Social Media Within A User Experience Team
There’s a popular presentation on Slideshare that discusses the exact nature of social media.
Essentially it asks the question ‘What the *goodness gracious* is social media?’ It’s a term that has become increasingly saturated and over-used by the industry and journalists alike in the last couple of years. Other words flung around include ‘engagement’, ‘interaction’, ‘participation’ and ‘conversation’. All ambiguous and innately difficult to define and measure (although there is a great definition of engagement here). However, this isn’t a post about semantics.
As Marta Kegan (@mzkagen) says in the presentation, “Social media is people having conversations online.” The key word there? People.
My position as Social Media Strategist at Redweb means I sit within the user experience team. This may sound odd to some but fundamentally social media and usability are concerned with the same thing…
It’s About People
Social media is people talking to people, whether it is the people at a company talking to the people who are their customers, or the people who are customers talking to each other…or potential customers!
User experience is all about people too.
As the great Henry Jenkins said in a blog post many (well, four) years ago: “Emergent platforms are not spaces to invade – they are spaces to learn”.
With any social media activity being built around people, we need to learn who these people are. User experience (UX) specialises in exactly that. Within the UX team at Redweb there is a wealth of knowledge around understanding how people use websites, web tools and the internet and how best to research who these people are.
These same techniques are of course applicable to social media in gaining target audience insights. If you’re going to enter in to a conversation, you need to learn WHO you’re going to be talking to and therefore HOW to represent yourself as a company or organisation in order to connect at the right level.
For example, when conducting user experience research for a new website, the practitioner may well conduct a survey, hold focus groups or interview a cross section of users for that site among other things. Similarly, when planning a social media campaign we must consider who our target audience is, where they are (both on and offline) and how we can best reach out to them. In order to find these things out we…conduct surveys, hold focus groups etc etc.
Without proper research you may wade in thinking that wearing a baseball cap, jeans and a t-shirt is the best way to talk to your audience.
