The teenage brain is, “like a car with a good accelerator but a weak brake. With powerful impulses under poor control, the likely result is a crash.” – Laurence Steinberg

Teens are always going to make mistakes: it’s part of what being a teenager is about after all, but the internet represents a whole new set of issues for teenagers.

For older teens, innocent pictures of a night out posted on their Facebook profile or MySpace page can result in difficulties when they eventually start looking for work. Younger teens and tweens can run into trouble by posting to much seemingly harmless information about themselves, positing anything from their favourite place to hang out after school, to what they’ll be wearing when they go out.

Naturally, risk taking is a key part of anyone’s development, but do social networks foster too great a sense of security? How can we give teenagers the space to explore and share whist doing everything possible to keep them safe?

Without some sort of guardian present, online spaces can become a virtual version of the unsupervised school playground, often made worse due to the anonymity afforded by the internet. Someone who may think twice about harassing a class mate face-to-face may have no such inhibitions when sitting behind a computer screen in the comfort of their own room.

So how can we guide teens, without stifling them?

Inhabit their world

Understand the language used by teens / tweens. This includes keeping up to date with changing language trends, including code words that children use to get round automated filters.

Children are developing and need some freedom to do this. At this stage in their lives, they are forming individual opinions and testing ideas. Our role as adults is to keep children safe, not censor them. But be clear what the line is, and intervene once it is crossed.

Listen to concerns or questions, and respond quickly. Traffic should be two-way – not only to protect your users and your brand, but also to learn from them and develop your offering.

Avoid being intrusive, or engaging with the user over the wrong platform. Listen (see above) to what platform children want to engage with you over, and use it.
    
Earn trust and respect. This is so important to young people finding their own boundaries and voices. Show trust and respect (and consistency), and don’t patronise teens and tweens. That way you’ll get trust and respect back.

Keep them engaged and happy online. Diffuse difficult situations, be aware of the day-to-day dramas and heartache and help them through the highs and lows. But don’t jump in too soon. Assuming a child is not in any danger, he or she will only learn how to deal with the emotional journey of teenage years by experiencing it.

Keep them safe
    
Watch out for and deter cyberbullying, peer-to-peer abuse and the kind of peer pressure that leads to this abuse. Researchers cited by CNET in an article on online abuse  say that anywhere from 40 percent to 85 percent of kids have been exposed to some kind of digital bullying, whether it’s a stolen password or being called “fat” via instant message.

Spot and prevent grooming behaviour. Technology has become so advanced that it is possible to use software as well as human moderators to spot early grooming behaviour by analysing patterns of behaviour, and to link that behaviour to previous activity on a website.

Keep children safe from themselves. Most children will give away personally identifying information (particularly from live feeds) without even thinking about the consequences, which can lead to abuse.

Don’t let them be exposed to potentially damaging, offensive or otherwise inappropriate material, uploaded by other users.
    
Educate them on the consequences of inappropriate behaviour. The role of a moderator in educating children is to work with parents and other adult role models to act as a guide for children – akin to a teacher in the playground, rather than a more censorial role – to help diffuse potentially damaging situations, or help children work their responses out for themselves.

Create mechanisms to report abusive behaviour, give feedback, or voice concerns. It is so important that children can easily voice their concerns or ask questions in confidence.

The moderator’s role as guardian

Adults who have a presence in online worlds inhabited by children – no matter how good their intentions – will be seen alternately as role model, common enemy, powers-that-be, guide, teacher and intruder. That is the role of an adult mentor, or guide, to a teenager starting to flex their muscles – it’s the way of the world.

Above all, moderators must be a guide to steer children through difficulties, and someone to keep them from self-harm or abuse by others.

Currently, there is no legal obligation to moderate online behaviour or content – although the Digital Britain report indicates that a content labelling system of some sort is not far away – but of course there is a moral one. The reputational risk of being associated with offensive material could have wide-reaching implications for brands.
 
For a more in-depth look at marketing to teens/tweens and their online behaviour, see eModeration’s white papers on the subject.

This week’s NESTA sponsored Reboot Britain conference brought together a mix of government, business, banks, technology, media people from the UK, and visitors from the USA that saw left leaning Labour/Liberal Democrat political views engage and collaborate with conservative Tory representatives. The crowd’s reaction saw the many of those who are normally distrustful of government, financial institutions and conservative politics try to mingle more with what they historically view as the “other side” of the spectrum.

Opening remarks from conservative Jeremy Hunt MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, had him lovingly embrace the Internet, new technology and the governments increasing integration of it into public services. He praised the transformative nature of new technology’s impact in delivering high quality factual content to the world from ordinary citizens, with Wikipedia, and talked about a new effort to publish and provide archives of government documents online for access to all. Hunt said that politics has been stuck in a rut toward progress, with its stance to first fight online, then ignore it, and only now begin to embrace it. People have flipped politics on its head by rushing online to express views and grassroots organizse around issues in powerful ways that have not beeen witnessed before, making for the emergence of a new movement composed of “collaborative individualism.”

“Huge change is possible with the Internet and the Internet also makes possible some very unpleasant things,” he said. “The Internet is a powerful way to connect voters and as a politician I have to engage more intelligently with my constituents.”  

Hunt’s speech received mixed reaction and a bix of cheeky tweet banter from a crowd of professionals who live on the bleeding edge of the technological world, think liberally and radically, and often wonder why the conservatives, and the government, with its recent release of the Digital Britain report, have taken so long to embrace new technology that the left and leaders like Al Gore have been pushing the agenda toward for years. Now, it seems, the people have collectively forced politics to adapt or be left behind.

Visiting Reboot Britain was a digital celebrity group of Americans called the Travelling Geeks, who mingled with the guests and presented panel sessions throughout the day, including Craig Newmark, the nerd who many people feel changed the world with Craigslist.org. 

“The Internet makes public service people feel they can come out of the darkness, and feel liberated and my hidden agenda is helping people in government affect change, and talk, and accelerate collaboration across the Atlantic,” he said. On the good side, most people want to be a positive influence, and on the evil side, noisy, idiotic spammers and trolls with extremist views pollute the channels of communication and need moderation to combat this ugly side. 

To combat the ugly side of the Internet, people need a friendly “nudge” to do good, and regulations toward social media use among public service employees needs to be relaxed so that they can feel safe freely expressing views and using the tools to improve things, citing the example of Newmark’s favourite project FixMyStreet.

I caught up with Newmark after his talk, and you can listen to his commentary here on this Audioboo. 

Pock marking the day was an insulting and demeaning panel presentation asking “Is the Web Female?” that attracted a majority of female attendants, only to sucker-punch them with horrible commentary from two of the American panelists who behaved like the scary, exclusionary popular girls in a Beverly Hills 90210 high school class. While lifestreamer Megan Asha and technology journalist Sarah Lacy may be respected digital influencers in US circles they did themselves, nor the women in the audience, any favours by describing how women behave online as being “catty, gossipy” and wanting to shop a lot. The comments provoked anger among the audience:

“Disappointed is the web female session seemingly stymied by pointless focus on imaginary gender characteristics. A waste.” tweeted @josiefraser

“A few minutes of listening to ‘is the web female’ debate and you lose the will to live.” tweeted @hollandshurst.

“Finally giving up on ‘Is the Web Female’, which is relying on a narrow, depressing & slightly weird definition of “female” tweeted @justinpickard

Panelist Joanne Jacobs balanced out the nasty catty female debate by smashing stereotype demographics and openly confessing that she often gender-switches online to allow herself more freedom with masculine-style expression. MT Rainey brought home the concept that the web is neither male or female but simply a place where humanity gathers.

The day’s closing address saw Howard Reingold outline ways to improve digital inclusion with digital literacy, and more activism.

“Boring blogs and Twitter accounts show that participating just isn’t good enough, being an active citizen is a start but from passive consumption you have to move toward participation,” he said. Reingold called for the end of crap content, miss-information, spam, porn spam and helping more people develop their own “crap detectors.” 

Master of ceremonies for the day was Policy Unplugged’s Steve Moore who remarked at closing that he was thrilled to watch #rebootbritain trending above the dominant topic King of Pop Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter.

Feeling gossipy, catty and like shopping so guess I should get online and surf the Web today,

-Lisa

Following on from my previous, less than enthusiastic post about outfit builders and their viability in online ecommerce, I came across this video which really got me excited:

Yes it’s clunky, and the production quality is poor, but if the guys behind this have managed to get a prototype working, others will surely not be far behind. This is the kind of exciting development that would be a game changer in fashion ecommerce.

 The ‘ad funded’ model has taken a bit of a beating this year. The big
question is whether it can continue in a recession-hit media world.

Last month Blyk (the ad-funded mobile operator) withdrew their consumer offer and just this week Joost
(the online video company) announced that market conditions meant that
it too was moving away from a consumer focussed ad-funded model. These
were both businesses heralded as at the frontier of the new media world
and examples of how an ad-funded business model could be used to
deliver new services to consumers on new platforms.

But that model is under severe threat.

Recessionary-driven declines in media spends have driven massive losses and cuts at ITV
and focussed attention on the long-term viability of Channel 4.
Newpapers too are suffering. And, to put this into a digital context,
the first quarter of this year saw a 5% drop decline in online advertising.

So a new model has to be found as only the largest traffic sites can continue a purely ad-funded approach.

Surely
it’s got to focus on subscriptions. However, the print media industry
let the genie out of the bottle with free content – and I think it’s
hard to see consumers willingness to pay for something that they have
considered free for some time – unless there is an industry-wide
approach. But who will blink first?

There are some interesting
models out there. Spotify the online music service uses a blend of
ad-based revenues and a subscription model. However, many people have
asked how Spotify can actually make a profit and there is a good
interview with Daniel Ek (the Spotify CEO) on TechRadar
- although Ek does not directly answer the question as to how its
business model really works. The core question for Spotify and others
is what % of users will pay the subscription model when the free model
is pretty good. The ads aren’t really intrusive enough to make me
switch to a premium version.

An alternative option is using
micropayments for content. Here users buy premium content in return for
just a couple of pence. However will users really want to make that
‘purchase decision’ every time they want to access/read a piece of
content? And how will that work practically? The user would already
have had to buy-in to the site producing that content and lodged some
form of payment (in the same way that works for iTunes). The
micropayment model has been mooted for over a decade – but is still not
gained much traction. Perhaps the media downturn will see it dusted it
off and reconsidered.

There’s recently been a flurry of activity at Pod1 h.q. meeting with various developers of online outfit builders. The principle behind all of these is pretty straightforward: allowing customers to virtually try something on and mix and match with other items is that one step closer to the real experience and will therefore lead to an increase in conversions…that’s the theory anyway.

Some of the better ones I came across were:

Schway
A simple mannequin experience that can be quickly and easily dressed. Nice layering functionality means you can see how items look when worn over each other – something not all systems I tested could do.

http://schway.net/

Boden USA
I really like this. Works straight off the listings page with a real model. Limited stock of course but certainly has the impact.

http://bodenusa.mixmatchme.com/MME/bodenusa/home.aspx

Republic, using Polyvore
This was more of a scrap book then an outfit builder but accomplished the task i.e. to mix and match items and see if they work together. Additional functionality to resize items was pretty good.

http://www.republic.co.uk/page/outfitbuilderwomens

No Need 4 Mirrors
A system utilised by Oasis, Karen Millen, Coast and Lipsy amongst others.

http://www.nn4m.co.uk

They all have their pros and cons but I’m actually yet to be convinced. Lack of product range, unrealistic visualisation of the body/face, inability to change skin tone, body shape and most importantly the arguably clunky technology (it’s flash but it’s not exactly a seamless experience).

It’s early days so would be great to hear if they are working for brands to deliver incremental revenue. I do think for systems like this to really work however, there needs to be some sort of standardisation of how these mannequins/avatars pull in data so retailers can integrate image dimensions into the standard photography schedule.

So calling all developers and innovators: create a common micro-format for this technology so that these outfit builders become truly useful and actually add value to the online shopping experience. One day this will be cracked, and hats off to those who’ve already attempted a system, but i think we’re still in Outfit-Builder 0.5 with 1.0 coming our way towards the end of the year.

Recently Comscore was commissioned to do a report
on behalf of online publishers to show that online display really does
work. “Forget about the click through” was the angle, “what matters is
that these ads drive awareness.”

A piece of research out by Harris Interactive
casts some doubt on that. A survey of American consumers found that
when it came to ad formats found to be the most ‘helpful’ in
influencing purchasing decisions, TV came top on 37%.

TV
was followed by newspaper advertising on 17% while search engine
advertising scored a respectable 14%. However at the bottom of the
table, only 3% considered radio ads the most helpful, dropping down to
1% for Internet banner ads.

When it came to ad formats
they claimed to ‘ignore’, only 6% of consumers ignored newspaper
advertising (there is life in the old dog yet), 9% ignored radio ads,
13% TV and 17% search engine advertising. Internet ads? 46% claimed to
have banner blindness.

For a more detailed response that I posted around the Comscore study, see a post I wrote on my home blog.

Since its beta launch at the end of last year the music streaming service Spotify has quickly become a bit of a “fans” favourite, offering a wide catalogue of music to its users to listen to for free with relatively little interference from advertising. With an interface that ingeniously ‘borrows’ (robs blind) from iTunes’, it begs the question: is Spotify the future of music in the UK?

There seems to be growing evidence to suggest this could be the case – take a walk through the LBi offices in London and you are unlikely to have to move far to find someone inflicting their ‘Friday mix’ Spotify playlist on their colleagues. As Spotify focus on rapidly sourcing additional record labels and content for their library and growing their revenue streams through a variety of non / low invasive techniques they look set to become a major player in music distribution in the UK moving forward.

Obviously the real money comes from users actually paying for a service, but based on a recent presentation they gave at the LBi office in London it is clear that Spotify are not foolish enough to make these users the entire foundation of their business model, instead ensuring they also develop a robust ad platform that takes the advantages and disadvantages of the medium into account.

Brands are being encouraged to go beyond thinking about pure display / audio creative combinations and to actually utilise the product – creating associated playlists and advertising that links into “Spotifyed” branded landing pages and back out again, encouraging a certain level of engagement from the user that should actually enrich their experience.  Best of all they have engineered their ad delivery system so that free users are a) not bombarded with ads and b) only served ads when they will be seen and heard by their users. They do this by restricting adverts to times when a user is active in the Spotify application. Planner Buyers – I hear you breath a sigh of relieve, your buy will not be served to a user that is working on their spreadsheets – your ads will be seen!

The flip side of this is the premium part of the model and the ways the business plans to drive take-up for this.  This is where things gets interesting – rather than just getting rid of the ads, premium subscribers will shortly get access to an iPod touch, iPhone and smart phone application that will allow them to not only stream music wirelessly on their mobile device when they have access to wifi but also store music locally in the app to access when they are somewhere without wifi, for example on the tube on the way home from work.

I love the sound of this and I believe a lot of people will certainly take Spotify up on this offer BUT I can’t help feeling that UK users are getting a poor deal compared to our friends over the pool. Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace has given what is essentially the same functionality but in addition to being able to store music locally it allows you to download a number of tracks each month to keep, even after you end your subscription – plus you can wirelessly share tracks to a friend’s Zune player for a limited number of plays so you can sell them on the wonders of whatever new track you have just found!

I guess to summarise: well done to Spotify for giving UK users a great service – this is something the music industry needs to monitor closely if it is to save its quickly diminishing revenues.  Ultimately the proof is in the pudding however… Will these innovative commercial models add up to enough to keep the music industry in the black?

We were fortunate enough to attend the sell-out ‘UX London’ conference at The Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch this year. It was the first conference if its type here in London aimed at user experience practitioners and there were some big names in attendance – both lecturing and running half-day workshops. The conference ran over three information-filled days. Day One was lecture day, with inspirational talks from the likes of Peter Merholz, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Saffer, Jared Spool, Jeffrey Veen and most excitingly Don ‘The Don’ Norman.

Days Two and Three went into much greater detail, with interactive workshops covering all aspects of user experience practice; from sketching lessons to learning how organisations can make better decisions through design. In fact there were too many fantastic workshops to get around all of them and there were no “fillers”.

One of the highlights for me however was hearing Don Norman speak on Day One. The author of seminal books such as The Design of Everyday Things, Things That Make us Smart and more recently The Design of Future Things, Don is well known to all user experience architects and designers alike. The fact that his comments were Twittered with the hashtag ‘#TheDon’ just goes to show the affection and regard in which he is held.
Often the contrarian (“When everyone is asking for something, I tend to take the opposite approach”), Norman has recently caused minor storms by arguing that simplicity is highly overrated and that complexity is good thing. At first this approach feels wrong: as usability people, we are often in the habit of trying to make online experiences as simple as possible. Surely complexity can only harm the experience and put customers off?

Norman offers a familiar example of simplicity: the Google search homepage – often quoted as the epitome of the simple. Without a doubt, Google is by far and away the most popular search engine. And yet Yahoo! have the most popular homepage and it’s packed with information. Yahoo! is optimised for exploration, with Google it takes a little more work. You might argue that these two homepages are different products but the sheer popularity of Yahoo! goes some way to show that complex pages are popular.

Another example: the iPhone is often touted as simple and consumer-friendly. And yet with a new software update, Apple has added 100 extra new features. How is this level of complexity compatible with the idea of a simple product? One might argue it’s because users have learnt how to use the device and are now demanding more advanced tools (like Copy and Paste).

There appears to be a fundamental conflict here: when asked, people will demand simplicity (“Why is it so hard to use?”, “Why can’t products be simpler?”) but when you watch these same people comparing products side-by-side, it is the number of features that sell a product. People want more features even when they realise this must complicate the product. People believe that as you add features you add capability, thereby making more feature-laden products more desirable. However, as user experience professionals, we believe adding more features decreases usability. Both positions, Norman argues, are wrong. “We must distinguish complexity from confusion, perplexity, and unintelligibility. The goal is complexity with order, lucidity and understandability.”

People prefer complex things. If it’s too simple, it gets boring. Once a user gains experience with a product, the user moves into a new role; that of the Intermediate and suddenly their perception of what is complex changes.
An aside. Roughly speaking, there are three classes of user: the Beginner, the Intermediate and the Expert. If we plot the number of people against perceived skill level, like most population distributions we get the classic statistical bell curve, with most users situated in the middle of the curve at ‘Intermediate’.

It stands to reason therefore, that these are the users we should spend the most amount of time designing for. And yet it’s often the Beginners and the Experts who get the most attention. The Product Manager demands the Beginner must be able to hit the ground running and yet the engineer or developer, if left to their own devices, designs for their own skill-level – that of the Expert.

So how does Norman suggest we solve the complexity problem? Unsurprisingly the first approach should be through well-researched design. By modularising actions we can contain the complexity and by teaching users as they go, we can help them manage complex interactions.

I’ll leave the last word to The Don himself: “Why are things so complex? Because the world is complex. Our tools must reflect reality. Complexity can be good, leading to a rich, satisfying life, filled with rich, satisfying experiences.”

This blog post was written by the Creative Director of Aardvark Media, Tim Minor.

ECRM is king. So why isn’t everyone doing it? OK, perhaps the rhetorical excuse for a diatribe about how everyone really must start doing it properly is a bit transparent. Actually there might be a perfectly rational explanation, no matter how much I might, as a passionate advocate of eCRM, be wary of it. The answer is very, very mundane.

We’ve recently been involved in two quite big pitches, for brands everyone’s heard of and almost everyone uses, both in transport. We’ve been drafted in as a wildcard – the brief’s been about making email marketing deliver revenues. We’ve come in and talked about strategy and how relationships, customer journey cycles and touchpoints affect frequency of purchase and average transaction values. We’ve talked at length about the processes involved in mining data, creating simple customer segmentation then rich, layered segmentation (starting with sponge cake and aiming for gateau, I suppose). We’ve described processes for selecting email providers, deliverability consultants, analytics. And we’ve talked about the results – millions in demonstrable incremental revenues, customer lifetime values that go up by 3% (read: millions of pounds), over the first couple of years.

Looking back over these two pitches, which we didn’t win (our normal win rate is around 75%), it’s clear why. These two clients wanted to improve their email marketing. Simple as that. What we should have talked about was how we improve email campaigns so they drive results. We should leave the data stuff as a functional but implicit element – same as usability, or build standards, or testing. We’ve been guilty of trying to explain the thinking, not the practice. In old speak, we’ve been trying to sell the sausage, not the sizzle. Sure, eCRM is infinitely more complex than just email marketing… there are plenty of big projects that integrate segment-driven microsites, emails, SMS and e-commerce, all in aid of making the customer the centre of a brand’s universe. But actually from some clients’ points of view they may simply want to take the next step in improving what they do already, and that may be taking a newsletter and making it more relevant through simple segmentation.

And if we do take this approach to those pitches where the brief really is for improving email marketing, then perhaps we can take these clients and move them on to eCRM by stealth. If we can start with quick wins – the kind that generate sudden revenues – then we can go on to justify spending time and money on strategic thinking, segmentation and online touchpoints. In retrospect, we’ve been guilty of a lack of patience, and it’s a trait endemic to the leading edges of the digital industry. So with (probably the vast majority of) clients new to eCRM, we need to start on ground that’s already familiar, in order to help transform the mundane into something that ensures that it’s the customer who’s king.

Last week Charles Arthur wrote an, as you’d expect much discussed,
Guardian piece on the long tail of blogging ‘dying.’ His rationale was
that in the long term, people are turning to more immediate and concise
services such as Twitter and Facebook updates to share their thoughts.

This is a theme that comes around time and time again. For example, last October, Paul Boutin wrote an article on Wired entitled “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004.”

The numbers don’t show a decline

Charles Arthur quotes the Technorati
stat from last year that shows that 95% of the 133 million blogs are
basically dead – abandoned due to lack of interest or time. But that’s
still seven million+ that are alive and well.

And on his data mining blog, MSN’s Matthew Hurst produced a series of graphs
to prove that blogs aren’t declining. He took a series of common (not
news led) terms like car repair and birthday, things that you’d imagine
to be fairly consistent year round.

Looking
at Blogpulse (which Matthew co-created), he found 142 posts about car
repair on 4 Jan and 144 on 21 June. Similarly, he took the term
‘birthday’ and found the trend to be fairly straight.

Does Twitter actually give blogs a new lease of life?

I’d also take the opposite view to Charles Arthur: Rather than spelling the kiss of death, Twitter and Facebook give a lot of blogs a new lease of life.

From personal experience of my own (News from the Herd) blog and from looking through this blog’s stats at Get Clicky, I know I get around 5% of my monthly unique visitors from Twitter.    While that doesn’t sound like a lot, that’s 120 odd readers I’d normally not  have and I know that for other blogs the % figure is much higher.

That’s
because in a lot of cases, Twitter is not a self contained place to
have conversations (the stereotype being it’s where people blast off
140 character thoughts about what they had for breakfast), it’s
somewhere where conversations kick off that get taken elsewhere.

So
I predict that in a year’s time we’ll still be having ‘decline of
blogs’ type pieces…and plenty of posts like this in return.

Blogging is dead – long live blogging

As an aside, A List blogger Steve Rubel recently announced that he’s done with blogging…actually not really as he admits himself.

What he’s done is move his blog over onto Posterous.
While he calls Posterous a lifestream, we’re really talking semantics
as Posterous is a blogging platform that’s a few steps on from blogger in terms of functionality, in that it integrates better with Twitter, Facebook and video sharing sites.

It’s
something I’d been considering (and no doubt a lot of other bloggers)
myself – moving this site onto a system that gives me a few more
options – and no doubt with Steve’s lead others will now follow. The
point is, it shows that the blogging industry isn’t permanently stuck back in 2004, but continues to evolve.

Image – Matthew Hurst / Blog Pulse