Social Bookmarking and Making It Easier For Customers To Do Business With Us

Early in my career I had the pleasure to work with W. Byron Dunn at Lone Star Steel.  Byron, now President and CEO of Lone Star is without a doubt the most customer-focused executive I've ever met.  His mantra has always been "What can we do to make it easier for the customer to do business with us?"  During the recent reformatting on my blog I quickly grew to wish someone like Bryon was running the Internet technology companies whose products I was using.

As you have hopefully noticed I recently changed the format of my blog and have included a button in the footer for some of the various "social bookmarking" websites where people can bookmark and submit their favorite blog and website articles.  I first noticed social bookmarking links on a number of other blogs and I thought it was a nice way to introduce readers to these sites and provide the reader a choice in which one they used.  Pre-filling the bookmark forms with blog story data made this a very convenient way to save favorite articles.  Because of this I decided to add this feature to my site during the reformat.  The intent of the reformat and adding of the bookmarking links was to improve the reader's experience with my blog (i.e. make it easier) which would hopefully, in turn, help increase my readership.

It was during the process of adding these bookmarking icons/links that I was struck by a thought.  Why aren't there "Byron Dunn's" running Internet technology companies?  It was amazing how unnecessarily complicated it was to accomplish this seemingly simple task.  After all, we are only talking about a couple of lines of HTML coding.

Some of the issues I ran into:

1. Many of the sites didn't provide icons or even logos that could be made into icons.  I got most of them from other blogs.
2. Many of the sites didn't provide the few lines of code needed to accomplish this.  I had to search out blogs that are using this and pattern the coding after what they had done.
3. The sites that did provide coding didn't provide very detailed instructions and I had to perfect the coding by reviewing what other sites had done.
4. One site (Newsvine) required that I verify my email address by clicking on a link that was to be mailed to me.  I received the email but instead of a link the email was blank.  The email contained nothing of any kind.  Nada, zip, zilch.  Since I can't use the site until my email has been verified I emailed tech support.  After 48 hours Tech Support apparently fixed the problem since I was able to regenerate an email that actually contained a verification link.  But I should note they never contacted me about it.  If I hadn't tried it on my own I'd still be waiting on them.  If I were providing individual icons needless to say you wouldn't find their icon below.
5. At another site (Blinklist) I was no longer able to login.  Although I was positive I typed my id and password correctly (multiple times) I entered the information to have them send me my password and their site displayed a message that they had emailed it to me.  I know my id and email are correct since if I try to re-register it says they are already in use.    After a week of trying the password reset finally came why I tried it again.  However the site would not open as there "was a problem with the website's certificate".  I've given up on them.  Fortunately I really don't need Blinklist as there are better alternatives.

Of the 9 sites involved only one (Digg) did a reasonably good job of providing the necessary information.  It is amazing how seemingly a whole industry segment has missed the point of making it easy for customers to do business with them.

But Mike, you're not using their product the way they thought you would.

You got that right.  Customers are strange that way, they usually have their own ideas of what they want to do and don't care what the designers thought was the way to do things.  Most of these sites did offer a button I could add to my browser to bookmark but a button on my browser doesn't do anything for you.

I should also point out my providing these links benefit the bookmarking companies.  By providing these links I introduce people to their product and give them the opportunity gain more users.  That is how I discovered each of them.

But Mike, these are free services.  You can't get good service that way.  You get what you pay for.

"Free" has nothing to do with it.  "Free" is their business model.  It's they way they get people to their site to hopefully click on the ads and generate revenue for them.  Again, anything that drives more user to their site is in their best interest so why shouldn't they support it.

What I'm doing is not new or especially difficult.  There are numerous blogs that have one or more of these links to bookmarking sites.  And yet the bookmarking sites stubbornly cling to idea of only doing it their way.  A browser button is fine (I actually use the one from del.icio.us) but why not support other uses of their technology?

Fortunately, after a few hours of perfecting links for 7 sites I discovered a number of third-party alternatives that accomplish what I wanted to do and it only took a few lines of code and a few minutes to make it operational.  [I've added a technical addendum at the end of the post for those that might be interested in these.]  Now it could be argued that letting a third-party take care of this for them lets them concentrate on their business but I should point out these third-party site highlight all of the bookmarking sites equally and thereby increase the competitive choices.  One option lists 36 bookmarking options - why drive your customers to an arena where they have the opportunity to view competitive options they wouldn't have otherwise seen?

There a few lessons that we in the IT business can draw from this:

• Get involved with your customers.  Go out and see how they use your technology.  They will come up with more new and different ways to use technology than you as an outsider ever can.
• Design for flexibility.  As new uses are developed you need to have the flexibility to quickly adapt your technology.
• Be responsive.  If we can not react to customer needs the will "vote with their feet" and go to another source.  Most often it will be that dreaded "shadow IT" organization.
• Byron was right all along.  It really is in our best interest to make it easier for our customers to do business with us. 

Byron, if you ever want to switch to the software business let me know.  I know a couple of companies that could use your leadership.

Well dear readers what do you think about this?

Technical Addendum

For those of you that might be interested in adding these features to your blog I offer the following list.  I see no need to put you through the extra effort I had  to go through.

• I'm using a bookmark button on each post and RSS feed subscribe button (in the left sidebar) from Add This.  The setup was simple and works with any blog provider.  Add This covers 26 bookmarking sites.  The part I like about Add This is that it doesn't clutter up your post with numerous buttons.  Readers simply click on the one button and select which bookmarking site they want to use.  You can also get useful statistics on what content your readers are bookmarking.
• If you use Wordpress, Alex King has a great plug-in that provides a drop-down box that allows readers to select from 14 book marking sites and email the post, i.e. "Tell a friend".
• Cal Evans also provides a plug-in for Wordpress that displays a series of icons (14) below each post to link to the bookmarking sites.
• Lifehacker's posting on Creating multiple social bookmark links allows you to put individual links on your posts.  You can choose from up to 36 bookmarking sites.  Easy selections allow you to select a list or drop-down for either a static page or blog specific and then generate the appropriate coding for you to add to your site.  Tip: If you use Typepad select the Movable Type blog software.  They don't provide icons but you can get some of them from Cal Evan's site above and easily add them if you are comfortable with basic HTML coding.

Comments

[Kent Blumberg]

Mike,

This sort of non-understanding of the customer experience is fairly common today, I think. Have you read "Lean Solutions" by James Womack and Dan Jones? They present a nice way of working on problems like this.

Kent

[Mike]

Sad to say but you are probably right about this situation being fairly common. I guess the only bright spot in this is that it makes those that "get it" stand out that much more. Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll add it to my reading list

Mike

[Matt Stone]

Mike,

How did you do it? I'm trying to figure out the exact problem you had right now for a blog I co-author (http://theglobalbuzz.typepad.com). I would prefer to get the little icons (Facebook, Diggit, Newsvine, etc.) on the blog. Do you know of any way to do this? Or has the situation not changed appreciably?

Thanks
Matt

[Michael Schaffner]

Matt,

I'll be glad to help but please bear with me a few days as I dig myself out from under a pile of work.

[Michael Schaffner]

Matt,

You have to start out with the bookmark html code. You can get this from the bookmark site (sometimes) or go to a blog that uses bookmark you would like to use and copy the code from the source (Click view/source on the menu bar) or get it from a site like in the Lifehacker link above.

Here are the steps using del.icio.us as a sample.

If you don't use advanced templates it gets a little complicated. It is a 2 step process to publish with the bookmark link which can be a problem if you use the "publish on" feature.

1. Publish you post so you can obtain the permalink
2. Redit your post adding the following on the html tab inserting the permalink and title where shown

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post/submit?phase=2&url= 

---INSERT PERMALINK HERE---

&title= 

---INSERT TITLE HERE---

&amp;" TARGET=”_blank”> Post to del.icio.us </a>  

3. Save the post.

If you use Advanced Templates you can modify the footer module and add the code with embedded tags that will automatically add the permalink and title when the post is published.

To do this:
1. Create a new template module, we'll call it mattfooter
2. Add the following code

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>

&title=<$MTEntryTitle$>">del.icio.us</a> 

3. Save the module
4. Edit the entries module and add the following code at the appropriate spot

<$MTInclude module="mattfooter"$>

5. Save the template
6. Repeat step 4 and 5 with the entry-individual and entry-list template modules
7. Publish your blog again

I recommend using Advanced Templates since once you set it up you are done.

I hope this helps.

I'm not a programmer so if anyone has a better method please share.

Mike

[Michael Schaffner]

Matt,

I forgot to mention -- if you go to Addthis.com you can get a bookmark button like I use and you can either add the code in Advanced Templates or if you don't use Advanced Templates it looks like they have a widget for adding it. This could be the simplest way to add bookmarking capability.

Mike