By Trent Mankelow 

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In this second part of a four part series, we are looking at social interactions.
 
The participatory web
The biggest difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is the change from static content to communities and relationships. Millions of words have already been written about the participatory web from Time naming ‘You’ as its person of the year back in 2006, through to Facebook breaking through the 300 million user mark just last month.

Unfortunately, the message isn’t getting through to many organisations. They say that they want a conversation with their customers, but the kind of conversation they want isn’t very real.

For a start, real conversation isn’t one-way. Blogs shouldn’t be used to push press releases into the world. They should be used to ask questions, engage customers and seek feedback like Nokia does.

Real conversation also feels like you are talking to a real person with personality, opinions, and emotions. Would your organisation write a blog post entitled "Sometimes we suck", like Flickr did?

The courage to publicly engage customers in real conversation has to be driven from the very top, and it doesn’t happen very often. You see it at online shoe retailer Zappos, where their CEO has nearly 1.5 million Twitter followers (the kind of numbers usually reserved for Lance Armstrong or CNN). Locally you see it at RaboPlus, where their General Manager is the one who’s answering all the customer queries. But these examples are pretty rare.

But, to be honest blogs aren’t really where it’s at. The simple fact is that fewer than a third of us read them (and most of those are in the younger age ranges).
 
Social interaction platforms
I think the really interesting stuff is when organisations provide a platform for social interaction.

I’m not talking about social networks so much, although their numbers continue to rise (the 169 social networking websites listed at Wikipedia include a site for knitting and crochet and there are even anti-social networks cropping up).

Providing a social interaction platform is more about helping customers connect with one another and with their own data. For example, on Delicious you can see how many other people bookmarked the same page you did, and see what else these people bookmarked.

One of the simplest ways of providing a platform is to aggregate people’s behaviour as they use your site, and then show the data back to them. Flickr uses the community to figure out how interesting a photo is, based on the number of people who view a photo, bookmark it, comment on it, and a bunch of other (proprietary) things. There are no human editors involved. The community, you and I, indirectly help to decide which of these photos are interesting. We add value to the site just by using it.

Mint takes this a step further by helping users to gather insights about themselves by comparing their finances to a group of other users in a similar life situation. How much are your paying in car insurance compared to others? What about weekly groceries? This makes the site extremely sticky - you want to keep coming back to compare yourself to your peer group.
 
Social psychology
Another trend we are seeing on the rise is the use of social psychology and game theory to persuade us, or to help us learn.

For example, when we publicly share our goals we are more likely to follow through on them. At SmartyPig they’ve taken advantage of this to create a 21st-century version of a piggy bank that allows you to set up a savings account with an automatic monthly contribution. But the trick is that you can share goals online with family and friends, who can also contribute to your account.

Nintendo’s Your Life Rhythm is a pedometer that is designed to get us off our backsides. Their trick is that the pedometer comes as an add-on to their Nintendo DS portable gaming system. Yep, walking around is now a computer game. But when you add in social aspects, and some element of competition, chances are that we will walk around more.

A more mature version of this idea is the Nike+. It uses a sensor in a running shoe to communicate with an iPod. You can track calories burned, distance, pace and time.

That’s all pretty cool. But where it goes to the next level is when you upload your data to the Nike+ website. I can challenge other Nike+ users to a race, see what kind of times other people in Wellington are running, discuss which Powersong I prefer on the forums (apparently Pump It by the Black Eyed Peas is the number one Powersong).

This is Data (it tells me that I most often run on a Wednesday), this is a Service, this is a Device (a sensor and an iPod), and it is most definitely Social Interaction.  That’s the thing with these megatrends we’ve been discussing - it’s often hard to unpick the threads on some of these things.
 
Organisations who understand how to facilitate conversations online can’t help but be more successful. How can you get your customers to participate more? With you? With each other? What can you do to help facilitate conversations? I’d love to hear your feedback.
 
In the next article we’ll cover Part III: Services.
 

By Trent Mankelow
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We are often asked by clients for our opinion on the things they should watch out for, what the future holds, and who’s doing the really interesting stuff.
These kind of questions have inspired us to reflect, and collect our thoughts into four inter-related articles covering:

1. Devices
2. Social interactions
3. Services
4. Data

In this first part of a four part series, we are taking a look at some common attributes of the latest devices. By "device" I mean a physical gadget with some kind of electronic wizardry - a cellphone, MP3 player, remote control, camera - something that someone uses for a specific practical purpose.
I want to talk about four trends relating to devices:
 

• Mobile
• Location-aware
• Touch-enabled
• Context-aware

 
Mobile
The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world. Already there are more mobile phones than computers.
This shift has some interesting social and cultural implications. For example, the 2002 book Smart Mobs suggests we are becoming looser about time and place. "If you have a phone you can be late…the opportunity to make decisions on the spot has made young people reluctant to divide their lives into time slots."
More and more organisations are creating new ways to connect with customers on-the-go. Kiwibank, ASB, National Bank, and others have iPhone-enabled sites or apps. A bank in the States is even letting customers deposit money by taking a photo of the cheque with their phone.
All of this makes sense - we don’t want to be tethered to our PCs. We want devices that are small, lightweight and portable. That’s why by the end of 2011 there will be more smartphones than PCs.

Q: People are doing more and more things "on the go" - what does this mean for your organisation?
 
Location-aware
Location-based services have been talked about since Y2K, but it has only been recently that we are starting to see devices that know where in the world they are.
For example, you can buy shoes with a built in GPS chip. This chip acts as a location beacon to help people find you (or your sneakers) and can also monitor heart rate, speed and body temperature.
Some new cameras know where you took a photo by automatically adding location data through GPS. You’ll never forget where a photo was taken ever again (especially handy if you are touring Europe and all the gothic buildings start to look the same).
Google Latitude tracks your location using your cellphone. Before you cry ‘Big Brother’, you need to give Google permission to know your whereabouts, and explicitly decide who to share that information with. I can easily imagine situations where this would come in handy: I’m in Sydney, Australia on business and get an alert that a friend is in town and is only three blocks away. I can see that my friend is stuck in traffic and is going to be late for tennis. You get the idea.

Q: Imagine if you knew the location of every one of your customers, in real-time. What could you do with that information? What location-based services could you offer?
 
Touch-enabled
When Pew asked an expert panel about future trends late last year, one of the things they agreed on most was that touch would increase as a common technology interface.
Gesture-based interfaces are definitely becoming more mainstream, thanks in large part to Apple’s family of products. (Although you have to agree with Seinfeld that there is a lack of satisfaction in swiping the iPhone when you’re angry).
Microsoft Surface and Sphere have shown us how large, multi-touch interfaces might actually be used, but we’re unlikely to see any Minority Report-style interactions anytime soon. Humans just weren’t designed to make small gestures in front of us. (Google "gorilla arm" for more on this).
Which brings us to an important point - designing touch-based interfaces isn’t like designing for the desktop. For a start, fingers are much fatter than mouse pointers and require larger buttons. One wonders if we are going to have to suffer though years of clumsy interactions, while designers catch up.

Q: In what way can your interfaces take advantage of gestures?
 
Context-aware
Devices are becoming more and more aware of the context in which they operate. They have sensors to measure all sorts of different things: motion, pressure, light, noise and even air quality and posture.
Accelerometers are one of the more popular sensors, and allow devices to detect movement and orientation. Using accelerometers some Nokia phones allow users to reject calls by turning them upside down, and some iPods offer a "shake to shuffle" capability.
Nintendo are about to release another add-on to the Wii console called a Vitality Sensor. It’s a fancy name for a simple idea - a sensor that checks your pulse. But think about the creative ways game designers could use it, like gauging when a horror game is too horrific, or when you aren’t working out hard enough when playing WiiFit.

Q: What innovative ways can you use sensors? Could you determine engagement by the way customers lean forward in their chair? What if customers could shake your interface like they can with the iPod?
 
Individually, each of these innovations is interesting and useful, but I think the true power is when we start to see devices with all of these attributes combined.
Some organisations have tried to peek into the future and imagine what life will be like with mobile, location-aware, touch-enabled and context-ware devices. Check out these videos from Microsoft and Nokia. (Thanks to LukeW for the links).
I don’t know what the future looks like but as more and more devices get smarter and smarter and the group of people who use them grows and grows, I am convinced that we ain’t seen nothing yet.
 
In the next article we’ll cover Part II: Social interactions.