG]

where the [TAG] is the single tag you wish to use; ensure you concatenate words using a hyphen e.g.

/tag/Customer-Experience

Will link to all posts tagged “Customer Experience”

However the smart guys at WordPress allow you to add 2 or more tags together e.g.

/tag/multi-channel+social-media/

which will search for all posts containing “multi channel” AND “Social Media”. Each tag is followed by the ‘+’ symbol. (currently nothing matches up!)

Finally if you wish to search for posts containing either keyword,

/tag/multi-channel,social-media/

hey presto, you’ve now searched all posts containing either tag using the comma as a separator. Clever? I think so…

The potential for this is three-fold

1. Improved Usability - you can of course categorise your posts, but with ever changing post topics and varying tags you may have the need for ’short term campaigns’ in terms of creating links to post categories to help users find information. Instead of changing categories you can simply choose which tags to point to. E.g. I’m blogging about holidays. As holidays are seasonal, I wish to now link to all beach holidays I’ve written about, in Europe that are ideal for families. Next month I wish to link to blogs related to winter holidays, in Europe ideal for families. Whilst categories would do the job (ensuring each and every post is categorised under ‘European Family Beach Holidays’ and ‘Winter European Family Holidays’ accordingly) it would be extremely time consuming should you wish to then also link to ‘Spanish Beach Holidays’ from your menu. Instead you can concatenate the tags and create links to all related posts.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – For SEO purposes, creating links is fantastic. You can use your keywords, which are called keywords as you expect this to be usable by your users. In the same way search engines will look upon your link text, link URL, title and body content quite favourably should you keywords match all the way down to content. Used as a menu link this signals to the search engine that you consider it important and so may your users….
3. Blog Fluidity - Static menus are always a must for usability when it comes to designing a website. Blogs are far from static so you do at times need ways to link to the most relevant posts at a higher level and this is where concatenating tags is extremely useful.

I’m sure there are other ways (e.g. using the ?tag= parameter) however in building strong, usable URLs I’ve found search engines and users alike get on well with this method!

There are some other enhancements I’ve made on other WordPress installations, such as displaying the tag query ‘meaningfully’ and creating specific page layouts depending on tags used and I’ll aim to blog these at some point…

Depesh

The InterWeb – Past, Present and Future

As I sit on this Virgin Pendolino train from Manchester to London a few random thoghts occur.

How amazing life is, with an entire ‘real life’ network of people, actions and thoughts. How could such a thing have simply evolved over time, without a more powerful existence to guide it.

Secondly, and unrelated, was how beautiful the British countryside really is and without the train journey I’d have probably never seen it.

yorkshire-countryside-uk

So this is a web log about the web so I thought of them in context to the InterWeb. For those that are not familiar with the distinction between Internet and Web, the Internet is the train and train track, the Web is a collection of all the destinations reachable via the train. The InterWeb therefore is my generalisation of both. Back to the topic…

The InterWeb as we know it, knew it and theorise it to become was not invented, in the same way as life as we know it was not. They
evolved over time. Such is the nature of our Universe that everything evolves, within the constraints of the environment.

However every now and again, just like the fish jumping out of the water, things need to evolve outside of its inherent constraints. Ask a cool sounding ‘Futurologist’ what the Interweb will look like in 5, 10 or 20 years down the line and you’ll hear lots of fanciful, some plausible thoughts including discussions on Web 3.0 (or the next big leap in web). However evolution cannot be mapped or guessed. At best we can guess but quite often we’ll be way off the mark. Just ask those born in the early 1900’s about the year 2000. It never happened that way… – but how could they have possibly known?
What did happen was technology. Technology has always existed. Who knew the power a transister would afford us, in the early days of its existence? No one did and know one thought to think about every possible application. Instead the technology acted as a catalyst to the evolution of computing into the device you’re reading this digital text from.

The future of the InterWeb is unknown. Will the train tracks change to allow us to take different journeys? Maybe new trains will enable new ways of working and thinking. Perhaps the entire structure of websites will change. Perhaps social media really is that catalyst for the evolution of web, maybe its the iPhone. What’s certain is that we as humans are full of endless possibilities. What limits us is the environment that we live in. We await the next catalyst to set off the next stage of online evolution – however I very much doubt anyone will be able to predict it.

In the meantime I reflect on this train journey and doubt, within the limitations of what I know and understand today, whether the experience of visualising the beautiful scenary can ever be replaced by anything digital, whether it be the next gen Google Maps or a new Virtual World gizmo…

What do you think this new online world looks like? Will we even get close to seeing the Matrix in real life? How much could we improve and globalise Second World? What’s the future looking like for Social Media?

Social Media & Customer Reviews – Subjective reasoning and what to do about it

Tripadvisor & Online Travel Agents (OTAs)

“Hotels.com will be integrating TripAdvisor hotel reviews on all of its 31 web sites across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The inclusion of the reviews is part of the brand’s mission to help its users choose the best property for their travel needs.”
http://www.hotelmarketing.com/index.php/content/article/hotelscom_includes_tripadvisor_reviews

Whilst Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) are quick on the uptake, their philosophy into Social Media is pivoted around ensuring the customer receives the right accommodation based on their preferences. Travel agents are far more promiscuous in their promotion of individual hotels or holiday providers thus the TripAdvisor model suits OTAs better than it does the independent hotels.

Brands cannot hide from the Social Media space due to the global reach of TripAdvisor; embracing TripAdvisor within a brand’s e-commerce strategy has yet to prove itself across the sector to be beneficial; moreover brands are looking for ways to manage their online social status whilst maintaining their integrity. Ventures include Facebook ‘fan’ pages, YouTube video groups and bespoke social media solutions giving the brands a closed control on their online PR.

Brands

In communication with TripAdvisor, the following brands were cited as examples of successful TripAdvisor integration:
• http://www.kkhotels.com/en/hotels/london/k-k-hotel-george/traveller-reviews/#startposition
• http://www.libraryhotel.com/ (scroll down)
• http://www.novotelstkilda.com.au/explore.html

The latter 2 examples show the more moderate embracing of the Social Review stratosphere.

It seems for many, TA raises more questions due to the very diverse range of views expressed. The key to customer reviews is the personal nature of the reviews and the particular experience of the user.

A “25 to 34” year-old couple visiting Hotel X may describe the hotel as “being surrounded by rotting seaweed” and commenting “wish we had saved the money and gone to Resort X just down the road”  is in stark contrast to the same hotel regarding “some of the negative reviews on here”.  After booking his break and then checking TripAdvisor,  Mr Smith  (a fictional character) states “[I was] somewhat worried about what to expect but gladly, I was not disappointed”. On the “rotting seaweed” he commented “the area is not the best area in the bay but for what I paid for I was very much impressed! Oh – and I’m a usually miserable 38 yr old so take this as praise! ”

Would you visit Hotel X? I’m sure a vote on this would be split at best, most perhaps siding not to stay at Hotel X.

Mr Smith rated Hotel X at 5/5 whereas Mr Jones rated Hotel X at 2/5. Both had contrasting experiences.

Delving deeper, Mr Smith is a middle-class office worker who spent the weekend at Hotel X for the location and enjoyed the accessibility and comparitively cheap price.

Mr Jones however is a Financial Director of a large law firm and expects much more class from a hotel. He thought Hotel X was more a hostel than a hotel and will probably fire his PA for booking Hotel X! Does this now change your perception?

From past experiences and analysis into customer reviews it has become a dangerous haven for many brands. Whether you’re a hotelier, retailer or financial institution these facts are hard to avoid:

• Customers are more inclined to post a review when they’ve had a bad experience
• Customers are likely to post a review if they’ve had an exceptional experience
• Over 80% of online consumers trust, or use online reviews before making a purchase (apologies I do not have the reference at hand for that figure..)

If 2% of your customers have a bad experience, a further 2% have an exceptional experience and the remaining 96% had a good experience, how would this impact your brand? Would 80% of potential customers trust 2% of your actual customers meaning you lose business to a competitor? Food for thought…

To control or not to control…

The fear for brands with ‘uncontrolled’ customer reviews is the openness of interpretation. Without ‘some control’ on how the feedback is portrayed to the end-user, the branded website hosting 3rd party reviews such as TripAdvisor could well become a PR and Guest Liaison nightmare with more time spent negating the negative reviews. What Tripadvisor does extremely well is in leveraging social power to provide consumers with a great insight into destinations amongst other things. The damage this has on brands is that when you’re the owner of Hotel X, TripAdvisor to some extent doesn’t really care (at time of writing!) what the customer wrote as long as it is clean and honest. Now whilst the manager of Hotel X can go online and respond to comments, how many people will already have been put off, and will continue to be put off even if the Hotel X manager states that this is a one off..

Contextual Reviews

Tripadvisor are used as an example due to the fact that they are arguably the number on travel destination review website in the world! However this is by no means a dig at Tripadvisor. In fact Tripadvisor do currently attempt to provide context to reviews; whether this is enough I don’t know.

An alternative approach to a situation like this is to consider a bespoke solution, tailored towards your brand’s product, allowing categorisation of context for the review. How old is the reviewer? What was their expectation? How could their experienced have  been made better?By leading the customer you can ensure they cover as much of the good as the bad and allow the viewer to firstly make up their mind as to “whether this customer is like me”.

This can be placed against your brand’s own criteria for with some openness on who they’re targeted towards using subtle yet distinct copy. If your hotel is a budget hotel with a USP of  “the best budget view of the bay” then make sure customers see this when they see the reviews.

In summary the Internet world is ever-changing and sooner or later more and more brands will realise the potential business they’re losing out on by not embracing it. I can only hope brands start to realise that it is not really as scary as it sounds, with a little insight and know-how!

What do you think?