I just had a powerful experience with Twitter that has cemented it in my mind as a powerful marketing tool.

In preparation for a meeting on a site UI this morning, I revisited An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design on 37signal’s site. It’s a fantastic overview of Christopher Alexander’s approach to design based on “chunks” or patterns.

After I read the article, I tweeted about it. I was sure that any number of my followers might have an interest in it. If not for their personal use, then for a reference if and when they work with me.

Here’s the tweet:

Doodlehaus tweet about Designing with Patterns by Ryan Singer

Here’s where it gets interesting. Minutes later, Jason Fried, owner of 37Signals tweets about the same article. He noticed someone was revisiting some older content produced by his company and saw it as an opportunity to promote 37Signals’ expertise on the issue.Check it out:

Jason Fried of 37Signals tweets about Pattern Design

From a random shout into the Twitter void to nearly instant recognition from the owner of one of the Web’s most innovative companies. Now that’s cool.

There are other halo effects from this exchange. Ryan Singer gets props for his article. 37Signals gets more exposure as a leader in clean, usable interface design. Christopher Alexander sells some more books. Hey, I write this post that references all these things.

All because of one little tweet.

Social Networking Sites
Facebook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
Originally designed for college students; facilitates interaction between friends and colleagues who can leave messages, post articles, photos, add applications; virtual equivalent of “hanging out”

MySpace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
Social networking site targeted towards a broader audience; more garish, wild and wooly.

Linked In
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_in
Professional networking tool; individual fill out a profile and invite colleagues to join; connections are suggested in a “7 degrees of Kevin Bacon” fashion.

Twitter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
Prefaced on a simple question, “what are you doing?”, Twitter helps its users broadcast their status over the internet to IM clients and SMS-enabled phones. Twitter feeds are published as RSS feeds.

Social Media Sites

YouTube
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
YouTube allows users to upload video where visitors can view and comment. YouTube videos are also distributed via RSS feeds and can be published on remote sites and blogs.

Flickr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr
Photo-sharing site where users can upload and tag their photos. Visitors can view and comment. Photostreams can be delivered via RSS.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free-for-all encyclopedia that is the scourge of educators everywhere. Editable by anyone, Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors to keep the mob in check. Often a great quick resource, a best practice is to verify Wikipedia information with more reliable sources.

iTunes Podcast Directory
A podcast is little more than an RSS feed with links to mp3 or mp4 files. iTunes and other RSS aggregators alert users to new episodes of their favorite amateur (or not-so-amateur) radio or TV show.

Technorati
A search engine for blogs

Slashdot/Digg
Users submit news articles and engage in discussions about said article. Both sites are known to cripple smaller sites by directing unexpectedly large numbers of visitors to a single page.

Social Bookmarking Sites
Del.icio.us / Ma.gnol.ia / Stumble Upon, etc
Ever say “I found an article online but I bookmarked it on my computer at home”? If so, then social bookmarking might just be for you. Sign up for an account and you can save your browser bookmarks online and access them from anywhere. Delicious allows users to tag their bookmarks, creating a “folksonony” where users give their opinion of what an article is about.

Concepts and definitions

Cluetrain Manifesto
“if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get… ‘We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings – and our reach exceeds your grasp.’” Written and signed in 1999 this document is one of the seminal statements of the Web 2.0 movement.

Blogs
Short for “weblog”, blogs are the digital equivalent of the printing press. Anyone can sign up at TypePad or Blogger and start publishing their opinions online. No real understanding of HTML, FTP, Apache or any other web technology is needed other than an internet connection and a browser.

Wikis
As described earlier, a wiki is a document that can be edited by anyone. Every iteration is logged and saved allowing for rollback to previous versions in the instance of vandalism.

RSS
“Real Simple Syndication” is a standard XML format that allows for standardized distribution of information. It is the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement.

Tagging / Folksonomy
Tagging is a more organic system of categorizing content. Blog postings, YouTube videos, Flickr photos are all “tagged” with short, descriptive words to facilitate sifting and winnowing through content more organically.

Web 2.0
The post-bubble internet trends towards social media via RSS as well as the prevalence of APIs to allow the sharing of data and content between web sites and applications.

Not so fast.

The New York Times article How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free describes how difficult it is to close your Facebook account completely. It seems that even when you leave, Facebook retains your profile in the event you decide to opt back in. This makes it really hard to become fully removed from the Facebook databases.

From a user support angle, I can actually see the logic in this practice. No matter how many “are you sure you want to delete this?” dialog boxes, someone invariably will complain that “I didn’t think you would delete it completely.”

From a higher ed marketing perspective, however, this inability to completely hide data you have entered raises some serious privacy issues. If an institution decides to use Facebook or some other social networking tool as a means to connect students, faculty and staff only to find in the end that they cannot completely wipe the data even after explicitly requesting that very thing, it opens that institution to everything from bad publicity to legal action.

Hopefully Facebook will address these concerns and adjust its account deletion polices and procedures. Sure the tech support staff will be faced with the unavoidable “I didn’t know that deleting my profile would delete my profile” complaints, but maybe they’d be better off without those customers anyway.

Some quick numbers from the article:

• only 15.8 percent of iPod users ever played any video content on their iPod or iTunes
• only 1 percent of the content items played on an iPod or iTunes was video content

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t talk much about the demographics of the 400 iPod users they sampled. It would be interesting to run a similar study of college student iPod use where lecture videos were available via iTunes.

While there are plenty of those sorts of blogs, there are plenty of reasons to blog in the corporate world. Heck, you’re reading one right now! In Why business blogs are important, you can read all about the reasons to blog.

Some of the reasons include knowledge transfer among employees (best practices and the like), to develop stronger customer relationships (with, oh I don’t know, alumni and prospective students), and to attract the best employees (hey, these folks are experts, I want to work for them!).

It’s a good read. Another good read is The Artful Manager, a blog by the Bolz Center’s own Andrew Taylor. If you were wondering, “what kind of blog should I have?” then you should read Andrew’s blog and see a master at work.

1. Invasive advertising: luckily, we don’t need to worry about this. However, making anything on your site invasive is a bad idea.
2. Re-inventing the wheel: people do not want to have to learn how to use a site before they can browse it. Fancy experimental navigation is for your own personal playground site, not for a corporate site.
3. ‘Leap of faith’ links: that means disclosing information on content and file size. There’s nothing I personally hate more than clicking a link that launches a pdf when I was expecting a web page. The Acrobat plugin takes forever. Always tell people if they’re not going to get a web page
4. Attention-deficit Web sites: “Users have a special hatred of flashing icons and banners, because they draw the eye away from what is important and hinder their progress,” Cunnington said. Blinking, flashing, buzzing and scrolling text is annoying.
5. War and Peace length: “A common mistake in Web design is to just [convert] a brochure to the Web. But the Web is its own medium, and communication has to change to reach users. Users are known to read 25 percent slower on the screen than on paper, read fewer words and don’t like long pages which require scrolling down,” she said. ‘Nuff said

So there you have it. The top 5 of “Web No-Nos,” print them out and glue them next to your monitor or tatoo them on your forearm if you’re really hard-core.

The Web is becoming more participatory and users seem to be very willing to contribute. From the article:

“[The Web is] shifting now to user-generated content; it shows people engaging with the Internet in a number of different ways in their lives,” said John Horrigan

Even more salient for the higher ed market:

“Online content comes more often from younger people”

So there you have it folks, younger people (probably college-aged) are ready, willing and expecting to interact with your Web site. This goes beyond clicks and navigation. They want to ask a question and get an answer. They want to say “great job” or “fix this.”

Take a look at your Web site, is it easy for your customers to interact with your site? Is it easy to scan for information? Can visitors easily contact you? Do you reply? Do you have a blog? Do you monitor your blog? The Web is the single largest piece of your communications mix and often the first touchstone for your brand, make sure you leave a good impression.

Netflix has 4 simple categories front and center, “Welcome”, “How it works”, “Browse Selection” and “Start Your Free Trial,” along with a large, graphically rich teaser to get you to start your trial. Note also that the family in the large photo is looking right at the “Start Now” button. Look at that happy family, who wouldn’t start a free trial? Only a bad person who hates children, that’s who.

Contrast that with the Blockbuster site which is borderline plagarism but still manages to fail on several counts. First, they put their logo in a weird graphical button that makes it look a bit like a banner ad. Aside from the logo, there are about 5 visual elements competing for your attention: the tagline, the photo and the free trial text. These are further diluted by the bulleted text underneath the logo. Let’s take a look at these elements in turn. First, the tagline.

Why, why do you need a tagline on a Web site? If you logo doesn’t look like an advertisement it should be obvious where you are, Blockbuster. Why do you need to tell people they’re online as in, “Welcome to Blockbuster Online?” People know they’re online. This isn’t a resturant, you don’t need to welcome them, but you do need to make them FEEL welcome. Next, the photo.

Unlike the Netflix site, this couple (sans children) are peering off the page and at your scrollbar. They aren’t even interested in what’s going on on the page. If you can’t get your models to pay attention to your Web site, you’ve got trouble. Next, the free trial section.

Aside from being subverted by the unnecessary tagline, the free trial button is about the same visual weight as the bullets and the tagline. A visitor to the site doesn’t know what to look at first. This looks to me like it should be the most important element on the entire page. “Get started! Give us your money! It’s easy. Hey! Over heeeeeeeerrre!” Not the case.

So what’s the lesson here? “Mark is overly-critical?” Perhaps, but secondary. The take-away is simplicity. Ask yourself, “what do I really need my site visitors to do?” then make it impossible for them to NOT do it. It is a process that requires discipline, sacrifice and focus on customer behavior. Good design is simplicity. Simple, not easy. When you are done, you may get reactions like “I could’ve done that” or “that’s it?” Ignore these people until you ask them to perform critical tasks on your site. Then listen to them say “that was easy” or just plain “wow.”