How often do you see great content on a Website that you would love to share? It’s easy right?  You copy the URL, open email, and send it off. Or, create a shortened link and tweet it away. However, are their better ways to move content around?

You bet! That is why Liquidity is an important dimension of our Customer Experience (CX) framework. As sites become more social, the ability for users to take content with them or move it around freely will become increasingly important.

As a refresher, Consensus introduced the CX Framework earlier in the year to help evaluate how brands create social media experiences. It looks at brands across four dimensions: dialog, liquidity, relevance, and consistency. Using a set of heuristics statements (rules of thumb), we pass judgments on the effectiveness of the experiences we see.

As far as liquidity is concerned, our heuristics include:

- Can branded content from digital channels be shared?
- Can user generated content from digital channels be shared?
- Can content that is available for sharing be customized prior to publishing/sharing?
- Is content primed for users to share?
- Can users subscribe to content feeds?

Let’s take a look at the first statement to see how it might apply. Here is the scenario. You are looking for a pair of shoes (New Balance 556 Sneakers) and want to pass on some info. Let’s take a look at a couple of options we are presented with on leading sites:

Piperlime: Piperlime let’s users fend for themselves. From a liquidity standpoint we would give this a negative mark. The site is not supporting the ability to move content in any manner, except manually.

NB Express: New Balance Express exposes the ability to share through familiar icons and links, but leaves room for improvement. There is no icon for email and the “Tell a Friend,” link is not intuitively located.  Also, it is not clear that “Tell a Friend” is the option that would invoke an email. We would give this a positive mark, but not call it a best practice.

Zappos: Zappos also uses “Tell a Friend” to invoke an email, which again could be labeled more clearly. “Share This Product” links to the AddThis widget, which gives the users 290+ options. We also give this a positive mark, but again the experience falls short of a best practice.

Overall, we see one option with no ability to share and two that leave room for improvement. The Customer Experience (CX) framework helps us focus on important areas of consideration like this and some guidelines for passing judgment (we will publish these eventually too). This allows us to create recommendations for improvement and benchmark experiences against each other. In terms of general benchmarking, here are two examples of what we would see as closer to being a best practice.

Target: “Email” and “Share This” are clearly labeled and the buttons are placed logically. Upon opening the “Share This” widget, the user is presented with a small set of the most used options for sharing (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc). If you know your audience you should be able to tailor your list.

CSN Stores: The share widget is logically placed, exposes most common options, and when open exposes a greater set. However, the list is not overly exhaustive list and the most used options are on top.

For the sake of brevity I won’t dive into each heuristic statement, but did want to show an instructive example of how we can use the CX framework.

As usual, feel free to comment. Also, please let us know if you have seen any great examples of giving the users ability to share content on a page.

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