Architecting the Social Information Experience

By Andrea Ames | Fellow, and

Alyson Riley | Member

This column explores the strategic aspects of information architecture and the tools to equip information architects (IAs) for success. Topics will address the business, strategy, user experience, and implementation of strategic information architecture, including organizational, content management, and tactical considerations. Send your comments, questions, and suggestions for future articles to thestrategicia@pobox.com.

In our last column, we asserted that the strategic information architect begins the IA process by identifying what’s important to the business and planning how to demonstrate impact relative to business strategy. In this column, we’ll explore ways in which IAs build product awareness, interest, and ultimately sales opportunities by taking a closer look at social media.

The Business Context

Let’s begin by considering a typical product purchase and loyalty cycle. The following flow provides one example of the stages that buyers may pass through on their way to product-ownership nirvana:

1. Awareness “I have a problem to solve.” or “I didn’t realize that I had a problem to solve until I saw .”
2. Interest “I searched for answers to my problem, and found .”
3. Consideration “I learned more about the vendor’s offering through the .” “I compared this vendor’s offering to another vendor’s offering using .
4. Trial “I downloaded and was able to see how the offering solved my problem.”
5. Purchase “I got what I thought I was purchasing, and it delivered high value.” “I buy education, including webinars, for-pay communities.”
6. Loyalty “I buy more.” “I upgrade.” “I buy service.” “I buy more advanced education, including webinars, for-pay communities.”
7. Advocacy “I am a reference.” “I blog and post to forums about the offering and the vendor.” “I co-present at conferences with the vendor.”

The game really has changed. Gone are the days when:

• Awareness resulted from a flier in your mailbox (5 minutes elapsed)
• Awareness is followed by a trip to the library or a bricks-and-mortar retail store to investigate the vendor and solution (2 days elapsed)
• Investigation progresses to chit chat by phone with a contact you think is a subject-matter expert (or, perhaps more likely, at parties with friends) to weigh the alternatives and recommendations (10 days elapsed)
• Discussion with experts is followed by another trip to the store to attempt to try out the solution and eventually purchase the product (12 days elapsed)
• The trial culminates in more cocktail-party discussion about what you purchased, why, and how you like it (3 weeks elapsed)

Total elapsed time: over 47 days!

The New Social Business Context

The ubiquity of the Internet, the power of search, and the much-lamented short attention span of today’s buyers have shortened the time frame and compressed the first three or four—or even five—steps of the product purchase cycle together into an indistinguishable mass. In stark contrast with the example above, today’s potential customers can be expected to follow a product investigation and purchase cycle that looks something more like this:

• I search—not reviewing results beyond the second page, of course—and while I don’t see the answer to my current problem, I see this other cool thing, and click the link in the search results (0:12 elapsed)
• I read a discussion forum posting about this new, cool thing, which includes a link to the vendor’s website (0:52 elapsed)
• I click the link and see the vendor’s website, where I spot an embedded YouTube video and several comments below it from customers raving about the solution (0:58 elapsed)
• I decide to view the video and click a link which takes me to the YouTube site. While the vendor’s video starts to play, I see that YouTube displays a list of other videos showing related products and solutions (1:38 elapsed)
• I view the beginning of two other vendors’ videos, as well as a video of the first vendor’s product being used by a customer (3:08 elapsed)
• I click the Back button on my browser twice to return to the first vendor’s website and see, just below the embedded video, a “Download a free, 7-day trial” link (3:19 elapsed)
• I click and download the trial, install it, and try it out, using help included with the product, as well as Web-delivered information (47:00 elapsed)
• I return to the vendor’s website to purchase a license, and register the product with the purchased license (68:00 elapsed)
• I return to the forum to add my opinion to the original discussion thread (72:00 elapsed)

Total elapsed time: around 3½ hours!

In this scenario, social media plays a critical role in closing the gap between becoming a first-time user and advancing to an advocate or a detractor from weeks or days to hours or even minutes.

If you still have doubts about the business value of well-executed social media, consider this article in the first quarter 2011 McKinsey Quarterly newsletter: The Rise of the Networked Enterprise: Web 2.0 Finds Its Payday (http://tinyurl.com/28f66uo) by Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui. (Note that they define “Web 2.0” as “collaborative Web 2.0 technologies.”) They conducted some proprietary research with companies that are using this technology, and they report measureable business results for most of them. They state (emphasis added):

Market share gains reported by respondents were significantly correlated with fully networked and externally networked organizations. This, we believe, is statistically significant evidence that technology-enabled collaboration with external stakeholders helps organizations gain market share from the competition. They do this, in our experience, by forging closer marketing relationships with customers and by involving them in customer support and product-development efforts. Respondents at companies that used Web 2.0 to collaborate across organizational silos and to share information more broadly also reported improved market shares.

They also present a very compelling illustration (Exhibit 1, found here: http://tinyurl.com/38wyfcw) of the measurable business benefits that a majority of the respondents have experienced, including 63% of respondents achieving specified benefits in the purchase and loyalty cycle.

You might be thinking, “Yeah, so? I get that it’s valuable to the business, but how does this relate to my work?” We hope not, but you might be. If so, consider the following elements of this process:

• Information comes first. The purchase and loyalty cycle is laced with information. Potential customers touch product information in all its forms long before they become actual customers who touch the actual product.
• Information written for post-sales use can be part of the pre-sales process. The content traditionally developed and delivered by the vendor’s technical communicators was used prior to the purchase and very likely influenced the buyer’s decision to purchase—and it could have easily been used even earlier in the process.
• Social capital sells products. Much of the information described in our second scenario was vendor information disseminated through social means (for example, the vendor’s YouTube video) or third-party information in social spaces (including forum posts, videos, and comments on the vendor’s video)—the elusive and very valuable social capital of subscriptions, notifications, discussion, blogs, shares, likes, tweets, retweets, and wiki posts. The content created by the user community very likely contributed to the buyer’s decision to purchase the product.
• Social capital keeps content fresh. Human contributions extend the shelf life of a content object by adding new information and new value. Static content inevitably becomes uninteresting after a while; content that lives through human interaction retains its appeal. If you’ll forgive us a dog-related metaphor, the situation is much like the stereotypical fire hydrant that Alyson and her dog Puck pass on their walks. It’s always the same red fire hydrant, yet Puck is irresistibly drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Over time, the draw ceases to be the fire hydrant itself; rather, it’s the social capital that other users have left behind that Puck finds so compelling—social capital that changes on a daily basis and captures Puck’s otherwise fleeting attention.

The process undertaken by a potential buyer in this new, online era provides significant challenge and opportunity for companies to create, encourage, and leverage the valuable capital that social media can provide—particularly in the form of third-party validation. Imagine, for example, that the vendor’s Web-delivered product documentation includes a feed of recent forum postings from a well-known community of users. Assuming the user community views the product in a positive way, readers of the documentation can determine how complex the product might be to use and receive validation from the feed of comments. A negative view, however, can prompt a company to burrow underground, trying to cover up less-than-stellar usability, performance, compatibility, and customer service (to name only a few common complaint topics). The bottom line, however, is that there’s no place to hide in today’s connected and highly social online world, so the smart (and enduring) companies are embracing the opportunities, as well as addressing the challenges, by resolving issues in their products that are brought to light in the social spaces. In all instances, the survivors are those who take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity to engage the community of current and potential customers that social media makes available.

Leveraging Social Strategy in the Information Experience

Keeping the new business and social realities in mind, the strategic information architect must look beyond wireframes, site structures, navigation hierarchies, content chunks, and the like—all the good stuff of classic information architecture. The strategic IA must plan the ways in which her work contributes to business objectives by improving content visibility and retrievability, search rankings, hits within the product domain, and the amount and quality of social capital generated. She also prepares to measure and illustrate (quantitatively and qualitatively) intangibles such as the thought leadership, mindshare, and market share that result from an information experience that embraces the social and eschews the parochial.

Looking for some practical ways for us, as architects, to think about and act on social strategy in your information experience? We encourage the following:

Increase the business value of your content in the social space.

Integrate social content with your content—for example, by providing feeds in your online information (both product-integrated and Web-hosted). Contribute to the social ecosystem around your offerings—for example, by announcing updates to products and product information via Twitter and feeds. Design your content and delivery mechanisms to encourage collaboration and social interaction around your product and information.

Leverage the social content to improve your customers’ experience with your products and information.

Feed the evaluation phase of your information-development process by mining the rich data found in the social environment. For example, are customers posting comments with embedded feedback that can help you improve your information? Are your customers’ comments revealing any gaps in your content? Compare what your users say they’re doing with the product to your team’s understanding of that use—then improve your development artifacts to ultimately improve your products and documentation. From your clients’ commentary, determine the pervasiveness and effectiveness of the marketing messages, as well as the way that the product maps back to the value propositions communicated in those messages. For example, are customers complaining about a lack of consistency between what they thought the product could do before they bought it and their post-sale experience using the product?

Create social capital from negative sentiment and comments.

View complaints as an opportunity. On the mild end of the negative spectrum, address real feedback. Acknowledge participation and contribution to your improvement efforts and describe how you’re implementing changes that respond to that feedback. On the seemingly destructive end of the spectrum, seek out the angry “complainers” and tap into their passion. Turn complaints into constructive input, address that feedback, and transform the toxic energy into advocacy—“there is no zealot like the converted.”

As always, no matter what strategy you’re implementing, demonstrate and communicate your value and the value of strategic information architecture to the business.

Measure how your architecture and content increases things like search results, and demonstrate the impact with numbers—for example, the more links to your content (from Facebook, third-party forums, etc.), the higher it will be in search results.

So don’t be afraid of social media! Transparency + conversation + social capital = added value! You can’t buy this kind of value, and you can’t control where the conversation will go. Deliver a transparent information experience, and leverage the flowers and the weeds that bloom around it—both can be used to benefit your career if you can demonstrate the business impact that your content has in the social discussion!

What We’re Reading

Thanks to Leading Change by John P. Kotter, Alyson is thinking about change management as an Agile process, where well-planned, short-term wins play a critical role in big-picture transformation. She’s also relearning how to cook by following Paleo (Google it) principles—not with printed cookbooks but through forums and blogs; she’s noting how social media is filling a niche information gap left by more formal publishing channels.

Andrea is now reading Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson et al. and is learning new strategies for influencing her own behavior, as well as the behavior of others. She is also discovering a “who’s who” in influence around the world—people solving problems from AIDS/HIV pandemics to weight loss to engaging hundreds or thousands of employees in massive business changes—and getting first-hand experience with their use of social media to create social capital and influence others, making huge and lasting changes in society.

An Interesting Footnote

If you ever doubted the incredibly subtle ubiquity of social media, here’s a cautionary and hopefully enlightening tale. After working on this article, Andrea wrote her “What We’re Reading…” paragraph above—all but the last phrase (following the em-dash), that is. After she read Alyson’s paragraph, in which Alyson so elegantly wove in the tie between what she’s reading and social media, Andrea realized two things:

• She had spent several hours Googling influencers, reading about them, and experiencing their investments in social media. (Brian Wansink, the weight-loss influencer, runs a for-pay, online community, even! It doesn’t get much more social than that!)
• She had not consciously thought about the fact that she was doing exactly what our readers do.
• Your users and readers are a lot like Andrea. Social exploration has become a “normal” way to research, shop, and learn. Don’t lose the opportunity to leverage this phenomenon.

Andrea Ames and Alyson Riley are veteran, strategic information architects with over 35 years of combined IA experience ranging from large enterprises to small start-ups and from commercial to public-sector/government to academic environments.