mohamed hamad

Engage, Communicate, Learn

// February 9th, 2010 // Design, Development, General, social media

Creating a successful web and social applications is quite the multifaceted adventure. There are great ideas, great design, great technologies, and great implementations. But the ones that become popular have a lot in common. And the ones that win do those things well. They engage and communicate with, and most importantly learn from their users.

Engagement

Creating an environment that attracts users and keeps them is one hell of a task, and continuously engaging your users is not small feat. You have to create a culture of sharing, collaboration, and reciprocation that makes the user want to participate in what you developed, and pull in others in to the fun.

Social engagement needs to involve actions that builds on a users social connections, and something that will appeal to a circle of friends. The hook is the quick and easy action that is viral and has high visibility to social graph. The line is the engaging actions that bring in your social connections and continues to connect them. And the sinker is community that brings more people together one way or another.

Communicate

Communication, communication, communication is to social media what location, location, location is to business. Communication with your users is one of the most important aspects of social media. What do I mean by communication? Meaningful dialog with your users through blog post commentary, forums and discussion boards, Twitter and support channels.

Communication has to be a two way street, where you can personally talk to your users. Now you might be tempted to talk about your product, how people use it, and give them tips and tricks on how to utilize it better. Thats a great start, but the key is to find out what your users want to talk about and not what you want to talk about. This is where you have to get more personal with your users and learn from them. And here is the segway to the next point …

Learn

Learning from your users is the only way to iteratively develop and enhance your product and user experience. Users can be very vocal about what they want and what they like, but you need to build a dialog of trust that brings out the constructive criticism to you. It’s important to be able to track feedback, themes in constructive criticism and be able to prioritize and respond appropriately.

What you will learn is that they way your application is used, can be very different from what you intended it to be. Learning and understanding how your users are thinking differently about what you’ve built will get you farther in finding news was to engage than any other way.

How do you continually engage with your users, and what tools do you utilize to learn form your users?