There is a concept in sales call benefits based selling, this is where you sell your product or service based on the benefit it will give your customer not on the features of the product being sold. For example if I was selling you home cleaning services I would talk about the fact you could get 2 hours back a week to go to the cinema not on services I could provide such as dusting or cleaning the oven.
This same approach can be used in a search context either using a simple keyword interface or with content filters / navigators or wizards.
The key advantage of using a benefits based searching technique is that you can reduce or if your lucky remove the complexity of the search scenario. As the searcher you no longer need to be an expert in the topic you are searching, you only need to consider the reason behind your search.
For example lets look at the scenario of a consumer searching for a new camera, you could allow them to search on size of memory card, number of megapixels, size of battery or even length of lens. All of these attributes would require me to be knowledgeable about photography. How about you switch this around and allow the consumer to think about how they will use the camera. Do they want to take pictures for 3 months without downloading them, do they want to print pictures off the camera and create large posters, or do they want to take pictures of distant objects. All of these questions can be used to identify the attributes that are important to the consumer, more importantly these are all questions that can be answered without having a deep knowledge of the topic being searched. This is the advantage of benefits based searching.
Retail is a great example of how benefits based searching can deliver you consumer advantage, I think local search is the next sector in which this paradigm will take off. When you consider the disparte topics that local search sites cover, you can’t expect consumers to be experts in all of the these fields. Educating consumers with content is one mechanism to improve the search experience, benefits based searching is another. Just make sure you have the ability to link the benefits users are searching on to the attributes you have stored in your database.
When it comes to your site, I’m sure you spend a lot of time working on your UI to make it look good and ensuring functionally works but how much time do you spend on the content you publish, how do you enusre it is fit for purpose, as you roll out new features do you think about how those features will look / work when you don’t have content depth to support them.
For information rich sites the content you publish is just as important as the features you have on your site, in fact at times it doesn’t matter how great your interaction model is, if the content isn’t there you are off to a losing start.
In my opinion you have to understand what the needs of your users are and how your content will support those needs in ordre to have a chance of success. To do this you need to define a framework by which you can qualitatively and quantitatively measure whether you are meeting those users’ needs.
Path analysis, satisfaction surveys, competitor analysis can all be used to define the needs of your consumers (or your perspective consumers if you haven’t launched yet), once you have identified the primary needs you can then identify the types of content you need to publish to support those needs. Once you have defined the needs of your users you can quantify how well you currently meet those needs, where the gaps are and what you need to fill those gaps. You now have a framework by which you can monitor and track your improvements.
Now its all about prioritizing your content roll out plan and away you go.
I’m in the process of writing a content strategy for my employer and I’ve been looking at the digital landscape to understand what key trends are going to affect our industry, this has allowed me to delve deeper into some of my pet subject areas.
The semantic web, metadata and creating context around content keeps being mentioned in both blog posts and industry articles. This along with an article I read on FUSMI ( by Fran Alexander) last week about how user generated folksonomies and author led controlled vocabularies can improve different parts of the interaction model reminded me of a diagram I created for a conference I was talking at last year on Information Architecture.
I was explaining that in addition to the benefits seen in using controlled vocabularies and folksonomies in different parts of your interaction model (searching vs content aggregation), you can also create a feedback loop between your user led tags and author led controlled vocabularies that can reduce management costs and increase effectiveness.
The theory is that you can use crowd sourcing principles to give you additional intelligence on modern use of terms as well as expertise in areas that are highly specialised, this works well for deeply vertical content sites.
Firstly user search can be improved as soon as user generated metadata is assigned, but secondly by looking at the terms attached to content along with the particular terms that are searched upon (I call this direct and indirect metadata creation) the managed controlled vocabularies can be kept up to date and improved without the need for large backend teams of information architects constantly analysing the information landscape, which in our costs saving times is a significant benefit.
The real barrier to implementing a feedback loop like this is trust, is your organisation open enough to trust the expertise and knowledge of its user base, I would argue that its too costly not too.
People in the web industry are on the social media bandwagon, whether it be Facebook connect, Google Socialgraph, Yelp style reviews or Wikipedia style crowd sourcing the user is at the heart of everything, but for me the question is how to you drive engagement, how do you get your users to interact.
Don’t get me wrong there are some people out there who would engage with a comments box on a blank web page. There are contributors who do it for the prestige, so they can see there name in lights, there are some who do it for altruistic reasons, to make the world a better place, and some people just want to rant at somone, and anyone will do. But these contributors have a certain view point and this view point may be different to the other 95% of your user base.
For a number of sites or web platforms, contribution is easy, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace and LinkedIn have been built from the ground up to facilitate contribution, that’s what they are all about, but where you have an online proposition that isn’t purely focused on social interaction things can get a lot tougher.
There are a number of sites that are purely focused on content consumption, I go to them to get some information so that I can fulfill the task I have at front of mind. This could be looking for a plumber to fix a leaky tap or chosing a fridge to buy because mine has just blown up. When I’m conducting these activities, Im not thinking about creating content for your site, I’m thinking about how can I satisfy my needs as quickly as possible so that I can get on with the rest of my life.
For these type of sites user contribution is very valuable, it supports the decision making process and its complimentary to more specific quantitative information about a product or service, but how can we facilitate the acquisition of this content?
For me there are 2 key areas of focus. Firstly there has to be something in it for the contributor, why should they be providing information, what do they get out of the deal, this could be anything from a warm feeling inside to a prize in an online raffle to an award for contribution of the week. Secondly, we need to lower the barrier to interaction, entice contribution with a single click, and then provide an increasing path of interaction so that you take the user on a journey. You can’t expect everyone to write an essay on why you should be buying a Dell laptop in stead of an ASUS netbook, but maybe you can get them to vote positively if they liked a particular product.
The point is that you can’t expect contribution on content consumption websites because you give your user base the functionality to do so, you need to give them a reason for taking part.
Unless you are starting up from scratch and have a clean sheet of paper as a technical architecture it is very difficult to implement a single content management solution across an organisation. A number of large companies have tried and failed with this endeavour.
Now that applications are using external web services to supplement the information they own and manage internally there is no reason that the same model can’t be used within an organisation to share and utilise data across different departments, brands or functional groups.
To support the use of internal data services there are a number of things that I think will make you life easier, firstly an enterprise content model can let you understand where content is stored, what types of content is available and where duplicates can be found, its amazing how a consistent content naming convention can help you out, so I would hire a few Information Architects and document your content model.
Secondly set up a single tagging solution so that you can find your content after it has been created, it also makes it easier to aggregate you content, whether it’s a folksonomy based solution or a faceted taxonomy based solution, a single tagging solution that everyone in your organisations uses will make life a lot easier in the future.
With social software being high on the web agenda at the moment, the selection of a web platform is becoming more complex. Should you chose a content management platform that contains social software functionality such as bloging, tagging, voting, profile pages etc. or should you go with a pure play social software platform that allows editorial content to be published. There are plenty of options on both sides of the fence.
For me the key question is how complex are your content management requirements?
Social software platforms such as Joomla, Drupal (and Word press and Moveable Type if you want purely blogging) are great for UGC, they are highly extensible and come with their own CMS back ends but they don’t support complex content creation lifecycles, multiple publication platforms and enterprise content models.
If you have a lot of editorial staff with publishing workflows, content reuse across a number of different workgroups and high volumes of content publication and syndication, I personally think you should look towards content management platforms that incorporate UGC functionality, platforms such as Ektron, Escenic, Tridion and Fatwire all support UGC and Vignette has just announced its new web experience platform.
Obviously the other option is to build something yourself, but I think you need to have a very good reason to go down this route considering the vast array of products out there in the market.