xperientially | Encouraging Exceptional Experiencesxperientially

April 19, 2012
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

Why Our UX Job Titles Hurt Exceptional User Experiences

Ever heard the phrase – “Let’s add some UX to this” or “When will the UX portion be complete?”

There is something amiss with a company’s understanding or commitment to product experiences if they have employees that think this way.

The UX umbrella is hurting designers in agile product development environments.

Why?

Because organizations assume that if they have people on staff that have the title of “UX”, that their products will then magically have a good User Experience. If companies assign roles to “take care of” UX, and do not also looking at making UX an integral part of the company business model, they are essentially never going to be able to deliver an exceptional user experience for any given product or service.

More often than not, UX Designers themselves get caught up in the UI of UX. While they might add user research to the equation, often UX practitioners believe that user experience consists of some mix of the following categories, and largely in relation to a User Interface because that is where the money is right now:

User research
Human factors
Content and copy-writing
Visual design & branding
Interaction design
Information architecture
Front end development

That is a lot to group into a category of “UX”. And really, most of these facets or specialties are based around designing a product. How is designing the same as “user experience”? It is not. Design has its role in product development, and so does user research which inputs into the design.

However a “user experience” is an intangible thing, that has inputs from an even broader – probably limitless – range of studies and disciplines. Behavior, psychology, development, service delivery, marketing – these are just a few of the disciplines you could pull on to influence an experience. And it cannot be up to the UX practitioners alone to deliver and cover off on everything about an experience.

In order to deliver great user experiences, a company has to decide whether they are going to build experience deliver into their company culture. They have to put money and passion into it to change their practices across every discipline to enable this way of thinking.

If a company just wants to make revenue, there are ways to do that, largely based around various forms of sales and marketing techniques. You don’t HAVE to have a great product to make money. One could argue that these companies may not be sustainable in an experience economy, but it certainly could be sustainable if that particular industry is not already saturated with parity products. I would strongly advocate that at these companies we go back to just caring about “Design” and not “Experiences”.

If a company has decided that they really want to deliver great experiences, then they have to walk the talk and change the way they deliver their products or services from every area of the company – not just within “UX”.

To give examples, some other areas that could fall into disciplines such as the “Engineering” or “Marketing” or “Customer Service” company departments can greatly impact a “user experience”:

Awareness – how the user found out about the product (Marketing channels, google, sales, management, app store, etc)
Reliability of the product (Often this is up to Engineering)
How quickly a user can access information they need for the product (Often this is up to Engineering)
The type of support they receive around the product (Sales or Customer Service)

Experience IS the product delivery commitment that a company has to to have if they are committed to delivering great experiences – and every single individual contributor needs to be committed to experience delivery.

Its a commitment to all the details of how to connect the dots in delivering a product (or service or event) experience to customers.

March 16, 2012
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

Simple is Good. Even Though its Hard Work and Costly.

Simplicity in product or service design is typically the result of a very clear business purpose and vision. Beyond that, it requires commitment from leadership and cross-functional alignment in an organization. Simplicity in design of a product or service requires the designer to live and breath the business purpose, and connect it with the user’s needs and desires. To make a process simple requires a large and focused effort in removing the unnecessary. Especially if you are re-inventing something that already exists and is complex.

To make something truly simple is a costly, hard, thoughtful, creative process.

Costly because it takes time from well paid individuals. Hard because there are usually a lot of different opinions, inputs and reasons to ‘add’ or ‘keep’ features. Thoughtful and creative because its not always easy to see how to group, mix, hide or otherwise convey information into meaning and value.

But in the experience economy, products and services are not about features. Businesses must create products and services using lean methodologies and deliver the minimally viable product or service. Lean practices are not mutually exclusive to great experiences, but an MVP or MVS cannot overlook what is truly required to create an overall satisfied experience for your customers. If simplicity is a need to meet your minimal viable product or service, then its likely that it will take a bit longer to create than to just create something with a lot of features or services.

Here are a few differing perspectives on simplicity:

The best description of simplicity in relation to design I have ever heard is by Jony Ive the Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson.

Jony Ive on Simplicity

“’Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.’”

Something can always be further refined from complex to simple – but at what cost? In the case of Apple – the cost is high, but it is ingrained in the very core and purpose of the company. This is why I believe many companies are not willing to invest in great design, or value simplicity it is purest meaning, because it costs a lot to get that type of product. A commitment and budget for quality must be high.

Charles Mingus On Creativity and Simplicity

“Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

I like this quote as well – tying the creative process to creating simple products. Again, simple in this case infers good.

2007 video from BJ Fogg on Simplicity

(Video does not seem to work right now)

Fogg says that simplicity is the minimally satisfying solution at the lowest cost. This interestingly enough, resonates well with the development lingo of agile development and lean principles of design.

According to Fogg, simplicity will vary by person and context – so its a perception we have as individuals and lives outside of the product… Expectations play a crucial difference in perceived simplicity. When you set expectations for complexity high, and people find things to be less complex than expected, the will perceive it to be simple.

He sees 6 elements of simplicity – time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance and non-routine. He thinks the more you have of these elements the less simple something is. He sees each person as having different amounts of these factors.

While I find Fogg’s theory interesting, I can’t help but re-iterate that in the world of business – creating products and services – achieving true simplicity is rarely cheap. And minimally satisfying is not going to create enough value for long term success of a business focused on the experience.

February 24, 2012
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

My 3rd Eye Sees in High Fidelity. There, I Said It.

In the User Experience field, there is much debate about the level of fidelity to design for at certain stages of your product development. The best discussion (read the comments) I’ve seen on it as of late was at this post over at UX Movement. Generally, people in the industry feel that visual design distracts from information architecture and that you can easily strip out and separate function from presentation. Maybe after 10 years in the business, I should agree with this, generally it can be true. But I am admitting it today, my mind just does not work that way. And maybe, for those that are like me, that’s okay. Even beneficial to the experience you are trying to create. Let me explain.

There are a few factors that should be considered when designing in higher fidelity early on:

First off – I am pretty good at visual design. Some in the UX field are not. If this is the case, often I’ve seen interaction designers feel less comfortable with adding visual design into the story, because its not their area of expertise. Perhaps high fidelity visual templates (Keynotopia, etc) can help, but they still give these non-visually inclined people the hebee-gebees. Even if you aren’t as visually inclined, I believe you need to become tied to the hip with the visual designer(s).

Here are a few reasons to consider why higher fidelity visual design is helpful early on:

It can be useful for early ‘vision-typing’ with stakeholders and in marketing collateral. It is highly encouraged in lean methodology to test early on – what better way to test both products and services than with a quick high fidelity online micro-site + adwords marketing to collect quick data on whether people WANT your product? (see the Lean Start Up). Money very, very well spent at the earliest stages of a product or service innovation process in my opinion. While this method may not work for all products & services (some B2B ones that I can think of would get no Google traffic) it still is very relevant for the majority.
It may help you to add context and show interaction better. Context is key for communicating your point to stakeholders and ultimately developers. I have found using Visio, Balsamiq, etc, for wireframing to be very limiting because they just don’t allow me to insert newer or more innovating design options for online software. So, I end up having to explain my intention with the blank box or strange thing I added to the low-fi mockup rather than simply designing it with fireworks where I don’t need pre-defined templates. I also find it easier to show the interaction of things with lots of layered interaction in Fireworks than in any low fidelity mockup too that I have seen. I just set up pages and templates in Fireworks and I am on my way. I would be curious to know if MailChimp uses low fidelity wireframes. Because to me, it seems like the visual design element is so integral with the functionality of it, that it would be faster and more appropriate to do the information design in close alignment with the visuals.
Visual designers always tell me they need to be involved earlier. Why? Because the IA often changes when the visual designer suggests a certain treatment, shape, color, font size, etc. So, if you aren’t working with the visual design early on, you are creating re-work right from the start. Also, visual designers need to be able to think about and try different versions of what is required early on just as the interaction designers do. So, especially in an agile environment, you’ll find visual design extremely crunched for time and the quality of the work they can produce suffers. Visual design is not just ‘icing on the cake’, its not just ‘decoration’. It needs to be an integral part of your application – from brand image to interaction – it plays a critical role in communicating your intent, persuading the user, an even in usability.
Time is always of the essence, sometimes designing in high fidelity speeds things up. Whether you are designing in an agile environment or not, time is usually one of your most precious resources for the delivery of a product or service. I’ve regularly had my products pushed up to much sooner than originally anticipated for delivery. After some initial story mapping, story boarding, and workflows, I have found that if I can get to the visual designer sooner, I can get to the end product sooner. Again, I can do this quickly in Fireworks, many can’t I understand that. But I know there must be others like me out there. And for us, this approach has its place in communicating effectively and perhaps even better than various other methods. The best case scenario for having this work well is working VERY closely with your product manager/owner, visual designer and developer. This means talking daily, not formal meetings where you don’t actually get anything done.

I agree with many others that for many clients or internal stakeholders, there is the potential to misinterpret visuals and get hung up on the details when things are presented in too high of fidelity too early on. You as a designer will know if that is the case with your clients. But if you are going to test products early on, or if you have a decent product manager, its very beneficial to start pulling in visuals early.

Don’t get me wrong, I do still love to use wireframe mockups for very quick, very early functionality concepting that get thrown in the trash multiple times. But these wireframing tools LIMIT me to think creatively, to use newer responsive and HTML5/CSS3 concepts, to know when I will want add the appropriate visuals and where.

Nonetheless, when I envision a new product or service I see the world in higher fidelity (this is the 3rd eye mention btw), and I believe there are important reasons to consider high fidelity much sooner.

February 22, 2012
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

Reflections on “For the Love of Experience”

Experience is about people, about meaning, about learning, about value.

I recently read the thesis work of J.M.C. Snel in Amsterdam entitled; For the love of experience: changing the experience economy discourse. You can read the full article at: http://dare.uva.nl/en/record/390030

I tend to agree with much of what she has written in the work that I have done, and plan to use it to further describe why companies and organizations need to start doing more testing (Lean Start Up concept) prior to investing large dollars into a new offering. The experience becomes more clear as people give their feedback, and can be further shaped and defined to serve the majority of the user group they are intended for. Also, you can allow for possible product pivots, or shifts to new product types or focus target markets by starting small and testing your new offering.

The author refers to the ‘experience economy’ and writes her thesis around better defining this as well as understanding experiences from an individual’s perspective rather than an organization only perspective. She states; “In the experience economy companies have to do even more. They have to create or ‘stage’ memorable experiences and evoke emotions in their customers, and allegedly the customer will pay more money for these experiences.”

I believe in the experience economy, whether it holds true for all industries or not, it is those organizations that support it that I want to work for, these are the organizations that will create exceptional value for our world.

The author continues to discuss her feelings on control of experiences, something that I have reflected on quite a bit after reading Steve Jobs’ bio, as he was obsessive about controlling his products, leading to some failures, but ultimately a lot of success. The success is in the money others are willing to spend on the products, and the perception they now have, but they are still experiences that are variable by the customers themselves.

Snel writes; “It is my strong conviction that experiences cannot be produced, managed, sold or directed either. You can however do your best to support, facilitate, and help people in having their experiences. You can also do your best to hinder, prevent and ruin the experiences of people. This lack of complete control is not new but somehow many people are still under the impression that they do have control over things like these.”

Upon reading through her work, I tend to agree with her argument that current experience definition is vague, and organizations tend to define the experience from their angle. I admit to previously thinking that its possible to orchestrate an experience, but in reality, facilitate, enable, support are much better words to describe a designer or creators role in providing excellent experiences, because experiences are ultimately pliable and up to the individual to decide to have or not to have.

She describes 3 areas of an overall experience; environment-centered, effect-centered and encounter-centered, and argues that marketers and business scholars typically do not look at all three aspects, and thus can run the risk of impairing their choices for a particular product or service.

She defines experience as:

“A contact between an individual and something in his or her environment, in which the individual is also part of the environment.”

She defines a environment-centered experience as:

“In the environment-centred approach, the role of the organization as experience producer and supplier is emphasized. Experiences are considered as economic offerings with objective features and it is the organization’s task to define and deliver the “right” features. By doing this, other concepts of experience are ignored.”

This is the typical approach that I have witnessed in my work. The risk here is that features tend to be over emphasized and other aspects of the experience – the sale of the product, the customer support, and how well certain non-feature experiences of software work, such as load time, data quality, etc tend to get overlooked.

She defines effect-centered approach as:

“In the effect-centred approach, special attention is given to the role of organizations in managing and producing predetermined hedonic effects for individuals. The individual himself and his role in the emergence of effects is not taken into account in this approach of the experience economy. The existence of effects other than hedonic ones is disregarded.”

This is not something that I have experienced in software design, but I could see it as very prevalent in other industries such as travel, leisure and gaming. Quite often, the pleasurable experience that will be encountered is emphasized in the marketing or sale of the product, service or event, but fails flat in the actual experience of these. Again, the overall experience is ignored in these cases, and could be even more detrimental to the individual as they were emotionally attached to the promised positive experience. As the author points out, the individual will determine their experience, regardless of what the organization has planned or attempted to control.

She defines encounter-centered approach as:

“In the encounter-centred approach, the contact between the individual and his environment is limited to the contact between an individual and an organization. The role of the organization is seen as determining which values the individual has to invest in the encounter, usually principally focused on money and time. Values that individuals invest in the experience that cannot be expressed in terms of money or time are left out of the picture.”

She discusses value from various perspectives related to the encounter-centred approach, in terms of whether perceived value increases or decreases based on the individual’s financial wealth.

The author argues that scholars tend to try to objectively describe experiences from an organizational perspective, when in fact experiences are more social and vary by individual.

From her interviews she finds there trends or themes emerge: Engagement, Direction and Investment.
She defines these as:

“Engagement is about the relationship between the various constituents and parties that are involved in the experience. Direction refers to the role that the organization claims in the experience. Investment, by contrast, refers to the role of the participants in the experience.”

I find these three descriptors to be useful, especially the investment term, which allows an organization to think about how to co-create experience with more active participates, those that have and/or are willing to invest more in their personal experience with a company. Notice this is not about the company’s investment, but the individual’s. Perhaps the term investment is too confusing, I would almost use another term to describe this, such as: commitment.

I also noticed the author refer to “organizers of the experience” in the way that she described the roles of the organizational influences on an experience. I am starting to think about calling myself an Experience Encourager or simply keep it at Experience Consultant to be nice and vague

February 16, 2012
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

Is it Time to Drop the User in User Experience Titles?

In terms of experience design titles, gone are the days of the information architect, user experience designers are here to stay. Or are they?

What’s the difference between a client, customer, consumer, user or experiencer?

Are users needs now valued enough across forward thinking organizations that the term has become less useful? This may not be the case in some organizations.

In the B2B space, I often have to explain to colleagues less familiar with my field that users and customers are not necessarily the same thing. In B2B, you may design an interface for a doctor’s office, so the user is the doctor’s administrative assistant, but the customer may be a healthcare provider selling that software. And it can get more complicated than that, with various reselling or levels of “Client”, “Customers”, or in retail “Consumers” in between before a product ever reaches an end user. So, the question often comes up, are we designing for our customers, their customers, or the true end users? And the answer is often: It depends.

One question you can ask yourself is: Is the experience of this product or service dependent on the existing knowledge of the end user?

If so, then you’ve got to design that experience for that specific user type. Personalizing an experience will continue to become more possible as technology advances for devices (though its trickier for service or event experiences). Personas come in really handy when designing for a ‘known’ user type. This is where you can setup lots of interviews, observation, and all sorts of tricks in the UX handbook to get to know what the user’s needs truly are. Yet people will always have subjective opinions about an experience, regardless of their functional role. So its important to figure out ways to design experiences for the collective that really serve the vast majority of the needs of the user type. This is where the art and intuition of great designers can truly stand out.

In many cases, products, services, or events are developed for a much broader set of users than can be defined. They need to be more generic, while still resonating with certain groups of people that the offering pertains to. In those cases, who are you designing for?

Well, in my opinion, its the most straight forward to say we are designing for the experiencer.

We ourselves, will be a part of that group as we design the offering. Yes, this term is generic, but often cases its more clear and realistic of what experience is being designed than ‘user’. Getting a great experience right needs to be something that the vast majority of your users feel. There are often design styles that are popular or trending that can help set the stage for what will resonate with a certain group of people. In the case of Apple, one of the more revered and discussed success stories for UX, Steve Jobs believed that his zen-simplicity style of design of devices would be universally accepted as beautiful. And, in fact, he was right. However, there are still those that hate the way the Apple devices look and work.

The biggest lesson that I’ve learned from Apple is that absolutely great design is an art, especially when innovating, reproducing it once you’ve got it nailed is a science.

There is already a lot being asked of us User Experience professionals. We are required to be a jack of all trades on a regular basis. Well, I’m sorry to say, but it’s my opinion that User Experience Designers need to broaden their way of thinking even further to look at and be able to influence the experience of an entire product, service or event delivery. More of us need to embrace and become Experience Designers – or if we aren’t willing to – fight back to be specialists.

This means that its not “marketing’s” job only to come up with the branding, we need to be involved. It’s not just the customer service department’s job to deliver great service, we need to be involved. Our knowledge of experience design needs to broaden to help deliver an exceptional end-to-end, or cross-channel experience. Perhaps thinking broader will also allow some more currently “UX” professionals to advance further up the corporate chain (or whatever type of organization) to be able to influence business strategy to be customer-centric. There I go again using a term that has an ambivalent meaning. Really, businesses need to care about their customers (and their customers customers) at the heart of how they operate their entire business. This shift towards “You matter“, will be where us “formerly-called” UX people need to continue to shine with our skill set at serving the true needs of the customers.

Can you think of other likely title shifts or developments in the experience field of study or practice?

February 15, 2012
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

Experiencing with Xperientially

This blog will document my thoughts about Experiences – what I know about how to create and orchestrate them, and what I learn along the way. I have transitioned some of my posts from my previous consulting business, Lead Online Marketing, to this blog.

It marks a broader direction for me professionally, as I don’t see myself as simply a web-person, a user-focused designer or a marketer. What I find amazing is that I did not even use a computer when I was first born, and now my entire career revolves around one. My daughters already think that everything digital should be manipulated with their hands, but I wonder what the next step in the evolution of the digital-to-real-world experience will be. While I tend to currently focus on the digital channel – software specifically – all of my professional background has led me towards a broader purpose, and thinking bigger for product and service delivery for organizations essentially boils down to 1 single word: Experience.

As economies struggle, and companies continue to try to stay afloat, the perceived collective quality of an experience with a product, service or event will continue to prevail as the driver behind success.

Or at least, those are the companies that I will choose to work with and buy from. It may still be idealistic, but its becoming more prevalent in organizations throughout the world. They know that experiences matter to people – good or bad. The orchestration of exceptional experiences comes from art and science. This blog will document my thoughts on the more abstract, creative elements of an experience as well as the more scientific approaches that are being used to document a repeatable structure for creating and improving experiences.

I am very excited to continue my journey in this discipline.

January 27, 2011
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

What’s the Difference Between a Web Designer and a UI or UX Designer?

I have recently joined a wonderful team of user experience professionals and as such am immersing myself in the world of UX design in the context of an Agile and lean development methodology.

What’s the difference between designing for a website and designing for an online application?

An online application is essentially a hybrid of a website and traditional desktop software. Designing for an online application requires that you expand your understanding of what might need to be considered in terms of the long term use of an interface.

Some items remain constant from web to UI design such as:

Brand: Consideration and translation of a company’s (or application’s) brand assets including logo, color schemes, graphic assets
Standards: Web standards for HTML/CSS javascript, XML, use of flash and other programming languages. Though important for both web and application design, accessibility considerations becomes even more important based on the application’s use.

Some of the most pertinent items that may differ from what a web designer typically considers are:

International: Will it be used internationally? If so, globalization, localization (language) considerations will drastically change how you approach a design. This is often important for large scale websites, but gets little consideration for a typical small to mid-size business.
Extension & Integration: Will it be used as part of many other applications? This is a particularly difficult challenge that I am facing right now where the application is being designed to expand in height and width and fit in an iframe. However, the design completely shifts based on the height and width.
Search Engines: In an online application, as opposed to a website, its rarely important to consider developing an SEO friendly interface. The website that drives traffic to the interface needs to be optimized of course.

I have quickly realized that I need to change my design style for these considerations to allow for variation in text formats as well as layout. Here’s what I have learned:

1) Prominence & Placement are More Important Than Ever: The most important elements of a online application must be presented as soon as possible, and as prominently as possible. This may seem obvious, but it is not easy to accomplish. If you do not carefully design the application to present the most pertinent information first, when it is globalized, localized, or expanded, you may lose emphasis on the most important elements, and in doing so degrade the user experience.

2) I have realized that extensive prototypes based off of excellent personas and user/business requirements, that include interactive functionality, can help Agile development environments answer a lot of questions and create better stories for the backlog. They would also help decrease development times for complex systems. What I have to figure out now is how to present the case for allowing up-front time, prior to sprints, for feature-rich prototypes. At least for the template and major features of the interface. It seems like it would save a lot of time, but in an Agile environment, you are moving so fast that not as much time is given to ‘think the whole thing through’.

Here’s a fun video about the ux designer for your enjoyment.

ILUVUXDESIGN from lyle on Vimeo.

September 30, 2010
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

Logo or Website Refresh, Is it Worth the Investment?

Many of my clients find themselves on the fence about refreshing their brand or their website. They have small budgets, and are concerned about losing or damaging the brand recognition they have already developed within their market area. Take a look at the major logos to the right. What is main difference? The newer logos have more complexity to the design, but retain the overall brand feel and recognition. They have depth and dimension. All of these styles of design have emerged recently as opposed to some of the more flat designs of the 90′s.

Here are some questions to ask yourself before you decide to invest in a brand refresh, website redesign, or any type of revision to your marketing and brand presence:

Is our logo or website outdated? Does that matter to our target market?
Does our logo represent the brand attributes that we want to convey in terms of colors, imagery, graphics? What do our customers FEEL when they look at our logo and our graphic designs?
Is our marketing messaging and imagery driving the right message? It it matched to the education level and emotional responses of our target market?
Is our website easy to use and customer-centric? Is our website designed for ourselves or for our customers?
What type of investment in branding and marketing will yield a return that outweighs the investment?
How will we measure and respond to the refresh(es)?

In today’s economy, you should not be redesigning and refreshing your marketing and brand attributes without good, justified reason. You should not be redesigning your website unless you have a reason to. However, with websites, you can almost always see measured improvements by studying, testing and tweaking your design and architecture for better results. The overwhelming amount of data available to you with your business website makes it a responsible choice to periodically evaluate if your site needs small tweaks or a major overhaul to increase your business and your conversions.

A decisions to refresh or re-do your brand should be based on your customer needs and your company direction. The same goes for your marketing materials and website. Try to make this decision based on statistics gathered from customers surveys, user testing and anything that you can use to pull the emotion out of your decision to invest in your company’s brand.

September 3, 2010
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

HTML5 / CSS3 Cheat Sheets

While HTML5/CSS3 is not fully supported yet across browsers, most notably the most daunting of browsers – Internet Explorer, it should be supported and used more widely in 2011 (It is supposed to be supported in IE9).

There will be a vast array of new possibilities available; everything from drop shadows to transparency, and even JQuery-like functionality that will be recognized at the browser level. Pretty amazing.

I found these helpful PDF “Cheat Sheets” for HTML5/CSS3 tags and their uses courtesy of Veign.com. Enjoy.

HTML5 Cheat Sheet (PDF)

DOWNLOAD

CSS3 Cheat Sheet (PDF)

DOWNLOAD

July 16, 2010
by Ariel Snapp
0 comments

Social Media Works Best If YOU Are Willing to Put A Little Time In

That’s Right. You. The Small Business Owner. You can pay others to do a lot of the work for you, and get results. But if you truly want to see results in social media, you are going to have to fork over some time and genuinely try to engage with communities online. It’s a commitment, but it can pay off.

The term “Social Media” has been adopted much like the term “Web 2.0″ was a few years back. Many of my clients want to use Facebook and Twitter, but don’t actually know why. There is a powerful mass adoption of certain social tools throughout the business world, however, I believe it is mainly based on copy-cating rather than trying taking action based on business need.

Take myself for instance, even I am at fault. I have a Twitter account for this business that I have difficulty maintaining. If you are not actively engaged in your social media tool, it will provide little relevance or use to your business.

I am a proponent of reserving URL/Twitter and other social media names for your business as a preventative and future strategy option. However, I suggest defining your website and online strategies and goals prior to implementing a tactical tool. Otherwise, you’ll find that you wasted your valuable time and resources implementing something that does not provide the value you were hoping for and takes a lot of time to maintain.

Then, there’s the question of authenticity.

Is it okay to pay others to update your social media sites? To represent you as a human? Of course its okay to outsource help. AND I do know from reading many case studies that the more successful examples of social media interaction occur when you yourself are making the updates and engaging online.

It doesn’t have to be forced. I have found one of my sites to gain a lot of success and traffic simply by me engaging in online tools, commenting on sites that I care about and researching. I did it because I was truly interested and wanted to spend the time. And it worked well for my site. Paying others to do this CAN work, but its not going to work as well as if you, the small business owner yourself, dedicate the time to building your online presence and engaging online with others in a genuine manner. That is the ticket to authenticity and success. Sometimes it just takes a little of your own dedication and time. You can outsource a lot of the setup, the grunt work and the help, but try to put some time into it as well to build relationships that will evolve into more sales and revenue for your business over time. The soft sell works better online than advertising, and it takes your own voice to resonate as genuine.