Category Archives: usability

Stay the course with your personal social media brand

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Social media icons: LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Twitter and FacebookI was lucky enough to be recognized by A Better User Experience as an influential Twitter person to follow when it comes to user experience. I am humbled by this recognition and true to form, I am sharing my recipe to how you can receive this type of acknowledgement.

A while back I made a conscience effort to start communicating information about user experience, SEO, content strategy and accessibility. I had built up a good list of RSS feeds for me and thought it would be nice to share it. I didn’t want to have an auto feed where people would sift through a bunch of articles that may or may not be relevant; I wanted my Twitter and Google+ streams to be useful!

That has been my only strategy and apparently, people like getting information from my Twitter and Google+feeds. So if you want to add value to your personal social media brand do the following.

  • Get educated in the field you want to focus your brand on.
  • Make that your passion at work and outside of work.
  • Usability 101 – Know your audience.
  • Keep a consistent message in your posts.
  • Use content curation to back up your opinion on subject matters.

These things can take your personal brand a long way in social media!

Who are you marketing to exactly?

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I get the feeling that for company that is scoring my personal online brand, Klout doesn’t know “me” very well. Aside from the roller-coaster scores that appear on my account, it’s the email offers that really confuse me. Take a look at this example:

Klout News Offer - Doesn't have any meaning to me, personally.

I think it’s cool that they are expanding their international efforts and helping Airbnb celebrate in the UK, but let me geo-locate myself. Nope, I’m not in the UK. I’m in the Heartland of the United States, Iowa to be exact. Maybe the campaign is trying to make me aware that Klout offers more incentives out of the US, but when the headline reads “Treat Yourself with a £50 Travel Voucher from Airbnb” – I immediately focus on the £50 and think, “Did we switch currencies?” If only I read my email thoroughly, maybe I wouldn’t have this confusion? Last I checked most people scan when they read, especially email offers.

The user experience and marketing strategy wasn’t thought through very well. Simple segmentation could have been applied to make sure that an offer that I would actually be interested would be sent to my inbox. Either my connections with user experience folks in the UK have put me in the European segment or Klout doesn’t know me at all!

Another great example of how important it is for you to know your users.