Experience Planner

So, I experienced an interesting problem/opportunity recently.

I was working on a project to add community to an existing website. The client is in healthcare. If you’ve not worked in healthcare before, it is a highly regulated industry. For example, getting site content approved requires several rounds of review by several reviewers. It sounds tedious, but it isn’t bad.

So, adding forums and user-generated content represented a significant step… it will be a moderated community, but one in which the approval cycle is shortened to minutes and not weeks.

So, all in all, it’s an excellent step.

However, while discussing the interactions and experience during the wireframing process, two points were brought up by the marketers:

1. Why can’t people just write what they want without signing in or registering for the community?
2. Why should we let people upload an avatar? They might upload something “bad.”

I thought these were very interesting issues… particularly because they seem to counter the idea of community and specifically the community we were creating for our personas.

Issue One: Guests

The site’s personas rely heavily on peer to peer contact for shared wisdom. Personal knowledge of the person or an understanding that the person who is providing the wisdom is or has undergone similar experiences lends a high level of credibility to what they are saying/writing. Our research indicated that this expertise was extraordinarily important to our users.

The goal of this community was to foster online social groups through shared conditions and experiences. It’s hard to foster friendships and alliances with people who are not invested in the community, who are not in the community.

Issue Two: Avatars

Let me just first say that I don’t know that I want to imagine this community without avatars.

An avatar is a simple way of saying, “Hi! I’m a person.” An avatar is quickly recognizable and gives some indication of what kind of person you are. For example, a friend of mine’s avatar is a monkey and a banana smiling, with their arms around each other. The caption says, “BFF.” Goofy, yes… but hey, so is she.

Compare that to the default avatar: the gray silhouette of a woman. What about that says there is a person with a unique identity here? Does that convey credibility?

How It Went

Fortunately, we addressed the issues and were able to re-align as a group and move on. Yes, letting the people take the reigns of the dialogue can be nerve-wracking for brands in highly regulated spaces. But, ultimately, it can also be very rewarding.

In a series of posts, I will examine the intersection of cause-related marketing (CRM) and user-generated content (UGC). I’ll take a look at the origins of each concept as it manifests offline and online, the psychological motivations of each, and analyze a few case-studies where the two practices intersect. In an age where marketing is turning from a monologue to a dialog, CRM has the potential to further evolve marketing messages into social movements.

An apparent pattern in brand Web sites today is cause-related marketing. The concept of targeting consumers with a group-cause campaign has traceable roots:

The phrase “cause-related marketing” was first used by American Express in 1983 to describe its campaign to raise money for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. American Express made a one-cent donation to the Statue of Liberty every time someone used its charge card; the number of new card holders soon grew by 45%, and card usage increased by 28%.
–Foundation Center
http://foundationcenter.org/getstarted/faqs/html/cause_marketing.html

The psychology behind the genesis of CRM in this particular example is a perfect circle of gratifying emotional impulse. Conspicuous consumption is encouraged and even rewarded, given the opportunity to wrap each credit card purchase in a patriotic wrapper. In restoring the symbolic icon of the Statue of Liberty the cause equates patriotism with capitalism.

Today AmEx still participates in the World Monument Fund’s funding, in an ongoing practice of corporate responsibility.

The partnership with the National Trust was born out of a desire to commit funds to help preserve historic sites in concentrated regions in the United States, and we have committed $5 million over 5 years to this effort. In 2006, we donated $1 million toward preserving 13 historic sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2007, we expanded this community-focused initiative to the Chicago metropolitan area, donating $1 million toward preserving 15 historic sites. This year we have committed to work with the National Trust in bringing significant resources to the challenge of saving New Orleans’ unique historic and cultural assets.
–American Express
http://home3.americanexpress.com/corp/gb/pip.asp

CRM was defined offline in the sponsorships of events or in the fund-raising endeavors for medical research, landmark restoration, education, fair-trade and environmental protection to name a few. While the commitment to the board and the shareholder is to deliver on the bottom line an amoral numerical value, the actions of corporate citizenship may come as a surprise. Knowing that consumers do consider corporate responsibility when making buying decisions (or at least justifying and repeating those purchases) leads to a harmonic relationship between company and community, may not be such a surprise.

Look for my next post when I examine the origins of user-generated content.