The Customer Experience (CX) Primer: Part 3a – Liquidity0

Posted on November 20th, 2010 in Digital, Social Web

To keep the Customer Experience journey moving forward, the next couple of posts will be addressing the dimension of liquidity (see previous post for background).

Today, we will tackle moving user-generated content (the second heuristic statement of this group):

• 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?

To take a step back, when it comes to branded content (site produced copy, video, audio, images, etc) there are often 3 scenarios. A site visitor can cut and paste the url to share, there are features such ShareThis and AddThis that provide sharing widgets, and/or site providers have some homegrown tools for emailing, posting to social networks, etc.

How popular is this? AddThis boasts 1.2 million installations of their widget and ShareThis claims a reach of 431 million share views through use of its widget.

Why is it so popular? Facilitating this activity is great for site publishers – it gets them more eyeballs, gives the ability to track what type of content is more sticky, has a relatively low cost to implement, and the message is mostly controlled.

However, user-generated content (i.e. ratings, reviews, and comments) are not often found with this capability. Of course, if you are sharing an entire page with comments you are close to achieving this goal, but typically once you are on the portions of the page where this content is…sharing widgets are not very close by. Furthermore, the packaging of a specific comment is a conscious choice by the user that should be supported (by the way…I recognize this is a topic all to itself, but for the sake of the post please run with it).

So, using our heuristic, let’s see how we might provide judgments on retail sites that have user rating and reviews – sites that facilitate user-generated content sharing fall on the positive side of our scale and those that don’t on the negative side. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples for illustration.

Amazon.com: We often look to Amazon as a benchmark, but in this case Amazon is an example of not providing the functionality we are looking for. For this example, we are seeing a well written review that shared along with a link to the product could be helpful in supporting a purchase decision.

Borders.com: Borders, on the other hand, gives users the ability to share user-generated content to top social networks. This example falls on the positive side of our scale, but still leaves room for improvement (i.e. additional options – especially email). As a brief side note, vendors such as BazaarVoice and ChoiceStream support social sharing for ratings and reviews.

For a best practice, I am going to set the bar at:

1. Providing the ability to facilitate sharing
2. Placing the functionality in a logical place
3. Providing for a complete set of options (i.e. top social networks and email).

Unfortunately, I am still searching for this best practice, but sense we are not too far away from finding it on top sites where user-generated content is common.

In the meantime, all comments are encouraged and welcomed.

Lastly, please check back for our next post, which will address the role of customizing shared content prior to publishing.