FREEDyourMind

Social Media Best Practices for Government

The federal government doesn’t have the same flexibility with implementing social media plans as the private sector. The feds have to deal with archaic public comment laws, bureaucratic approval processes for messaging, and smaller budgets.

However, despite all that red tape, our researchshows that all 15 cabinet-level departments have some presence on the 3 big social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube).

We've been releasing the ACSI E-Government Satisfaction Index since 2003. We're trying to shake things up a bit, and while we still plan to release quarterly updates on citizen satisfaction and citizen ratings of transparency, we're trying to supplement that data with other topics of interest to those who are working in e-government, whether at the federal, state, or local level.

So this quarter, two of our usability auditors (thank you Kamaria Campbell and Kathy Totz) did an exhaustive study of what the 15 cabinet-level departments are doing in terms of social media in order to make suggestions and recommendations to other government departments, agencies, and programs. You can download the full report for free on our website.

In addition to the social media best practices, the report also includes satisfaction scores for 100 federal government agencies and our quarterly Transparency Index, which provides a quantitative measurement of how transparent an agency is perceived by citizens. Rhonda Berg does a great job with the satisfaction and transparency data every quarter.

Here are some highlights of the report:

• All 15 executive departments are participating in the three most popular social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube).
• Almost half of the 15 departments have more than one presence on a single social media platform.
• Organizations that have a number of presences on one or more social platforms should create an aggregate social media page that lists all of the options with which citizens can interact with them via social media.
• Citizen satisfaction, at 75 on the study’s 100-point scale or higher since late 2009 (with only one exception in the second quarter of 2010, when satisfaction fell briefly to 74.7), shows no sign of waning and maintains an aggregate score of 75.5 in the third quarter of 2011. 
• The aggregate Q3 2011 online transparency score is 77.3, which has increased from last quarter and is the highest aggregate transparency score measured so far.

What's missing from our list of best practices for government social media activities? Any thoughts? We'd love to hear them. I'd also like to hear it if you have ideas for other topics we can include in future ACSI E-Gov Satisfaction Index reports.  

CS Session Replay – 2 Months in!

This is a guest post from Drew Bennett, our senior product director at ForeSee results.

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This past May at e-Metrics we released an exciting new product called CS SessionReplay. In the most basic sense, CS SessionReplay makes movies of a customer’s site visit (as long as they respond to your satisfaction survey!) that you can watch and observe. It truly is the ultimate usability study – on demand, perpetual and directly linked to critical data such as satisfaction scores, custom question responses and future behaviors. You can look at those key audiences at any time and truly “sit on their shoulder” and see what they see.

We were thrilled at the time to bring such a compelling solution into the market place, and we all expected great things. However, if I’d tried to guess the full power of the tool in advance, I would have really underestimated it. Customers do interesting and unpredictable things on websites, and being able to get insight into their actual experience on the site is fascinating and serves up great and tangible opportunities for improvement.

On occasion, watching movies of user sessions reinforces what you expected. For example, a visitor gives very low scores to the search function on the website, then when you watch their session, you can see they had trouble with it. That makes sense but provides a great “real life” example to back up the hard data when making the case that search needs to be improved. It can also provide guidance for small site tweaks that you might have otherwise missed. In addition many times you can confirm that the changes you made to improve the users experience actually take hold, look at their scores and watch them use the improvement as you had hoped – confirmation that your focus and spending were on target.

In other cases it is amazing to see where people move between options and how they use your site, not in a usability lab, but in practice. Couple this with open ended comments, and it is really pretty eye opening. I recently looked at some open ended comments expressing concern about the availability and clarity of shipping information. When you review the site it lists two different options, within a matter of an inch the site listed two links “shipping info” and “freight fees”. In reviewing the movie the user moves their mouse in between the two, uncertain where to go. Once they clicked on one they went in a circle to get back to the original as it did not have the information they were looking for. This pointed out a somewhat obvious and potential opportunity for improvement – the customer was confused and indicated as much in their scores, comments and actions. The “total package” of information at your finger tips.

It is somewhat like seeing a concert “in the round”, you get to see all aspects of the customer, their actions, their attitudes and intentions as well as their direct comments leading to a comprehensive view of the customer. It truly is making the dream of a “full view” of the customer something more than a dream but an actual reality. As the old adage says “a picture is worth 1,000 words” but in this case I have truly come to believe that it is more of a picture and a 1,000 words creating a deep, full 3-D style view of your customer. Nothing could be better in helping to build and protect that most precious of all assets, your customers!

Are You an Elitest?

Kevin's post on whether elitism is the source of poor usability is getting a lot of attention this week. One of the commenters has a great point about watching the user experience before they even get to the site. It may not technically be site usability, but still useful and illuminating.

What mix of techniques do you use to improve usability?

Honda.com Has Best Auto Website

Automotive websites have a tough mission: they need to inspire brand loyalty and encourage sales and dealer visits without actually selling cars online, since most people will obviously buy a car in person.  Their mission is not unlike other brand-based websites that don’t conduct e-commerce, but the auto industry doesn’t seem to pay nearly as much attention to the web channel as the consumer-packaged good industry, for example, does.

Therefore, we’re launching the inaugural ForeSee Results Automotive Website Satisfaction Index, and we released our first set of findings today. Read about them in the Detroit Free Press or feel free to download a copy of the study from our website.

Here’s what we found: On the ACSI’s 100-point scale, Honda.com did best and NissanUSA.com did worst. The industry aggregate was 78. Individual automotive website scores are as follows:

    * Honda.com: 80
    * Chrysler.com: 79
    * FordVehicles.com: 79
    * Chevrolet.com: 77
    * Toyota.com: 77
    * NissanUSA.com: 76

The study also found that Honda.com does the best job leveraging the website to get visitors to buy a vehicle or visit a dealer. Chevrolet.com, FordVehicles.com, and NissanUSA.com were tied for being the least likely to influence customers to purchase a vehicle. Visitors to FordVehicles.com were the least likely to visit a dealer.

Considering the fact that top e-retailers like Amazon have scores in the high eighties, these guys still have a lot of work to do. However, it is impressive that Honda is doing such a great job leveraging their website to encourage dealer visits and sales.

The commentary has some specific usability examples that may be of interest.

ForeSee Results Acquires Red Spade

We’re thrilled to announce our first acquisition—a Chicago usability consulting firm called Red Spade that we had heard great things about from their clients like Best Buy, Borders, JC Penney, Lands End, Walgreens, and DTE Energy. ForeSee Results uses the methodology of the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to help online businesses determine which areas of online improvement would have the greatest impact on satisfaction, likelihood to purchase, loyalty, word of mouth and ROI. By adding usability audits, we’ll be able to provide companies with specific prescriptive information based on usability best-practices about the changes they should make to increase satisfaction and influence customer behavior. The ACSI methodology will focus the usability audits so that companies don’t have the expense of a site-wide audit. Jennifer and Kay over at Red Spade are moving their office from Chicago to join us in Ann Arbor on October 1, and we can’t wait to integrate them into the team!