Oh dear. The lawyers are getting involved. So you’ve got this great idea, you want to get closer to your customers, get them talking about you, with you, to you… You are thinking about building out a social networking proposition, leveraging your branding to ensure traction and reason for people to visit. Let customers upload videos and pictures of themselves using your products. Hey! You even decide to let your customers build your taxonomy through tagging. Lots of user generated content all around your product. Your brand.
And then the lawyers get involved.
You discover this is not going to be a uTube or a Wikipedia. It is not going to be the wisdom of the crowd. It’s got to be moderated first. And not any old moderation.
The legal team are insisting that all content be moderated by the Corporation before it goes public. Now that may not sound as bad as all that- some sort of moderation was always going to be inevitable - you want to be able to pull anything that is obviously inappropriate or damaging to the brand. But moderating everything before it goes live? Suddenly the proposition becomes expensive. Who is going to do the moderation? And the customer experience becomes compromised. What sort of social network would it be if it didn’t have immediacy? Any Twitter functionality is clearly going to be out. So before you get too excited about your great web 2.0 idea, think about how those party poopers the lawyers who are going to get rich out of killing you dream.
The web is changing. The words of the Cluetrain Manifesto are being realised - “Markets are Conversations”, driven by this thing called “Web 2.0″ a mish-mash of ideas around digital strategy, experience and technology. For the mainstream the web is moving away from being solely a provider of content with primarily a “push” experience with crude journeys to purchase and fulfilment to being the platform. It is becoming an increasingly interactive experience; web sites are becoming applications, social in their nature.
There are the obvious candidates; Google docs and spreadsheets, these are web applications that challenge their desktop brethren. What they offer in addition is the ability to collaborate on documents - real time. Look at Kayak and the experience it offers for selecting flights. The experience is more like an application, entering and manipulating data in the same place (rather than the old web linear experience: enter data -> hit enter key -> wait -> “Result: Sorry, nothing suitable matches your criteria” -> start again). Social networking sites are also more akin to applications than websites - Facebook even calls its widgets “applications”. Wesabe is a social Microsoft money - it strives to replace an application.
Where does that leave you if you want to harness the new interactive potential and more fulfilling customer experience of ‘web as platform’, ‘your site an application’? In the old world (old world in this space being a couple of years ago), you would probably have engaged a technology firm to build / configure your content management system with a more creative “new media” firm building the on-line brand giving you the look and feel. Any interactive components (such as calculators, quotation engines) would probably be built and owned by IT, with minimal input from the creative agency. Take a look at many large institutional websites and you will see evidence of this. The static content managed brochureware side of the site will be polished; it will have been built by interface developers with experience of building excellent front ends. Yet the parts that were built by technology, by Java developers (for example) who are excellent in back end stuff but not so experienced in the front end stuff will usually be sloppy in their execution. (Sloppy to a pedantic UI guy’s eye - not to the customer!)
So, if the web is a platform and your site is to be an application, who do you turn to? I’d suggest take care. If you are going to engage a new media agency make sure they have the experience and can demonstrate delivery on time and on budget. Indeed, are they really the right people for the job - interestingly, the most successful new propositions on the web (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc) go easy on the creative design (if at all) focussing upon the customer interaction. Alternatively you could choose an organisation whose pedigree in application design and build (ahem, like ThoughtWorks for example) and insert some sort of measure of aesthetic quality as a non-functional requirement. Want an example of this in practice? Take a look at the new ThoughtWorks Studios product Mingle. To the uninitiated it is a website - hey! it is in a browser. But this is nothing short of an application. A rather good one at that. Has your New Media Agency built anything like that?
Have you thought about what your users can call themselves when they register? Particulalry if you are building any social networking where users can identify themselves to one another user nicknames, do you have a restricted list of names that are inappropriate or offensive? Urban Dictionary provides a pretty exhustive list of words to consider…
