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So lets start by saying that what we define as netnography is not meant to replace face to face ethnographic research but is designed to compliment it. Netnography takes the observational principles of ethnographic research and applies them to the social media space. At Face we have developed a powerful netnography methodology that uses both on-line consumer immersions with wider content analysis of consumer conversations that take place around a brand or product.

To bring this to life a bit more here’s a case study of Carphone Warehouse who have adopted Netnography.

Carphone Warehouse Social Media Immersion Casestudy

Pulsar: Face's Social Media Immersion Platform and Methodology

The team at Carphone Warehouse are on a mission to provide world class customer service and are adopting social media such as Twitter as a way of managing relationships with customers. To help them develop a strategy for engaging in social media Face started with a comprehensive social media immersion. Using our Pulsar tool we started by monitoring a bespoke panel of social media sources over a 1 month period to analyse the conversations around the carphone brand and category. From this data we were able to immerse the Carphone team by showing them who their key influencers are, the types of conversations they are having, the perception of their brand and their relative positive/negative visibility as a brand. This is what our client had to say about using this type of netnography:

“We already use Twitter to communicate with customers, answer questions and deal with any issues but decided to work with Face Wired because we wanted to engage more with our customers through social media. At The Carphone Warehouse we place the customer at the heart of everything we do and we realise that social media can help us with this. Face Wired have already provided invaluable insight into our current role within our consumers’ social media lives and the results are shaping our planning and informing our digital strategy”

Baby in the boardroom...not too far from the truth!

A driving principle behind co-creation is the idea that as consumers we want things to be done “with us” rather than “at us” or “for us”. It is a principle at work that will drive change across all aspects of our society. Today my blog covers briefly how it will change the way we work.

Changing the way we work

The next generation of youth are the co-creation generation – a group of consumers who are growing up used to wanting things done in a more fluid, collaborative and interactive way. This is going to change some of the fundamentals of how we work today, the way businesses are driven for example.

The area of Enterprise 2.0 is creating new internal communication models and processes that are making organizations more transparent, participatory and collaborative, supporting internal co-creation processes where employees influence the way the business is driven as peers.

For the new generations the whole idea of having to go to work for a corporation that is represented by a building in a fixed place will start to become less attractive. As will the way many corporations conduct their business day to day. If business is going to have to take place within these immovable structures then it is going to have to move more freely, more openly and more quickly. Gone will be the days of doing things in silos where one department; one group of workers or even one individual is not sharing what they are doing with others within the walls of the organisation and those outside it.

Don Tapscott in his book Grown Up Digital and Professor Urs Gasser in his book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives have both touched on this. In a recent article in the FT Tapscott urges business leaders “Listen to young people. Put them in the driver’s seat alongside you when designing work spaces, processes, management systems and collaborative working models.” In other words, be prepared to make big changes in order to unleash the power of these new employees. For the first time the “inexperienced generation” will be teaching the “experienced generation” how to shape their working lives in the years ahead.