The Much-Needed Factor for Websites: Social Interaction

The other day, I was checking my mail and I realized I had received an email from a very earnest person. I wish to share some of his concerns with you.

It went in this manner….

“I have a very talented design team who has used their creativity to come up with an excellent design for my product site. The website includes a display of all the products with details required by my consumers. It also contains a varied range! Yet, I feel that I do not have the right kind of response that I wish to generate for this website. Please have a look at my website and kindly let me know where the problem exists for the site.”

The first thing that struck me after reading this post was that if the website is good then why should he seek feedback a person who has never visited his website before? It would definitely make sense to talk to his visitors directly and check out their views and opinions. Well, still wearing a critique’s hat I surfed through this website to see what could be the issue.

My first impression was exactly how the mail stated; it was attractive and interesting to look at. I could view all the pages with ease. Yet, there was an element that seemed missing from the picture.

I saw everything seemed fine in terms of design. The missing piece seemed the lack of activity on the web page! The web pages and their product display played the function of attracting the users. The thing about the website was that it did not create any action for the user!

The website basically lacked a very important factor - creation of social interaction amongst users. This is why the website owner did not receive the desired results. One may wonder what the importance of social interaction is! The answer lies in the results which are seen after the use of social interaction!

What happened here was that due to lack of interaction with the consumer, the website owner had to resort to seeking my advice. This not only created a longer channel for the website owner, it did not give him the chance of knowing the consumer opinions!

The use of social interaction on the web pages would solve many things! This gives the website owner a chance to interact with the users online. Users can put forth their views. This gives better and faster results once the changes are implemented. These changes when implemented also make consumers feel that their suggestions are valued. It only generates loyal traffic for the website!

One can use many ways to interact with users. The use of a Presentation slide show that showcases the latest achievements of the week may garner more interest. This can make a user take active interest and watch the slide show of the products, either to submit comments or view those from other users.

The website users should also get a chance to interact with each other that helps them to discover more about the options being offered on a website. There could be an FAQ, which users refer to for information posted on a website. They can also ask their questions to which other users or a website owner can answer. In this manner, live chats, sharing of images or links can be utilized to make the whole experience socially interactive!

Implementing social interaction on a website helps users to interact amongst each other, which in turn proves to be useful for a website. Apart from creative presentations, a website that obtains feedback from users will get better results!

This is what I finally replied to the email I had received. I received a long email thereafter that thanked me for everything!

Speaking of Eating Your Own Dog Food…

TeemingPod was designed for web developers who want to add social interaction to sites and applications. As someone involved in the making of TeemingPod, I’m quite excited about the platform. So, when someone asked me last week “How do YOU use TeemingPod?” I thought I would reply through this post.

Speaking of eating your own dog food, we use TeemingPod in a variety of innovative ways, and today I am going to describe the most unusual one.

The TeemingPod product team uses TeemingPod to report their daily work activities. Surprised? Wonder how they do it? Read on…

First, the background. Flash back to January 2008. Every Friday, my inbox received weekly reports from all ten engineers in the product team, and my task was to consolidate them in one report. It was a tedious job to get a snapshot of the week’s output from ten different reports. It got worse as the team grew.

There were further challenges: keeping the reports organized in folders, making them accessible during travel, tracking who has not reported, going back and forth to get reports in the right format, and so on. All this consumed a huge amount of my productive time.

Now, the big idea. One Friday, when I was fretting over this weekly chore, one team member came up with a bright idea: Can’t we use TeemingPod instead of these reports?

The objections were immediate: TeemingPod has polls, debates, FAQs and so on, but it does not have a “Reporting” activity. That wouldn’t stop our creative minds, so someone suggested: Can’t we use the Debate activity for reporting?

“How so?” I asked. And the ideas flowed. Everyday, we could create a “debate”, identified by today’s date as the “topic.” Every team member’s work becomes a “view” within the debate. Each team member simply logs into the pod and enters his “view” of the day. The team manager accesses the pod to get a daily report.

That day we realized that creativity has not stopped at the product itself, but it continues on how can we effectively use a TeemingPod activity in our day-to-day life.

The system went into operation in February 2008.

Fast forward to today. We have been using this reporting mechanism for almost a year now. Our team reports that TeemingPod has had over 250 “debates” as of today, which I can scan in no time by simply accessing the pod. I can search for information in a single click. Now searching for information like bug 239 is no longer time-consuming. Nor do I have to worry about reports while traveling. There is no headache of arranging them in a proper format and no back and forth of emails. It is all there in a single pod and a single click away, anytime, anywhere!

Of course, the content of the pod is secured, as only my team members are invited to the pod.

Now for the bonus benefits. TeemingPod has helped me a lot to raise my team’s enthusiasm and motivation. If a team member does a great job or solves a complex issue, I simply give him or her a TeamingPod thumbs-up. This increases their ranking on that day (their view’s ranking in the debate). This has introduced a healthy competition within the team to do their task in the best possible way and become the team member of the day.

This is how we have been using TeemingPod as a daily reporting tool for a year. I can definitely state that usage of TeemingPod is limited only by its users’ creativity!

For More Info… Please Don’t Leave This Page!

How many times do you go to a web page looking for some information, and find only a part of what you are looking for? Then you have to leave the site and rely on search tools or discussion groups to hopefully serve up some additional relevant material on the topic. Information revolution has made available every possible information just a click away. However, it has had an unfortunate side effect. While it benefits from expanding information availability, the amount of time it takes to find the right answer impedes productivity and drives up costs.

There are various tools which help reducing the time to search for the right kind of information. Like Google blog search, yahoo forum search, Google website search etc. But, still they have their own limitations.

A solution which would give all the related information with the topic we are searching for is desired in this age of information revolution. This knowledge base would be created by users which share same interest and read similar articles. Hence, the information would be relevant.

On the other hand, content owner of a webpage would also benefit by gaining insights of users' thinking, their questions and even their knowledge of the topic.

TeemingPod offers one such solution to maximize business value from information. It provides a flexible platform designed to enhance information sharing and communication in-context (/embedded) with the topic being discussed on that web page. When a user does not find information on web page, one can look for the information in TeemingPod embedded in that page. User can ask questions, reply to queries, leave behind useful links related to the web page, discuss the topic with other readers sharing same interests etc.

Every reader can contribute information relevant to the web page in the pod, thus enriching the web page content with additional information. Readers can streamline sharing of trusted knowledge that can significantly improve content of the web page.