Interview with Roboboogie Social Media Coordinator, Etain O’Longaigh

etain o'longaigh social media coordinator

This week we’re chatting with roboboogie’s Social Media Coordinator, Etain O’Longaigh. Etain wrangles all of roboboogie’s social channels, and makes sure we’re posting relevant content that resonates with our followers. She also spends hours everyday engaging with the social community. How does she do it? Read on to learn more about what social media means to roboboogie, accounts we love, and where the industry is headed.

How do you describe what you do?

I am a Social Media Coordinator: wizard of social strategy & content promotion. From curating content that supports our optimization strategies to engaging with fellow digital marketing accounts, I translate our optimization world for our social media followers. My role can be broken down into four main areas involving content: content optimization, content design, content strategy and content translation.

Content optimization involves the process of selecting photos, articles and blog posts that are relevant to our particular field and directly connect with our practices. I utilize social media analytics to determine which areas of content are connecting with followers, and curate research around our social media practices. Analytics are particularly interesting to explore with social media, especially audience metrics!

Content design is a critical part of the visual aspect of social media. From taking photos of events and everyday office life to maintaining a constant design theme on social media accounts, the visual aesthetic aspect of social media shapes the brand. My favorite part of content designing is creating visual themes to match our brand!

Content strategy is a critical aspect of every social media coordinator’s position in a company. I have to select meaningful content to share, engage our audiences, and craft meaningful messages to our followers. For example, I created the #happycustomersconvert campaign to align with our presence at Opticon 2017. I wanted to create a social campaign that reflected our belief as an agency that creating memorable and personal customer experiences is paramount to increasing conversion rates. Accompanied by some fun face coasters and matching t-shirts, #happycustomersconvert expressed an agency strategy with a fun social tone!

Content translation is the most important role that I play in social media. Our agency operates in a unique digital and design sphere that can be foreign to many of our followers. My role is to translate and interpret our practices in a easy to understand manner for our audience. From highlighting new tech practices that our team is excited about to promoting work we’ve done with our clients, content translation bridges the gap between the world of optimization tech and our audience of marketing professionals.

What is a skill set that you use every day, but never thought you would have to?

Being a professional translator between the world of technology and experimentation into the world of tweets and Instagram posts was a skill set that I was surprised was so necessary for working in tech marketing. My role as a social media coordinator is to provide content that is valuable and meaningful for our followers. Therefore, in order to share what we think is exciting in experimentation and testing, I must be able to translate technical terms and practices into a form that is accessible to our followers. I have to be adept with the basic knowledge for each practice of our agency, without necessarily being involved in that area.

I was surprised about how many different development terms I was learning while explaining our experimentation process in tweets and article posts. Being able to translate our agency’s process into social posts is a fun but challenging process!

What are five twitter accounts everyone should follow to keep up to date on optimization, experimentation and personalization?

  1. @marketingland
  2. @FastCoDesign
  3. @ux_influence
  4. @conversionxl
  5. @MktgExperiments

How do you decide what content to share with roboboogie’s followers?

The most important thing I keep in mind when curating social content is showing off what makes our agency tick. From integrating different office interests, such as exploring Oregon’s best hikes to trying out the latest coffee shops, I try to present a clear picture of the brand culture associated with our team. We are a true Portland agency: obsessed with good work, good times, and good fun.

I also enjoy sharing our latest projects, or tech topics that we’ve been diving into, in order to help our followers understand more about our digital world. From sharing our latest tech terms with “Word of the Week,” to illustrating the behind-the-scenes design and planning process for our team, I try to make our social channels reminiscent of our everyday process as a team. If we are excited about a new trend in the experimentation industry- you can bet that our social channels will be sharing our opinions about it.

What trends in the experimentation industry are currently most excited by?

As someone who is constantly looking for ways to integrate personalization into our social media strategy, the rise of artificial intelligence in the customer experience world is fascinating. I am excited about the ways that AI can help improve the bridge between brand communications and customer needs. The integration between Voice AI and customer shopping experiences has been interesting to watch. I think that AI can be applied in so many different ways to the world of social media. I’m excited to see if we can start searching for picture inspiration on Instagram or tweeting during a marketing event by talking into our phones!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on all things social media, Etain! Stay tuned next month for another interview with a roboboogie pro.

Exploring Design Thinking with Roboboogie’s Lacie Webb

Design Thinking at March Camp Optimization

On March 15th, roboboogie’s Camp Optimization hosted Lacie Webb – our very own Sr. UX/UI Designer. This edition of our bi-monthly networking meet-up was all about Design Thinking, and the positive impact it can have on optimizing brainstorming sessions. Design Thinking is all about shifting focus to the user in order to solve problems. What does that mean? It means that listening to users’ problems and crafting empathetic, creative solutions is a surefire way to help make their lives better and easier. The best part of Design Thinking is that it’s not just for designers! Despite the name, Design Thinking is a great framework to allow people from all disciplines to take an active role in creative problem solving.

Design Thinking at March Camp Optimization with Lacie Webb

During the event, we even participated in some group-wide Design Thinking exercises that helped to get our creative juices flowing as we prototyped newer, bigger, badder backpacks for predefined users. Unable to make it to the event last week? Here are 5 key steps you can take to get started with utilizing Design Thinking in your brainstorming process.

Empathize

The first step in the process of designing effective solutions is understanding the way users think, feel, and behave. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, and Design Thinking provides a great platform to get started. Our goal here is to determine who our users are, and to understand their needs, wants, and concerns. Consider empathy-phase exercises such as user interviews or creating customer journey maps. Listening to your users creates an empathetic solution to their problems, which will be something they can more easily resonate with. By creating a foundation of who your users are, you can start problem solving and developing solutions that will be effective and achieve a deeper understanding of the issues and challenges your users are facing.

Define

Once you’ve gone through your desired process to empathize and get a better understanding of your users, it’s time to reframe and define the problem with the user in mind. Remember it’s not only our solution that needs to be empathetic, our problem needs to be empathetic too. This means it’s human-centered and allows for creative thought, but is specific enough to make the problem-solving manageable. This phase determines the direction the solution should come from and points your ideation phase in the right direction. Defining your users also helps remove any personal or professional bias there may be towards what a business thinks the real problem is.

People in conversation at March Camp Optimization

Ideate

The Ideation phase is where we gather a group of people, ideally from different backgrounds, in order to broaden and deepen our possible solutions. For this, focus on creating as many ideas as possible and thinking outside the box to create solutions that are tailored to our users and their needs. There are literally no bad ideas in this phase. Here are some rules to live by:

  • One voice at a time – Not everyone feels comfortable expressing their ideas. Avoid talking over other people in the group, and make sure to give each individual enough time and attention to fully express their idea.
  • Encourage wild ideas – Don’t focus too much on technical scope or feasibility just yet. You never know which mutation of an idea will make it into the final product.
  • Defer judgement – Always build on the ideas of others in a, “yes, and…” fashion and avoid saying “no.” These brainstorming sessions can be sensitive, so make an active effort to support your team.

After the ideation phase, you’ll have a large number of ideas that you’ll need to categorize and prioritize in order to determine what will go into a prototype.

Prototype

Now that we have a multitude of ideas (our exercise at the event yielded roughly 150!), we can start to prioritize and strategize around which ones we want to pursue. In this phase, we’ll take all the ideas from the ideation phase and cull them down to the top features we think our users will most resonate with.There are many ways to go about this, and Lacie mentioned two that she’s had success with in the past: affinity mapping and dot voting. Affinity mapping is grouping together similar ideas into common themes to identify patterns in the brainstorming. Dot voting allows people in the brainstorming group to vote on which ideas they think would be the best, and to see if the team is on the same page in terms of reaching a solution. The goal of the prototype phase is to create a series of quick, iterative prototypes to test with our users to gain meaningful feedback and a deeper understanding of our user base.

Design Thinking at March Camp Optimization with Lacie Webb

Test

Once you have a working prototype, it’s time to take it back to you users and – you guessed it – test it out! For physical products this could mean focus groups, and for digital products, it could be A/B testing or user interviews. Testing allows you to test your ideas with your users and gather qualitative and quantitative data in order to create feedback loops for the team to iterate and solution around. From this data, you can determine the most effective solution to the problem at hand. Testing can also give you new insights into your users and your problem, which can potentially impact your solution. Once you’ve completed this process, you may want to revisit certain stages of the process with any new insights you gained along the way. Keep in mind this process is not rigid – you can choose to reorder the stages to fit your particular problem, or repeat/eliminate certain steps depending on scope.

Putting This Process into Practice

These steps all tied in very nicely with the interactive element of the event, where we created a prototype for a better backpack. The audience was provided a business goal: Increase backpack sales for your company by 12% this quarter. Our first step to approaching this problem was to empathize with our backpack users. For this, Lacie provided some great data on how backpacks are used by the roboboogie team, and where they fall short as far as storage, features, and general usability. From there, we were able to define and reframe the problem to “Our users need a bag that is functional, versatile, and packed with special features.” Then came the fun part: ideation. We spent a few minutes jotting down ideas for how our current backpacks could be improved in terms of storage, style, versatility, technology, and WOW factor. Once we had plenty of ideas, it was time to prototype our new backpack. We worked in small groups to narrow in on our favorite ideas for the new backpack, and even sketched a prototype! All of the prototypes were wildly different, and amazing in their own ways.

Design Thinking at March Camp Optimization

From this stage, Lacie explained, we’d test our prototypes with our users, and use the test results to iterate and further improve our new product. The biggest takeaway from this event? Breaking the ice and working with others toward a creative problem solving was not only fun and memorable, but it was effective and we designed some backpacks that were way more interesting than one person alone could have envisioned.

Thank you, Lacie, for an interactive and informative event! Are you interested in embracing Design Thinking via a roboboogie-facilitated workshop? Contact us to get started.

Want to join the fun for our next Camp Optimization Event? Join us May 24th as Aaron Stusser, Ecommerce Manager at Yakima, talks about the importance of copy in making or breaking a conversion. Get a head start and RSVP today. See you there!

Written by Andrea Pappoff

Unpacking the Anatomy of eCommerce Shoppers: Flash Based Sales

Iconography panel showing bikes, cameras, shoes etc

The retail e-commerce landscape is alive and thriving. Statista anticipates a 246.15% increase in worldwide ecommerce sales, from $1.3 trillion in 2014 to $4.5 trillion in 2021. That’s a nearly 300% lift in online revenue in under ten years.

One of the growing trends in ecommerce is through limited duration, “flash” style sales. Promotions like “Daily Deals” and “Online Doorbusters” have proven to have a 57% increase in likelihood for an online shopper to click-through, according to Shopify. Entire websites are now dedicated to this style of shopping. Sites such as The Clymb, Beyond the Rack, Fab, Gilt, HauteLook and Jetsetter have crafted their commerce structure around this flash-sale based model.

At roboboogie, we spent over three years optimizing the web experience for The Clymb, and learned a lot about what makes this special breed of shoppers tick.

To help us better serve this customer base, we mapped the behavioral tendencies of the customer we uncovered through our test and iterate approach to design. We then categorized those learnings to develop our understanding of what makes up the anatomy of a flash-shopper in today’s commerce landscape.

Check out the four biggest characteristics we uncovered, as well as some experimentation recommendations:

  • Impulsive

    Make it urgent

    impulsive face icon

    “I get an adrenaline rush saving big on the brands I love.”

    A/B Test:

    • Copy variations and CTA tones that create a sense of urgency
    • Location and prominence of quality remaining indicators
    • Use, placement and prominence of countdown timers
  • Thrifty

    Celebrate the deal

    thrifty face icon

    “As long as I am scoring deals, I can justify any of my purchases.”

    A/B Test:

    • Order minimums for FREE shipping qualification
    • Location and prominence of promo codes in check out
    • Prominence and location of savings and discount messaging
    • Product bundling
  • Distractable

    Less is more

    discracted face icon

    “I hit all my favorites. If I don’t quickly find something I like, I move on.”

    A/B Test:

    • Methods and interfaces that streamline login and registration
    • Quantity and location of informational and branded content
    • Options for streamlining checkout process/flow
    • Location and prominence of cross promos and recommended products
  • Moody

    Right time, right place

    moody face icon

    “I shop in the morning to quickly scope the latest deals and again at night to browse.”

    A/B Test:

    • Time-based personalized messaging
    • Balance of urgency messages and helpful guidance
    • Various nevigation methods supporting various shopping modes
    • For differences in desktop and mobile preferences

Hopefully our learnings helped shine new understanding on your customer base – or your own shopping habits. Either way, we hope we’ve equipped you with some new tools to help create more happy customers online.

Have a different perspective about flash shoppers? Drop us a line!