Digital Explorers

Digital explorers are the Marco Polo’s of a new age.

In 1287 a man named Marco Polo changed the face of the western world making one of the first significant connections to the eastern world. His established connection was more than an anthropological one. The connection eventually opened up a trade route named the Silk Road. Its connection yielded a huge benefit to the western world.

What happened to people like Marco Polo?

Do people like Marco Polo still live today? Or are the days of exploration of new parts of the world over? Is there still room for exploration of new and lucrative venues of business? Are there still people like Marco Polo connecting parts of the world in a new way?

The Silk Road.

The Silk Road was a series of ancient trade routes stretching across Central Asia to Europe, its name still evokes imagery of caravans drawn by camels packed full of Chinese silk, ivory, jade and gold. These caravans traversed across snow topped mountains through deserts and every imaginable geographic and cultural obstacle. The great explorers that piloted these caravans spent years making journeys, but only a few completed the task and the ones who did reaped tremendous profits. Read the rest of this entry »

Limit rather than confuse.

This is an issue that we have experienced more than we actually would admit. When building a new website it is easy for someone to feel that they must offer their users every imaginable feature. The results are typically a complicated navigation process, confusing content, and a general lack of direction for future site features.

So what then is the key to ensuring this doesn’t happen to your site?
Limit rather than confuse.

Ok, ok, so what do I mean? Quite simply, if a feature seems unnecessary or would benefit less than a fifth of our users, abstain. Don’t build it. Building a feature that is only useful to a small percentage of your users doesn’t make sense, especially from a return on investment perspective.

Remember MySpace? They let users run wild customizing and adding everything possible to their MySpace page. The result? Users were able to customize images, CSS, and it eventually lead to their pages being so complicated and confusing that usability went out the window. Each MySpace profile page had its own navigation scheme, or lack thereof, color scheme, and varying content. Users had too much choice, too many features.

The trend of limiting features is happening in Social Media sites, just look at MySpace versus Facebook, and Facebook versus Twitter. Users want great features but not at the expense of being confused. Build a few features and build them great.

What’s the context?

How many of you have fans on Facebook and Twitter and really have no idea who they actually are? The Social Media realm of the internet is one of the most interesting digital places in the world. In some ways I view social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as new countries where all nationalities have been merged together. This is primarily where a problem presents itself. The elements of culture in each of these nationalities collected into once space make it difficult for marketers to connect with its audience.

To not have a proper understanding of the cultural framework of your audience could be disastrous.

Not having an understanding of cultural context limits your capability to communicate. Effective communication in itself requires that both parties have a frame of reference or a context from which words are being expressed. For example: Let’s say you are from the United States promoting a fresh line of designer jeans to a new market in Britain. You decide one way to break into that specific demographic would be by using a Facebook fan page. A few months pass and you notice that a British girl is wearing your new pants and posts a picture of her on your fan page. So you thank your British friend for wearing your “pants”. But in England “pants” are what we would call “underwear”. The frame of reference for the understanding of the word pants from a British perspective is entirely different from the American perspective. Read the rest of this entry »