Determining What Users Want (Part 2)
Posted by Chris Kieff on December 5th, 2008
Enterprise Social Media Lessons Learned
Part of our series in Enterprise Social Media Lessons Learned. It’s always best to start at the beginning and you’ll find that here.
Our panelists were asked what their organizations did to determine what people wanted in a social media site. Josh Resnik of Gannett and Dan Hickey of Meredith responded with the tactics both organizations used, some of what you would expect, and some that maybe you wouldn’t.
Note that Gannett launched www.MomsLikeMe.com in October 2008 and Meredith will be launching MixingBowl.com in the next few weeks. Both of these sites are complete social networking sites with full compliments of features and capabilities, you can visit the sites or learn more here.
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QUESTION: One of the things that many fail to do when they begin a social media project is adequately plan the monetization of the site. How do you think future social media planners can avoid this?
Next – New Revenue Models for Social Media.
Previously:
1. Enterprise Social Media Lessons Learned (Part 1)
View Comments to “Determining What Users Want (Part 2)”
December 5th, 2008 at 8:38 am
This series is very interesting so far!
I don’t know that I agree with the extent that these gentlemen are going to in order to poll the desired end-user though.
One of the things that I’m seeing in Social Media is that too much user input at too early a stage results in a misstep because the intended users themselves are not fully cognizant of their needs.
This rather parallels the software & hardware designers pitfalls in the System Development Life Cycle… if your users have not already been familiarized with the type of item you are designing, they often ask for things that later become the issue after development.
In some cases, too much user input prior to the actual architecture of a site or social media tool can be a detriment rather than a benefit.
It is a good idea to be cautious of the “well I thought I wanted that, but now that I’m using it, I don’t like it” phenomena.
Nonetheless, looking forward to seeing the Revenue Models post!
Great series so far!
December 5th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
The MomsLikeMe site is visually overwhelming.
http://centraljersey.momslikeme.com/members/exploregroups.aspx?p=163
December 6th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Lucretia, you are spot on with the idea that too much user input too early can be misleading. Just like any good writing project, there needs to be a draft, a strawperson if you will. Once a vision is able to be seen by users, the input you receive about every aspect of the product, UI, content, direction, function is much more useful.
This was true with Blue Shirt Nation, Best Buy’s employee portal that started out as a means to get better information about how customers were reacting to products and turned out being a window into the employee perspective as well. http://culld.us/656998
December 31st, 2008 at 9:32 am
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January 13th, 2009 at 8:49 am
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January 13th, 2009 at 8:49 am
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