Marketing to Women Consumers?
Social Design brings you closer than ever
Ayesha Mathews-Wadhwa
Chief pixel bender
PixInk
Have you heard about the poke?
The poke is a wingman to social networkers. It was strictly an offline player until Facebook built its social network based on human-to-human interaction. They call it social design. And it’s turning the poke into an online superstar.
Social design speaks of a time, long before flash-dominated web design and scrollable copy blurred vision. “Today, Web designers are returning to original design principles—simple shapes, contrasts, and colors. It’s not like 10 years ago, when it was all about what tools you could use to create animations on a web page,” says Kate Aronowitz, Facebook’s director of design in Reena Jana’s Design Mind article, “Facebook’s Design Strategy: A Status Update.” ttp://tinyurl.com/3fm8xlg
Social design is a poke in the right direction if you follow these truisms
1. Humans crave interaction, but not with websites.
“Facebook is very much not about Facebook,” says Facebook’s Ethan Beard in a Knowledge@Wharton interview “Facebook's Ethan Beard: Driving Engagement — and Growth — Through 'Social Design'.” http://tinyurl.com/3l25fcr
What is the social network about? It’s about breezing users pass the machinations complex web design and leading them to the human interaction that they crave. Perhaps it’s the Internet in its most elemental form: connecting people to other people and information without roadblocks.
2. Being too simple is a good problem to have.
The names of Facebook Features such as Photos and Groups prompt laughter from creatives who are perplexed by the simplicity of the social network’s design. “We design a place where there aren’t new objects to trip over,” says Christopher Cox, vice president of product in Jana’s article. There is something behind Facebook’s approach. According to the PixInk post, “Click, Connect, Convert: Marketing to Women with Persuasive Technology,” http://tinyurl.com/4xrul9x brands should not expect consumers to change their technology channels and behaviors at the same time.
3. The early bird integrator gets the consumer engagement.
Changes in terms and privacy settings often send shockwaves throughout the blogosphere. How can brands transition to social commerce unscathed? Beard believes nimble startups and smaller retail platforms have the advantage over large corporations like Amazon. Why? They can integrate social design early on. “For example, you could imagine a store that says, ‘By default, when you shop in this store, everything that you look at and everything you put in your shopping cart will be shared with your friends,’” Beard reveals to Knowledge@Wharton.
“These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise,” said Steve Jobs. Sure, the Internet is flashy, content-rich and able to wow surfers with its marvels (This may appear sacrilegious coming from a design microagency like PixInk.) Integrating elements of social design into your website can spark consumer engagement.
They are craving connection and information. And you didn’t bring them to your website just to poke around.
September 23, 2011
