Strategic Social Design & SxD. Some humble thoughts.

Posted on 25 November 2009 by semanticwill

(caveat emptor: This is just a draft of thoughts I ran together this morning about some thinking I have been doing. I published it in the blog just to force me to tend to it, edit it, and gain feedback while I think through some of the issues that have been vexing me about designing effective social strategies for brands.)

Conceptual Model of Social Ecosystem based on SxD (PDF) (Illustrator *AI File)

Companies have traditionally relied on branding and communication to develop positive customer perceptions of their products and services, and have engaged advertising and marketing agencies to do this work. Marketing teams often work closely with their design partners to ensure that what is promoted is actually delivered. Companies are now aligning around “social business” without a strong understanding of experience design or even what it means to be ‘social’ in online mediated spaces, nor how to leverage that to increase value and engagement with their core customers. Conversational relationship management doesn’t exist yet – but it will, and it may be led by agencies offering things coined and service marketed with names like ‘digital influence marketing,’ or ‘social influence design,’ or ‘social business x,’ without really digging into depth about what it means to influence, what is the science behind sociality, and how does one actually design sociality into a business, as well as into the greater ecosystem that includes vendors, clients, co-consumers and the cadre of pundits and prognosticators tied to this dynamic social ecosystem.

However, these agencies have no core understanding of experience and social engagement design, social interaction design (SxD), or business intelligence analytics, and therefore holistic experience often suffers at the expense of form – they have the idea, but dig deep and there isn’t much there, there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. This wouldn’t be so bad, if these coined terms actually had some deep meat on the bone combined with a strong understanding of social interaction design (SxD) which has a huge body of work created by Adrian Chan.

The messages communicated through advertising, public relations and digital marketing support only one side of the branding equation, and are classically use “push” media – and these people are now responsible for designing and engaging in conversations with your audience? It has become increasingly clear to me that the customer’s user experience of products and services themselves is a powerful branding moment – made more so when they are social experiences. For instance, a customer’s delight with the experience and emotive power of an Apple iPhone, an airline’s online reservation system, or the interior of a coffee shop are examples of powerful branding moments – things that can be powerful social moments. This means that the entire experience needs to be designed to be social. Interactive Ad agencies can’t do that for you yet, which means your going to have to push them towards this new reality.

The experiential interactions that generate these positive perceptions are critical to achieving customer engagement with increased and repeat business. Creating positive customer experiences is particularly important for businesses that are increasingly relying on the social digital ecosystem to attract, convert and retain engaged co-customers.

By adopting a strategic experience design approach, companies benefit from a form of thinking that is unique to designers. Often referred to as ‘design thinking,’ coined by IDEO, it is different from more traditional approaches to problem-solving in that it is at its most effective when it includes all, and not just some, of the following attributes:

Co-Consumer, Customer, and User-focused: It is ultimately about bringing an engaging, social platform to your customer.
Creative and Innovative: It is about evoking new ideas and solutions and successfully bringing them to market.
Experimental: It is about conceiving, building and testing prototypes in an iterative fashion.
Evaluative: It requires gathering the best information from design ethnography and allowing stakeholders to make recommendations about which steps to take and what to build – this means creating an analytics framework to provide a 360 degree view of the social mention ecosystem.
Collaborative & Collective: It incorporates multiple viewpoints from various organization divisions and global operations leveraging a social enterprise platform the frankly doesn’t exist yet but Socialtext is leading the way in this.
Integrative: It provides integrated ecosystem solutions that keep the bigger business picture in mind
Emotive and empathetic: It builds emotional appeal and encourages positive perceptions through experience based on theories of sociality in social interaction design.
Experiential: It’s about usability, emotability, aesthetability, culturability, and sociability.

A strategic approach to social engagement design, driven by design thinking and human-focused design principles, can have a profound impact on a companies customer experience strategy. For companies whose customers are increasingly doing business with them through social networked digital channels, and where traditional channels are being increasingly redesigned to drive social engagement to digital channels, creating a positive social experience across the entire dynamic complex ecosystem – including web sites, mobile devices, social appliances, conversational television, and more – is critical.
To succeed, companies must:

Design an online social engagement experience that successfully connects the strategic goals of a company’s business and brand with the social goals, interests and passions of their customers
Design an online customer experience that is in-line with the other customer touch points, as well as a company’s overall brand and marketing strategies, to create a unified experience across all customer touch points
Build a design organization with the necessary business and design skills to support the experience strategy and to ensure that design is incorporated into the innovation effort.

Here are 12 Design Thinking resources useful in providing a good groundwork for understanding how design thinking shaped this little post and provided much fodder for consideration: