Users, Not Customers by Shapiro Aaron

Author:Shapiro, Aaron [Shapiro, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2011-10-26T14:00:00+00:00

• The working engineer who was more of a specialist or an academic. He would want information targeted specifically to the niche in which he worked.

• The student who was looking for career guidance to excel in the field. She would want information on how to bridge the transition from academic to professional life.

• The support worker who went to the site to buy codes and standards. He would want easy access to the products he visited the site to buy.

This last one was ASME’s only existing user. The rest would be new. And the question was how to get the others involved. It chose to take a largely “complementary services” approach. It would attract its full breadth of members to the site and add value to ASME membership by making the destination a source of highly relevant and engaging content for all personas.

To achieve this goal, the site’s strategy for choosing and presenting the content would be integral to success. One tactic the team explored has been to put lighthearted content upfront as an entry point for professionals, students, and engineering enthusiasts alike. These articles would then be linked to other areas of the site with more complex information. The user can follow the links to the extent of his interest, all the while being exposed to headlines about the field at large and the significant role mechanical engineering plays in the world. “We want to tie things together—current news, developments in engineering, conferences we are having, books we are selling—so that people can see everything that’s going on across the field,” Maodza says.

Say an expert in tribology—which focuses on the friction between objects as they interact with each other in motion—went to the site for information relevant to his niche. On his way to his target content, he may come upon a story profiling a recent mechanical engineering graduate who consults for a television show that speculates about what type of historical fighters would win in battle such as a Spartan versus a Ninja. Or he could read a story featuring a compelling headline such as “Four More Bolts Would Have Done It, They Would Have Saved Us,” about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “We’re really pushing the organization to say, ‘A big engineering disaster happened, and here’s an analysis,’ ” Maodza says. “We want this to be a place where engineers can come, get information, and then have analysis and a case study to find out why these things happened. And students can come and find out about what they can do in the field, and why it’s important.”

All of the content would ultimately facilitate an online conversation about matters of interest to all members of the field and attract them to further engage with ASME. And this would undoubtedly support the organization’s higher calling.

The new product vision is scheduled to be released in phases over time; the first was launched in March 2011. But before the initial launch, and even though

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