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USAToday.com recently relaunched with integrated social media features, and it’s caused quite a stir. Profiles, avatars, comments, and ratings are now sat side-by-side to the traditional content (albeit now digital) offered up by the newspaper, and there’s no getting away from it all.
Stowe Boyd said the features should have been phased in, or at least offered as an alternative to the traditional browsing experience for some period of time. But he’s also the CEO of Blue Whale Labs, a company which provides “Strategic consulting, design & development for innovative social applications”, and considering his background and expertise, I simply can’t agree with his advocacy of gradual or phased implementation in this instance. Would the users who opted out of the new features be happy once they are taken out of testing, and made mandatory across the site?
USA Today installed these features to further their on-line prescence - this isn’t just an experiment. Anyone who invests time and money into social media integration with their site will want to maximise their ROI (just as all the Blue Whale Labs clients will do), so why offer up the features as an alternative, when people will most likely switch them off? People don’t like change - if you’ve even glimpsed at the principles of change management you’ll know this back-to-front - but more often that not they need change. And in the case of USAToday.com’s latest redesign, could it be the readers must make use of the social media integration to further the newspapers own business, or even just to keep it alive? Afterall, Warren Buffett did predict newspapers both on, and off-line, would struggle to find a place in the changing information landscape, and Boyd is in agreement.
