CASE STUDY
Cision Communications Cloud
Cision’s Communications Cloud platform is a cloud-based SaaS product suite that empowers media and communications professionals to manage disparate systems, content, data, and analytics. Resulting from a merger of two of the largest players in the media intelligence community, the product incorporates the most valuable features of each legacy platform and creates a product that delivers a top-tier user experience.
I was the Director of User Experience and was responsible for driving design strategy for the platform and managing the design team members. In addition to my management responsibilities, I was very hands-on, leading the up-front human-centered strategy and touching pretty much every screen and feature in the product.
Business Problem
In addition to paid advertising, companies used what’s called “earned media” to connect with and grow their customer based. “Earned Media” is publicity and recognition that is is typically achieved through avenues other than paid advertising, by engaging people who not associated with the company to publicly mention them in a positive way. Historically, this was through established relationships with members of the traditional media (television, newspapers, etc.). Today, though, there are many types of “influencers” who promote their message across channels like social media, blogs, and other digital platforms. This influencer base is constantly in flux and hard to track. So, the problem becomes, how can companies effectively navigate this dynamic influencer ecosystem and be successful in their earned media strategy?
User Goals
In order for the business objective to be met, Marketing and PR professionals need to be able to accomplish their jobs. There are multiple personas for the product and a primary one of those is a media strategist with a variety of job responsibilities, one of which is managing outreach efforts to influencers. This persona, given the name of Jaquie, was particularly useful in determining what the product needs to be and do because she is a “mid-touch” end user, meaning that she is not an analyst who will be monitoring activity in real-time, nor is she a senior manager who only wants a high-level summary of results.
Solution
To solve this problem, we broke the larger, complex problem into the smaller goals that need to be achieved along the way. From there, we were able to define the key questions a user would need to answer at each part of the journey along with specific tasks they’d need to accomplish. This understanding was used to determine the key features and then roadmap them with the Product and Engineering teams. Some of the product screens for each of these parts of the journey are shown below.
Finding the right influencers
Intuitive search query functionality to find the best influencers for a particular purpose
Easy exploration of search results to more deeply understand each influencers and clear pathways to take further action (e.g. save to a list or send a message)
Contacting those influencers in a way that “meets them where they are”
Management of, and visibility into, team activity
Composing and sending messages across multiple communication channels through seamless integrations
Tracking responses to outreach
Evaluating the performance of sent communications including click-throughs, bounces, responses and other trackable interactions.
Monitoring frequency and sentiment media mentions
Visibility into media coverage trends, such as frequency and sentiment of mentions across traditional, digital, and social communication channels.
Analyzing the coverage, identifying trends and opportunities
Evaluating Return on Investment, determining what adds the most value
Reporting out to stakeholders, keeping everyone up-to-date on what they need to know
Culture
At least half of my daily interactions were virtual. My design team was spread across the east-coast, midwest, and west coast of the United States and our primary contractor partner was in Vietnam. The engineering teams were based in Sweden and North Carolina. We communicated through many different synchronous and asynchronous tools such as Skype, Google Hangouts and chat, Trello, and the Atlassian suite of products.