Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Dub, one of the world's leading online qualitative research software and support businesses, announces the launch of its new Twitter site for market research professionals.

'Researchers within agencies and in-house research departments are now adopting Twitter as their real-time information resource of choice. It's convenience lets researchers stay in touch with developments in the market research world with little effort, so we felt it was the right time to start connecting and sharing details of our research product development and international case studies' says Stephen Cribbett, Dub's CEO.

You can find us, message us and follow us @dub_research

Dub has helped it clients reach out and engage consumers in over 20 countries, 11 languages and 5 timezones. Our market research software platforms, including BulletinBoard, MyBlog and IdeaStream are supported by a range of essential services including moderation and community management, online research community building, research design and translation.

For more information, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7274 3327 or stephen@dubstudios.com

This week saw Dub launch two great new tools for qualitative researchers, namely bulletin board focus groups (BBFGs) and online market research communities (MROCs) solutions.

IdeaStream is our new online research community platform that combines  live, asynchronous and qual / quant market research tools. IdeaStream is designed to support communities of several hundred members anywhere in the world and has multi-lingual capability. IdeaStream has a range of task-based tools alongside those of a more open nature. Moderators and Community Managers (CMs) also benefit from the integration of our powerful moderation tool, Notes, which alows Moderators and CMs to collaborate more effectively on projects, manage community members within a single environment and share insight with clients and colleagues at the push of a button.

You can download an IdeaStream product sheet here, and request a demo here.

Knowing how much researchers love bulletin board focus groups (BBFGs), we've also released a new multimedia BBFG solution, aptly named BulletinBoard. It's been designed by researchers for researchers, and comes with all the features you'd expect such as text-based responses and moderation tools for deeper interrogation. It also offers some unexpected and powerful new features including multimedia sharing (pictures and video) and integrated polls and surveys. BulletinBoard also benefits from use of our Notes tool, so moderators can work collaboratively and document their thoughts and rate posts over time. This removes the need to scan everything again sequentially come the end of your project, and saves you valuable time, effort and, of course, money!

Get a copy of the BulletinBoard product sheet here, and you can also request a demo here.

If you'd like to find out more about IdeaStream and BulletinBoard, including standard rates,  then please contact Stephen Cribbett. In the meantime, you can register your interest and keep up-to-date with our news and new releases, including the soon to be released qual research-oriented journal and blogging solution, by entering your details on our homepage.

Added Value - part of the WPP marketing services group of companies - is the world’s leading brand development and marketing insight company with some 25 offices worldwide and a global client list that spans all categories.

 Dub have been working with Added Value for over three years, developing and enhancing a leading-edge digital insight and innovation tool that helps them to source the latest ideas, insights and opinions from consumers and experts around the world, without the need to bring together contributors - an activity that can prove costly and inefficient.  By both providing the social software and helping the client with some of the finer points of building and managing online communities, Dub has helped Added Value win more pitches, delivered more creative multimedia insight, and cemented its positioning as one of the leading industry innovators.

The platform, designed to support Added Value’s work - known as AV-id - makes use of micro-blogging, IM, forums, bulletin boards and media-sharing technologies, and harnesses the latest social networking behaviours to support live and ongoing dialogue among leading-edge consumers and experts from around the world. Added Value consultants are empowered with a unique moderation toolkit that allows them to interact directly with the community whilst sharing their thoughts and ideas with other members of the project team in both local and remote offices.

Driving actionable insight

By assigning members of the niche online communities structured tasks and activities, (of both a qualitative and quantitative nature), a stream of rich, multimedia insight and consciousness flows. Data visualisation tools such as tag clouds help strategists identify trending topics and emergent themes, and subsequently used to spot issues that require further investigation and probing.

Idea generation and collaboration innovation

Recognising that traditional research techniques can sometime be a one-way street, we worked with Added Value to develop a number of collaborative tasks and techniques that allow members of the communities to generate and share ideas, and then select winning ideas. This co-creation technique is widely accepted as a new paradigm that brands are quickly latching on to as they seek to enhance their innovation  capabilities.

Usability, training and adoption

Today,  many of us use social software in our own private lives, but relatively few are adopting them in the workplace to enhance productivity and, as in this case, support greater insight and connectedness.  Knowing this, we worked in partnership with Added Value on a rigorous education and adoption program for key Added Value stakeholders, including a regular series of global webinars and inspiration sessions. These sessions also provide the opportunity for valuable debate that feeds into the platform's ongoing development program.

The AV-id platform and  methodologies it supports are being deployed around the world everyday by Added Value, and in languages including Spanish, French, Polish, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Korean and Italian.

As well as being used to engage consumers and experts, AV-id is equally at home engaging internal stakeholders - marketers, R&D teams, designers etc - and creating internal innovation communities.

For Bel - a global food company - AVid was deployed to help marketers, R&D professionals and designers come together to create new ideas and innovative solutions to everyday problems they face.

To-date, brands including Pepsi Lipton International, Meetic, Tefal, Reliant Energy, and Barilla among others have embraced the AV-id approach.

We've talked about internal communities and using social networks to power business before, here, on this blog, and time and again we get pressed about the risk that these new informal, more open structures present, over and above traditional command-and-control models. Most commonly, people want to know about how they can tackle their security concerns and whether or not letting employees loose with social media will result in a reduction in productivity.

We've said before that by building an internal culture around trust, creativity and greater freedom will in fact enhance productivity, and allow people to shine. However, it's vitally important that you engage and educate your people first, then set some clear guidelines that they can follow.  This creates the right environment for people to thrive and a framework that supports better work practice and efficiency.

In support of these discussions are a few useful resources that we've come across. StopBlocking.org is a resource for those that vehemently believe that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Here you'll find a new report by Cisco Systems carried out among medium-to-large enterprises across ten countries. The establishes out that more than half of organisations sampled prohibit use of social media or collaborative tools, but that half of the end users admit to ignoring company policies prohibiting use of Social Media, with a further 27% admitting they change settings on corporate devices to gain access!

And finally, this is a great post containing Five Reasons Why Companies Should Not Block Employee Access to Social Networks. It speaks for itself really.

If you're still struggling to make the right decisions, why not drop me a line and let's get our heads together to determine the best approach for you and your organisation.

I don't normally do book reviews, but this one has just got me all wrapped up. See the strange this was that literally the moment I pondered  how interesting and inspiring a book about business by 37signals would be, they released one called Rework. I kid you not - it's like the book and me were meant to be!

As a quick intro for those of you who don't know 37 signals, they're on-demand web-based software legends who also just happen to be responsible for the programming framework Ruby on Rails. I refer to them as legends quite simply because they have an attitude and approach that sees them take on large global software businesses and win. They believe in simple, smart solutions that anyone can pick up and run with, and they don't try and do everything all at once, they just do most things, and do them well.

And so to the book. It's not a coffee table book or a heavy-weight management consultancy book - it's somewhere inbetween. I think of it as my lunchtime book, which is when I pick it up to inspire my daily business thinking. See we're a small business, and a relatively young one at that, hence you'll begin to see why I'm so switched on by it. The book guides you through the pitfalls of setting up a business by offering advice like 'Ignore the real world', 'Planning is guessing' and my favourite, 'Why grow'. It has a light-hearted approach, but delivers a lot of punch and practicality if you're running a business, thinking about running a business, or simply a budding freelancer.

I particularly enjoyed their banter about business 'start-ups' and exit-strategies, and how as business owners we shouldn't be thinking in these terms from day one, if at all.

What 37signals have also done well over the years with their Highrise, Basecamp and other solutions has been to generate interest with little or no-budget. How? By delivering a great product that people want, and that inspires them to spread the word. They've taken this approach to the book too, and are battling it out with Karl Rove's book here to become a number 1 bestseller. I say support the cause, get a copy and get reading - you're professional outlook (and business) won't be the same again!

A few of you have recently asked about our involvement with a slightly unsavoury story rolling out through the nationwide press. It involves the incetivisation of kids who are members of private online communities to market less-than-healthy snacks and food products.

While we can't comment on the story, we can make it absolutely clear that we are not the company in question, Dubit. We share three letters in our name, admittedly, but that's where the similarities end.

If you want to speak to Dubit, here are their details.

On Monday this week I visited the Social Media World Forum at London Olympia. It's in it's second year (I think) and growing, and hosts a series of conferences, workshops and a walk-around exhibition. This year the event was seemingly split in two; one half of the camp representing Social Media practitioners, including PR and SM agencies and SM monitoring specialists the likes of Yomego, Huzu (hi Graeme!) and the ever-provocative Nixon McInnes, the other half more focused on Enterprise2.0, including platform providers, cloud computing businesses and other specialists software service providers including Telligent, Huddle and Siteforum.

I went along with an open mind, not sure of the quality that would be on show, or the extent of the show. While it was only relatively small - some 4,000 visitors over two days - there was a healthy buzz, particularly around the Enterprise2.0 entity. So while PR, Internal Comms and Marketing people surveyed the Social Media room, more as a catch-up than a get ahead, the Enterprise2.0 room was demonstrating that business was finally getting its head around how to harness social tools for things like productivity, collaboration, KM and the like - the constituent elements in what we at dub label Social Business Design.

The reason we set about creating dub, and what is clearly lacking based upon my observations from the Social Media World Forum, is to offer clients impartial advice and support in helping their organisation not only identify which platforms - bespoke or off-the-shelf - they should consider as part of the solution, but also to help generate user buy-in, or as one organisation put it, carry out user diagnostics.

There are more and more useful and successful on-demand products and services available, yet few organisations fully understand how to get user adoption, and how best to tackle things like internal policy and compliance. Sadly, the stories that came out of the event demonstrated that these things are the biggest challenges, and the things that often require the greatest resource and budget in order to achieve any semblance of success.

So while dub can and does create bespoke social tools, we also work with clients to understand if there are social solutions readily available that can do the job, and then, more importantly, work with the 'people' so that they can identify what's in it for them, and how they can use it to help them with their daily grind.

(My next post will contain the excellent presentation given by co-founder of Huddle, Andrew McLoughlin. There's also an alternative view/review of the show through the eyes of my colleague Dan Miles here)

The opening day of the Social Media World forum was a mixed bag;  eager attendees and interesting talks, underpinned by appalling organisation.

For me, the underlying theme of the day was around integration and ownership of enterprise 2.0 tools. Helen Farrar of Virgin Media presented an interesting case study of their strides to embrace social tools over the last three years. Her statement that e2.0 tools MUST be fully integrated into existing company systems and processes to succeed really resonated with the audience. It was a point that was echoed by almost everyone who presented.

I asked her what the greatest challenge was in getting internal buy-in and she was refreshingly candid. Simply put it was fear. Fear of technology, fear of loss of control and fear of disruption. The solution she gave was equally simple – show people they’re being listened to and show that top brass are behind it.

This point was reinforced by Sonia Carter of AXA UK who gave a fascinating insight into the AXA e2.0 journey to date. As a toe in the water, they developed a vBulletin forum to act as an idea engine and to develop learnings across their three distinct businesses units. Adoption was slow until they put the CEO and another top exec into a live 2-hour Q&A session. Participant numbers rocketed, a server melted and this is now seen as the single most successful piece of internal engagement in the company’s history.

The thorny issue of compliance also raised its head here. The first incarnation of the community was developed at low cost and therefore rapidly implemented 'under the radar'. However, with its success came the need to expand and the need to adhere to corporate policy and create user guidelines. This took 12 months and cost over ten times the original community!

Which nicely epitomised the key take-outs of the day for me. To create a sustainable and successful internal social programme you need to:

• Spread the ownership - if only one department owns it, it will surely fail
• Engage stakeholders early and engage them often
• The objectives dictate the success metrics
• Look beyond the bottom line to measure ROI - think engagement/knowledge transfer/retention

Overall it was well worth attending and as with all of these events – you get out what you put in.

I don’t know the exact number of organisations that have experimented with social software or social media for internal communications, but from those that we’ve connected with and listened to it’s clear there are a large number of them that didn’t get the results they wanted because they didn’t know where to start or were unsure of how to build adoption. So if you fall into one of these categories, here are a few pointers that you may find useful.

More than just push messaging tool
First off, social tools (wikis, forums, tagging etc), and more importantly social networking behaviours, can be deployed to help information flow more freely, enhance knowledge sharing and internal collaboration, activate deeper employee engagement, and even has proven results in achieving staff retention. They shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as a replacement for those things you are already doing, and they should be seen as something more wide-reaching that simply a communication tool versed with message pushing!

Command and control no longer
The days of command & control are numbered as social tools place greater emphasis on people at all levels by providing everyone with a voice, whether they choose to exercise it or not. Therefore, their is no such thing as ownership - it is owned by everyone, and more so by those with a hunger, passion and willing to participate and contribute. This is heightened by the fact that there are less rules than before - but guidelines are vitally important nonetheless, as leaders seek to engender adoption.

Social networks are a solution, not a problem
There are a lot of organisations and business leaders out there banning the likes of Facebook and other social networking sites from the workplace as they see it as a threat to productivity. I question, is technology the reason that people want to do something other than what they are paid for within the workplace? Perhaps job satisfaction should be studied very carefully, as should the behaviours that are now commonplace among staff in their private lives, for it is this which needs to be harnessed in the workplace.

Host the conversation, it’s taking place anyway!
Business also fears that their workers will talk negatively about a range of work-related issues. To this I say embrace it, listen carefully, and if it becomes such a problem then let the community themselves report it and deal with it in a way they deem relevant. By offering these controls, you will find such negativity rare indeed! What’s more, these conversation are taking place elsewhere, so better to be able to gather them and respond to them in the best way possible.

Don’t be afraid to experiment (and fail)
When considering the use of social tools within the workplace, don’t be afraid to experiment, and we advocate starting small. Invite a number of people whom you believe will be early adopters, and allow them to spread the word. Make them champions within the business, and they will help culture the guidelines and behaviours that can achieve your goals. Social tools are by their very nature flexible and cost-effective, so create a playground, sit back, watch and learn.

A range of business applications and solutions
And finally, developing social tools for internal communications isn’t an initiative that should be led or driven by your IT department. Why? Simply put, they exist to implement now out-moded command and control systems, and are much more focussed on the ‘tech’ rather than the all important behaviours.

Wrapping up, social tools can help you with a plethora of business cases, including the following;

• Internal collaboration
• Knowledge sharing
• Business networking
• Learning
• Internal communications
• Resource management
• Sweating knowledge capital
• Sales support
• Customer service

If you’re asking yourself how you can achieve some of these points, and want to learn more how social tools can benefit your organisation on the inside then drop me a line, I’d be happy to help, advise, guide and get my hands dirty.

There's been some considerable buzz around location-based services for some time now, but thats mainly among us consultants. That was until the arrival of Gowalla, Google Latitude and especially the rapidly rising Foursquare. These applications allow you to connect and follow friends as they travel the world (or just your local postcode). They work by using the geo-data captured from your mobile device and then, in the case of Foursquare, get you to 'check-in' to the precise destination. Simple, fun, insightful!

We like Foursquare not only because it keeps us up-to-date with the movements of our friends, but it also allows is to discover new and exciting places to visit in cities around the world, thanks to our well-travelled friends. Perhaps more importantly, the service has massive potential for business owners - especially retailers and operators - in that users can be tracked and rewarded for multiple visits to destinations. This offers great opportunities for customer and brand loyalty schemes and deepens engagement with customers in the 2.0 way.

Best of all, Foursquare harnesses gaming mechanics to increase participation. Simply, the more you visit, the higher your points. Earn points for multiple visits to the same destination or be rewarded with Adventurer status when you check-in to new destinations.

Here's how points are currently awarded:

• +5 points for your first time checking-in at a venue
• +5 points for adding a new venue
• +1 point for per checkin, increasing by +1 with each checkin (e.g. your 1st checkin of the day is +1, 2nd checkin of the day +2 points, etc)

We've even witnessed meet-ups in Sydney and New York for those awarded Mayoral status! So what are you waiting for, drop by Foursquare, befriend me and then drop by Dub....we're waiting for you!