Information Architecting My Online Life

Over the years, I’ve created accounts on many social media, community, and blog-related services.  It is increasingly more difficult to keep content updated across all of these channels and accounts.

Here’s a rundown of the various sites or services that I use:

LinkedIn

• Professional networking
• Relatively static content, non-segmented

Facebook 

• 90% personal, 10% professional-related content
• frequent updates, content segmented/filtered to 3 different audiences- trusted circle, friends/acquaintances, limited view
• content sourced from Friendfeed, Twitter, mobile and web apps

Twitter

• 80% personal, 20% professional-related content
• frequent updates, no audience segmentation/filtering

LiveJournal

• 90% personal, 10% professional-related content
• content updates about 1-2 times a week
• 95% content primarily filtered to “friends list” only

MySpace

• Personal/social networking
• Relatively static content, non-segmented/filtered

Nil8r WordPress Blog, viewable on www.nil8r.net

• Personal-life blog
• Primary subject matter around tech/geek, gaming, anime, scooters, cats, hobbies and daily life
• infrequent updates 1-2 times a month, no audience filtering

OperationEmail WordPress Blog, viewable on www.nil8r.net

• Professional-life blog
• Primary subject matter around database/email marketing, marketing operations, and Expedia/tech worker  life
• infrequent updates 1-2 times a month, no audience filtering

FriendFeed

• Primarily using as a content aggregator
• Pulls in content from Facebook, several blogs, Twitter, Netflix, Pandora, Last.FM, Digg, Google Reader LinkedIn

Posterous

• Primarily using as a content publishing mechanism
• Account pushes content to Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs

What I really want might be the web-equivalant of the Holy Grail.

1. A seemless, single-entry point widget/service/site to generate content and publish to; must allow selective publishing
2. A single point of content aggregation, cross-platform

For #1, Posterous is getting me closer. Myspace isn’t supported, but that’s not a site I pay attention to much anymore. The autoposting enhancements to Facebook and WordPress makes this super-convenient, as a single email with some metatagging controls where I publish. No web-logins required.

For #2, Friendfeed is good for aggregating self-generated content, but it seems to be lacking in generating my “friends list” content, if they don’t already have a FriendFeed account.

I’d love to be able to have one place to read all of my Twitter follower posts, Facebook newsfeed/status updates, Livejournal friends posts, and blogs/RSS feeds (via Google Reader). The closest platform I’ve found towards fulfilling this wish is my iPhone. Unfortunately, it means leveraging 3-4 different apps and viewing the LJ mobile website via Safari.

I’m noticing (especially with Facebook and Twitter) that I sometimes make duplicate posts. This isn’t the user-experience I want to thrust upon friends and the internet-at-large. It would appear that I need to map out the information flow and interactivity between all of these services and update Friendfeed/Facebook/Twitter/Posterous settings accordingly.

Five years ago, I would have never expected to have to “debug” my communication information flow.  Nor did I expect to come full circle to leveraging email as a content distribution mechanism.

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Who are you?

Nil8r?

Part techie, part marketing, pure gamer, Seattleite, and scooter enthusiast. 

You may not have guessed it, but some of my hobbies include gaming. My current favorites right now are D&D 3rd edition, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft for the PC, Animal Crossing, Osu Tatakae Ouendan, and Age of Empires for the DS Lite, Final Fantasy Tactics on my Game Boy, card games, board games and more. In a secret past life, I was the beta coordinator for Xbox Live. After launch, I moved over to Xbox.com and managed the Xbox Live channel content. The experience was as cool as you would image, but it was also a lot of hard work!

Other things I enjoy are gadgets, gizmo’s, knitting, dancing, anime, music, single malt scotch, and my favorite color is blue. I’m not married, but my boyfriend and I are very committed to each other. He’s a computer technician/support analyst, and shares my wacky outlook on life. We have a Russian blue cat named Zelda and someday we hope to add an English bulldog to the family.

Posted by email from nil8r’s posterous

[Day 2] Email Insiders Summit – Measurement & ROI

Measurement is… “a framework, a use of tools, a practice and an organizational movement,” according to David Baker, Avenue A|Razorfish.

ROI is… “The result of measurement, your interpretation of financial value, and your lever for change.”

The Roundtable is comprised of Naeem Kayani from Dell and Michael Atwell of The Hartford (Insurance industry).

How would your CEO or Sr. Leadership team describe the performance of the email channel today?

Dell: Easier to get budget compared to other as it’s so trackable; email team doubled in the past year, and while it’s “extremely important,” no one in the organization understands the complexity 

Hartford: Reletively new channel for them (6-7yrs compared to 20+ in the direct mail channel) and while they recognize the value, they’re not necessarily using email as a retention or communication channel.

KPI’s that matter?

Hartford Group – Loss Performance, Media Spend, Sustainable Volume, Response Rate, Cost Per Policy, Policy Issue Rate, Cost Per Response

Dell – Engagement and basic reporting to learn what worked and didn’t, and they are paying attention to lifestage a well as behavioral

Capitol One – Value of an email address

 How is ROI defined by your organization?

eDialog – Frequency and engagement, they will consult with their clients to deal with the “drop-off point” that can happen when frequency is increased

Hartford – Looks at it from a five year perspective and potential long-term profitability

WedMD – Revenue by email sent

What tools do you use to help?

 Dell – A very transaction based company, uses internal tools, site (VisualScience) analytics

Hartford – Excel based forecast, planning, performance models and SAS analytics

 

Relevancy Score formula for email

Ron B. posted the following formula in Tamara’s http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/ blog, in the Email Insiders Summit live feed:

Revelance Score =(Unique_Opens/Total_Valid_Recipients)+((Unique_Clicks*3)/Unique_Opens)-(Unsubscribes/Unique_Opens)-((Spam_Complaints*10)/Total_Valid_Recipients)

It’s primarily an open/render based metric, and originally posted on: http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/04/we-need-a-way-o.html

[Day 2] Email Insiders Summit – Mobile Email De-mystified

Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget and Deirdre Baird, Pivitol Veracity discuss how the mobile growth, challenges and how to optimize mobile email. Notworthy was that 2007 was the first year that smartphone sales overtook laptop and pcs for the first time. Some interesting metrics from Morgan:

Symbian OS (Nokia devices use) is only 1% of market share in US, but roughly 65% worldwide. RIM (Blackberry) comprises 41% in the US, but 11% WW. Apple iphone is 28% US marketshare and 7%WW.

Email – the next killer app of mobile? It’s entirely possible that email could overtake sms/text in the next few years, particularily in the US where each sent/received text message costs money and email is free. Today however, the email in mobile is not a full feature experience and roughly 50% of users find mobile email functionality inferior to computer clients.

Multi vs Single Platform Users – 52% access the same account through mobile and computer; 48% maintain a unique mobile email address (note this survey was taken at the cusp of the iPhone launch).

Deirdre takes over to discuss how we can optimize for mobile email readers. She gives an example of one email viewed in four different devices:

• Symbian, the global leader, shows on the text of an HTML part, and only full URLs are clickable
• Blackberry, the US leader, strips the html of an email and only keeps the text part and will link to image URLs
• Win Mobile 6 has html support, images off by default
• Apple iPhone, html support and images

Three reasons to optimize?

• Customer,  ”not you,” controls which email client to read from
• over 50% receive the same email and both platforms
• email client they use directly drives their experience. These experiences are as varied as there are clients

Other thoughts? Images off is the new norm. The “wiew this email on your mobile device” is not a good solution since mobile browsers have rendering issues across platforms.

Marketer’s use of top real estate: 48% have “add at address book” at top, 60% have “click to view” at top to combat rendering image issue despite the image enable like nearby in the browser/client. Also 2/3rds of recipients with preview panes, rely on them! (Jupiter Research)

Mobile optimization tips– 640 pixel width maximum recommended, and keep the “weight” at 20KB or less (that’s after images are downloaded). Don’t bother with images spacers, blackberry will just mess it up. Use full URLs or it won’t be clickable.

[Day 2] Email Insiders Summit – Email From the Outside In

David Baker, VP Email Solutions for Avenue A|Razorfish, opens up with a couple of comments and takes a poll of the audience, wherein roughly one-third are first time attendees. There is a 3:1 ratio of email marketers to service providers or vendors.

—

The first keynote speaker is David Barlin, Sr. Product Mgr at Microsoft (Windows Live) who has a background in email since 1997. Once of the topics he plans to address is the proliferation of marketing silos. As an example, the lack of integration between the email and search channel.

A study by Microsoft showed how search conversion goes up 22% when consumer is also shown a display ad prior to the search activity. An Altel case study revealed a 56% increase versus search alone.

David, segways into discussing display advertising in email and shares the following key thought “Be top of mind where people plan their life.” He follows up later with some additional points:

• Understand your customer
• Hit the right Moment
• Spark the conversation
• Use brand to maximize ROI

Basically, Microsoft says it’s a good idea to combine search and display ads (ala AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.) with your relevant emails to drive brand awareness and increased conversion.

Hotmail conducted a study with 15,000 participants around the world to better understand the top topics discussed in email. Not suprisingly travel, consumer electronic/gadget purchases, and social activities were at the top. Hotmail has made the study public domain, I’ll post as soon as I can get my hands on it.

[Day 1] Email Insiders Summit – Social Media

“This social stuff is even harder to measure than email”

Jupiter Research presented by David Daniels indicates thats email will be a 2.1 billion industry in 2012. he also points out that the amount of email reaching a person’s primary address hasn’t gone up that much in the last couple of years and there’s more adoption of using the cell phone to check email. For the often desired 18-24 year old demographic, email is still an effective driver for purchase, but we need to understand that email as an application is less compelling to them.

I think there’s another round of new widgets and sites ahead, but there’s got to be a consolidation of these mediums. That or social aggregators will become the new “hotness.”

Marketing still has a little time to figure out why and how they should care about social networking and media, but if the panelists and research are tracking to the overall behavior of the college students today, then we need to figure out how to reach them in their mediums if they won’t come to email.

[Day 1] Email Insiders Summit – Privacy Panel

One of the challenges many marketers face is that they have different brands and accounts and what are the legal requirements around sending separate emails or consolidation.

Scenario: unsolicited marketing messages send to social networking profile, any legal rules?

Today, there are not CAN-SPAM or similar compliance laws, although the new judgement applying CAN-SPAM to the recent Myspace case may build the way.

[Day 1] Email Insiders Summit – Next Generation, Does Email Have a Future?

Micherlle Prieb, Project Manager and Researcher at Ball St. University Center for Media Design moderated the panel of 3 University students on the panel.

Each student with introduced and asked to describe what media couldn’t they live without. Examples from the panelists include the smartphone – checking email, spend upwards of 2000 minutes a month in cell phone use, and mobile sites. General internet and computer use is an average of 7-8 hrs. a day. Most are early adopters of mobile. 

The college students were all in agreement that they consider the use of email to prmarily be where they conduct “important,/corporate world interactions (ie. college, job recruiters). However, social networks, and specifically Facebook, is the primary point of communication socially and with friends. One panelist describes his morning wake-up ritual as check email and facebook. All are reluctant to integrate business and social contacts into Facebook. As one panelist says: you can’t “poke your professor,” referring to a Facebook nudging feature. Amanda’s position is that social networks are solely about communicating with friends today. Brandon is more hesitant to open email than he is to a participate on a social network (it’s more fun) and perception that email is full of advertising, solicitation, and junk. Email is secondary in their world.  Here were a couple of questions posed:

How do you see your behavior change as you enter workforce?

August says that email will not be as preferred in the workplace, as today’s college students get entrenched as the next business leaders, but he’s not sure which network- likely something not yet conceived; Amanda & Brandon don’t think the shift will happen as quickly and email is still a professional platform for communicating to your boss or coworkers and the social network method of communication as not something they’ll integrate into their professional lives. 

How do you feel about branding/marketing messages being delivered to email?

The key message from the students? The more targeted, less intruisive it is, the better. All were more tolerant of opted-in email, but their responsiveness and acceptance will change day-to-day. The students all have a perception that if they are unsure of the email, then they will delete it as it may have a virus. Also, the myth persists amongst the college kids that the unsub functionality is a confirmation to spammers to send more.

The panelists prefer a more targeted, blog/content related email and less focus on coupon or deals. For instance one panelist won’t delete email from Apple, it’s “slick,” interesting, and not to freuqnently delivered. Amanda loves newsletters – Mediapost, blogs and anything with an immediately relevant content or subject. No panelist could define a specific metric of “too much frequency” but all wanted to know upfront what to expect when they do opt-in.