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Wikipedia Puts Usability on Top around the World

Wikipedia is a popular site whether you want to admit it or not.  Sure, the content is user-generated and often flawed, but it is a handy place to get quick tidbits of information.  Personally, I find the links in the Resources section of articles to be a quick and easy way to verify facts and gather more information.  Again, it’s quick and easy, but we all know you need to do some additional research before you rely on anything you read on Wikipedia.

With that said, we’re all familiar with the boring, plain, text-heavy pages on Wikipedia as well as the iconic Wikipedia globe logo.  When you land on a Wikipedia Web page, you know where you are before you even have to scroll.

Despite that recognition, Wikipedia spent the past year researching the usability of its Web site, and last week launched a prototype new Wikipedia site design that is being beta tested with nearly 700,000 users.  The new look is shown below (you can get a better look here) and offers more color, a ‘boxy’ look that puts more content above the fold in a more organized design, and what looks like easier navigation.

wikipedia_prototype

Additionally, the new Wikipedia logo — an updated 3-D globe — has been launched, which is described on the Wikimedia blog as representing, “a new chapter in the history of the logo … as volunteers examined languages and scripts that were not represented in the previous iteration of the puzzle globe.”

wikipedia_logo_old_new

Users are even invited to create local versions of the Wikipedia logo to make it more relevant to local cultures.  I have to give Wikipedia credit for investing the time and money into making these changes.  Regardless of how you feel about the content on Wikipedia, this branding effort and usability initiative are both strong positives for the company and site overall.

What do you think?

Be Careful with Blog Outsourcing

 

320px-Smiley-sceptic.svg

I recently had some dealings with a company that sells business websites and blogging services.  An established company with a reasonable client list—so I was surprised by the fact that their plan doesn’t seem all that excellent.

Situation: The provider company needed some guest posts in order to fill the pipeline for a client blog.  The client (a mid-sized company, not a start-up) is in a technical field that requires some moderately specialized knowledge on the part of the bloggers.  I happen to know something about the field, so they asked me to suggest four topics to write about.

Here’s the first catch.  They didn’t tell me the name of the client company, just the topic areas.  I sent along four pretty good ideas, which they professed to love.  Apparently, however, they did not notice (or did not know) that one of my proposed topics concerned a product that belongs to a direct competitor of their client company.  So they okayed a topic that would have been quite a poor choice for the blog.

Second catch.  I was told to leave my posts in a queue, and the blog editor would provide images.  Which turned out to be true–but not exactly in a good way!  Most of the posts had small, rather outdated-looking stock photos.  And some of the posts had the same photo.

Third catch.  Most of the stories had a generic by-line.  I.e., “Posted by the [Client Name] Team.”  I’m personally okay with being anonymous, but it’s hard for a blog to establish credibility if it looks like a string of unowned news bytes.

During my brief involvement, I received no communication at all from the editor–and if there was a plan or philosophy for the blog it certainly wasn’t apparent to me.  Here’s the final catch, though.  They paid in the top tier of market rates, at least for my contributions.  Which probably means they are charging the client somewhere near top rates.  And the product they are providing seems . . . well, not “top” quality.  Or at least not so far.

Takeaway: There may be some very good reasons to outsource a business blog, especially when the goal is to provide industry-level content rather than company-specific content.  “Inside Acme Widgets” should be written by Acme insiders, but “All About Widgets” or “Widgetmania” might be done as well or better by professional bloggers.  Outsourcing is not the same as offloading, however!  Give the vending company detailed directions and monitor their work carefully if you want to end up with a good blog.

 

(Thanks to ArséniureDeGallium for the delightfully “skeptical” smiley.)

The Wizard Can’t See You Today

 

Oz Museum

In today’s story, the Wizard of Jobs rejects all comers by putting up this sign:

There are currently no openings.
Please check back again later.

I recently came across those exact words on the site of a mid-sized, modestly successful company.  The company is privately owned, and may typically hire only when there’s attrition.  So (one might ask) why bother to put a more elaborate message on the Careers page?

Come to that . . . why bother even to have a Careers page?  Which is the key question here.  In the case of this particular company’s website–otherwise very well done–it’s hard to see the sense in having a page where the only message is “Go away.”

That message, or some variant version, often shows up on the websites of small- to mid-sized companies where hiring is fairly rare.  Or where hiring may be cyclical, seasonal, or otherwise intermittent.  In those circumstances it’s not surprising that on any given day/week/month there are no jobs available.

And yet!  If a Careers page exists, there has to be something on it.

Obviously the page offers an opportunity to provide further information about working at the company.  But that option only has value if the company really expects to hire people in the future and wants to build a pool of potential applicants.  If not, no point.

Big corporations almost always have some jobs available, so there’s value in offering visitors useful information about employment, along with incentives to return if no current job openings are appropriate.  That’s part of building an employer brand.

But in reality, smaller companies that rarely employ don’t need an employer brand.  Therefore, the obligatory Careers or Jobs page becomes little more than a place to say “No.”

Which doesn’t seem like an asset to the website.

The point for smaller companies is: Either do something worthwhile with the Careers page or don’t have one.  Use that real estate to extol the virtues of your company culture.  Otherwise, take down the page.  And either issue a real invitation (“Please come back in March, when we expect to have new openings”) or skip the whole thing.  After all . . . how often are people supposed to “check back”?  And for how long?

The point for bigger companies is: Consider what your corporate Careers site would accomplish or offer if there were no job openings.  After all, most visitors won’t find a suitable opportunity on any given day.  But they should still leave the site with something of value.

 

(Thanks to JoshBerglund19 for snapping this Emerald City vignette at a wax museum.)

Perils and Perks: Government Online


Hyperspiral

Two completely opposite experiences with “gov tech” led to this post.  The first was a catastrophe so vivid that it illustrates every mistake an entity could make in public.  And the second was a nice surprise.

Let’s start with the story of how an online system set up by an American state crashed and burned in less than a minute—in the process, outraging hundreds of thousands of citizens.  Seriously.  Here’s a quote from the most recent excuse letter sent out by the errant agency:  “The program experienced more than 38 million Web hits, and nearly 39,000 rebate reservations were made both through the Web site as well as the phone system. “

Do the math!!  Even assuming that half the reservations were made by 18,000 people who spent up to four hours to get through on the phone (1,000 calls a minute, says the letter), and assuming that every web visitor tried 20 times to hit the site . . . that would mean 900,000 people were trying to get through on the website to make one of 18,000 available reservations.  So two-tenths of one percent of the web applicants were successful.  (Even if everyone tried 100 times—well, you see the gist of it.)

So why is this worthy of a post?  I’ll content myself with proposing three takeaways:

  1. Realistic planning is vital to all online endeavors. In this case the problem was humongous numbers, but that shouldn’t have been a big surprise.  In fact, it turned out later that the program had been outsourced to a company that encountered exactly the same problems in other states.  So—how did these people (on both sides of the contract) end up so completely bumfuzzled?
  2. When something goes radically wrong, don’t make excuses. Do not talk about the problem in the abstract:  “X happened because Y.”  Go straight to “We failed and we are abjectly apologetic.”  How is it that no one ever learns this lesson?
  3. Do not tweet hysterically in a crisis. As the web mob became increasingly frustrated, they tried getting news from the program’s Twitterstream.  Here’s what the tweeter(s) were saying:  “We are experiencing unprecedented demand.  Please keep trying.” Which adds . . .

    4. Insult to injury.  In the first place, “trying” was irrelevant—the site wasn’t responding at all.  (No one can figure out, by the way, how any online people could have gotten reservations.)  And in the second place, encouraging people to keep hitting the site only made matters worse.

    If you are wondering why there was no queueing system, join the club.

    Meanwhile, for what it’s worth—just boil those three points down to Prevent, Repent, and Think Before You Tweet, and you can apply them to just about any situation, large or small.

    Now for the nice surprise.  I heard somewhere that the Health and Human Services (HHS) department of the U.S. government wanted to leverage “the wisdom of crowds.”  (In case you’ve forgotten already, that’s the notion—popularized by James Surowiecki’s 2004 book–that aggregating the opinions of many will often produce better decisions than following the careful thought of a few.)  Intrigued, I visited their website to see how this desire would be implemented.

    It isn’t, actually.  The site is mainly about how to use blogs and social media.  But the reward for visiting is a very nice set of “guidelines” for the business use of social media tools.  Free for the taking, so stop by!


    (Yes—that is a hyperbolic spiral.)

Listening and Discussing – The Social Media Success Imperatives

listenOne of the most important aspects of any social media marketing strategy is research, which comes not just in the form of segmenting audiences and analyzing statistics but also in the form of listening to the conversations going on across the social Web.  For a company’s social media marketing plan to be successful, listening and joining discussions are the two most basic imperatives.

IBM understands that listening is the cornerstone of social media marketing.  In fact, IBM has a social media program called Listening for Leads that utilizes what the company calls seekers (who work on a voluntary basis) to listen to social media conversations happening on key Web sites where the company’s target audiences spend time.  When seekers identify conversations that could generate leads, they notify appropriate IBM representatives who join and follow up on those discussions.

According to an interview with Ed Linde of IBM, which was conducted by eMarketer last month, the IBM Listening for Leads program has been the company’s most successful social media marketing initiative citing millions of dollars in sales leads and a tremendous amount of closed deals.  Linde attributes IBM’s success from its Listening for Leads program to two primary factors:

  1. Using enough employees as seekers who each voluntarily spend a couple of hours per week listening to social media conversations (in addition to performing their regular IBM job functions) to uncover a good amount of credible leads.
  2. Knowing where to look for conversations (i.e., where target audiences spend time on the social Web) and what keywords to search for in order to find relevant, actionable discussions.

Thanks to the social Web, companies have the ability to legally and ethically eavesdrop on real-time conversations, join those conversations, and offer suggestions, help and solutions right when people are looking for information or assistance.  It’s an amazing opportunity!

Are you using your existing employees to help you keep up with social Web conversations that could lead to new business?  IBM’s Listening for Leads program is a perfect example of a company that understands the importance of social Web conversations and used out-of-the-box thinking to keep up with and respond to those conversations thereby turning them into tangible business results.

Image: Flickr

Preboarding! (AKA, Recruitment)

Air_Berlin_boarding_apron_Sm_art

My inbox has been stuffed lately with articles, invitations, etc., related to “onboarding.” I’m guessing that reflects an expected uptick in hiring, plus the notion that better onboarding creates more productive (and therefore more cost-effective) employees. Get an overview of the onboarding value proposition in this HR Management article, which summarizes some findings from a recent Aberdeen Research report.

But whatever the reason for interest around this topic, it’s worth a revisit from the recruiting perspective.

Most discussions acknowledge that onboarding actually begins during—not after—the hiring phase.  For example, Mary Lorentz’s very good post Un-Boarding: 5 Ways Companies Get Employee Onboarding Wrong notes that onboarding should begin during the interview.  In a helpful post on Creating an Onboarding Plan, HR Bartender Sharlyn Lauby observes:  “onboarding to me is really about the pre- and post- hire process that helps an employee become acclimated to their new working environment.”

And yet!  There’s not much said in either case—or anywhere else–of what this truism might mean in practice. So I’ll go out on a limb and propose this basic standard for successful preboarding:

Don’t make the future employee hate the company before they get hired.

Onboarding is all about engaging the new employee, and that process is much easier if the employee is already disposed to like their new job.  The more unpleasantness they have experienced on the way to getting hired, the less optimistic they will be about the company.  Although some new-hires had a choice (i.e., they were persuaded to accept this position instead of one or more others) many or most would have taken almost any job offered—so they may be more relieved to be employed than excited about the new opportunity.

Here are three (hopefully obvious) rules for not alienating prospects online:

  1. Make the application process efficient and pleasant!
  2. Keep in touch—acknowledge applications, respond to email, and update applicants on their status.
  3. Provide plenty of relevant information on the website—and of course, make it easy to navigate.

And a couple of rules for not alienating prospects in person:

  1. Be sure the interviewer is prepared—and that absolutely does include reading the candidate’s resume beforehand.
  2. Listen!  Whether the interview process is structured or unstructured, leave room to draw the candidate out with real conversation, not PR fluff or obligatory chat.

Bonus thought: Feature some new-hires on the Careers site, talking about their experiences with the whole process:  finding/researching the company, applying, interviewing, and getting that magical offer.


(Thanks for the original boarding snapshot, Matti Blume.)