Courtesy of Activeside via Flickr

Because of a post about engagement design that I wrote in late August, I was awarded with a free ticket to this year’s IDEA 2008 conference.

First, I’d like to thank Melissa and all the good folks at IDEA for the award and the chance to participate. I am terribly excited.

Second, I wanted to explain why I’m going and suggest that you consider it as well. As some of you may know, my career was primed with years of studying literary theory, then I spent almost six years in politics. My path to online marketing was not so direct, to say the least. While persuasive writing was always a part of that, I had to learn more than I ever would have expected.

I taught myself bits of HTML so I wouldn’t have to wait for the I.T. guy to fix my problems. I kept up with tech news because that was sudden the means of communication. I veered into unexpected territory to stay ahead of the curve. Likewise, I predict the next important things we need to learn as marketers and online folks in general will be covered at IDEA 2008.

Grandmas On Amazon

A few years ago, the online experience was radically different. Read some books published in the mid-1990s and you’ll see what I mean. It was a major project just to get a website up and running, never mind e-commerce and regular communication with your customers. Dynamic content was still a dream.

So we spent most of your time educating. But now, due to that education, extensive broadband access, lowering of prices across the board, and a general acclimation to the web, we have moved well beyond those early days. I’m willing to bet that your mother or grandmother could (or does) use Amazon.com. That is no small feat.

Changing Times

In the web 1.0 era, websites lived in the I.T. department. Now, they’re housed in marketing. Before we were educating the customer; now, the customer is telling us exactly how he wants to interact with our brands online (and we’ve finally got the metrics to prove it).

Which brings me back to IDEA 2008. The design, usability, and information architecture topics covered at this conference will the next big things we need to learn.

While I haven’t taken an art class since college, I recognize that I need to sharpen my eye for design. While I think I know a good amount about user experience, I need metrics and tests to back up my assertions these days.

Just as I taught myself HTML and learned the business of web 2.0 from the ground up, so too will I need to be fluent in engagement design and good information architecture. And likely, so will you.

The Goal

Of course, the goal if all this is now firmly centered on the customer, where it ought to have been in the first place. All of this is to ensure that they find what they’re looking for and get it without any trouble. In other words, marketers better learn to provide value and a good experience, rather than interrupting it with their sales pitch.

I’m excited to go to the conference; the program looks spectacular. After going to an IA conference hosted by Adaptive Path, I am looking forward to hearing from their Co-Founder Jesse James Garrett. Also of particular note is local web 2.0 celeb David Armano from Critical Mass. While I’m sure all of the speakers will be brilliant, I am especially looking forward to hearing from these guys.

If you’re already going, I encourage you to join the LinkedIn IDEA 2008 group and then look for me at the conference. (I’ll be the only guy there named “DJ” guaranteed.)

And if you can’t be there, try to follow along. The conference has a Twitter account and you can follow me at @MarketerBlog. I will do my best to provide live tweets about the conference.

I hope to see you there!

(Sidenote: Besides my free ticket, I get no compensation from the IDEA folks. I’m no shill; I really do believe all of this.)

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Information architecture isn’t enough. Sure, it’s important – I gave some tips just two weeks ago – but it’s not the only organizing structure we need to consider.

That said, it may be confusing when I wholeheartedly recommend you attend the upcoming IDEA 2008 conference held by the Information Architecture Institute on October 7-8 in Chicago. The reason I suggest it is because they don’t just stop at information architecture – the conference examines the interaction and engagement that is possible in a web 2.0 world. (Note – This post is in no way sponsored by this or any other organization. It’s just me talking here.)

By the end of this post, I aim to convince you of the importance of the emerging engagement design, how companies can use it to grow business, how agencies will change in response, and finally persuade you to study engagement design at IDEA 2008 or elsewhere.

There’s No Marketing Funnel In Web 2.0

This blog is based on the idea that marketing is changing – rapidly and fundamentally. Forrester Research describes a key component:

“The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers’ trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence.”

We need to look at information architecture and engagement design in exactly this way. Imagine that information architecture is the skeleton – very web 1.0 – organizing and presenting information in a way the webmaster believes is most beneficial.

Now, imagine engagement interaction as the body and soul in web 2.0. Instead of guessing what will most benefit her readers, webmasters can (must!) interact with her readers to determine how they use her website.

Businesses Engaging To Sell

Business is changing as well. In the report Use Personas To Design For Engagement, Forrester outlines three business who, with the help of their agencies, harnessed engagement interaction through the use of personas. These businesses found the key to interaction design through:

• Analytics: QVC and Critical Mass rated website functions on their usefulness to particular users and designed the website around those highly-rated features.
• Usability: Thornburg Mortgage and Enlighten ensured that their new website features truly served their current and potential customers.
• Advocacy: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and WHITTMANHART provided supporters with a website that kept them more involved as well as facilitated their donations.

In all three cases, harnessing engagement design resulted in huge increases in business.

Agencies Need To Change Too

As IDEA 2008 speaker and engagement savant David Armano described in this video, the roles in your marketing agency need to change to accommodate this shift in business. David claims that engagement design exists as the design of behavior with three elements: human, technical, aesthetic.

Of course, this requires a very different agency layout with IT sitting over in the corner, the writers up in the loft, and the designers on another floor altogether. Formerly siloed roles are becoming both more blurry and moving closer together. Creative departmental overlap will be key as we move to a user-focused model.

Forget the days of the “star” designer. As Malcolm Gladwell describes in The Talent Myth, “the organizations that are most successful at [coordinating efforts of many different people] are the ones where the system is the star.”

It’s a wildly exciting time. Again from David: “Marketing, design and ‘branding’ are on a violent collision course as communications, experience and messaging become indistigusible [sic] to the average customer/user.”

So Who Cares?

Well, hopefully you. Readers of this blog are usually keenly attuned to marketing, advertising, PR, and social media. And it is this world that is changing.

Events like IDEA 2008 are essential for hearing from the best minds in the business and plotting out how your business or agency can flourish in a web 2.0 world. My boss recently sent me to an IA conference run by Adaptive Path and I found it immensely useful.

I’m not sure if I’ll be going to IDEA 2008 myself (sponsor now being accepted!), but I encourage you to attend. Like I mentioned, this blog is all about the changing world of business and marketing. Hearing from the best minds in the business can only help you.

Watch this blog for updated about my attendance. If I do go, I will do my best to live blog and tweet while there. Until then, think about how your organization can harness engagement design. I promise that your customers and supporters will thank you for it.

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