Microsite vs. Primary Web Site vs. E-Commerce Site

When people refer to a "web site" they often mean different things. I thought it might be helpful to clarify some terms.

Microsite: This term is usually used to describe web sites made up of a small group of pages created for a specific purpose. They are often built to support ad campaigns, launch new products or have some other specific, limited purpose. There are some advantages to creating a microsite instead of adding new pages to an existing web site. One advantage is the reduced cost of search engine marketing. Because a microsite can carry content solely related to its purpose, ads are given better quality scores and clicks can be purchased at lower cost. Another advantage is flexibility in user requirements. Because of the limited purpose of these sites, they are great places to utilize animation, video and interactivity such as gaming. Your users will not be returning to this site on a regular basis like they would a primary web site or e-commerce site so more interactivity and richer content can really work well here to support your brand.

Primary web site: This term usually refers to a company's main web site. It is a place to store corporate information such as management team bios, career opportunities and maps to offices. If the company is public, this would be the place to show stock price, press releases and SEC filings. Sometimes a primary web site can house product or service information. This is especially true with B2B companies or companies that don't wish to draw a distinction between the company brand and individual product/service brands.

E-Commerce web site: This term refers to a web site whose sole purpose is to sell products or services. There are well-known best practices to optimize these sites to increase conversions and following these best-practices can substantially increase sales.

Those are just three of the most commonly used terms. Other terms such as blog, wiki and even Facebook page can be interchanged with the term web site, but the ones mentioned above seem to be the most common.

Atemporality Revisited

Recently I've been thinking about Bruce Sterling's 2010 TED Conference speech, "Atemporality for the Creative Artist." I like how he defines the idea of atemporality, but I think other examples may illustrate his point better. Many of his examples, especially those related to social media, do a great job showing how we've managed to create a world outside of space, but I think there are other ideas and products in the market right now, that will eventually help us create a world outside of time.

Take, for example, the growing ubiquity of devices like the iPad and iPhone. These devices have the potential to be always on and always recording. Couple that with the growing number of surveillance cameras everyone is subjected to, satellite images, mapping projects, geo-coded photos and tweets, etc... and you have entire portions of the world in which a substantial portion of the visual and mental landscape is recorded.

If these trends continue, and the cost to archive this content continues to decline, then without much difficulty you can imagine a future in which you can dial back time as easily as you can change the aperture on your camera.

For example, let's say I am sitting in my office on a beautiful sunny day in 2050. I hold up my future reality recording/augmentation device (or simply adjust the setting on my digital glasses) and dial back time 5 years. I can easily see this same office in 2045, the people that are here, the way the furniture is arranged, what people on the street and in the press are talking about. Enough adjacent content will exist that unrecorded objects can be extrapolated and rendered automatically.

Now, I've abolished at least a part of the concept of time and definitely changed the nature of history. I am well on my way to an atemporal world.

FourSquare: The Rise of Location-Based Social Networking Applications

For those of you who haven't heard, FourSquare is one of many emerging location-aware social networking applications. And like most social networking applications, FourSquare is a great tool to support and encourage the creation of communities around your brand.

While the growth of FourSquare has been rapid, the application still has a relatively limited reach compared to other social apps and the final marketing model is still being worked out. In the meantime, if you want to use FourSquare to reach customers, it is best to refrain from using the platform to aggressively advertise and instead tie promotions to community activity. This model has worked well with other social media platforms and it's likely that FourSquare will continue to follow this trend.

Here are a couple of ways to tie FourSquare promotions to community activity:

1. Create promotions that reward customer loyalty. This can be done by providing discounts for frequent visits or when customers bring in friends as new customers. In FourSquare, the person who visits your location the most times becomes that location's "mayor." Loyalty could also be rewarded by providing recognition of your mayors on your primary web site.

2. Create promotions that leverage the gaming aspect of FourSquare. FourSquare lets users gain points and unlock badges through the use of the service. Bravo Television and Intel have both created custom badges within FourSquare that users can gain through interacting with the brands. Creating similar custom badges is another way that FourSquare could be leveraged to support your own unique communities.

FourSquare is like other social media platforms, but with the added dimension of location. This gives rise to several exciting opportunities to engage your customers. In addition, with the growing ubiquity of GPS-enabled smart phones, the rise of apps like FourSquare that leverage user location will also continue to grow.

What will you do with your new iPad?

Customer research is a core part of the Method Engine process, so while we waited in line for the release of the new iPad, we took advantage of the time to ask other pad people what they planed to do with their new purchase.

CMS ROI

Method Engine clients often require a content management system (CMS). These systems allow companies to keep a web site up-to-date with current information such as news, new products, etc...

We've implemented a variety of these systems. They can vary from small custom interfaces that allow a client to add limited information following a rigid template to robust custom systems supporting a variety of new information including the management of user-generated content, to off-the-shelf CMS systems ranging from Drupal to SharePoint.

Essentially, all of these systems do the same thing. They allow companies to keep their web site up-to-date. It is a natural reaction to want the ability to do this internally, however, it is important to first have a realistic assessment of the frequency and type of updates that will be needed. Building custom CMS tools can be costly and using proprietary tools can limit the types of user experiences that can be created.

It is often the case that outsourcing these updates is less expensive than creating the content management tools to do so internally.

There is a need, of course, for companies to engage in ongoing dialogues with their customers. Another way to handle this is to shift the burden of the management of this communication to social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. These tools are simple to use and the content can be pulled into a corporate web site to keep it fresh.

SEO vs. UX

At Method Engine we often find ourselves in a position of balancing the need to create a compelling user experience (UX) with the need to create an interactive experience that is highly findable by search engines (Search Engine Optimization). Determining the proper balance is important as it drives the design process and the budgeting process (allocating resources to one or both of these areas).

I'm sure you've come across example web sites that fall into both extremes. You've seen sites that are so laden with "keywords" that they have a cheap, untrustworthy look to them. And other great sites (you love them as soon as you see them - the UX is that compelling) that you would have never found on your own - you only saw the site because a friend sent you a link or you saw the URL on a TV spot or in a magazine.

You may have also found yourself trying to decide between allocating resources to SEO or spending these resources instead on updating an aging or flawed user-experience.

Every Method Engine engagement begins with a Strategy Phase. The only way to deal with this issue effectively is to have a good understanding of the customer, including their touch points with your brand and their use of technology.

Other key factors to consider are: What are the goals of the site? Will other marketing (or sales) initiatives take on the work of bringing people to the site or will this be accomplished primarily through search? What other customer touch points are there in the digital experience with the brand and how is this relevant to the new initiative?

These are just a few of the questions that should be addressed to come to a final strategy for deploying UX and SEO in a way that maximizes your marketing dollars.

What we can learn from Chatroulette

Kate Moss is addicted to it. Devo says it is more Devo than Devo. I came across an estimate last week that over 1.5 million people use chatroulette.com every day.

The question is: What can we learn from it? Here are a couple of things that were reinforced for me by the success of the site.

1. The site and its rapid growth demonstrates the power of social networks and blogs to turn a modest site into a global phenomenon.

2. As average bandwidth increases, the ability of more users to have a good experience with interactive full-motion video also increases. As the tipping point is reached, more and more sites based on full-motion video will proliferate the web.

3. The power of a well executed, simple idea. Chatroulette is based on a simple idea and fulfills a singular human need. It's neither over engineered nor bogged down in gratuitous fluff. It's a nice example of user-centered design.

4. The power of a platforms. Many of the most successful sites: Ebay, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Craigslist are just a few sites that are successful because they offer users a platform to create and distribute their own content. We can now add Chatroulette to this list.

Lastly, there is surly a lot that Chatroulette can also teach us about the human condition and human nature, but I will leave that to the philosophers among us.