August 6, 2015
As designers are you giving the audience ample opportunity to interact with your sites? Are you incorporating other avenues for online communication like social media that resonate with your audiences?
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Go back to Kietzmann et al’s honeycomb. Choose the top 2-3 blocks that you think are most relevant to your work in web design and online communication. Why are they so important? Are there aspects of the theories we’ve covered this semester in your honeycomb analysis, and if so, which ones?
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Within my professional sites, in addition to taking a “mobile-first” approach, we’ve tried to incorporate and integrate interactivity and engagement for our users. We initially included a “like” and “share” feature to all of our webpages, as well as including our own website review/comment feature where guests could write and share their own experiences with the product or park feature.
However, we removed the review feature from many of our sites in favor of moving to include other more widely used review sites, specifically TripAdvisor, which not only provides peer-reviews for our consumers when shopping for our product, but also an opportunity for guests to share their opinion and review, creating interactivity within our community, inspired largely by Uses and Gratifications.
With regards to Kietzmann’s honeycomb for my company’s websites, I’m a bit challenged as I feel the top two to three most relevant have likely changed or shifted over the past few years, as our own company strategies and directions have changed and evolved. However, these would be the current blocks:
Reputation – given the negative and attacks against our organization, what we do each day, and the treatment and care for our killer whales. As such, most of the new websites we’ve launched in the past 18 months have been designed to improve our reputation with potential guests and current consumers of our products. This has largely been driven by our public relations team and therefore the corresponding public relations theories.
Identity – our brands, overall, focus on the “real,” “authentic” experiences our guests can enjoy in our parks. Therefore, without our sites, we try to focus on that identity and how we can communicate this very specific point of difference to consumers that separates us from all other competition within our key markets. It’s this identity that we share and communicate. Because of the item above, which is why Reputation is higher in priority, we want full disclosure in how we take care of animals within our collection and while it’s not necessarily of a “personal” nature by our company directly, we have brought forward our best-in-class team members in our whale training team to share not just their professional, but personal experience in an effort to shift the dialogue and debate.
Identity, Interactivity, MMC6400, Reputation, Web Theory,