Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

A study carried out jointly by BITKOM and Oracle found that ‘More than 50 percent of German companies use the means of communication provided by web 2.0.’

So why are UK companies taking so long to catch on? Below are a few issues which I think are to blame.

Afraid of the unknown

For many, the online world is something they are still getting to grips with and at first it can be a daunting task to keep up to speed with the continually changing online landscape. But we all know not to knock it until you’ve tried it, and those who aren’t are getting seriously left behind.

Not buying into the idea of ‘web 2.0’

Frequently I hear ‘but we have a website, we don’t need anything else’. These little figures from Microsoft digital advertising solutions, speak for themselves:

• 73% of UK social networkers have visited the personal space of a brand
• 16% have had a dialogue or sent a message to a brand
• 68% will visit a website related to what they have seen or read on a friend’s site

It’s not enough to simply have a website - consumer’s use a range of different networks and sites to find out about your business and brand.

According to research by Hitwise (Hopkins, 2006) , social networking site MySpace is responsible for more Traffic flow into the HMV.co.uk music portal than both the Yahoo and MSN UK search engines.

Confusion on how to measure the results

There’s no jiggery pokery involved, and compared to some forms of activity this is one of the more tractable and measurable activities. On the simplest level of measurement; conducting searches to determine the number of times a brand was mentioned on forums and blogs is a good self analysis tool. However there are some pretty smart ways and means of tracking conversations about your brand which range from monitoring online share of voice within a particular sector, analyses of content and tracking micro blogs to name a few.

Not sure where to start?

A good starting point is a company blog, something that we here at PRWD could help you set up. It gives your customers and possible consumers the opportunity to see a more personal side to the company and allows them to participate and comment – and as marketeers and usability professionals know the key to building brand loyalty is getting the consumer highly involved with the brand.