SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

The tact of social media monitoring

In context of ongoing commentary about social media and branding, Adrian Chan observed on Twitter that “metrics analyze individ[ual] tweets for brand mentions and sentiment, losing context of talk and user’s relationships.” Follow-on conversation with Thomas Vander Wal and Chris Baum focused on opportunities for network conversation analysis to elicit valuable information about the social context of brand mentions. The challenge for marketers lies in how to use this information in a way tha...

Slides from our talk

Our talk at Idea09 touched on a few key steps for building social experiences, a few of the most salient principles and a handful of the anti-patterns covered in the book. A 40 minute talk barely taps into the breadth of content from the book, but it’s a nice teaser. Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, 5 [...]

Beyond A/B testing: hypothesis testing for startups

We do a lot of A/B testing at SlideShare. Such tests (or at least the ones we run with Google website optimizer) are mostly tactical. They are about getting your call to action, the size of your button, or the copy of your landing page right. While it’s important to do these experiments, they are mostly useful for refining ideas. As Andrew Chen would put it, you can get caught in local maxima if you focus only on them. The substantive decisions : to try a different product strategy, to build ne...