For most businesses, the question of what to play while customers are on hold is not critical. Important, but not vital to customer satisfaction.

What if most of your business is handled over the phone? If you’re the iconoclastic savings bank ING Direct, you help customers cope with waiting by playing messages that are witty, informative and, most importantly, respect your customers’ intelligence.

Check it out!  ING Direct: On Hold Messages

“Over and over, I have seen how a UCD (User Centered Design) process will tend to emphasize certain benefits of an experience like ‘convenience’ over other, more meaningful sources of social value.”

From an article in core 77 by Robert Fabricant, creative director of frog design.

HOW PEOPLE APPLY THE BASIC SOCIAL RULE OF POLITENESS TO COMPUTERS

There is a well-known documented fact about human behavior: People will tell you what they think you want to hear. For example, if a waiter asks how his service was, people are more likely to give him a positive response. If a 3rd party asks about the waiter’s service, people tend to give more negative responses. Why? Because, generally, people want to be liked. And people feel they are liked more when they are being polite. (Certainly there are a few exceptions to this rule). You probably don’t need to think too hard to relate to this, your parents taught you at an early age the importance of being polite.

But did you know that people apply that same social rule to computers. I’ll wait a second while that sinks in… Yes, people are polite to computers! Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, while professors at Stanford University and Co-directors of the “Social Responses to Communication Technologies” project at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, conducted controlled experiments to get to the bottom of this seemingly illogical idea.

In this study, one of their many studies on the subject of people’s social response to computers, participants were split into two groups. They asked the first group to sit at Computer A and participate in answering questions about a series of facts. They were told that they would evaluate the computer’s performance at the end of the session. The computer would state a trivial fact and ask the participant if they know about it, giving them three choices: a lot, not much and none. Based on their answers, the computer would offer additional information about that fact. At the end, the computer would test the participants retained knowledge and let them know which questions they had gotten right. After each reviewed question, the computer would state that it had done a great job. At the end of the session, Computer A asked the participant to rate its performance.

The second group worked through the exact same process on Computer A as group one, answering the same questions about the same series of facts. At the end of the session, they moved to another identical computer (Computer B) where it asked the participants about Computer A’s performance. Hands down, group one had far more favorable responses towards Computer A than the second group.

Mind you, there were no graphics and everything on the screen was text-based (copy and standard UI buttons). During the exit interview, the participants were asked if they provided answers that were polite to the computer. All of them confidently dismissed that notion–they said that they were not being “polite” to the computer in the least [insert image of them rolling their eyes here]. So that means, consciously, that they considered the computer to be an inanimate object. However, their actions obviously tell a different story. You might be thinking that the participants were identifying with a “programmer” behind the computer. But even that theory had been ruled out through the experiment. There can only be one reason for their reaction: people subconsciously apply the social rule of politeness to computers.

Knowing that we treat computers as social actors, what could this mean for your organization and the connections you make with your customers, patients or students online?

1. First, know that feedback solicited on your site (like a survey) will be more positive towards you than if it is solicited through a 3rd party (like a review site). Those 3rd party evaluations will tend be more honest (or at least more balanced) than the feedback solicited on your site.
2. More importantly, turn the study around. Ask yourself if your web site is “polite” to your visitors. Is it nice and is it helpful? For example, when a visitor is presented with an error, does your site take responsibility (“Sorry, I can’t find what you’re looking for [insert helpful instructions here]) or does it make the visitor feel like a criminal ([ERROR: Access Denied! You have attempted to modify your access to the secure Web site. As a result, your session has been terminated. This attempt to falsify your credentials has been logged to our files.] This is an actual message given to a user after he forgot that his username was case sensitive).
   Too often, Web sites speak the language of the organization, or the programmer, which is almost always very different than the visitor’s. If a visitor doesn’t feel connected to your site, they won’t feel connect to your organization or it’s products and services. (This idea actually tips into the social rule of “likability” which I’ll write about in a future post.)
3. Taking it a step further, consider putting a polite human face (or voice) on your product or service. Make a human connection. Don’t speak about features, talk about how this will make their job, health, life better. A more human tone in your copy will increase the likelihood that users will have a more positive, more personal experience.

Mark Dunst, a partner of Polymer Studios, is a Web strategist, interaction and interface designer in Portland, OR.

What probably seemed clever in the mind of a 23-year-old, childless copywriter turned out to be quite offensive to many moms (and dads, to be sure) and unleashed a social media firestorm.

Within a few short hours, a movement was born, complete with its own #motrinmoms hashtag on Twitter, angry blog posts, video rants, CafePress stores, Flickr groups and parody videos. In less than a day, Motrin was forced to take down the ad and apologize.

• Morriss Partee has published a chronology of events.
• Enterprise Social Media has assembled a Harpers-like index of Motrin Moms activity, which also gives a good sense of how quickly, from Motrin’s point of view, this whole thing got out of hand.
• Jack Neff covers the incident in Ad Age.

Update:
My biz partner Dean Gulstad points out an article by Jakob Nielsen on participation inequality, which supports Neff’s view that Motrin acted too hastily in responding to the social media uproar. Nielsen points out that “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” Therefore, he says, “If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.”

Yet another update:
Seth Godin pans Motrin’s apology for its lack of humanity.

Just when you thought you’d seen every Google Maps mashup imaginable, the Commercial Crime Services division of the ICC (International Chamber of Commerce) has launched the Live Piracy Map. The map shows the locations of piracy incidents across the globe.

This is a great example of “data marketing” – disseminating meaningful data in order to help your prospects better understand their needs and/or your company’s relevance in meeting their needs. In this case, the ICC is not a business but a trade organization. But why couldn’t a maritime security company have produced such a map?

Via the ever-entertaining BLDGBLOG

Interactive demos are a great way to give your customers and prospects a good idea of what your product is and how it can benefit them. Demos are usually associated with demonstrating features of software or consumer products. And they’re just as effective for selling complex services or conceptual ideas.

Demonstrate how your product solves the problem–not just how it works.

Demos are nothing new, however many fall far short of their potential as a virtual sales tool. The biggest problem most demos have is they usually focus on how the product works, not on how it actually solves a customer’s problem. Businesses are missing out on a huge sales opportunity if their demo only addresses a list of its product features. Of course you need to talk about features (what does it do?), but more importantly, your demo needs to do it within the context of how those features solve your customer’s problem (why should I care?).

All demos are not created equal

Depending on which stage your customer is at in their buying decision (awareness, interest, trial, buy, evaluation, loyalty), you’ll need to consider how best to frame your demo’s messaging.

Awareness: First, customers need to recognize that they have a problem and that your product can help solve it. Once they’ve identified their problem, they begin gathering information from the Web, their peers and various media. At this stage, your demo must focus it’s messaging on how it solves their problem.

Interest: Once they understand the variety of solutions available and have identified your product as a possible contender, they begin to narrow down their choices. At this stage customers need help making the right choice. Your demo should now focus on how your product is unique and how it’s faster/better/cheaper than the competition. The messaging should be framed in benefits, not features. Use scenarios that your customer can identify with, then show how your features solve their problems.

Demos that focus on benefits are very effective at moving customers from awareness to interest to trials. These types of demos are called “tours.” They give your customer a broad overview of your product, what it can do and how it solves their problem. At this stage, because your customer is not yet a raving fan of your product or service, their attention span is short. Keeping your tour brief and focused on solving your customer’s problems will motivate them to take the next step.

Trial: At this stage, customers are comparing apples to apples. As they dig deeper into your product’s functionality, they will be comparing your features against the competition. Again, frame the messaging about the features in a contextual, scenario-based framework. Allow the user to play with the real thing or at least a simulation. As the user gets closer to making their decision, all things being equal, it will be easier for them to choose the one that is most familiar.

Buy: When they understand that your product or service best fits their needs, they buy. But selling your customers doesn’t stop after they fork over their cash.

Evaluation: What happens after your customer purchases is more important than what happens before. Post-purchasing service and support has a direct impact on customer loyalty. Demos that explicitly explain how a customer can complete certain tasks is, of course, called a tutorial. Tutorials can help users get acquainted with important features, give them confidence in using your product and help them self-service problems they may run into.

Unfortunately, many organizations use tutorials too early in their customer’s decision making process. If your customer is in the Awareness, Interest or even Trial stage, a tutorial-type demo can be overwhelming and paint your product as being too complicated. Ultimately, scaring off your customer in search of an “easier” solution.

Ask for the sale and track the results
You’d be surprised at how many demos don’t ask for the sale. Always include a call to action. What will your customers want to do next: request a live demo, call a rep, sign up? The call to action should be persistently visible throughout the demo. You never know when the light bulb will go off, make it easy form the to take action.

Finally, build some sort of analytics into your demos. What sections are most and least popular? How do customers move through the demo? How long are they engaged? Where do the lose interest? At what point do they exit and where do they go? How many customers did the demo convert? This type of information is invaluable in helping you make future decisions, how to position your product, what features are most important and what the demo’s ROI is.

An interactive demonstration should give your customers a good idea for how your product or service solves their problem, not just how it works. Tailoring the messaging at each stage of the customer’s purchasing decision process will improve customer conversions. And monitoring and tracking results gives you critical and objective information for what’s working and what’s not.

(Sorry the width of the widget doesn’t fit on our blog).

This is a great example of using visualization to give people an instant and intuitive understanding of the underlying data. Data should always be behind the scenes–invisible. When data is expressed in a graphical format, it creates meaning. Adding a layer of interaction–allowing people to manipulate, filter and make connections–lets them develop intrinsic understanding of a bigger idea.

social media

But despite the mounting curiosity, there’s still not much action on the part of mid-size to large companies.

Waiting and seeing
I can see why some folks are taking a wait-and-see approach to social media. If you wait, other folks will figure out some things for you. One or two leaders in your industry will make a big move and you’ll be able to see whether they fail or succeed. And eventually, some kind of broad consensus will emerge regarding how companies should engage with the user-generated Web.

I believe a consensus already is coalescing, but it exists mostly among brand-me and small-business owners, technology gurus, forward-thinking marketers and their followers – some of the same people who advised us that businesses should embrace the Web way back in the mid 90s. And boy were they right, even if we had a bubble and a hiccup along the way.

An emerging consensus
The emerging consensus on social media simply says that now is the time to jump in. Now is the time to play, to experiment, to make your mistakes and start to form your own professional opinions about which domains (blogging or microblogging, podcasting, wikis, social-networking, etc.) are the most productive and instructive for your company. All while it costs you next to nothing. Think of it as a free or cheap form of education, since very few of these mediums require a huge investment.

In the same way that nobody questions the need for a company to have its own Web site anymore, I believe in a couple years we’ll be at the point where nobody will question the need for companies to be engaged, in some form, in the millions of conversations taking place every minute on the social Web. Not just because a growing number of customers will expect it, but because it could come to represent one of the lowest-cost means of connecting with people who are predisposed toward your products and services.

Price to play
What might you expect to spend getting your feet wet in social media? The good news is that participation is free. It doesn’t cost you a thing to set up a blog (start with Blogger), a Flickr account, a Facebook or MySpace account or a Twitter account. If you’re reluctant to put your company’s name out on Facebook, just set up your own personal account first and see how it goes. Oh, did I mention? Unlike some forms of marketing research, it’s lots of fun!

Now, if you think you’re ready to dip your toes in the tub, but you can’t spare any FTEs, or even a portion of an FTE, consider sloshing over just a little of the cash you’re blowing on TV, radio and print ads.

• For the cost of producing and buying a print ad in a trade pub, you could hire a consultant to establish a passive presence on all the major social networks – or, better yet, an active presence on a couple of select networks!
• For the cost of a radio spot, you could hire a team to build and help you feed your blog for a year.

If you want to get serious and be prepared for the media of the future, you just might have to borrow a little from the media of the past.

Yeah, but what’s my ROI?
With some companies spending money is not the issue, but justifying the spend is. Consequently, I hear a lot about ROI: “What’s the ROI of blogging?” “What’s the ROI of being on Twitter?” And quite honestly, that’s a tough one. For instance, I can’t tell you if this blog has literally resulted in revenue for my business. But I do know that in some cases, we couldn’t have won the job without it. The blog was one of seveal critical pieces that contributed to the sale.

As you think about what kind of return you might expect from social media, keep in mind that the ROI could be entirely qualitative. Comcast maintains a Twitter account, @Comcastcares, staffed by a real guy, Frank Eliason, which they use to monitor conversations about Comcast and then to intervene when a disgruntled customer needs personal service. The ROI? Probably pretty lackluster from a pure financial point of view. But then again, what is their reputation worth to them? And how is that reputation built, if not one conversation at a time. So, what is it worth to Comcast to have thousands of influential technology aficionados – the same people you ask for help when your computer or high-speed Internet goes on the blink – see that Comcast is staffed by real people who actually appear to care?

Give ROI a vacation
Ultimately, it’s not for me or any other consultant to predict what ROI you should expect. The whole question of ROI is an evolving conversation that I believe needs to be left as a big question mark – for now. And given how cheap it is to do social media, why put so much pressure on it to earn its keep? Your company’s potted plant budget is probably ten times more than what you’ll spend on social media…and what’s the ROI on that?

The danger is that if you approach this medium with an immediate need for gain, or to monetize it somehow, you might not have the sensitivity to see how online communities are driven not by taking so much as giving. Yes, it’s a very hippie sentiment, but guess who’s running Web 2.0? Grown up hippies and their philosophical offspring! The point is that in order to thrive in any medium, you need to understand that medium’s unique rules and mores. If you don’t your marketing could come off as clumsy and self-serving and you won’t be able to build a community around your product or service.

One way forward
I know a number of marketing managers who are already familiar with social media and are eager to jump in, but they want to do so thoughtfully. They’re looking for a framework that will lend some sense of professionalism and planfulness to their social media efforts. Fair enough.

If that’s you, let me suggest that your initial success and longer term ROI on the social web will hinge on these three things:

1. Your social media persona – Do you have a clear understanding of who your company is and what it stands for in word and deed? Perhaps you’ve explored this territory in a recent branding effort. If so, dig up the dusty brand book and see what it tells you. Ultimately, you want to determine whether your company is a teacher, a helper, a connector or a [insert a personality type here].
2. Your imagination and sense of play – This is all fairly uncharted territory with very few precedents and formulas to latch onto. You might see that as a curse. I see it as a blessing. It means that the playing field is fairly level. Are you a small bank? You have just as good odds of beating out the top banks to become a real player in social media. There are many right answers and many ways to capitalize on this sea change in online behavior. But you’ve got to explore and find them.
3. Trial and error – Since there’s no script or formula to guide you, it’s reasonable to expect that some things you try might fail or succeed underwhelmingly. Maybe you’ll build an application on Facebook that attracts just 50 installs. Don’t fret. Tweak it and see what happens. With your social media persona as your guide, look for another way to act out your company’s role oline. You’re making omelets, so just commit up-front to breaking some eggs!

Get help if you need it
Of course, you’re not entirely on your own. Without spending a fortune, you could hire a social media consultant to shortcut your learning curve. A consultant could help you clarify your company’s social media persona and explore the many ways that could translate into actions. Or simply help you narrow the field and point you to some sites or networks that your company should consider first.

But ultimately, you have to take a first step, which might be as simple as bringing up the topic with your boss. Perhaps you need to lay out the alternatives:

• Your can jump into social media now while there’s still time to experiment, learn and lead.

OR

• You can wait until everyone else does it and be forced to jump in with little forethought. Because the landscape will be more defined and some of your competitors may have already set a high barrier to entry, you may not have the luxury of picking your battles. When we do achieve this “critical mass” I believe it’s going to be a mad rush. To paraphrase wine and marketing celeb Gary Vaynerchuck: You think social media is big now? Just wait until Oprah gets on Twitter!

Areva commercial

Royksopp video

Photo from Stiftung Archaeologie

Stark white marble temples and statues. That’s what the scupltors of the Renaissance saw, and copied. And that’s the visual language that informed the architects of our nation’s capitol. But what if the original sources were not at all like everyone imagined? What if the ancient Greeks and Romans actually painted their works of art in riots of vibrant color?

That’s apparently what they did, according to the research of Vinzenz Brinkmann, an archaeologist who has been studying the hidden colord of the Greeks and Romans. Apparently, the organic and mineral pigments used by the original artists wore off with age. Later cleaning by well-meaning archaeologists and collectors further removed any evidence of the original colors.

Imagine the Parthenon or the Coliseum painted in dazzling reds and blues. Had the pigments lasted, would Michelangelo have been inspired to render David in full color? Would the White House have been painted in the colors of the Rainbow flag?

• Read about the research at Stiftung Archaeologie (German)
• Learn about recent exhibition: Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity

Via the Color + Design Blog