Here at Naviscent, we project manage literally everything, from the most complex iterative research and design engagements to the simplest week-long usability studies. So a few days ago when I attended my friend Christine’s amazing Thanksgiving dinner party (complete with an interesting and eclectic group of guests, live music and delicious food), I thought to myself, “what the heck!” Why not create a project plan for the perfect holiday party? I can tell you right now, having a good plan will enable you to carry off the party without a hitch, and at the same time avoid appearing like an OCD control freak. If done right, it will even give you a politically safe out for dealing with an overbearing “alpha” extended family member bent on running the show. Come on, you know who I’m talking about! So let’s start with what every good project needs, a name and a scope! Let’s call this “Naviscent’s Guest-Centric Holiday Party.” Our scope statement: “To host a fun and memorable holiday dinner party for 25 family members and friends on a budget of $500.”

Our assumptions:

1. We have a date set that we’re sure most of the guests can make.
2. Guests will bring their favorite appetizer and adult beverages to share.
3. We have adequate space, tables and chairs.
4. We’ll have adults and kids at this party.
5. Dress will be casual.
6. Martha Stewart is not on the guest list.

So let’s get the invitations in place! First we’ll create an invitation list, in excel or word, complete with e-mail addresses. Next, we’ll go to e-vite.com and send out invitations. But of course, since all Naviscent personnel are customer-facing, and this is a guest-centric party we will conduct a little research to determine exactly what will make this party fun and memorable for our guests. Our invitations will include a link to a survey we’ve created using an online survey tool. From the survey we’ll find out what food allergies we need to deal with, and what the focus of our “fun” will be.

Let’s assume we’ve learned from the survey that we have a guest who’s allergic to shellfish, and that our fun for the party will be a talent-show in the round, with each guest telling a joke, acting out a short scene from Shakespeare, reciting a poem, or singing a song. Each guest will get to take home a video of their impromptu performance. That’s the “memorable” part.

This means we’ll need to send a follow up to the invitation warning guests that if they bring an appetizer that contains shellfish, it should be labeled in some way to help our allergic guest avoid a reaction. Not to do this would make me selfish about shellfish. Say that three times fast, I dare you! This also means we’ll have to designate a couple of our tech-savvy guests to run the video and burn the .mov files to disc. And we’ll have to be sure to have a kid-friendly joke book, a poetry book, a book of scenes from Shakespeare plays, a guitar and a few other acoustic instruments on hand for the talent-show in the round.

OK, so our menu is going to include Turkey, Ham, a garlic spinach tofu dish for our vegan guests, a selection of side dishes and desserts, and a plate of white bread peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts removed for the nieces and nephews who won’t eat anything they have to chew for more than 2 seconds.

We’ve set aside a budget of $500, with $350 going to food, and $150 going to decorations and other item’s we’ll need to pull off this party.

We’ll need to create a work breakdown structure for this event. We’ll start by identifying the tasks we know we’ve got to accomplish:

1. Create an invitation list.
2. Send out a “save the date” email.
3. Create guest-centric survey at surveymonkey.com
4. Send out party invitation through e-vite with survey link.
5. Analyze survey results to determine food allergies and entertainment plan
6. Send out follow up email regarding food allergies
7. Plan menu
8. Create list of buy-ahead items
9. Create list of perishables
10. Purchase buy-ahead items
11. Purchase perishables
12. Design & print special event labels for the blank CD’s (or lightscribe them)
13. Clean house
14. Set up tables & entertainment area
15. Set up beverage station
16. Board the overactive pets for the weekend.
17. Food preparation: desserts & side dishes
18. Food preparation: main dishes
19. Have the actual party
20. Serve the appetizers
21. Serve the dinner
22. Serve the desserts
23. Video the talent in the round
24. Burn each video onto a pre-printed disc
25. Clean up after the party
26. Pick up the pets

In order to complete the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) we’ll have to identify for each task who the task owner is, the estimated level of effort, and any dependencies on other tasks. We’ll include some of this in the Gantt chart.

And let’s think about potential risks and contingencies to address them:

1. A guest might get a little tipsy: have extra pillows and blankets on hand to accommodate guests that might need to stay the night, or have the number of a taxi company on hand. (Notice this is a contingency and not part of the plan)
2. Food allergies: we already planned for this thanks to the survey, but just in case, let’s keep some Benadryl on hand.
3. That alpha relative who has to run the show: create a special project he or she can be in charge of, like get a guestbook and have him or her make sure everyone signs it and writes a special holiday sentiment in it.
4. The really young kids may need quiet time: set aside a guest room for napping babies/toddlers.
5. What about someone getting indigestion after eating one helping too many? Better have some Alka-Seltzer on hand.

Here’s a simple Gantt chart for the party. The Gantt chart looks pretty busy around the actual days of the event, so we may want to assign some tasks to willing helpers. Of course we could always add some other fun items to this project like a Facebook page for the event, or post photos at a photo sharing site. To really make this guest-centric we’ll do a post-party survey to find out what our guests really liked, what they were indifferent to, and what they didn’t like. We’ll take those findings and apply them to our next party! Any lessons learned? Again, we’ll take note and apply to our next party. We won’t forget to compare our actuals against the plan and find out how well we did at staying on track with our budget and time estimates. OK. Now I’m ready for the holidays! Now where’s that Gantt chart for putting lights on my home?

I’m a big fan of the US Space Program. I have in my possession a collection of original press clippings from the Apollo 11 flight. I have several friends who work for NASA and their contractors. My husband has even had a trumpet-playing former astronaut sit in with him on several occasions at Heide’s jazz club in Cocoa Beach where he plays on Tuesday nights. I am fortunate enough to live right across the intercoastal waterway from Kennedy Space Center, and I normally watch every launch from my backyard. Now that funding has been killed for the Shuttle Program, Discovery is scheduled for her last voyage on mission STS133. I had planned to go onsite to view the launch with some good friends last week, but “C’est la vie”, the launch was scrubbed not once, but three times! We’ll now have to wait until Nov 30th, or possibly into December.

The impact of this change to me? My friends and I picnicked on the Indian River, and snapped photos of windsurfers enjoying the 17mph winds. Then we visited the Wildlife Sanctuary and later got as close as we could to the launch site to shoot photos. Not what we’d planned, but still very enjoyable. I’ll just wait and see the launch another day. The impact to my NASA friends? Now that’s a different story entirely.

Good project management enables us to thoroughly understand the impacts. So while NASA’s engineers are evaluating how to repair the fuel leak and cracks in the fuel tank foam insulation, the flight crew waits for the next launch attempt, the Robot member of the crew, R2, tweets about the experience (follow @AstroRobonaut,) there is a team of project managers hard at work analyzing the impact of the delay and reporting to management to support the ongoing decision making and contingency planning. Now, I’ve never worked at NASA myself, so these are strictly my observations based on publicly available information.

Think about the resources associated with the launch or payload for just a moment. What if those resources or materials have a shelf life? If the launch delay pushes those resources out beyond their useful shelf life, then that means entirely new resources have to be procured for the next attempt, which adds materials costs and man-hours. In terms of people resources, delaying the launch until Nov 30th may mean that key personnel must be asked to cancel holiday travel plans over the Thanksgiving weekend so they can be onsite for pre-launch activities. Let’s not forget the personnel who flew out to tracking stations around the world. They had to fly home, and will be on standby to fly back out for the next launch attempt, which of course means more cost and man-hours. What other kinds of impacts do project managers have to take into consideration? How about coordinating the repair work so it’s completed in enough time to meet available launch windows, and meets safety standards? Or coordinating changes to scheduled work with the space station crew? There may also be changes to the actual mission objectives because of the impact of all of these considerations. This just scratches the surface. NASA has rigorous project management disciplines in place that enable them to manage these complex scenarios. With each success or delay, lessons learned are folded back into the body of knowledge applied to new projects. These best practices and learnings are reinforced at every level of NASA’s project management discipline through training and knowledge sharing.

If you want a glimpse into what NASA project management is all about, check out these links:
The NASA Project Management Excellence and Innovation Office and the NASA PM Challenge 2011.
Check out NASA’s shuttle page at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

“One of the valuable byproducts of the US space program is the body of knowledge concerning management of large complex development project activities.” - Unmanned Space Project Management: Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter, Erasmus H. Kloman

I have a love-hate relationship with election season. I hate the junk mail. The smear campaigns that hinder voter ability to make rational decisions. The election-season politics that lead to ridiculous laws being passed as a token for political manipulation.

But I LOVE numbers. And my go-to place to geek out over polling statistics is Nate Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight.

FiveThirtyEight is the creation of a former sports statistician that started applying his quantitative skills to politics in 2008. His methodology is based on incorporating a wide variety of pollster data—and weighting that data based on the accuracy of each pollster. While aggregating data seems objective, it’s clear that paramount to the accuracy of FiveThirtyEight data is ensuring the right people are participating in the polls aggregated. For example, the methodology requires removing polls conducted by a partisan organization.

In this morning’s post, Agree to Disagree, he provides analysis on what’s behind the exceptionally large deviation of pollster predictions regarding how many seats the Republicans will gain in the house. Based on models of well-respected pollsters, the Republicans are reported to likely gain anywhere from 23 to 77 house seats. FiveThirtyEight is predicting—not too surprisingly—53 house seats will go to Republicans, with a 95% confidence interval that that number will fall somewhere between 23 to 81 seats.

My take: Early and absentee voting is becoming more prevalent (as explored in this Wall Street Journal article), and this phenomenon could swing election results significantly. In the 2008 election, early voting benefited Democratic candidates. This year, I believe this skew will likely swing the other way—and early data from organizations such as Politico are pointing that the tides are swinging the other way. Whether the pollsters or analysts have taken this into account when delving into the difference between the likely behavior of registered versus likely voters? Ask me Tuesday night.

Are you a senior-level UX professional who’s been doing the same thing for so many years that you feel you’re in a rut? Do you struggle with processes that feel rote instead of practical? How important is innovation to you and your company? And most importantly, when was the last time you had any fun?

Now…think about animals for a second. What characteristic do humans and animals share?

The answer may surprise you: humans and animals both possess the ability to play games. But unlike most wild animals who shed their play stage early, we have the ability to continue learning through game play throughout our adult lives. Sadly, that doesn’t mean we do it.

On October 19, Douglas van Duyne, author of the UX best-seller The Design of Sites and author of a seminar series called GameFraming, will show you how to reconnect with the sense of play you were born with, and how you can apply it to your practice as a UX professional. He’ll cover Game Principles, Design Strategies, and the Hero’s Journey which you’ll discover applies as much to interaction design and project management as it does to World of Warcraft. Douglas will also share two case studies where GameFraming was used to break the typical rules of project management and design, which led to amazing results.

Who should attend?
This talk is geared towards senior UX professionals who are familiar with project management, user research, client engagements, and interaction design, who have been deeply involved in projects from start to finish. This talk is not about how to create the next Wii, although Douglas will discuss the universal themes that contribute to a successful online or offline game experience. This talk will be aimed at senior practitioners, but those who are new to the UX industry are also welcome.

To register, please go to: nycupa.org

I’ve been surprised just how many times I’ve gotten calls from marketing manager wanting us to “run some focus groups”. I can understand why: when the average American thinks of market research, they think of the group of people “dissing” on the quality of Domino’s Pizza, or single women in the 1960s breaking out into an all-out sob fest over discussing face cream. It sure LOOKS like a great way to gather insights into what customers think—and, really, who doesn’t want to observe a group of people behind a one-way mirror?

Focus groups, in my opinion, are over-rated—there, I said it. They definitely have their place in an arsenal of market research methods, however because of their prominence in the media, education, and research journals I believe that market research is perceived by many to mean assembling a group of people around a table. What you don’t see on TV is the effectiveness of other methodologies: one-on-one interviews, mining social media data, ideation sessions, or a litany of other methods of collecting consumer insights.

Here are some of the wrong reasons marketers choose focus groups:

• To save money versus one-on-one interviews. The truth is, after you pay more for participant recruitment, facilities, logistics, and the additional time needed to analyze focus group findings, arranging a 2-hour focus group is often more costly than interviewing the same number of participants.
• To increase sample size. If you’re looking to evaluate a business question across a wide range of your customers, you need to look for quantitative measures such as surveys or polls. Using focus groups to get the voice of 36 customers instead of 24 does not increase the statistical validity of a study. More participants are good, yes, but if your business question requires a large respondent base, focus groups are not the answer.
• To gain buy-in from upper management. I’ve actually had prospects tell me that they really need to run a focus group because forcing upper management to observe a group of people proving a point in real-time is the only way they’ll believe a marketing decision. Personal exposure to raw feedback is powerful. However, I do suspect that if upper management needs anecdotal, versus scientifically aggregated research, they’ve either used the wrong research team or have deeper trust issues I won’t go into here.

Yet despite the fact that marketers will turn to focus groups when they are an inferior method, collective feedback on concepts, products, and image can be very important. The two most common instances where focus groups are very effective include:

• When collective, versus individual, feedback is necessary. Focus groups allow for the moderator to foster group discussion around a topic, which can help sociologists dig deeper into the reasons behind consumers’ preferences.
• When evaluating concepts that are likely to be referred by word-of-mouth. Understanding how opinions are impacted by others are hugely important in status or style-oriented industries; so observing back-and-forth discussions among peers can be critical to understanding how you can best design and/or position your offering to your target market.

Market researcher teams should not shy away from running focus groups when they are the right tool for the job. However, they should remember to always go back to the basics: what business questions need to be answered, and who are the right people to talk with to answer these questions? From there, carefully determine what research method will best answer that question.

Family vacations have always seemed like a great metaphor for topics in project management. The topic “capturing success” is a case in point. On one family vacation I hiked with my Dad to a backcountry lake in the Sierra Nevadas. At least, that was the plan. We were going fishing. Our plan was to hike in, catch a limit of trout, then hike out and meet up with the rest of the family. I was 9 years old. We set off on the trail, and about 10 minutes into the hike we took a short-cut Dad knew. We climbed off trail up over a series of ridges to where he thought the lake was. About an hour into the hike there were no people to be seen, there was no lake in sight, and we were standing in the middle of an ancient looking stand of pine trees that had been shattered and burned by lightning. “Are we lost?” I voiced the question while visually scanning the slightly scary skeletal trees. “I know where we are” my Dad answered confidently. We hiked a little while longer and he finally admitted that he didn’t think we’d be finding the lake that day, and that we should head back to meet up with the rest of the family. I really didn’t care that we never found the lake or caught trout, because I was having so much fun hiking off trail, seeing areas completely untouched by civilization, and talking with my Dad. We managed to find our way back to the trailhead, and before we rejoined the rest of the family my Dad made me promise not to tell them that we’d gotten lost. He didn’t want Mom doubting his navigational capabilities! When my Mom asked why we didn’t have any fish, Dad simply said that we hadn’t caught any. I just smiled. Dad and I had shared a fun adventure.

To the casual observer, the trek might have seemed like a failure. Not a single fish was caught, and we never even found the lake. But my Dad had a completely different set of criteria for success on that trip, and by his criteria, the trip was a total success. When I was old enough to understand, my Dad explained his goal for every family vacation was to spend enough time with us to be a positive influence in our lives. He had complete clarity regarding what success was for these vacations.

Having clarity on success for a project is elemental, it’s fundamental. Those who fail to gain clarity on this point put their project at risk for a number of maladies from overruns to organizational conflict, to completing something that totally misses the mark intended by key stakeholders. Many times people think they have clarity on what success is because they have a well defined scope or definition of requirements. But this is not always enough.

So how do you capture the kind of clarity on your success criteria you need to insure your project gets off on the right foot? Simply ask your key stakeholders. Then ask again. Keep asking until nothing is left to add. And don’t always take what is said at face value. Be willing to go beyond the “what” questions into the “why” questions. The “why” questions often reveal the real success criteria.

Imagine a conversation between a key stakeholder (KS) and a project manager (PM):

PM: What would you consider success for your web redesign project?
KS: A really edgy design that would help grow my core customer base of 18-24 yr old men.
PM: So success would be growth in your core customer base. Why an edgy design?
KS: Several months ago our main competitor launched a redesigned site with a very edgy almost video game-like look and feel. We’ve been seeing our market share erode and theirs grow ever since. We ran some comparative research studies and found that the participants were far more engaged at our competitor’s site than at ours, and that it was the level of engagement more than the product features that led to them choosing our competitor over us.
PM: So success would also be to create something that’s as engaging or even more engaging than your main competitor’s site? Anything else?
KS: I think that’s it.
PM: So if the usability research during this project reveals a design and interactions that are extremely engaging to your core customer base, but isn’t really edgy, you’re more concerned with the overall customer experience than just being edgy, right?
KS: Yes, definitely.
PM: Anything else?…

And so on.

By pursuing this deep digging into the real success criteria you accomplish a few things:

1. You capture a body of guiding principles that will inform the project scope and requirements.
2. The project team can use the success criteria to make better decisions throughout the life of the project.
3. When the project is finished, you know whether or not you’ve achieved success, because success is well defined.

Here’s a quick good news/bad news note: The bad news first. This line of questioning will often reveal disconnects or differing priorities among key stakeholders. The good news is, for the project to be successful, these will be discussed, negotiated and agreed upon before the project starts and will result in a more successful project by everyone’s agreed upon criteria.

Marketing Research is a BIG field. Marketing executives generally view it as the necessary evil: you need to do your research to get your product marketed to its target audience, but the time and cost of doing research can be intimidating. Add in the language marketing researchers use, you can quickly get enveloped in a very thick set of questions you didn’t know you had. Quantitative or qualitative? What sample size do you need to ensure statistical validity? Is your question best answered by VanWestendorp or Conjoint Analysis? Is 5% an acceptable margin of error?

There’s a lot at stake when conducting any form of customer research. But it all really boils down to this: in any research effort, you need to ask the right questions of the right people.

Sounds easy, right? The basics are easy. Most executives realize that they want to get input from people that will buy their product or service. They also understand that they need to ask questions that will help market a product to those people.

Execution, however, can be trickier.

Asking the Right Questions

Recently, I was reviewing a survey that asked a question aiming to measure the perceived challenges faced by professionals living and working in the United States that were raised speaking another language. The organization wanted to measure the extent these professionals felt they were at a disadvantage professionally. By the time I had a chance to review the questions, it was clear that the survey had been sliced and diced, edited, and re-worded several times by a variety of executives. After all of this, in the pre-launch version the question was worded:

To what degree do you feel being a non-native English speaker has impacted your professional success?

The survey went out to a very small test sample, and we were finding that many professionals were indicating the top of the “extremely” range. Digging in a bit further, thanks to an open-ended qualifying question we included as part of the test run, we found that many respondents rated in this way because they felt they were impacted in a *positive* way. Being bi-lingual has helped them.

Encouraging, yes—however the organization conducting the research already had plenty measures of the positive aspects of being bi-lingual. So, to get a better sense of negative perception, the question was changed to:

To what extent do you agree with the following statement:
I feel that I’m being promoted at a slower rate than my native English speaking colleagues.

In this way of wording, the client was not only able to focus on the frustration these professionals felt, but also provided a definition around the relatively vague term ‘success.’ The question, worded in this way, was now able to capture very specifically their perceptions of professional success, as measured by the rate they’re being promoted within their companies.

Asking the Right People

One of the most memorable incidents of not asking your question of the right set of people came after the 1948 presidential election. In a perfect storm of trying to keep up with the competition in news journalism, the Chicago Tribune assembled what information they had to call the election—such that they’d be able to report accurate news first thing in the morning. They relied on early returns and the pollsters, who had been conducting surveys throughout the campaign season to predict which presidential candidate was likely to win. Dewey, the Republican challenger, was estimated to be many points ahead of the incumbent Truman. So, when the Chicago Times looked at the returns that had come in as of press deadline, combined with what poll data they had, they called it: Dewey had defeated Truman.

Needless to say, Truman won that election—by a surprisingly large margin.

The problem in the information they had was threefold: timing (polls were conducted a good 2-3 weeks before the election), a large number of undecided voters (who, as it turns out, are more likely to vote for an incumbent), and a skewed sample.

The polling organizations at the time were using two methods to obtain lists of voters to sample: telephone records and automobile registries. In 1948, ownership of these goods were limited to the relatively affluent, who at the time skewed towards the Republican Party. So, the people being polled were those that were more likely than the average to vote for Dewey, the Republican candidate. Which, in turn, provided less-than-accurate information as a result of asking the wrong set of people.

Before your next research effort, whether you decide to do it in-house or hire an outside organization, remember these basics.

• Ask the right questions. Make sure the answer will help you and not lead to more questions. Be certain that there is no ambiguity or room for interpretation within the questions. Have one or more fresh set of eyes - people removed from the development of the survey - look at the questions. Better yet, field them to a set of test respondents. Ensure the aggregated responses will provide you the insight you need to make your decisions.
• Then, make sure you’re asking the right people. Identify the types of people you need to answer these questions, and either ask questions such that you can compare two groups of people, or only look to include those that fit your target. Consider age, gender, region, the demographics and psychographics you need (or, don’t need).

Sounds simple, but these basic concepts are worth careful development, review, and critique every time.

Naviscent was highlighted in Oracle Profit Online this week. For more information on how UX Customization helps Oracle customers, please follow this link:

Oracle Profit Magazine

For more information on Naviscent’s service offerings or to request one of our white papers, please click on our home page, www.naviscent.com.

Persuasive technology is a concept that has received some attention lately, as researchers merge concepts from psychology and technology to help people improve their own lives. By providing incentives and disincentives, companies can design new social games that influence customers to use products and services that help them improve skills and acquire healthier habits. While the science of persuasion advances, so do Web, mobile and software interfaces that can guide users into specific behavior. Some very powerful and useful examples have emerged lately, in the form of Nike+, Vive Coach, Booyah, and others.

Nike+, an online community of runners, is a great example of how peer encouragement, shared achievements, and technology can enhance people’s performance. Nike+ uses a pedometer to track a runner’s performance, and pumps the data through an iPod or iPhone to the Nike+ Web site where the community can view, encourage and support one another around their fitness goals.  This social game, which takes advantage of a well-known psychological concept called the Hawthorne effect comes into play: People perform better when they believe they are being watched.  By sharing one’s goals, improvements and success with the community, individuals perform better and are more likely to complete those goals. A great example of someone taking advantage of these concepts is Floyd Mayweather. Floyd purposely works out in front of other people so that he feels compelled to work harder. Nike+ scales this “public performance” and encourages everyone to share their workout in view of others. This creates the environment that pushes peoples performance beyond their normal level.

In e-commerce, flash sales sites like RueLaLa.com and Gilt.com use persuasive technology to great effect. The psychological triggers used in these sites are: a) the sense of urgency b) limited availability, c) rare discount, d) affordable luxury.  People don’t want to miss the train and loose out on the opportunity to buy luxury items at a discount.

Woot is another site that operates under the same principle: offering only one product per day at a big discount, in limited quantities. In this social game, there is a disincentive to waiting and the incentive is the discount. They have designed a model where the lack of visiting their site on a daily basis would create an aversive experience.  How is this possible?  These sites create a situation where it is easier to simply make a quick visit to the site in the morning rather than risk the disappointment of missing a deal.  This student video does a great job of explaining the concept of “alarm clocking”.

Mint.com similarly uses a number of methods to help users change their behavior.  This site pulls data from the users various financial institutions and displays this data in a very useful way.  In doing this, Mint makes it easy for the user to see where much of their income is being misspent. Once a user sees this graph, or one showing how much they can save by switching brokerages for example, the user becomes much more open to advice from the program.  This is an important concept for a range of sites that may be interested in changing user behavior.

Persuasive technology enhances existing social games and protocols and provides a conceptual framework for creating new social games in which both incentives and disincentives are used to change attitudes and behaviors.  These social games may build off existing social games, for example: in a sales situation when something is given away for free, that encourages the recipient to reciprocate.  Our tendency to “give back” that is built into our biology and cultural education is universally human.  By building off of such almost automatic behaviors, persuasive technology can provide businesses with an ability to reach, engage and even transact with customers on a much grander scale than is possible person-to-person.  By understanding the existing social games people play, and by designing social games using incentives and disincentives, testing them experimentally with real customers (see Naviscent’s Experience Revolution methodology) these persuasive technologies can be effective, scalable, and powerful for businesses and customers.

Written with Chris Bierbower

Term: Persuasive technology (also known as captology) Noun:   A mechanism designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users through persuasion and social influence, but not through coercion.

Related links: http://econsultancy.com/blog/905-interview-persuasion-guru-bj-fogg

Something that began as innocent and informal socializing among college students has turned into a very serious platform, for e-commerce.  Facebook is becoming a viable business model, still in its infancy, granted, but nevertheless very promising. Let’s look at the big picture.

One of the more recent developments is that the demographics of Facebook users is shifting. Originally composed mostly of very young users, today member in the 25 to 35 age group are leading the pack. This makes the platform more attractive as this demographic is the most commercially active on the Net. Add to this pre-canned shopping cart solutions like Payvment, which eliminates the need to write any custom code for your online shop, and you no longer have an excuse to not try.

Narrowing down your constituency and knowing exactly who your visitors are, has always been a problem. Since the first days of online shopping we started working on ways to determine the demographics of our customers and channel them accordingly. The range of solutions spans from simple cookie-based tracking to third-party research firms that will analyze your traffic, capture clicks and embed surveys. Even though the latter gives you a fairly accurate picture, is far from cheap, and is often only cost effective to big players.

Facebook attempts to level the playing field. By putting your retail front-end on Facebook, as the theory goes, you solve this problem once and for all – on Facebook you always know who your visitors are. Something that required a great effort and expense comes for free. However, this new platform calls for a different and nuanced approach to earn your new clients business.

We’re basically dealing with a reverse paradigm: in a classic online store, we don’t know who is looking at our site, so it needs to be generally attractive, with convenient ways for any potential customer to drill down to what is interesting to them.  On Facebook, we already know who we’re dealing with, so we need to address customer needs and desires specifically, not generally. This I believe means to do away with a classic one-fits-all design. We don’t need a site as such, but rather a view that suits the person we know just landed on our page.

Secondly, the fact that Facebook people are there to socialize, not to shop, the shopping experience needs to respect that fact and leverage it as much as possible. Besides obvious things like user’s physical location and age, previously unknown data such as the customers interests and traveling habits, Facebook API allows to fetch any user’s friends list. This fact opens up a wide range of opportunities.

1. Personalized recommendations based on demographics, beliefs, and activities, likes and dislikes as they are revealed in the Facebook profile.

2. For businesses, personalized recommendations based on occupation, industry, and title.

3. Personalized products that incorporate media from Facebook, like memorabilia, picture books.

A good example of this type of application is the Gifting application embedded in some birthday reminder apps on Facebook. These apps remind people of their friends’ birthdays, enable sending an electronic birthday card, and suggest sending a physical gift. Can the product suggestions be more targeted? Yes.

The potential hasn’t been fully explored yet since this all is so new. We need to look into a completely new way of engaging potential customers.  Even the highly targeted audience by itself turned out to be not enough. Facebook launched its ads engine in November 2007 but it hasn’t yet yielded the kinds of returns that Google’s relevant ads do, despite the belief that ads on Facebook are any advertisement team’s dream-come-true. We need a different design approach, a new breed of a Web application that revolves around social interaction.

Related articles

• 20 social media predictions for 2010 that might actually happen (directmarketingobservations.com)