Archive for the ‘Co-creation’ Category

Online qualitative research is maturing fast, and there's a huge range of live and asynchronous tools on the market for researcher to use, including our own best-in-class asynchronous application, IdeaStream. But we're not posting this to discuss the merits of our own tools and apps, we want to learn more from you, researcher, as to what you like and dislike about the 'live' focus group tools you've used. What works, what doesn't, what are their limitations, what would you change or add given the chance. All these questions and more...

We're compiling some research into what you want from your live focus group tools. Share your views and opinions, and learn from experience of others. We'll be compiling a report of the findings and sharing them with valid contributors here at a later date, thus helping you can make informed decisions.

To join the debate, simply answer the questions below as comments to this post.

Q1: If you could design your ultimate live focus group tool, what would be the top three features you'd include?

Q2: Considering your experience of live focus group tools, what have been the least useful features, the ones you could live without?

Q3: What features do you get most excited about, only to find out they don't do what you expected of them?

Q4: What's the most common technical problem experienced by respondents during the live focus groups you've run to-date?

Q5: What features are most useful when analysing the data gathered?

When should you be using online qual tools?

I’ve spoken to a lot of researchers and agencies about online qual research this year, and while there are those that have quickly  embraced it and reaping rewards, most remain interested but hesitant.

I regularly meet the same obstacles…

‘I’m interested but when it gets down to it, I know where I am with a traditional focus group’

or

‘We just can’t seem to find a project where we feel it’s relevant to use an online methodology’

For me, this boils down to a misdirected comparison between online qual and traditional workshops and focus groups. Essentially, online qual is a new paradigm, with it’s own unique set of benefits. It isn’t simply a cheaper or easier alternative to face-to-face research methods.

At Dub we believe there are a few of the key objectives that drive the choice to use an online methodology:

1. Exposure and Reflection – do participants need to be exposed to stimulus before a live workshop, and do you want them to respond in a more thoughtful and creative manner?
2. Creative Expression – do you want participants to be more creative in their expression and response to a task?
3. Ethnography – are you looking to gather deeper, richer insights into the day-to-day lives of respondents, without a physical intrusion
4. Collaboration – do you want to work ‘with’ respondents, and allow them to assume the role of designer, innovator, tester etc, and have a greater role in the development of new products and services beyond validation

If you’re nodding right now and/or saying yes to yourself, then our online tools and methodologies will deliver inspiration results to your research needs and creative challenges.

At Dub we’ve been using online tools and methodologies to engage consumers and experts for a long time now. However, it’s the leading-edge consumers that are offering some of the most original, creative thinking and freshest insight possible using online methodologies. So we thought we’d share our thinking on why this is the case.

Authenticity and spontaneity
Leading-edge consumers - let’s call them LECs - are by their very nature the first to grab hold of new technologies and forge new behaviours. They are hyper-connected and most use mobile, internet-enabled devices to communicate all day everyday. This is the key - it’s second nature to them to share and communicate online more than any other group. As such, insights captured online are authentic, spontaneous - the communication behaviours simply aren’t being forced upon them.

Richer, deeper, more candid
By allowing LECs more freedom to participate how, when and where they chose, you give them license to flex their creative muscle and deliver content of the richest order. LECs are at-home producing their own video content of the quality you’d expect to see on TV, and when the pressures of alien environments are removed, their creative juices are unshackled!

Moments of truth / moments of use
LEC will have a variety of ‘capture’ tools with them at all times, so gathering their moment of use or moment of truth is ever easier. So whether its in a store, on the street or around the world, you (the researcher) will literally be with them 99% of the time.

A collaborative mindset
By removing frontiers and time differences, and creating cross-cultural collaborations to generate ideas and fresh thinking that is relevant globally. LECs are more comfortable exchanging ideas, views and experiences online. A large section of LECs are also online gamers, who’s skills, abilities and experience in large-scale collaboration are second to none. While many people view gamers as time-wasters, under the surface they are learning and developing collaborative skills that can be put to use in many ways, including their professional lives.

Standing out
To be noticed  and get your message across online you must have something be bold and outstanding, and be hyper-connected so that your message cascades quickly. This means being outspoken, taking risks and being creative, all aspects of modern design-thinking that feed positively into online idea generation.

To find our more about how you can engage leading-edge consumers and involve them in your business, contact Stephen Cribbett

Last night, a few of us from the office went along to One Alfred Place to listen to a presentation by Jemima Gibbons on her new book, Monkeys with Typewriters. The event was actually hosted by the Society for Organisational Learning (SOL-UK), and was attended more by academics and those in the business of Knowledge Management and Learning, than Social Media/Business/Software people like ourselves. This however was what made the debate captivating!

To in part quote Jemima herself, Monkeys with Typewriters sets about debunking the idea that social media are an amateurish distraction for today’s organisations. Having only seen snippets of the book at the present time, I can’t reassure you that the book actually achieves this, but what became evident was the progress and development in social media and social software that have been achieved since Jemima set about writing the book. Many of the chapter hooks such as co-creation, passion, openness and transparency have already been well document elsewhere, leaving the book feeling the somewhat dated. However, it soon became clear that this particular audience were naturally some way behind our own thinking and work practices

What I feel Jemima has done well is to engage and strong selection of web entrepreneurs, practitioners and industry spokespeople. This has allowed her to present many varied views of such topics as co-creation, openness and transparency, whilst hitting home the point that entrepreneurs of the future will create much flatter (non-hierarchical) business structures, and harness the power of ‘we’ thinking.

Among those interviewed include Scott Monty (Ford Motor Company), who’s view was that Ford is essentially a news organisation, Craig Newmark (Founder of Craigslist) who emphasises his role as a customer service manager, and Lloyd Davis (Tuttle Club) who states that if you can’t come to Tuttle Club because of work commitment then you simply don’t get it - it is work!

Perhaps my main take-out of the session was that of the perspective of the learning professionals present in the room. They were adamant that ‘learning’ will never take place in such an effective manner online as it does offline (or face-to-face), despite knowledge flow and information the internet puts at out fingertips. Learning clearly needs to combine the two within organisations, but must understand how, when and where to integrate the two, and provide a real purpose to the social tools that support it.

I tweeted snippets of the presentation here for you to view, and was astonished to even get a response from the Craig Newman himself as praised him for his beliefs!

(New things I learnt: Tuple and Panopticon!)

So this is a bit of a left-field use of 'the masses'. A group of people have decided that Star Wars: A New Hope needed a bit of a refresh. Seemingly unable to access multi-million dollar Hollywood funds, they have been forced to take a different approach.

Enter Star Wars Uncut - a chance for 473 people to collectively re-make their favourite film. The premise is simple - you choose a scene and 'claim' a 15 second chunk. You then have 30 days to make that clip in whatever way you want (animation, mobile phone video, CGI, whatever works for you). It's then uploaded and stitched together with the output of everyone else.

What's incredible, is that it actually seems to be working! The trailer is a work of genius in itself - lots of different people making clips of their favourite film, in a variety of ways.

I've no doubt, the source material helps. This film must be one of the most viewed and most loved of all time (that's a totally unofficial, unverified stat by the way). All this means the 'creators' are up for producing content with passion. And Kudos to the creators of the site for taking the time to set up a workable structure, interface and proposition, which allows people to participate.

Enjoy!

PSFK recently released Good Brands Report 2009, with help from a global network of brand, creative and communication experts.  The report was generated in response to the recently released "Super Brands" report. While an interesting review of top brands, PSFK felt that the report did not accurately reflect the global brands that were doing good in regards to innovation, environmental responsibility and
social collaboration. To counter the Super Brands report, PSFK created its own account of what we think are the top 10 "Good Brands" for 2009.
Key Findings

There are a number of common traits shared by the Good Brands. The list below provides some insight into what makes these brands special.

Utility - Aim to enhance your usefulness for the consumer. In doing so, look not only at your product or service, but the eco-system that surrounds it.

Experimentation - Constant innovation is the essential element of growth. Continual- ly push the boundaries of your offering and create ancillary products.

Design - Premium aesthetics coupled with consistent delivery wins every time. A premium experience can be applied to any product or service, no matter where it sits on the price spectrum. Make your audience feel valued, encouraging them to include you as part of their identity.

Community and listening - Create a sense of community for your customers. Actively engage them and listen to what they have to say. They are the best source of guidance for improved service.

Change the model - Look at your consumers’ eco-system of needs and change your business model to suit them.

Beyond the 30 second ad - Of the top 100 largest advertising spenders in 2008, none of them made it onto this list. Instead of spending money on advertising, leverage the existing community that’s involved with your brand to promote your products and services.

Environmental priorities - Brands in the lower half of the list lose points prizing innovation over environmental responsibility. Build in sustainable practices wherever you can in your brand’s eco-system.

You can download the full report here

We’ve recently had an international, multi-brand organisation benefit from using our web-based tools to gather ideas from their internal expert communities. It was a great project since a) the platform was deployed in a foreign language, and b) it allowed staff from all levels and various departments to come together to share their ideas. In effect, the brands were cross-fertilised and the resultant ideas were then opened out further for exploration, research and development by the relevant expert communities. Ideas were created and co-created by individuals and groups, thus providing a greater array and some more quirky, interesting thoughts.

This process of using staff to innovate collaboratively is fast becoming the norm thanks to the emergence of social media. What is especially interesting is that collaborative innovation provides a voice for all within the organisation, no matter what level they are. Young or old, Junior or Senior, Receptionist or Director - an idea can come from anyone, anywhere at any time.

Relative to this concept of providing your staff with a voice, and listening to them, Sainsbury’s - the UK’s oldest supermarket - has turned to it’s staff for help during these tough times. Justin King, CEO, needed fresh ideas to keep the supermarket ahead of it’s rivals. In a new Channel 4 program currently airing, King opened up the (shop) floor for ideas from his staff and gave a select few the opportunity to bring their ideas to life, to see if they could really make a difference.

In the first episode that I watched, a new employee of Sainsbury’s with a background in sales took to the floor and carried our face-to-face, or direct, sales. It was a hit, though it was clear that the personnel carrying out the sales had to be carefully selected. The lucky lady who came up with the idea and led the way is now in-charge of implementing the initiative across a number of stores as a further trial. Brilliant, bravo!

Organisations need to innovate during these tough economic times, and beyond. Collaborative innovation, and the identification of new leaders to bring it to life, is a strategy that should always be considered, given the right tools and support. Here at Dub we help our clients generate and manage ideas, spot the best talent and drive innovation using our proprietary technology and added value service. For more information, contact Stephen Cribbett

There's a new term in town doing the rounds, Voice of the Customer or VoC. It's what we at Dub use to describe what we do for our clients, and it is also a language that clients themselves are adopting as they seek to deliver Voice of the Customer Programs and 'listening' strategies.

Bruce Temkin neatly defines VoC in a blog post as 'a systematic approach for incorporating the needs of customers into the design of customer experiences'. He also outlines the five key levels of activities in a client's VoC program as being:

1. Relationship tracking. Organizations need to track the health of customer relationships over time. That's why companies often ask customers to fill out surveys — typically quarterly or annually — about their perception of the firm. Using this feedback, companies can create metrics that are simple to understand and easy to trend. Why is this important? Because an easy-to-grasp report card helps align everyone in the organization around a common purpose.(Note: I won't get into the debate between 'satisfaction' and 'NetPromoter' metrics in this post, but I'll definitely be touching on that in the future)

2. Interaction monitoring. Every customer interaction — from an online transaction to a call into the call center — is important. Firms need a way to monitor how effectively they handle these customer touches. That's why many companies do post-interaction surveys — asking customers for feedback on recent interactions.

3. Continuous listening. Structured feedback through customer surveys provides enormous opportunities for analysis. But one of the strengths of these approaches — providing data — is also a limitation. To avoid this data-only view of customer relationships, companies put in place processes for executives to regularly listen to customers. There are many opportunities to hear what customers are saying, such as listening to calls in the call center, reading blogs, reading inbound emails, and visiting retail outlets.

4. Project infusion. The following statement is probably not too controversial: Projects that affect customers should incorporate insights about customers. Despite the clear need for this type of effort, many companies lack a formalized approach for infusing customer insights into projects. To make sure that this doesn't happen, some firms are incorporating customer insight steps in the front-end of their Sigma processes.

5. Periodic immersion. Every so often, it's valuable for all employees — especially executives — to spend a significant amount of time interacting directly with customers or working alongside front-line employees. These experiences, which should be at least a half day, provide an excellent opportunity for the company to question the status quo.

In order to help deliver such VoC program, Bruce the following activities:

Relationship tracking. Survey customers at regular intervals on how they feel about the company. Use simple metrics such as likelihood to recommend, repurchase or switch companies etc

Interaction monitoring. Survey customers after key interactions to determine how satisfied they are both with the results and the processes

Continuous sampling. Sample front-line customer interactions in a regular basis by listening to call center conversations, reading emails, chat logs, or blog, or by visiting stores and branches.

Project infusion. Systematically include definitions of target customers' needs within project plans for tools like design personas and requirements documents

Periodic immersion. Periodically get executives to spend significant time interacting with customers and front-line employees

Dub's online customer communities are one method by which to listen to and engage your customers in conversation in order to gain a clearer picture of their shifting sentiment and attitudes. Social media technology allows large scale engagement to happen quickly and cost-effectively, and can be used to help extract insight, though there is never a replacement for our skilled human eyeballs!

Contact Stephen Cribbett if you'd like to know more about how Dub can help your business become more customer-centric.

Creating a universal set of metrics that can be used to gauge the success and returns achieved by using social media has long been a hot topic of debate, so to join in the debate we decided to visit Measurementcamp yesterday.

The event took place at Dare and was fronted by a very affable chap by the name of Will McInnes. The purpose of the collaborative initiative is to create open resources, be they guidelines, frameworks, metrics etc, which allow us all to measure the impact of social media online and offline. As Will put it, the initiative is un-owned and relies on feedback, hence this post.

The 2 hour event kicked off with some introductions among the nearest group of people - within which we had Beth Granter who later gave a presentation on work she had been doing at her agency The Good Agency, Claire the PR lady who has been working with Metia, and one other lady whose name escapes me but who I recall came from a job/recruitment site.

Next up were two presentations, one from Beth (mentioned above), the other from Robin Wilson, one of Measurementcamp's co-founders.

Beth walked us through her work with an animal charity (sorry, didn't scribble down the name!) and how specifically she used social media to a) Drive traffic to their website, b) Increase awareness of the charity and its campaigns, and c) Increase charitable donations.

Much of Beth's efforts were concentrated on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, with the likes of QDOS, Samepoint, FlickrStats and Google Analytics used to create reports and metrics that could be fed back to the client to validate the project.

The second presentation from Robin (of McCann) focused on his work with Durex, and in particular one of their newer female orgasm heightening products. The campaign was aimed at a) Increasing sales, b) De-stigmatising the category and c) Making Durex less clinical and more fun. The campaign was aptly titled 'Things that make you go oh'. Like it Robin!

Robin used three main constructs to report back to his client, namely Conversation Triggers, Conversations Created and People Engaged. Most interesting however was how he used 'reach' statistics to allow a direct comparison with his work and that taking place in other channels such as advertising and DM. The conclusion of this was that social media was twice as effective, though how much post-rationalisation that went on here is anyone's guess!

The big take-outs that I came away with from the session were:

1. There are lots of ways of measuring social media, though practitioners don't trust them all yet
2. Facebook still provides the most powerful vehicle to engage in conversation and build brand and campaign awareness
3. There is a need to create bespoke social media dashboards since each social media platform has its own and it can take a lot of time gathering the data up and wrapping it for onward presentation to clients
4. Their is often a delay from 'input' to 'response' that needs to be carefully considered when seeding content
5. Tracking sentiment is, and is always likely to be, very difficult due to its subjectivity. Get over it and move on!
6. This is an extremely young practice, and the many ways in which people are approaching it, from agencies to individuals, further supports this fact.

All in all it was a great event and I praise the co-founders' attempts to iron out some of the differences and negativity around social media. It is a powerful medium that should be considered as part of the mix, but objective planning is oh so important to truly understand whether or not social media can offer a solution. As both speakers bravely confirmed, their campaigns did not meet all their objectives, but certainly hit most of them. With shared learnings comes a stronger, more forthright approach. Onwards and upwards Measurementcamp!

Here at Dub towers we love the magazine WIRED. So much so that it's almost a pre-requisite to working with us that you read it! For those of you that haven't experienced it (why not!?) then you should take a look at the online version here, and see for yourself its coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics etc.

When my partner Tom and I joined forces, we probed each others ambitions to confirm that we were on the same line, and it came to light that Tom wanted to be published in WIRED, such is his adoration!

The Guardian have today posted a homage to WIRED magazine by way of a gallery of some of their most inspiring covers. One of the strengths of the publication has always been the manner in which it communicates often techy or dry information in an engaging and palatable way - themselves driving graphic design trends. If you enjoy the Guardian's gallery then why not create your own WIRED cover here, it's so much fun and they look great on your office walls (believe me, clients are impressed when they think that their agency has been featured in WIRED!)