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Amazoning The News > Five Rules for Net Engagement


That's where the 5 Rules Of Net Engagement come into play. These are the rules for enabling the five experiences that I just talked about. These rules are based on what the web does better than other media. Just as linear narrative is a tool of the print medium, just as montage is a tool of movies, these are the tools of the web.

1. Network - The web is the great distributed medium. It has no boundaries and it thrives on mass. Napster succeeds not just because it offers music. Its strength is based on its network. The more people who participate, the greater the value of the network.

2. Time and place - In old media, in print, you're pretty much limited to one time frame, the past. A newspaper is, in fact, an artifact, a snapshot of a certain point in time. But on the web, time is fluid — and it's a powerful tool. Time is information. And information is time, web consultant Mark Teflian reminds us. On the web, time can be both timely — up to the minute — and timeless.

3. Interactivity - This is one of great differentiators of the web. This is what web guru Jakob Nielsen means when he says that doing is more memorable — and makes a stronger emotional impact — than seeing.

4. Data - No where else but the web do you have the opportunity to provide so much data; it's literally limitless. You also have a plethora of different data types — such as audio, video and Flash files. Mining data and creating relationships between them is something the Britannica site does so well.

5. Personality - This is something people tend to forget about on the web. As we're all try to figure out the new rules, everyone ends up looking like everyone else. But when you consider the immensity of the web, the billions of pages out there and the ubiquity of information, perhaps the only thing that's going to set you apart is creating a personality: a tone, a voice that mirrors who you are. That's why successful sites have a personality, why Suck is different from Yahoo and Flowerbud.com.

So now you have 5 Rules of Engagement. And you are probably using one or two of them on your site. You may even be using all 5, but perhaps not in the optimum way. And that brings me back to Amazon.

Amazon is a site that has mastered the vocabulary of the web. It engages all 5 goals — share, entertain, create, inform and transact — and it uses all the tools: network, time, interactivity, data and personality.

It has a network of readers who offer reviews, and you always know what's timely and how old information is. Users offer not just reviews but their own Top 10 lists, that is, they interact. Amazon mines its deep well of data to tell you what's selling, what's not, how items are ranked. And as for personality, you always know when youÕre on an Amazon page.

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0  Pages
1  Web Storytelling
2  Five Web Goals
3  Five Rules for Net Engagement
4  Example 1 - NBA Story
5  Example 2 - News Story
6  Web links
7  Readers respond

0  Related on this page
•  www.useit.com
Jakob Nielsen's site is chock full of good ideas on what works and doesn't online.

 

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