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7 days ago
Talk I'm Doing at SLA Seattle in June
18 days agoShopping 2.0 - A New-Old Model for Optimizing Library Web Portals
By Dan Klyn*
Information Architect, Flannel
Lecturer, Univ. of Mich. School of Information
Probably you’ve heard a colleague or a patron remark that the library should be more like Amazon.com. Or that a new public library branch is really great because they have a coffee shop and colorful end-cap displays of new and featured titles just like they do at Barnes & Noble. The extension of ideas and tactics from retail worlds into the setting of the library is nothing new. And in some ways the work of applying retail and merchandising concepts to the library has been made easier by the fact that the biggest retailer on the planet started out as a bookseller. The metaphors and models line up so nicely when we’re talking primarily about books and CDs and DVDs. Just add to cart...
From my perspective as an e-commerce information architect with a background in librarianship, I’m concerned that these tidy comparisons between bookselling and booklending have had the unintended consequence of narrowing and prefiguring our perspectives on what we might or could or should do to optimize library web portals. Instead of asking “what does Amazon.com do” when we plan our online strategy, what if we asked “what does Etsy.com do?”
In this session we’ll examine website navigation and product findability concepts from some of the most innovative and effective online retailers. Attendees will see how special libraries can look beyond the 800lb gorilla that is Amazon.com and find inspiration, ideas, features and functionality from online retailers whose tactics and techniques aren’t confined to or built primarily around books and music and films.
*Dan Klyn is an ALA-certified librarian who’s never worked in a libraryChecking In With My Executive Profile 1.5yrs Later
26 days agoA friend of mine was reading an article someplace, and when he looked at the author's site for some context, he noted that this person is displaying a link back to my blog. Small world! The post this person linked to was written what feels like forever ago. Nevertheless, as I read what I wrote then ... I think I might be the exact same person today that I was a couple of Augusts ago. So much for progress!
postscript: I forgot to remember that I have not touched tobacco since the beginning of this just-past Lent. So that's kinda like progress.
Meijer Twitter Marketing FTL
27 days agoYesterday I reported a surprisingly OK moment of being marketed to in Twitterland, and Laura Fisher talked about how we should maybe not overreact to what's emerging with marketers in Twitter (agree!) but at the same time ... man, this could get really sucky:
"At some point it will become tiresome, and then I’ll turn off notifications and I’ll miss following back some cool, innocent and interesting people. Which will be a shame, and will definitely diminish the delightfulness of Twitter."Today, I got a notification from Twitter saying that Meijer is following me on Twitter:
Based on what I was talking about yesterday in terms of Relevance and Value, I went ahead and clicked thru from the email:
See the offer there for $100 off a "funky" outdoor storage box thinger? I opened a different browser and went to the homepage of Meijer.com:
See how that same product is being offered to any old whoever might visit Meijer.com for the same discount? This is exactly the opposite of how you do marketing in a space like Twitter. I'm so not gonna follow you back if there's nothing relevant or valuable to me for having done so.
I Just Got Tweeted By A Marketer...
28 days agoI'm not sure how I feel about what happened to me just now. For some time now I've had this policy of following anybody who follows me on Twitter. Oftentimes I'll un-follow in short order, but my "default setting" for stuff like this is to embrace serendipity and give it a chance.
I think today is the day to change that policy. Moments ago, I clicked thru from the Twitter email that notifies you when somebody has signed up to follow you... and in the 2 seconds inbetween the time that the page finished loading and the time that I can move my mouse pointer to the "follow" button, I took pause. Noting that this user's Twitter handle was " fatresistance", I scanned the rest of the info on the profile page and it becomes clear that this user is selling a diet book. For the first time .. at least that I've noticed ... this thing that I enjoyed using to communicate with my friends and some random strangers is tainted by marketing, and what's weird and a little unsettling to me is that I'm mostly ok with it, and the reason why is relevance and value.
Looking at the tweetstream from this user named "fatresistance" ... what appears to be happening here is that the people who're hawking this book are trading valuable bits of their content in exchange for valuable bits of my attention. Check out this smattering of tweets - there's stuff in here that I find to be worth noticing:
Tea is loaded with powerful antioxidants that help to promote weight loss, and support overall health.
09:17 PM April 12, 2008
The powerful benefits of blueberries come from the dark blue color of the berries, which is high in flavonoids. Put a handful on your b ...
05:17 AM April 12, 2008
Arugula contains as much calcium as milk and the calcium in arugula is readily absorbed. It’s also a great source of bioflavonoids.
01:05 AM April 10, 2008
Apples contain vitamin C, fiber, and quercitin, which supports the body's detoxification.
05:40 PM April 09, 2008
This is stuff I'm glad to become aware of, and which might make a positive impact on what I order for lunch if I'm checking Twitter on my handheld before the waitperson arrives. Heck, the tweets are so compact and grockable ... I might even remember some of this stuff when I'm offline.
Unanswered question: did fatresistance start following me because they think I'm fat? And more ponderous than that: what's going to happen when some marketer who's not giving away value and being relevant starts following me on Twitter and I click thru to their page and find marketing junk? I predict Twitter will either become bigger than email in the next 12 months or it will cease to exist, the determining factor being how the swelling ranks of marketers will behave themselves in the Twittervers.
UPDATE: a person I know in Ann Arbor is blogging about this very issue, and doing it better than me :) Yay Mitten!
Video Merchandising for eCommerce
31 days agoWow. This looks pretty sweet:
Shopflick is a new social experience where you can connect with your favorite sellers and products at their online stores, share their videos with your friends and embed them in your social networks and blogs.Take note that they're describing this as a social experience... where some of us might call it shopping. But with everything we know from Paco Underhill about higher average order values and probabilities-for-purchasing being so strongly correlated with social activities during the shopping experience... this ShopFlick thing is looking smarter and smarter to me the more I poke around inside of the private beta.
You Know When People Say "Unbelievable?"
44 days agoLike me, you might know somebody who uses the word "unbelievable" as if it was interchangeable with the word "wow". I'm cool with that. Except that just now my Google Reader showed me something that I find to be truly unbelievable. This company for me is a Lovemark, and I refuse to give even tiny amounts of search engine visibility to this story about this company and a purported interaction it had with a customer. So instead of copying the text into this blog posting or linking to it, I'm using workarounds. Here's what's supposedly an email reply the customer got from the upper eschalon of the company in question's management:
What do you think? Is this credible? B.J. Fogg says that credibility can be used interchangeably with the word believable. BGR is saying that the email is "certainly a direct response from the ****.com domain, which is only available to employees of the company". How did BGR become so certain that this email is authentically from this company's domain? To me, having only seen this blog posting ... from a blog I enjoy and thought was fairly credible ... I just can't believe this. UNBELIEVABLE!
That's devotion beyond reason is what that is...
Last Night's Lecture Slides
103 days agoSlides are up on the facebooks... Del.icio.us-ing of examples from last night happening now...
iTunes Video Rentals: From Poofware to Nagware?
103 days agoI did my first-ever iTunes video rental a day or two after the announcement at Macworld. My initial reaction to video rentals? The selection was crappy ( I ended up choosing War Games ), but the image quality and user experience was awesome. As promised in Steve Jobs' keynote speech, the rental went "poof" on at the stroke of 24-hours-plus-whenever-it-was-that-i-started-watching this movie. Poofware, as it were. Then a day or two later I read that some users were getting prompted by iTunes at the stroke of 24-hours-plus-whenever-it-was-that-they-started-watching this movie, but then the prompt provided an option to finish viewing right now. Nagware. I like the nagware and 2nd chance approach better, but there's actually no other movies for rent on iTunes that I wanna watch, else I'd test this again. Anybody else out there have the nagware experience instead of the poofware one? Email me if you have...(dan dot klyn at geemail dot com).
Course Materials Now Updated and Available
126 days agoI just now completed updates to the syllabus and workplan for my information architecture course. First day of school (for me at least) is tomorrow, and I'm all amped up about how sweet it's all going to be this year. Can't wait!
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My name is Dan Klyn, and I'm an information architect.
I work with amazing people at a nonprofit company called Flannel in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I also teach IA in the library science programs at the University of Michigan and at Wayne State University.
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