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?

So what are my passions?

I’m a geek ! I’m a total technology geek. I love my gizmo’s and gadgets, and I buy and play around with a lot of them. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I’m in the Information Technology space. I’m a web developer, information architect and user interface designer, developing a social media application for a Montreal based VOIP company by the name of babyTEL. I’m project managing the development of a Facebook app called “Telephone” which lets Facebook users call, instant message and voice message any of their friends.

I love good design too. I’m almost obsession with good graphic and industrial design. I spent my childhood immersed in art and design. My dads and architect, and had a lot of influence over me. My first year of university was architecture, but I loved technology and computers too much. I find a lot of user interface and experience design foundations are based on architectural design principles, which helps a lot in what I do. My main focus though is web interface design, and I will be talking a lot about that in this blog.

I’m an amateur photographer. I’ve been taking photos since I got my first digital camera back in 2002, and I’ve been a happy snappy chappy every since. My amazing friends recently bought me a Nikon D90 DSLR camera, and I’ve just finished my first photography course. So I’ll be discussing my trials and tribulations, learning how to take good photos.

So I hope I can keep this blog interesting, entertaining and useful and I’m looking forward to writing.

Thanks

Mohamed Hamad