Disney, where I am this week, has a concept called a Moment of Truth. A moment of truth is “any time a guest comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression.” Note that it’s “an impression.” It can be good; it can be bad.

Why “guest?” Because guest is much more hospitable than “customer.” What “experience?” Because experience covers so much more than “service.” Service is important, but there are many other parts of the experience than just that.

Can you see how that opens up the game? Can you see how this position, this mindset gives you so much more to work with? Let’s just walk through it a bit, using a few examples: a hotel and then a small publishing company.

Guest Experience for a Hotel

Let’s break out the different phases of a hotel experience:

• Prospecting – guest wants a place to stay.
• Research – guest compares information for selection.
• Purchase – guest pays for a room.
• Arrival – guest reaches the facility.
• Checkin – guest secures room.
• Entry – guest steps into the room.
• Inhabitation – guest’s stay at the facility.
• Error handling – anything that goes wrong.
• Checkout – guest leaves the facility.
• Aftermath – any contact with guest thereafter.

That’s pretty much all of it, right? Now, how many ways could you brainstorm to make this better, if I put you in charge of guest experience design?

You’d start at prospecting, of course, because this is where you’d find new ways to share with your guest why you’re the right choice. You’d use listening tools to find potential guests talking about traveling to the locale where you have a hotel. You’d think of ways to make that prospecting experience better.

Walking through it, you can just see it. How would you improve the guest’s experience at check-in? What could you do to improve the “inhabitation” stage? What else?

It feels obvious. But is that just me?

Guest Experience for a Publisher

Again, let’s break down the components of the experience.

• Prospecting – guest wants information/content.
• Research – guest investigates possible sources.
• Purchase – guest pays for products (services?)
• Consumption – guest absorbs the information.
• Aftermath – any contact with guest thereafter.

Now, with publishing, depending on what kind it is, might have more than one kind of “guest.” If it’s a magazine, advertising sales might be another kind of guest experience. Finding authors/creators is another type of guest experience. We’d have to add other components. But you can do that without me having to type it all.

What could you do to design a better “purchase” experience, for instance? We sell magazines as annual subscriptions, and we sell books as a single unit purchase. Why couldn’t someone subscribe to a book? What would that experience be like?

There’s a context, a design, a sense of style that needs constant updating, and it’s a lot like paying dues. As companies stay current and intend to work with contemporary customers, their typography and colors and the like have to stay recent and fashionable (in most cases). We want to feel that a brand fits our time, lives in our moment, is something related to us.

Even “timeless” brands evolve their logos.

We can argue that looks don’t make the can. We can say that it’s the experience that matters, that what’s inside is what counts, but when we see logos or styles that seem old fashioned, they do stick out in our head.

Lower-case seems to be hot these days:

But that’s okay, too. Again, it’s like being sure to wear the current clothes. Several companies keep their designs current. We don’t ding them for it.

I think they had to do it. Was the fanfare necessary? I don’t know, but if you’re going to spend a lot of money tidying up your brand, how much more is it to get the word out there.

Some thoughts from the couch as I look at the side of a shiny new Pepsi can.

When you travel as much as I do, there are many opportunities to be in a situation where I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. I get lost in confusing airport terminal bathrooms some time (don’t laugh… much). I can’t operate certain pieces of equipment. The reason is always the same: poorly marked directions.

Think about this with regards to your blog or website. (I’ve talked about blog improvements before, so check that out, too.) Are you guiding people to what you want? If you’re selling something, do people know that’s what you want them to do? If you’re looking for more reader traffic, have you made it easy for people to subscribe at the end of every post? Do I know how to find the best material on your site?

Look at your site and think it over. Mark your site clearly and give people an easy path through it.

How are you helping in that regard?

Photo credit, Jake Liefer

People Want Information

Not marketing. When I go to Staples.com, it’s because I need a store locator, or the price of a USB drive. I don’t mind being sold potential values and bargains around the information I seek, but I sure don’t want to hear marketing-ese about whatever you think the summer value plan is going to be.

People Want Simple

When I go to GM.com, they give me three easy choices right off the bat: corporate info, vehicle info, and “experience GM,” whatever that is. That’s not bad, because they slot me pretty quickly, but the risk there is that the site is static, and definitely “cold” in color and experience.

People Want Connection

Want the real secret magic? People want to feel “seen.” There are ways to do that. One is something we do all the time on blogs: we comment back. Another is through polite (!!!) use of cookies to remember that you like things set up a certain way when you are visiting.

Further, people would like to connect with the people at an organization, not just through forms and chutes, but in as many ways as they can conceive. Know who does this well? Sun? Go to http://blogs.sun.com, and you’ll see that there are blogs to suit most every taste. That means, there are conversations to be had at lots of levels. Cisco and some other great tech companies are doing it. Are retail or consumer companies ready for this?

What do You Think?

You travel the web all the time. You need information from various companies. You visit sites to buy things, to learn about things, to make decisions. What do you think people want from your site?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

• Submit stories or parts of stories.
• Collaborate on other people’s stories.
• Comment.
• Vote.
• Add friends.

It’s nicely made, has some reasonably interesting features, and if you’re a writer, it’s worth checking out.

And Yet

I want more. I want lots more. No, don’t come comment on my post and tell me that it’s coming. It’s not your fault, but here’s the thing.

We have the baseline functionality of account, friends, comments, voting, etc. That’s all done. There are hundreds of implementations of it. We get it.

At this point, I want someone to get smart like the ZLoop guys and figure out a centralized social networking profile repository that permits us to have multiple iterations, depending on the network.

For a site about stories and writing, I want MUCH more specialized tools. Maybe a floating ajax thesaurus. Could there be a visual storytelling tool that lets writers branch the story in multiple ways like a choose-your-own-adventure book? I want mark-ups and overlay editing features so that others can come in and give you edits and annotation to your stories.

For a site about music, maybe it would be different tools. Come to think of it, Flickr should buy Aviary and roll Picnik in tighter so that we get specialized tools there, too.

I think professional networks have the most opportunity in this regard. Businesses and professional organizations need tools that go beyond what LinkedIn have offered to date. We’re actually looking into that at CrossTech Partners, researching toolsets and building use cases for how professional networks can evolve.

If You’re Developing a Network

Don’t stop at the basics. Don’t just give me another place to make a profile and add friends. It has to give me much more than that before I care. And I think I’m speaking for the user base in general at this point.

Consider what might really make the software valuable and useful. Consider ways in which your targeted users might want to interact. Specialize instead of generalize. Give us VERY specific tools. What would librarians find interesting? What would educators need to take time away from their typical haunts?

And as for YOU, what do you want in your specialized social network? What can you imagine being a set of tools for growing out your human relationships?

Love your thoughts on some variations on the theme.

Inspired by Jon Udell’s interview with Bill Buxton.