Adobe Government Symposium 2020

Peter Buckmaster, Director of Digital Experience Design, New South Wales Department of Education

Megan Atchley, Enterprise Account Executive, Adobe

Todd Wolff, Principal Solutions Consultant, Adobe

Most citizens don’t need to interact with agencies every day. But when citizens need government information or services, they do expect them to be readily available, targeted to their needs and instantly accessible. The future of citizen engagement is the delivery of personalised government directly to the citizen, instead of having the citizen search generically for it. In this session, we’ll explore how personalisation can make it easier for constituents to find and consume what they need, how and when they need it.

See at https://business.adobe.com/au/events/government-symposium/2020/a-personalized-citizen-experience.html

Mark Szulc, Adobe Asia Pacific Peter Buckmaster, NSW Department of Education Listen to the Department of Education on how they are creating a great student experience beyond the classroom.

First published in July 2012

A really short post but in any project delivery I think expectation management is often forgotten.

First published in February 2014

Customer Experience (CX) in business, particularly in utility, telecos, energy, banking etc is not a new concept. Since Business Process Management (BPM) began to map customer experiences across functions and multiple customer touch points, businesses have realised that customers engage in multiple ways. By doing this they also realised that these multiple touch points need to be consistent and seamless, that is to say one channel should provide just as good an experience as another and allow customers to start and end an interaction through any channel.

This extends the thinking of User Experience (UX) from digital design into physical spaces to what has been called service design or now customer experience (CX). Semantics really, what is important is that users/customers expect to interact with us in any place and at any time, or what is referred to as an always on environment.

In the past User Experience evolved as digital sort to optimise user interfaces and architects sort to connect users in better ways, to improve computer machinery interactions. The approach to UX or what was then Usability, in the 90’s, focused on the interaction model, interfaces that were not necessarily intuitive but intuitive to learn. The next evolution was to engage users in the design to develop a User Centred Design process.

As smart phones became prelevant Users began to interact on digital devices in physical spaces. Also the interactions were not necessarily limited to the device but more often linked to the physical space. The rapid growth of Social in the the later part of the zeros helped drive this. Consumer and retail spaces saw customers search for product information, on their phones, while physically touching the product. In this case consumers knew as much if not more than the sales staff. More importantly consumers could physically research the product, try it and then purchase it at the best possible price from an alternate vendor. 

These sorts of examples threatened the old bricks and morter model. The development of brands, such as Apple, highlights that one space does not make the other irrelevant. We only need to look at history to know that one channel does not necessity supercede the other, for example still photography did not destroy the medium of paint. In the case of Apple they ensure that shopping in store is the same as shopping online, unifying the experience.

The final and most important point of CX is that interactions with our customers is not limited to a channel or a single process. In stead it is may begin within any channel and move across channel and device. For example a user may start online, waiting for a bus to research a credit card and complete an application at home. To pick up the card they may go Instore whilst linking their PIN. The number of touch points is not an issue, the challenge is to ensure consumers are able to connect seamlessly at any point of time they need too, regardless of location or device.

UX to CX

The aim of CX is to pull together channels (contact centre, online, Instore, direct etc) into a seamless and frictionless experience across digital and physicial environments. This covers the end to end experience and expands UX’s scope. The move can create friction as CX strives to move physical design into its realm, typically protected by industrial designers and architects. 

The opportunity/challenge or solution to this is to create a cross functional team working together to deliver digital and physical solutions with some generalists able to work in both the digital or physical realm. This approach will become the evolving approach to UX and in my view the norm…. It will become the next evolution to UX as it becomes commoditised and the accepted approach.

First published February 2012

Video content and the ideas of internet as a broadcast channel are no longer a question. Whilst broadcast rights control the nature of content the channel delivers, content is no longer constrained by the technology around it.

Internet directly drives the nature of video content online as it aims to deliver an immersive experience rather than a linear one. Marshall McLuhan identified this in the 60s as he talked about television by saying, “The medium is the message“.

To create an environment where Creatives pick up a camera in the same way as a pen white (and myself at white) worked to develop the white film competition within the agency. The objective was to help promote the challenges, processes, techniques, highs and lows involved in creating video content. The competition targeted Producers, Account Managers, Developers, Strategists and Designers in a discipline outside their areas of expertise.

White kicked off the year with a creative concepting day. Staff was then divided into seven groups, and within each team members were allocated roles from director to production designer, editor to actor. The teams were led by people with no video production experience, with staff from the Video department taking supporting roles. With only three weeks to produce a film, the competition kicked off with a three hour masterclass in ‘Acting & directing for the screen’ and ‘Camera techniques and lighting’.  Groups were given four hours to shoot their work.

A red carpet premiere built up a healthy sense of competition with a screening at the Chauvel Cinema. See the documentary video below or visit white’s website to see the full list of films

First published in September 2012

We live on a spinning rock. It catapults us at 1600 kilometers an hour. It is only the sense of inertia that reminds us of the speed we travel at and the rate of change, the feelings when our body stops but the earth continues.

Toffler’s 1970 novel “Future Shock” discusses what happens when people are overwhelmed by change. It tells the story of someone becoming lost on a trip to the supermarket because the environment around them has changed overnight. It hypothesizes that it’s “not only the direction of change but the rate of change” that needs to be considered, focusing on how quickly we can adapt.

In contrast, the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” tells the story of mice and their inability to change, resulting in their death, starving as they continually revisit their feeding ground despite the fact the location of the cheese has been moved. In my early career, a print copy of the book had been placed on employee’s desks by the CEO. We quickly dubbed it “a guide to change management for people about to get shafted”. My then CEO had worked for a government department implementing some rather unpopular change programs. My feelings were that his view on change and their impacts were not good and this was later cemented with his implementation of some adverse employee conditions. Feeling sorry for myself, I went home and started to import CDs into my mini-disk Walkman…this was 10 year ago. The idea that I could fit several CDs on a small disk excited me and reminded me that not all change is bad.

As a digital agency we ask our clients and consumers to change every day. Despite this, the concepts of change management and its theories are almost out of date. Kotter, the father of change management theory and his “Change Model” are over fifteen years old. The ideals are accepted as key activities in any project and referenced by any project management methodology. Yet we often forget its impact in digital marketing.

Digital lives in constant change, while things like online shopping in Australia have taken 10 years to be adopted by consumers, the impact of social has been faster. In 2008 organisations had yet to develop a policy or approach to social. PR releases and any communication required a lengthy process of approval. Social challenged this through an always on channel that required an immediate response and ongoing engagement in a two way conversation.

Kotter concepts of change are based in organisations, yet the ideas support the principals of any change program. For me the fundamentals in delivering any project or campaign still include his principles:

1. Make people really want it
2. Identify advocates/amplifiers
3. Link it to a vision that people can easily remember
4. Communicate the vision to the broader consumer
5. Remove obstacles and build buy-in
6. Create short-term wins to demonstrate success
7. Anchor change in ongoing behavior so it is sustainable

(Kotter, 1996)

First published in April 2009

The rise of social networking media is stirring up a nonprofit sector eager for new opportunities to connect with and attract supporters. But as organisations dip their toe into this fledgling field, many are finding it a difficult maze to negotiate.

Social Networks a Forum for Influence

Nonprofits and political groups have always engaged with social networks, which have traditionally taken the form of community groups, clubs, societies and other kinds of organisations. By engaging with these groups, nonprofits and political organisations hook into “human networks” that share information.

Through evolving technology platforms, social media is extending traditional human networks. Blogs and applications like Facebook and Twitter are allowing people to have two-way communication and create content for their friends, peers, family, workmates, and just about anybody who wants to listen, look, chat, or exchange information on a topic of interest. One of the key points to understand about social media networks is that they acknowledge that people seek, and are influenced by opinion. People look for advice from others. They like to research something before they make a decision about it. They like to tap into the thoughts of leaders and experts, and social media networks provide a valuable tool in this.

What is Social Media Marketing?

With social media rapidly attracting millions of users, and this number growing exponentially all the time, the commercial and nonprofit sectors have spied an opportunity to try and snare customers and supporters from this mushrooming pool of networkers. But how do you connect and engage with these people? Marketing your cause to such a vast and diverse audience is not only challenging, it can be downright confusing.

Australia has around 13.5 million internet users with 4 million Facebook members and some 500,000 bloggers. In short, social media marketing is about hooking into these people through conversations and advocacy.

Social media marketing involves the integration of social networks with social media around issues or “topics of the day” to create conversations, debate and buzz. It also means producing content (to help stimulate the conversations), implementing search engine optimisation (to attract the right people to the conversation) and tracking and reporting.

Social media marketing is an area that advertising agencies are keen to leverage, but people in social networks don’t like to be preached to or advertised at. And herein lies the kicker for nonprofit organisations. The work of nonprofits naturally lends itself to the social networking space because the issues and causes they are addressing provide great fodder for individuals to express their views.

Social networking is like a soapbox. Some people will champion your cause and be prepared to blog about you until the cows come home, and this is perceived to be a legitimate exercise because the blogger doesn’t have anything to gain by sharing their views. But if a commercial organisation tried to do something similar to promote its services, people would feel like they were being flogged a product – and they definitely do not like that in the social networking world.

Generating Donations

There are examples of social media being used successfully for fundraising, however like all online activities this is a new and evolving field. In the UK for example, WaterAid teamed up with Thames Water to promote World Water Day and raised funds through a social media marketing campaign. A good test to assess the possibility of people donating to your cause through a social media marketing initiative is to look at the effectiveness of your current search campaigns. If visitors to your website through these search activities convert to donors then social media will work for you. If the answer is “we haven’t run a search campaign yet” then do this first.

So What’s It Good For?

Campaigning: social media is great for campaigning and advocacy. For nonprofits that engage in grass roots activism it’s an excellent medium for using amplifiers (people who are prepared to voice their thoughts).

By providing amplifiers with tools such as case studies, research and other information, you can help them to spark and maintain conversations among their networks. Or put simply, you market to one to talk to a hundred.

But you don’t have to be an “activist” type organization to use social media marketing. Other nonprofits this would work for are those that are trying to educate the community on specific issues such as diabetes or homelessness.

Lead Generation: social media is a great environment to generate leads as its users are the “long end of the tail” if they‘ve taken the time to search and read content. This is not dissimilar to direct mail where the “ask” is more likely to be achieved if the supporter has taken the time to read and engage in the letter.

There is also the added advantage that supporters can often see an immediate impact from their actions. For example, when a person is asked to pledge support to an issue they can usually see onscreen the number of pledges increase by one immediately following their sign-up.

Case Study 1 – Human Rights on the Radar

In 2008 a human rights organisation successfully campaigned on the issue of internet censorship during the Olympic Games in China. The purpose of the campaign was to generate awareness about freedom of expression online and acquire leads for potential donors.

Prior to the campaign the organisation had a 5% share of the social media conversations occurring on this issue. To create more buzz, research was conducted to identify a list of influential bloggers who were sent emotive content, thus encouraging them to advocate about the issue. Conversations were maintained by monitoring blogs and responding to comments.

Further promotion was done by distributing content through newswires such as PRweb and integrating paid search initiatives and banner media. A key part of the campaign involved encouraging people to pledge their support to the issue by signing up to a register.

Results:

Traffic to the website increased 590% during the key campaign week of July 23-30

Pledges doubled to 30,000

1,430 blogs posts were posted

18,071 conversation threads were generated

Organisation’s website went from page 5 to position number three on campaign keyword searches. This occurred within forty-eight hours of the campaign launch.

Share of conversation jumped from from 5% to 70% base on campaign keywords.

Case Study 2 – Fight Against Water Poverty the Winner

WaterAid Australia recently used social media marketing to drive awareness of water scarcity by asking people to sign up to a challenge to live off 30 litres of water a day.

The campaign used newswire releases (optimised for the web), link baiting (where people link to and from your website) and optimised web page content.

WaterAid was able to achieve the number one search ranking for “World Water Day” within seventy-two hours, with 60% of registrants providing a telephone number (for later follow-up and possible donation ask).

Implementing a Social Media Campaign

There are a load of strategies to consider however the basic approach is:

1. Research – start by identifying campaign keywords (including paid search keywords) and map these to “share of conversation” research. This would include instances of your brand being associated with campaign keywords, for example “sponsor a child” mentioned with “Childfund”.

2. From “share of conversation” identify key bloggers.

3. Rate Bloggers.

4. Develop content (e.g. case studies, background articles on the issues, interviews, downloadable pdfs) and optimise content for search engines.

5. Engage key bloggers and provide them with assets (i.e. content pieces)

6. Distribute content to general newswires (to encourage link baiting and social media optimisation).

7. Set up a “supporter decision path” for transactions (e.g. donations), linked to a strong “call-to-action”.

8. Ongoing tagging of content and reporting, base-lined against benchmark reports.

First published in January 2013

Relevance in advertising was first mapped Anecdotally based on sales and then by a mix of market share and research (brand recall). Public Relations (PR) was the first to measure the value of the channel by placing a value on media exposure/real estate and equate this to paid advertising placements. It then expanded this to valuing word of mouth. To do this PR used media monitoring services to identify mentions and conduct analysis on the quality of the mention. Like any channel it sort to include metrics on frequencies, volumes and reach.

It is no surprise that the first form of social monitoring came via Search Leveraged PR – essentially a tactic to distribute content through out the web. Search engines made it easier to tract the effectiveness of these releases by identifying indexed content using keywords (across multiple search engines).  The tactic also had the advantage of improving your websites Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) through backlinks.

The development of social media saw the introduction of social media marketing and social media optimization (SMO). Key to this was the development of Press Release Distribution that pushed content to blogs, news channels and general online sites through automated feeds or releases that can be downloaded from the distribution site. A key aim is to aggregate content by search engine news channels; Google News, Yahoo! News, Bing etc to improve your relevance in search engines.

This reminds us that search is still the hero for users navigating the web and keywords are the method for this. Therefore relevance is not only about your brand keyword (individual or organisation’s name) but the generic keywords. In the age of digital words have taken on greater value; cheap flights, home loans etc are words that organisations seek to own. The value of relevance is therefore strengthened through association. Brand strategy has always sort to bind words through values and attributes, however, digital seeks to directly attribute words to a brand to drive relevance and as a result direct consumers to a brand through search/search engines.

Relevance and Memory

Cognitive science teaches us that working memory, and the ability to remain relevant, occurs as we select the right sensors (sight, sound, touch and smell) to capture stimuli and build a representation of an object. In the world of brand advertising this is extend so that the object and the brand are one in the same.

In copy/content, stimuli are presented in the form of brand/generic keywords, while in visual formats stimuli may take the form of colour; linking a colour to a brand and therefore increasing brand recognition.

To create and maintain relevance we seek to increase recognition through memory. To do this we create focuses on stimuli, across the sensors and optimize these to the marketing channel.

Conclusion

Like Google and its search algorithm, relevance and being relevant is always changing, however, the basics in digital are still the same.  

1. Align the product to its brand (values/attributes)
2. Be viable to be sustainable
3. Identify stimuli and align this to the sensor and then channel
4. Identify word of mouth opportunity

First published February 2013

The 5 Ps

Price, Place, Promotion, Product and the later Position have become known as the 5 P’s. The 5P’s or marketing mix is still key to the concept of online merchandising.  In traditional retail, merchandising is the display of products and the way that these products are displayed to ultimately move the consumer from consideration to purchase.  Online presents merchandising as an acquisition funnel – people research, become aware, move to consideration and then purchase, if convinced.

In bricks and mortar we are limited by physical space and the way we control space. Even with the shopping-mall design concept of the Gruen Transfer, that deliberately confuses consumers by providing them with distracting stimulus to take them away from their original shop purpose, we cannot ultimately control their journey.

Online seeks to take away the confusion by identifying consumer behaviour and desires. The aim is therefore not to confuse but deliver a simple experience that allows consumers to move through a sales funnel with confidence as they are presented relevant content and the right product. This typically is the eCommerce experience. One only needs to look at Amazon to see the pure merchandising experience; Search as the Hero Feature; Featured Products; Offers and Product Categories allow consumers to browse or quickly move to their purchase objective. This is supported with a relevance engine that will target product to a consumer, based on their browsing habits.

Key to the success of merchandising is that ability to sell production that is needed or wanted. One only needs to look at good affiliate marketing campaigns to realise this is key to success; examples include low interest rate credit cards and iPhones.

Changing Behaviours and Customer Experience Design

 Change and the ability for consumers to change their behavior is accepted. In banking consumers have changed from banking from a single branch (location), to linked branches; And signatures in passbooks, to electronic cards linking banks across the globe. Accelerated changes in banking supports the view that consumers are able to change and change quickly if there is benefit.

In digital the discipline of creating effective change is delivered through User Experience (UX), now also commonly referred to as Customer Experience (CX). UX engages a User Centred Design (UCD) approach to deliver an experience that also supports change. The limitation of this research in the UCD approach, if too puritan is that Consumers/Users only know what they know. New thinking or innovation therefore needs to be inspired.

The first commercial user interface for Computers was DOS, based on the constructs of  using a keyboard (such as a typewriter), to enter commands. This was followed by a Graphic User Interface (GUI), that used a mouse to issue commands in a graphical environment. The benefit to the User was that they would not need to remember commands but would interact with icons. The objective of this change has always been to create a simpler experience for Users to meet their objectives.

In User Experience this has included refining the Information architecture and User Interface or what UX would call the interaction model to allow users to quickly and intuitively complete their task. Most recently UX design needs to take into account multiple device that allow a seamless experience. The ultimate is to move towards what is called a Service Design experience that will present an uninterrupted experience across multiple touch points. In short the consumer will be able to start an experience in any channel with the same brand experience across offline or online; And complete this purchase path through any channel seamlessly through hands-offs.