How to Take Advantage of Gmail's Evolving User Experience

Although it's still invite-only, it's only a matter of time before Gmail's Inbox becomes the norm, so email marketers need to prepare themselves.

Don’t wait for an invitation to start tailoring your email marketing for Gmail’s new Inbox app. Launched at the end of October, Inbox is still invite-only, and interested Gmail users have to either request an invite from Gmail or bug their friends to send them a golden ticket. If you’re not already studying Inbox, here’s a preview of the email marketing experience and how you can make it work better for your Gmail subscribers.

Gmail's Inbox expands on Google’s 2013 design change, Tabs, adding four additional tabs (now called Bundles) and offering users the ability to create their own personalized bundles, sorted by sending address. Inbox also includes new features geared toward making the email experience more personal and fun.

Highlights:

A revamp of Quick Actions, highlights allows users to save time by offering them a quick overview of their emails. In Gmail’s standard version, Quick Actions would appear subtly after the preheader, but in Inbox, these links are more pronounced and add to the presentation of the email. Below are the standard Gmail and new Inbox versions of the same message. In Gmail I receive the standard presentation of sender and subject line with the addition of a quick link redirecting me to USPS to track my shipment. With the same message in Inbox, not only do I get a link to track my package, but I also have an expected date and an image of my purchase right in my inbox.

Gmail:

Inbox:

These highlights are not limited to purchased goods. They can include quick links to YouTube videos, website links, and reservation details of restaurants and flights, including updated status information.

These highlights provide subscribers with additional information without effort from customers. Messages that include information like this will offer a more streamlined and helpful experience, saving your customers the time it takes to search for this information themselves.

Bundles:

As I mentioned, after the success of Gmail’s Tabs launch, Inbox has remodeled, increased, and renamed tabs "Bundles." The Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums tabs have made the transition into Inbox and are now joined by Travel, Purchases, and Finance. These three additions help decongest the Updates folder, which previously contained any financial, travel, and transactional updates along with newsletters and notifications. With Inbox, users’ itineraries won't be buried between receipts and finance notifications. For travel senders, email confirmations and updates should become more valuable to Gmail subscribers now that they have their own designated section of the inbox.

Reminders:

A new feature, Reminders allows subscribers to create their own personalized reminders as well as to "snooze" messages for later. The Reminders option provides four pre-populated optional snooze times: later today, tomorrow, next week, and someday. Users can choose "pick date and time," allowing them to create their own custom reminders.

For those with a more flexible schedule, (non-9-to-5) they will enjoy the location-dependent "Reminder Option." Customers who have varying work hours will have the ability to be reminded when they get home or into work, regardless of when that is.

Marketers can take advantage of this option by asking customers to set a reminder for ongoing sales or offer deadlines, either for a specific time or for when they can visit a store.

Verified:

Authentication, Google’s version of the verified checkmark, shows the company logo next to the "from" address in the inbox. When subscribers see your message with your logo next to competitors’ efforts without logos, they get a clear indication of whose they can trust. It’s also more eye-catching and distinctive.

For example I received emails from Kate Spade and Michael Kors - one with a logo and one without. With its logo prominently showing in my inbox, Kate Spade draws attention to its brand. Michael Kors only gets the letter "M" in place of its logo. Brands that want their logos to appear need to be authenticated with either SPF or DKIM, have a Google+ presence, and register with Google’s developer program.

As Inbox becomes the common subscriber experience, taking these steps to reinforce your brand makes sense - don’t wait.

(via)

Marketing to the Experience Generation

Mobile should be a key strategy for any brand hoping to reach the "Experience Generation" in India.A lot of the rules that marketers have trusted for years are slowly changing as the "Experience Generation" redefines how and when marketing can succeed. This Experience Generation is changing the consumer landscape in a number of ways:

• Living Life Uninhibited: A new generation, brimming with confidence and comfortable in their own skin.

• Focus on the Now: There is only the present. The past is old baggage and the future is just a promise, so maximize the now. If you keep maximizing the now, you work more, seek more, expect more, and are rewarded with more. 

• Mobile First: Mobile is the primary and preferred way to be online, and where media and information is consumed, quite often in short bursts. 

• Things Expire: Relationships, jobs, and fashion all expire. The few things that can keep up in a world of heightened expectations get to stick around.

• Youth: For these digital natives, mobile devices aren’t changing the way people communicate. It is how people have always communicated. 

• Urban: With people moving to cities for the promise of higher paying jobs, the confluence of people, culture, and energy is creating new ways to engage and interact that benefit from more disposable income and a premium put on value. 

The Experience Generation is already having an impact in India and, although the old forms of marketing and communication are still effective for now, the data is clearly showing that the quicker we address these new challenges, the better we will serve the wants and aspirations of a new generation ready to cut ties with tradition.

3 Keys to Creating a Superior User Experience

With the massive proliferation of sites and apps, most will suffer the ignominy of remaining incognito. For some, they may think of themselves as the world’s best kept secret. For others, I would argue, it is just as well!  Why? Because so many continue to offer a very poor user experience.

Why is the user experience so poor?

• Trying to please all the people all the time
• The underlying architecture is out-dated
• The navigation is confusing
• The images are too heavy (the site doesn’t load quickly)
• The website has been constructed by multiple people from multiple departments over a prolonged time
• Allocated resources were not sufficient
• The team is lacking the requisite skills
• The mobile version is nonexistent

I marvel at how some sites are structured. You can still find sites that are set up merely according to the organization’s structure, with internal department titles lining the navigation tabs. Even worse, in-house jargon appears on the customer-facing website. How is the customer supposed to find satisfaction in such an environment?

3 keys to improve the user experience in an organization

Getting to a superior user experience requires taking strategic (i.e. tough) choices. Here are what I believe the three keys to help refine and define those choices:

1. 
   Understand better the Customer Journey. Empathy is a significantly important quality in understanding the customer journey. It is only truly possible to create a great user experience once you accept to get into the shoes of your customer. The key point is to understand fully the customer’scontext at the time of contact. One of the cardinal sins of ‘traditional’ marketers is to do observation sessions of customers surfing in sterile conditions, based on a marketing script. {Tweet this!} An important part of creating a superior customer experience comes from understanding the customer’s situation at the time of interface (bandwidth, device, surroundings, time to spare, mindset…).
2. Breaking down silos. Most companies have a legacy structure that perpetuates silo building. I have seen many cases where web marketing teams are segregated from the rest of the business. In any event, that is too often how websites or apps are created: in virtual isolation from the rest of the business. In creating a customer experience, many people in the business beyond marketing need to be included, such as IT, sales/retail and customer service. I would further counsel, at least at the beginning, having a much wider net, including the CEO, HR Director (for better appreciation of the skillset required) and even the Finance Director. The point of having all members of the team participate in observation sessions (e.g. behind a one-way mirror) is to have the internal debate focused around the customers’ experience. This way, conversations move from “I don’t have the resources” or “I can’t do that” to “how can we improve what we just witnessed?”
3. Aesthetics count and… it needs to work. Since technologies and usages are in constant flux, what constitutes a great user experience is also in movement. In order to get the user experience right, you clearly need to have the right talent. Taste and refinement are intangible qualities, but it’s all about the right attitude: to obsess about the look, the feel, the functionality, the navigation. Importantly, the individuals need to be curious and open to continuous learning, unlearning and relearning. If aesthetics are intimately related to brand image, functionality is related to simplicity. The challenge is to marry aesthetics with practical functionality.

To create an optimal customer journey is like engaging in a complex and long experiment. Not only are there different customer profiles to manage, there are scores of channels, platforms, devices from which to select before considering the appropriate timing and content. Digital is marvellous in that it allows for metrics that most executives would dream about. Unfortunately, few top executives have the measure of the options and data that digital affords.

via

Google Wants The Best User Experience for Mobile Users

Google recently made a move to improve the user experience of mobile search users. Its a move that we have expected from a Digital Marketing view point since last year – we simply didn’t know how the move would be made. So the move means that if your website has a redirect for users and it does not go to the equivelant page of a mobile version (or your site is not responsive) you will see a similar message in search as to the one below.

If you are reading this, it’s likely you are a website owner or SEO with this issue. So what is the solution?

Interigate The Issue

First we need to check that the message you are seeing is “smartphone” related and not some other issue. So nip into Google Webmaster Tools for your website, you should have a message if you are seeing these in search results. If not you can still check go to Crawl > Crawl Errors > Smartphone – if you see anything in “faulty redirect” these are the urls you will need to address with the solutions below.

Fixing The Issue

There are a few ways to fix issues with the redirect message from Google. Here are the top 3 we would advise:

1. Don’t simply redirect all “smart device” users to the homepage or category pages on a mobile site. Try to ensure a one-for-one experience between the two versions of your website. This isn’t always practical though so where this is the case limit the number of “wholesale” redirects you have.
2. Where you can’t redirect users to a similar page on a mobile version of the site, it is advised that you simply “do nothing” and do not redirect them from a desktop site.
3. Try updating the design of your website to use responsive web design, this would mean that a single version of your site would serve both mobile devices and desktop devices gracefully.

via

How Combining SEO & Usability Solves 4 Common On-Site Problems

One of the most trying points in my search marketing career has been molding a mindset coupling both SEO and the user experience. This primarily means stepping away from “bot obsession” and solely thinking about rankings and traffic.

Every campaign must meet site objectives while hopefully maintaining heightened organic visibility. SEO is evolving more to focus on satisfying the end user.

However, there are many times where I still want to make SEO, bot-focused revisions to a site that may impede upon site usability and the user experience. So this begs the question: which should win?

Both.

SEO, Meet Usability

While it may seem difficult to meld both SEO on-page implementation while also providing the best user experience, those who can do this well will be the more successful search tacticians.

What I have compiled below are what I seem to encounter the most day-to-day in the ongoing relationship between usability and SEO with my clients.

Problem

We need more content above the fold but if we do add a few paragraphs it will push our product listings below the page fold. This is a logical worry. We can appease the engines with above-fold content but what if it is at the cost of losing product listing visibility?

Solution

Use tabs or an expanding div. With this, you will be able to show introductory page content with an option for an interested reader to read more while also having product listing visibility about the page fold.

If you're using an expanding solution that is visible text to search engines, then you should have no worries. Where folks go wrong is with the usage of frames. The framed text is invisible to bots.

Problem

Instead of posting text content on page we have a lot we want to say it in a more entertaining manner. We want to use video.

Solution

Video? That’s great! If you choose to go the video route you need to take advantage of video SEO needs such as titling, video sitemap, video schema, and placement on video sharing networks.

Instead of descriptive video copy, provide an expandable area featuring a transcript of the video. With this you are again taking advantage of the fore-mentioned copy tactic above or if you wish you can just list it below the page fold. Now you have one message separated into two different content types.

(via)

Related articles

• What to Look For When Completing an SEO Analysis
• 24 Things to Consider When Designing and Developing a Website
• 6 SEO Mistakes That Are Killing Your Google Rankings
• SEO versus User Experience: The Problem and Solution
• The Role of Social Media in SEO

SEO versus User Experience: The Problem and Solution

For any small business looking to get involved in online marketing, this is the age-old dilemma. User experience and SEO should, ideally, work hand-in-hand, but that never seems to be the case. Company owners and Webmasters have to make changes to their websites in order to please the search engines, but this doesn’t always coincide with what readers want to read. So why not just write for the readers? You should, but how will they ever find you if you can’t make it to the top of search engines?

As time continues, this catch 22 only seems to get stronger and more annoying. Businesses have to ask the inevitable question: How can I find that balance between SEO and user experience?

Why SEO and User Experience Don’t Always Work Together

It’s first important to understand why the two have a hard time working together in the first place. There are a few different reasons many Webmasters have found:

• Visuals. The Google algorithm bots cannot see visuals the way that humans can, and this poses a problem. Humans like to see graphics more than they like to see text, and many time graphics take some interpretation. This is something that a Google bot cannot do, and therefore websites are torn between creating an awesome graphic versus awesome keyword-rich text. For this reason, both are necessary to succeed in most cases.
• Choppy Text. Readers like to read choppy text online. In other words, they like to read text that is broken up into bullet points and subheadings so that they can skim across the page. This is fine for Google bots to understand, but Google bots need a lot of content to be able to really get a feel for the page and how the page should rank. With many choppy online texts, there isn’t as much content to work with (of course this doesn’t have to be true, but it’s something many writers need to learn, which can take quite a bit of time and training). In other words, writing for both is really a developed talent.
• Keywords. Google says that you can write naturally and your keyword should naturally appear, and while this might be true, we all know that a little bit of extra help can’t hurt. Webmasters and content writers are always going through and adding keywords into headings and titles to give it that extra push whether readers like it or not.

Still, don’t forget that SEO and user experience CAN, for the most part, work together. It’s not easy, and there are going to be these certain situations (discussed above) where you’re going to have to lean one way or the other, but overall it’s not impossible.

How to Bridge the Gap Between SEO and User Experience

When it comes time to think about how to solve this age-old dilemma for your business website, I like to think of three different situations:

The best solution: The best way to bridge the gap is to think about your readers first and SEO second. This doesn’t mean that you’re ignoring one completely, but you’re putting your readers first, which is the most important thing. A few things to keep in mind:

-       You don’t want to have doorway pages, or pages just for search engines, so the only thing you can do is create great content for every page. If that means a lot of graphics, try to couple it with a lot of great content.

-       Teach your content writers how to be thorough without being overbearing

-       Do some keyword research so you know that what you’re writing about (for your readers) is something that has a good chance of ranking on a SERP (usually based on search volume and competition).

When SEO should come first: This is the real question that many Webmasters have to ask. Is there ever a time when SEO should come before your readers? Not really. Google hates this and readers hate this. Although doing so may put you to page one, it isn’t going to mean much if the content isn’t engaging.

A case study: Ian Wortley of Webshed recently wrote about his decision to use javascript to make his homepage a slideshow. He explained that “users get movement and interaction (which are plusses) while having the information broken down in such a way that they are more likely to read more of that text.” It’s the perfect medium between pleasing readers while still allowing for a lot of content for the bots.

(VIA)

Related articles

• Top Google Website Optimization Resources
• What to Look For When Completing an SEO Analysis
• Marketing Automation & Search - 3 Strategies for Mutual Success
• Watch Out: Google's Penguin 2.0 Is Fast Approaching
• Simple Way to Improve SEO: Learn about the People Behind Bing

Want to Increase Website Conversion? Fix These 5 Problems

Ever been told your website is all flash and no cash? If so, you’re probably sitting on a high-octane brochure website that has little else to offer. Somewhere down the line you forgot to create a coherent site structure or any form of rational organization; site visitors don’t know where to start. What about interoperability and interactivity? Come on, the experience is bad enough on PCs; mobile users don’t stand a chance. Social share buttons? Those are for companies that have content to share. Forget about on-site analytics; you’re not even sure anyone is visiting your site.

If some or all of this is hitting a little too close to mark, you probably need to revamp your website ASAP. Here are five problems you’re gonna have to fix if you really want to increase website conversion.

Lame Layout - If your site’s layout more closely resembles that of a Rorschach image, it may be time for a website redesign. Begin by sitting down and thinking about what it is you actually want users to see and do while on your site. Think user experience, taking a cue from your own likes and dislikes when navigating websites. After all, in today’s digital age, your site is more than just an online storefront; it is the lynchpin of your brand’s online presence. Make sure your its look, feel, and functionality properly reflect your business goals and values. Once you figure all this out, consider implementing a responsive web design (RWD), which provides a seamless user experience over devices of varying size and screen resolution.

Messy Messaging - Like words and music, the integration of messaging and design are critical elements of a well-functioning website. Both stem from a clear understanding of two things: your brand’s value proposition and its target audience(s). In other words, what/why you are selling and who you are selling to. Designing a website without a clear brand message is like building a road without giving thought to its destination. This is an area where simplicity is your greatest ally. In fact, 99% of your website messaging should revolve around addressing these fundamental questions: Who are you/why are you in business? What are you selling? Who are you selling to? Why should these people buy from you? It’s not rocket science, gang- don’t over complicate it.

Crappy Content - Forget the early SEO playbook of dense, static, keyword-laden content; the times, as they say, are a changing.’ Today’s consumers expect websites to inform and resolve in the most streamlined manner possible. In short, they want value. Informative blogs, quick how-to videos, highly-visual eBooks that are easy to access and digest provide value; offering useful content will establish your brand as a go-to resource for consumers in the market for the product or service you provide.

Inadequate Interactivity – One of the biggest differences between a brochure website and a functional website is interactivity. Enticing calls-to-action (CTAs) with descriptive landing pages shape the on-site user experience and make your web content more actionable; both also help clear the path to the sale.Social shares invite visitors to promote your content to their followers: people who may have similar interests, wants or needs.

Absent Analytics – In an age characterized by the proliferation of measureable consumer data, having a business website without some form of analytics is tantamount to lobotomizing your sales and marketing efforts. How do you expect to offer a more relevant product or add value without measuring performance? Would you do the same offline? I highly doubt it. There are a number of free and paid sales and marketing automation software applications providing scores of useful metrics to help you increase website conversion. Website analytics can provide a number of useful insights, such as who is visiting your site, which types of content do they prefer, where are they sharing it on social media, etc. Big data is only going to get bigger. Your competitors will use web-based feedback to improve their brand; don’t get left behind.

Consumers, aided by social, mobile and internet technologies, are expecting more from the brands with whom they choose to do business. They are beginning to define a brand mostly, if not solely, by its online presence. To offer value and increase website conversion, make sure you fix these any or all of these five elements if they are broken.

(via)

Related articles

• Top Google Website Optimization Resources
• 50 Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Analytics, and Management
• Why Your Social Media Strategy Isn't Working - and How to Fix It
• Mobile Marketing Conversion Optimization Tools & Code Tricks
• 5 Advanced Social Media Metrics for 2013

Mobile Marketing Conversion Optimization Tools & Code Tricks

Getting the mobile experience wrong can be deadly to your bottom line. You don't want to turn off customers with a bad mobile site and lose them to a competitor. Use these tips, tools, and code tricks to enhance the mobile user experience and drive more conversions.

The Consequence of Getting Your Mobile Experience Wrong

Schottmuller shared two staggering stats:

• 43 percent of consumers are unlikely to return to a slow-loading mobile site.
• 40 percent of consumers are going to turn to a competitor's site after a bad mobile experience.

So when you're doing conversion tests, and you're saying, "how can we get a 5 or 10 percent lift on specific pages?" And imagine that 20 percent of your traffic is coming from mobile; if they don't get a mobile-optimized experience, there's a huge opportunity right there.

How to Approach Mobile Conversion Optimization

You need a plan.

A simplified layout for mobile is really the biggest thing, according to Schottmuller. Design your landing pages for mobile first and make sure they're simplified and focus on only one product or service on the page.

Mobile is dead. Schottmuller believes there's no such thing as mobile.

You can walk around with a laptop or MacBook Air that's not plugged into anything, and it has Internet access, allows you to accomplish your tasks, explore, etc.

The biggest difference is touchscreen vs. non-touchscreen, which is one of the key things to consider when thinking about mobile conversions.

Screen size is important as well. Keep in mind that there shouldn't just three or four general sizes you're creating pages for – soon the market will be flooded with different types of screen sizes, whether it's in your rearview mirror in your car, or in your refrigerator in your house. You should plan how you fit those different width ranges, so that you're not perpetually always playing catch-up.

Can the user make phone calls from the mobile page? Phone calls are one of the top actions for mobile users. So make sure you present the phone number as a call-to-action – you can do this by using jQuery on the page (more below), and use CSS to style it appropriately if you want it to look like a button, move it around on the page, etc.

"Content is Only King…in the Kingdom of Context" 

Given all of these different areas to focus on for mobile, you need to adapt your strategy.

What is the context for your user? Not just the device but their surroundings (i.e., where they might be when you're asking them to take one of your conversion actions.

If you come across a website that is executed nicely on mobile, then take a look at how they did it by examining the code on their page, Schottmuller recommended.

Mobile Mini Toolbox

Here are three great bookmarklets to view a site's source code from your smartphone:

• Snoopy
• ViewS
• View Source

With these tools, you can see how they're executing on mobile (e.g., if they're running jQuery, Google Analytics, Wordpress, etc.).

Here's a tip for taking a deeper look at the site's code on a larger screen: use one of the bookmarklets and click anywhere in the code, Select All and Copy the code; then email it to yourself so you can open it on a desktop or laptop. From there, dump the code into an HTML editor so you can start to dissect it.

What are some other things you can do to understand your mobile users?

Detect "mobile" devices. There are a lot of different factors to consider when it comes to mobile.Detect Mobile Browsers really covers the different platforms, languages, browsers, etc. that you're going after.

Mobile Analytics

Schottmuller noted that when it comes to Google Analytics, Webtrends or SiteCatalyst, at least 25 to 40 percent of mobile traffic still isn't being covered by those tool sets.

What we need to do for measuring mobile is deep diving into server logs, and the above-mentioned tools just aren't digging fast enough. So she highly recommends exploring other mobile tracking platforms. Here are three options:

• Bango
• Percent Mobile
• Amethon

Schottmuller said she has had some really good experiences with Bango and thinks it's solid in terms of how much data it's able to capture. So if you've been contemplating building a mobile app or doing anything with mobile, for that matter, and you really don't know how much mobile traffic you have, put this on your site for 30 days, to get an understanding of what's the reality.

Mobile Design Tricks

Schottmuller said jQuery is your friend. If you have any Flash on your site, you should set it's life expectancy date and kill it and never let it come back again. jQuery can do the following: slide shows, any type of animation, reset the size of different components for different mobile screens, etc.

Here are some useful jQuery responsive plugins included in her presentation:

• FitText, which allows you to achieve scalable headings
• FitVids for fluid width video embeds
• WooThemes FlexSlider toolkit
• Photo Swipe image gallery for mobile and touch devices

Mobile Call-to-Action Tips

Avoid using too many calls-to-action on a mobile page – keep it simple. Also, if you have a rainbow of colors on your site, you need to evaluate how you can neutralize those pages. 

Schottmuller likes to use a "conversion color wheel clock" where you take your primary color on a site (e.g., a blue background) and look at the opposite color on the color wheel (e.g., red or orange). Using a tool like this helps you find contrasting colors so that you can place a button on your site that really ends popping out on the page.

Smartphone users are very task-oriented, whereas tablet users are very interactive-oriented, so they'll be interested in sites that actually have the gestures and movements, etc.

Desktop users are more benefits-oriented and typically have a little more time, have larger screens, they're interested in looker deeper.

If you have mobile pages with a call-to-action that's far down on the page, and you want to engage the user, one tactic you can use is setting the expectation for the user at the top of the page. So you can say something like, "Fill out the form to win a new iPad3".

They might not be able to see the how long the form is and how far down they have to go, but they'll get a sense of what they're asked to do from the beginning, which can help increase the amount of people that engage and ultimately convert.

(via)

Related articles

• 5 Easy Ways to Optimize Social Media Marketing for Mobile
• 5 Tips to Make Facebook Marketing Mobile-Friendly
• How effective is M&S's use of QR codes?
• More reasons for retailers to offer wi-fi in stores

How Social Media Is Humanizing Brands

It's simple. Talk to me like I'm a human being. I'm more than an inbox, Twitter handle, or opportunity for a Facebook "Like." I'm your audience. And if we connect, there can be a meaningful exchange that's beneficial for both of us.

In my experience as a user, customer and digital strategist, open conversations mixed with memorable connections are the fastest way any brand can create a meaningful relationship. Sometimes this happens online. Sometimes it happens offline. But no matter what, whether we're talking about good service or better products, in the end it all comes down to how we relate.

I think brands forget this, but honestly who could blame them. In the foggy mix of economic pressure, bosses demanding insatiable amounts of measurable results and the rapid pace of high-stakes decision-making, it's easy to lose perspective and grab for more traditional ways of thinking. We see it all the time. More eyes lead to more awareness which ultimately lead to more success. Well, that's not true. The presumed path to success is paved with brands that have risen and fallen in the pursuit of "more eyes."

What is true, is that each relationship must be earned. Right now, more than ever, brands have the opportunity to blend digital and physical strategies to create authentic relationships with their audience. They can earn it. And they can do it in ways that remind us that we're all human and not just deliverable metrics. To me, this is the path to long-lasting success.

While I'm fascinated with experiences that live at the intersection of digital and physical, I do think it's possible (and fun) to create successful experiences that live independently. But, the brands who are consistently winning and making powerful connections with their audience are the ones that execute fully integrated campaigns. No longer should digital strategy sit in a silo. Invite these strategies into the brand's larger goals and vision. Not only are they at the forefront of fostering authentic relationships with existing consumers, but they may often be your best kept secret for forging new relationships and growing your consumer base.

As I look at social media today and its integration with physical events and products, it proves to be an exciting time for us all. The industry is packed with new ideas, energy and enthusiasm. For example, the Internet of Things is a booming field sure to disrupt many markets and offer new opportunities for entrepreneurs all over the world. All of these factors are driving us toward better connections and more authentic conversations. Now that we're here, let's take advantage of these opportunities and build more meaningful relationships that offer deeper engagement among brands and their audiences. Let's build something that goes beyond the singular focus of quantitative metrics and offers something new! Who knows, we may find the results to be humanizing.

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and Social Media Week in conjunction with the latter's Ideas Connected, a three-day event taking place at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City on Feb 19-21. Presented in partnership with MKG and Crowdcentric, Ideas Connected is designed as an inspirational, educational and explorational deep dive into the architects, inventors, and collaborators who are shaping our lives in extraordinary ways, accompanied.

via