An increasing number of the websites that we test, particularly redesigned websites, contain some level of social media integration. Social media integration can be very powerful and if implemented in the right way, on the right website can provide an excellent means for a business to communicate with their customers.

Examples of social media bookmark buttons

One aspect of social media integration on websites that interests me is the almost ubiquitous inclusion of social media bookmarking buttons. The most common of these is the Facebook ‘like’ button; however, many websites provide access to a very broad range of similar functions for other social media websites.

In our experience, users tend not to attend to these links during general use of websites. It must be conceded that users may not be in the mindset to spontaneously share information about their usage of social media in the context of a usability session that is not explicitly testing this functionality. Based on our observations so far, it is somewhat  unclear whether the  lack of spontaneous use is due to a lack of prominence, a lack of interest or the test environment, however, when we explicitly test social media bookmarking, we see that a proportion of participants like and use it.

Social media bookmarking has the potential to be a powerful tool in reaching your audience through recommendations, however, when deciding whether to include this functionality it is important to ask the following questions:

1. Does the website audience use social media?
2. Does the audience use social media simply as a means to communicate with friends or also as a means to broadcast information about themselves?
3. Is my content something that users would want to share using social media?
4. How can I use the connections that are made to my audience using social media once they are established?

While at the v21 conference earlier this year, I was reminded of how the NBN roll-out will enable downloads of 1GB per second over the internet, almost ten times faster than it is today.  What does this mean for the everyday user?  It means you will be able to browse your favourite website, whilst downloading a movie or your favourite album and uploading your holiday pictures to Facebook without any delay.  Exciting?

However, in the words of Spiderman and Barack Obama said, ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’.

With an increase in power usage across our broadband network it means we need to use more energy to operate it.  This in turn leads to much greater carbon omissions which need to be offset.  Has this been taken into account?

Just because we will have the capability to reach this kind of power, does it mean we should? Your thoughts?

It will come as no surprise to  you that a recent article from the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8562801.stm) noted Facebook is the 5th most visited website in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, US and Australia. Twitter comes in at 24th, closely followed by Skype at 25th.

Organisations have been quick to explore ways the can increase the reach and speed by which they communicate with their target audience through the use of social networks.

In focus groups and one-on-one interviews, more often than not we observe users rejecting attempts from organisations to infiltrate social networks. In order to sign up to a Facebook group, encourage their friends to do so, follow someone on Twitter or read a blog, users need to feel some level of affinity or relevance. While users may have a pre-existing off-line relationship with an organisation, it does not necessarily follow suit that they will want to see this relationship extended to their social network. For example, if I am an avid bicycle rider I may want to link with a local bicycle riders association and a particular brand of bike that I really identify with, and let others know about this. However, I am less likely to identify with my insurance company, an organisation I only have a relationship with out of necessity.

In our experience, those organisations which put serious thought into how they might make themselves relevant to their target audience in the context of a social network, reap the benefits.