Thursday, August 30, 2012

Being “online”: what does it mean today?


The online world has changed more rapidly in the past 5 years than perhaps any industry in history has changed in the same time frame. Five years ago, being online in business meant that you had a website – perhaps you did ecommerce on it, perhaps not. That was it. A website. If you were a blogger, your blog was your website, and you wrote and posted blog posts, period. We all know that the goal of a website 5 years ago was to drive traffic to your site. That was even the goal 2 years ago.

What is the goal of corporate and personal websites today? Is it to drive traffic to your site or to drive customer engagement? It is to drive engagement. It’s all about content. You want your customers/readers/followers to engage with your content, share it, use it. Ultimately, if you're in business, engagement with your brand online drives business. Yes, ROI is difficult to measure, but in order to compete, you need to go where the people are. That is on social sites, not on the traditional internet.

Being online is no longer about going to websites. We engage online in a variety of ways in 2012. Yes, websites are still important. But how do people access your content? No longer is the traditional desktop the main avenue of online engagement. People do still engage from their desktop, yes – but they also engage from their laptop, their tablet, their phone, through apps, mobile sites, and yes, still the good ol’ internet.

We no longer have a Field of Dreams internet. If you build it, they might come. But they’ll come by their preferred means of transportation. If you want them to come, you have to make it easy. Let people engage where they are. Don’t force the method of engagement, or you’ll find that you are left far, far behind in this rapidly changing technological world.

Here are several examples that all happened to me just this morning (and I admit they are all a daily occurrence):
I follow several hundred blogs. Many are for work, many are for pleasure, many are political (no, that doesn’t count as pleasure, obviously!). But to make my life easier, I aggregate all those blog feeds into a single feed reader. I use Google Reader, but there are tons of feed readers out there. I want to be able to go through my blog feed each morning, read the news and engage where I choose. That means rapidly moving through blog posts, reading them, and if I choose to, either sharing them via social media or email or clicking through to comment on them. It used to be that commenting on a blog was the only way to engage with others on that post. If you limit yourself to that today, or if you gauge success by the number of comments on a particular blog post, you are not seeing the full picture. People share, people talk on social media. That is still engagement with you, your brand, your online presence, even if it isn’t actually engaging on your internet website itself.

Where do I read all these blogs in my Google Reader? Usually on my mobile device, which is mostly my phone. You may have a tablet, but it may not always be with you. You may have a laptop, but it may not always be with you. Your desktop is only with you at home or in the office. But my phone? Aren’t we all attached at the hip (sometimes literally) to our phones? Mine goes almost everywhere with me. Unless you ask my kids, who frequently want to know why I didn’t answer their texts.

Point is, I read blogs on my phone. Therefore, my use of the traditional internet, while not hampered, may not be as easy a process as I might like. When I read blog posts, I want to read the entire thing before I decide to engage or not. If you make me click through from my feed reader (which is an easy to use app on my phone) to the big bad internet just to read your post (not having chosen to engage yet), it’s just too much trouble. I have 300 other posts to read, and I don’t have the time to wait for my phone’s browser to load only to discover the site isn’t mobile friendly, and it’s a pain to read your post. That is just not going to happen.

What does happen if you don’t include your entire post in your feed? I delete your feed. Therefore, I don't see your content at all!

We need to make it easy for people to engage. I can share a blog post on Twitter or Facebook straight from my feed reader, along with a comment about it. From there, I can engage other users about the content in that post. I can email the link straight from my feed reader to my husband (who despite my best efforts) isn’t all that tech savvy, and would rather read it online, and tell him to read the article. This is still engaging with your content, even though I haven’t commented on your post.

Major social sites need to make sharing content easy. And for the most part they succeed. But my irritation was triggered this morning when, while checking Facebook on my phone via their mobile app, I wanted to share something. Facebook has become all about sharing content. But the one item missing from their mobile app is the Share button. If I want to share a picture, I either have to go to the full site (NO!) or download the picture and repost it, which defeats the entire purpose of the “Share”. Not to mention that it can bring a whole host of copyright infringement issues because it makes it that much more difficult to attribute content to a specific user.

If I belong to a specific online networking community (like a Ning, for example) for professional purposes, I want to be able to access that easily on my mobile device. Not everyone uses an iPad. Like I said, my mobile device of choice (by the default rule of convenience) is my smartphone. Make it easy to network and access content in that community on my phone. Otherwise, I’m not likely to participate in your community.

So if there is a point to my post today, it is this:

  1. Let your readers engage where and how they want, whether you’re a huge brand or a small blogger.
  2. Include a FULL feed of your content in your RSS.
  3. Make it easy to share content (looking at YOU, Facebook).
  4. Re-evaluate how you determine success. It may mean that you change the metrics at which you look on a monthly basis. Instead of number of comments, look at number of shares. Find the count of your social mentions. Look at backlinks. Engage with your customers (readers, whatever) where they are and where they want to be, on social sites like twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (for companies), Reddit (look at President Obama’s AMA on Reddit yesterday!)
  5. Don’t force people to use the internet in any particular way, like forcing them to your site to read your content. It will only lose you readers, not gain you engagement.

I'm interested to know what you think. Agree? Disagree? Do you have a full feed or do you limit it to a few words of content, trying to entice readers to your site for more? Tell us how you engage online.

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