ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Video: less is more for the user

ConnectingHR tweet-up January 2011: video and pictures

Last night's ConnectingHR tweet-up was great fun and it certainly looked like those who were there were having a good time - see the Twitter stream to feel the love.

Well done to Gareth and Jon for organising a great event and keeping the free drinks flowing for as long as they did.

I took a few photos and a video. Enjoy . . .

 

Why it pays to recycle ideas

Interesting to see that food producer Yeo Valley has reported increased sales that it attributes to its Live In Harmony marketing campaign. This campaign included this hugely successful rapping farmers video . . .

More interesting is the fact that the video was not an original idea. Check out this video from some Canadian rapping farmers from more than a year ago . . .

What Yeo Valley has demonstrated is that great content delivered in the right way can be really engaging - it also helped to run the ad in the first ad break of a new series of X-factor. 

Here is another example of using a great example to your own advantage. This time Sesame Street did a great job of jumping on the Old Spice bandwagon.

 

Ideas are invariably recycled - it's just how you execute them that counts. For Yeo Valley it has been a very worthwhile exercise.

[Many thanks to Tim Relf and Adam Tinworth who shared some of these thoughts at an Elevenses session I curated on viral video].

 

 

Redesigning medical data into actionable content

A great talk here from Thomas Goetz, exec editor at Wired, looking at how Wired redesigned medical data to make it more accessible and engaging for patients - if it is more accessible and engaging it will help behaviour change (eg the redesigned data shows you are at risk and it also clearly tells you what you should do next).

This is a great example of how content can be redesigned to really engage with the user. And with medical data the stakes are higher as easy to understand information can help patients to take action.

An interesting theme here is personalisation - turning data into content that resonates for the reader, it addresses them directly. I'm sure there are other pools of data out there that could be redesigned in similar ways.

At the heart of this project was the user - the patient. Put the user, your user personas, at the heart of what you are trying to achieve with your content and you will be much better placed to engage with them.

This project is a really good example of exposing data that has very limited relevance to the reader - in this case patients - and transforming it into something relevant and useful (ie engaging).

H/T @stephenanderson

Phone, Twitter, audio app, blog and cupcakes - content on the fly

I love it when someone else's post kicks you into action. A bit of Friday fun over at XpertHR's Employment Intelligence blog care of Michael Carty and the fact I was meeting HR Zone editor Charlie Duff - whose cupcake pictures featured in XpertHR's post - provided me the opportunity to interview Charlie about cupcakes. Here is the interview . . .

I love the fact that with an i-phone, Audioboo app, Twitter and a blog I have been able to quickly and easily publish the interview and have a chat about it on Twitter. Easy, fun - a great way to create content on the fly. Thanks for the interview, Charlie - those cakes look and sound amazing!

Game mechanics, content and building user engagement

This week's connectinghr chat - #chrchat - prompted this post. In the chat I raised the issue of using game mechanics in developing learning apps. More of that later in the post.

Game mechanics - the techniques that are used in games to help participants progress through the game and to get fully immersed and engaged with it - can be usefully applied to increase user engagement with content - that could be a learning app or it could be B2B content.

Essentially we are talking about the psychology of user behaviour and understanding how certain elements within gaming lead to behaviour change ie doing something different. Gaming is very good at achieving behaviour change, motivating us to do the next thing and take the next step.

It is also worth noting - and this is a point Richard Sedley made at last year's Design for Persuasion Conference - that anyone who chooses to play a game plays freely - as opposed to a task they have been told to do, for example. Playing a game against your will simply does not work - you have got to want to do it. You either want to play or you do not. And implicit in this is that participation will be enjoyable. Yes, gaming is fun.

Richard expands on this point here:

In terms of learning apps, his final point is very important - intranet users may see taking online training as a chore. Put a gaming interface on it and that chore suddenly seems like something fun that they will enter in to freely.

On a separate point, I think fun is hugely overlooked when it comes to publishing content - be it an app, an article etc. In B2B publishing, for example, the really fun stuff can be rare. Why? Because most of the time readers and users are seen as being serious not people who also had a sense of humour. 

Back to the mechanics. Here are some . . .

Points/rewards - you are rewarded for achieving certain goals. Central to this is the idea of collecting and completeness. Gain a certain number of points and you get a reward. Notice how Linkedin uses completeness for profiles eg your profile is 95% complete. Once your profile is 100% complete you should attract more eyeballs to your profile. The psychology of collecting is also discussed by Richard in the Audioboo above.

Levels - players strive to get to the next level to get rewards. Progress is rewarded so we are motivated to continue. This affects their profile.

Profile/status - once players accumulate points their profile/status changes to reflect their achievements. This is clear for others to see. Location services such as Foursquare have this at its heart - collect badges and gain a different status.

For a more complete list check out this list of game mechanics at Gamification - it is an excellent resource. 

Game mechanics have an important and powerful part to play in engaging users. The challenge is to adopt some of the psychology behind the techniques in game mechanics.

Final point about learning within the enterprise - this is not about turning training content into games (although Richard Sedley provided a great example of how his agency developed a games interface for training content on an intranet which hugely increased engagement), this is about thinking through how game mechanics can be used to design and deliver engaging content. Especially exciting is developing content for mobile as the interface requires a whole new approach to how to use content.

I'll end with this fantastic slide deck from interaction and game designer Amy Jo Kim - there are lots of great examples - really inspiring ideas and real world examples of how to motivate users to do what you want them to do.

Putting the Fun in Functional

View more presentations from Amy Kim.

Looks like I'm going to be a a pop star (not)

I have a bit of time thanks to the redundancy money so am trying to do a proper job in preparing my CV and getting focussed on what I want to do next.

As a part of the my redundancy package I get access to the Penna Sunrise system, an online resource for jobseekers. It has loads in it including a set of tools to help you identify your work values, competencies, achievements etc.

I have never spent much time looking into this but I am this time - I figure that if I do my homework I will be a lot clearer about what I want and how to get it. The Sunrise system is packed with tools, tests etc.

So far, it has been useful and time well spent. Competency-based CVs are popular and in order to have a decent one I need to have a list of skills and achievements that support my competencies.

I quite like the STAR acronym to describe how I would explain my achievements in an interview - Situation, Task, Action and Result.

One curve ball thrown out by the system that did make me laugh was provided by the career matching service. It reminds me of the career questionnaires I used to fill out at school which would always come back with ridiculous suggestions.

Based on my answers I am currently well matched to be an artist, business owner and pop star to name but a few.

My great, great uncle Joseph Tabrar wrote the smash hit Daddy Wouldn't buy me a Bow Wow but I don't think that's what I'm aiming to do next . . . you will be pleased to hear!

 

Social media the Betfair way

Great post on how pokersite Betfair is using Twitter. Thanks to Lakey for pointing to the article.

I'll leave you to enjoy the post but will run the last couple of lines as they are telling for all organisations using or thinking of using social media.

It’s one thing to talk about the potential of social media for marketing communication and brand engagement.

It’s another thing entirely to be prepared, both personally and corporately, to take the calculated risks necessary to realise that potential.

The King's Speech and the spoken word

I saw The King's Speech last night and was bowled over by it - it's a film about King George the VI overcoming a stammer to deliver a memorable speech which took Britain in to World War Two.

It's a great story - king needs help and finds it from an unlikely place - an eccentric speech therapist - and just in time to deliver the speech that inspired the nation.

But why was making a speech such a big deal? Obviously he was king and a war was about to break out, but it is the significance of the medium - the radio - as the most immediate and most widely (geographically) broadcast  medium that mattered. The king had to put into spoken word what the country as a whole was feeling and thinking and he had to galvanise the country into action. The nation was gathered around radios to hear what he had to say.

I enjoyed being reminded of the power of the spoken word, something I tend to forget when tweeting or reading blogs.  

Thinking about it, I consume far more written words than I do video or audio content. Maybe that will change . . .

Content marketing - the new game in town for journalists?

I enjoy following Joe Pulizzi's blog over at Junta42. Joe's focus is content markting - how organisations can use content to engage with their users and attract new followers and fans.

The concepts are pretty straightforward, especially if you are a journalist or have worked in the publishing industry.

You provide relevant, timely content in an engaging format and you use that to start engaging with users be it through social media or other channels.

The aim is to provide useful information to users - to keep them better informed - it is not about selling to them - ads are for that.

What underpins this content is marketing automation that helps identify who the users are and what content of yours they are interested in. The content will be related to products or services you provide.

Yesterday's post by Joe focussed on why organisations would create a news service. You can see the logic - refreshed, timely and relevant content for users.(Note, the use of news in the broadest sense - interesting info that is 'news' to a user)

It is what will attract people and help bring them back time after time. And such a content service is the domain of journalists. Or rather journalists have the skills to do this kind of work as they do it day in day out.

Clearly, providing content for a company might not sit well for some journalists, but I reckon the oppportunity to bring engaging, useful content to a site that helps drive business is an exciting one.

Seems this is one area that journalists could move in to. The skills look like they would transfer easily. I also think that, as content marketing is concerned with all content output from an organisation - sales, marketing, PR - then journalists have a real opportunity to shape how content is created as a whole in order that it is as engaging and relevant as possible.

The flip side of developments in content marketing is that companies are now getting more spohisticated at generating original and useful content. This presents a challenge in the B2B space where the content has to help users do their job.

My final point, and one I am very interested in is how well publishers actually market their own content. My feeling is not particularly well, but more of that later . . .

Related post

• How good are journalists at marketing their content?