Co-creation is about collaboration. It’s about working together to solve problems, uniting a range of perspectives and approaches to an issue. Very often this collaboration involves consumers working directly with professionals from inside and outside a client organisation, to define and create a range of outputs, from strategy to communications, from products to experiences.

Co-creation can help break the yo-yo effect of research and development, where clients go back and forward between creative agencies, research agencies and their audience. By working with your consumers, rather than directing stuff at them in the hope that it will stick, clients get a real sense of what works and what doesn’t as the ideation takes place. Ideas emerge, develop, are refined and validated in collaboration with your audience, in real time. No need to wait around for endless tests.

Why co-create?
Much of the growth of interest in co-creation as an approach and philosophy comes against a backdrop of dramatic changes in the communications landscape in recent years. The evolution of the internet has had an enormous impact on the way that businesses interact with their audiences, and vice versa. It is near-impossible to underestimate the extent to which social media has empowered consumers to voice their opinions, create and distribute their own content, and, as active stakeholders in the brands they consume, to set a new agenda for producer-consumer relationships, and in many ways the advent of co-creation is a corollary of these developments.

How?
There are, of course, different approaches to co-creation. The heart of the co-creation process we have adopted is typically a face-to-face workshop, but the ideal model involves a multi-staged approach to insight generation/opportunity shaping, ideation, validation and refinement. We often talk about reversing the research funnel, starting by consulting the crowd, moving on to work with defined online communities, then collaborating with an intimate group of co-creators.

Hello!

We are currently looking for an Digital Intern to join us and aid our community and development teams. To start with this role will last 3-months but there is potential for it to be extended.

The main responsibilities for the Digital Intern will be:

• Helping the community mangers with the day-to-day running of communities
• Website testing
• Helping with bug-fixing/troubleshooting
• Learning to manage research communities
• Assisting users with any issues they may have

This role is perfect for someone who has a keen interest in the online world and a desire to learn about communities, research and marketing as a whole.

The successful candidate will need to have good Microsoft Office skills (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), excellent written English (for blog writing), confident telephone/communication skills, a keen interest in social media, an understanding of how websites run and, in a perfect world, a basic knowledge of HTML.

To apply for this role you need to have access to Central London, our offices are based on Tottenham Court Road, and be available to work 5 days a week, 9am-5.30pm.

All travel costs will be paid for.

Ideally we are looking for a recent graduate or young person looking to get a start in the marketing industry. No experience necessary.

To apply for this position please send your CV & cover letter to – matthew@facegroup.co.uk

We would also like you to answer the following question in no more than 250 words:

What is your favourite online community and why?

Thanks,

Matt

A month ago, I was reading this excellent guide to getting beaten up on the Vice Magazine website. I am not a massive fan of violence, but the article gives an interesting insight on how real men, as opposed to Steven Seagal, should act when engaged in a duel: it’s all about cutting down the risks of damage rather than pretending to own a black belt in karate.

To a certain extent, I think this is applicable to the way brands (or institutions) should handle their online reputation. Think about it this way: whatever your marketing department plans to do, the team is outnumbered by the opponent: a crowd of angry and opinionated internet users. From the moment you publicly expose your point of view (it can be a blog, a video or a whole campaign), you must be ready to engage in conversation with your audience, including debate, non-agreement, parody and a bit of fighting…

So with all this in mind, I introduce to you…

The Face Guide To Getting –Safely- Beaten up
on the Internet:

1. Get ready for a worldwide blast: everything spreads on the internet

The internet is the perfect medium for spreading good, funny or tragic multimedia content. So be aware that whatever is on the internet, has the potential to spread everywhere.

For example the case of Pepsi’s “Suicidal Calories” campaign: Pepsi launched a very targeted campaign for a niche anti-establishment German audience (ads for one magazine only), involving a poor Calorie character feeling lonely in a Pepsi Max can and attempting to commit suicide.

Obviously, the content spread very fast (especially the design of the campaign, which was pretty nice) and led to a massive reaction from offended audience members worldwide. Pepsi, are you really making fun of suicide?

2. It’s okay to make a mistake. Just make sure you apologise.

In the case of the Pepsi Suicide controversy, the other very good lesson learned is that it is okay to make a mistake as long as you publicly acknowledge it. B. Bonin Bough, PepsiCo’s Director of Social and Emerging Media and Huw Gilbert, Senior Manager for Communications at Pepsico immediately responded to the buzz and presented their apologies on Twitter directly to users.

The great lesson is that “With social media, this is all it takes – show your users and critics that you’re human and can make mistakes, but you’re listening to feedback” – Cheryl Gledhill, moltn.com

3. Faster faster faster: working on your reactivity is key.

I think the previous two points lead us nicely into speed: to effectively deal with online uppercuts, you better be very fast – it’s a matter of a day or two.

The Web is the fastest form of any media, you have to be reactive: catch any buzz on the internet and respond to it. Things can become massive instantly. If you’re not reactive you may find yourself added to the “case studies” of social media failures. For instance, Nestle’s well-documented struggles on their Facebook page are now referred to as the “Nestle controversy” and are probably going to be studied by business school students for years to come.

If you catch and tame the buzz quickly the effects will be a lot less painful than if you are slow… or do nothing at all.

4. No shortcuts and no cheating in the exchange (even if it hurts)

It is such a simple piece of advice but brands still don’t seem to get it. Do not remove comments. Unless it’s useless trolling or spamming, every comment must remain on the public space as you are engaging in a conversation with your audience.

As Kris Colvin explains in this article: “The spotlight is on YOU when someone is calling you (or your company) out, and you are being watched to see how you will respond. “

The fact is that if you cheat in the conversation, fatally a few users will spot it and pass the word on (rule number 1!) and the brand will be even more damaged. Transparency is key.

5. Blood spatters can’t be cleaned up without getting your hands dirty

It is not possible to delete your online reputation and start again; you can only rebuild it. Many companies with bad e-reputations panic and buy “instant cleaning packages” that contain a smart mix of SEO, backlinking, content production and lawyer fees, as good as this sounds it doesn’t delete users memories or create miracles.

Your brand cannot have a good reputation without dirty hands: you have to be present, relevant and engage with your users routinely. It’s also important to build one-to-one relationships with your audience: as we’ve seen with our communities Headbox and Mindbubble if users are interacting with brands within the social space (facebook, twitter or website…) it’s because they want a direct relationship with their favourite brands.

To conclude, if a few battles are lost, keep on fighting the war. Most companies are now aware of the impact of social media on their business. For the record, in the Nestle case, and as Dennis Howlett shows in his analysis, the Facebook disaster didn’t produce any direct effect on the company’s results. However it has been a great example of social media leverage and a great illustration of user power, influence and sovereignty in the social space.

It was a very insightful evening that allowed both sides, clients & agencies, to have an informal discussion about the pros and cons of engaging with fans online and best practise. From the Face side of things Francesco and I were joined on stage by 10 Headbox & Minbubble members who had sent in videos explaining which brands they were interacting with online and why. Check out our presentations and the video below:

There were three other very interesting presentations from Andrew Davies (Thrudigital), Ian Green (10 Downing Street) and Craig Harries (Farm). A full write up from the evening can be found on the Co-creation Hub website where you can also find all the presentations from the event.

There will be more Hub events coming up soon and we look forward to seeing you there!

Stumbling into Paddington station at 6.30am is not usually something to get excited about. However, on this particular Friday morning there was a tinge of anticipation in the air. As I navigated myself around the station and checked the boards for the next train to Oxford I bumped into Francesco and Sharmila who would be accompanying me on this latest Face adventure.

After we all got heads in gear and boarded our train, it was laptops out time. We knew we had a expectant and well informed audience awaiting us so there was minimal room for error.

On the eventful 1 hour train journey we managed to make all required tweaks, run through our presentation, eat breakfast, listen to a new mix on Francesco’s iPhone and get told off for making too much noise in the carriage… nice.

Before we knew it though, we were there, Oxford, the home of academia, Morse, Radiohead and Martin Keown. After taking one step out of the train station we saw our final destination, the unmissable pale brick hub of future commerce that is Saïd Business School.

A couple of months earlier, Francesco had been approached by Professor Catherine Dolan, a lecturer at Saïd, and asked to take one of her MBA Customer Insights classes, focussing on co-creation and research communities. Within a flash Francesco accepted and plans were put into to place to adopt a quite experiential approach.

Since the topic was basically how to generate insights in a collaborative way, we decided the students should be experiencing first hand what it means to run, and be part of a research community and get a taste of face-to-face co-creation.

With this in mind, prior to the class we opened a 2-week research community for all the students to participate in. The class would be split into 8 groups with each group focussing on a different type of drink and being assigned their very own task.

The groups and tasks breakdown looked like this:

• Group 1: Tea – Mobile Status Updates
• Group 2: Ready-to-Drink cocktails – Idea Generation
• Group 3: Wine – Video Diary
• Group 4: Craft Beer – Poll
• Group 5: Cider – Visual Lead Task
• Group 6: Champagne – Discussion
• Group 7: Energy Drinks – Debate
• Group 8: Lager Beer – Diary

All of the students completed all of the tasks; they then took the results from their specific drink task and analyzed the results. Following this, they were asked to create a presentation that contained their drink analysis and also, their opinion on the pros and cons of online research communities. They would then present their findings during the Face lead lecture.

At the point of entering the beautifully spaced, Dixon & Jones designed building the online research community was already finished and the students had done a sterling job. We were greeted by Catherine and taken through to our lecture theatre. As a humble 2007 graduate of the University of East Anglia this was a little surreal to say the least. I joined Face in the same year I graduated, and when I walked into the lecture theatre about to present to Oxford students it really hit home both, how far Face and I had come over the last 3 years.

As the students entered it was time to present, Francesco was up first. He took the students on a journey through the world of empowered consumers, netnography, the evolution of the internet and the ways businesses and brands are looking to take advantage of the technological advances available to them. Following this we talked with the class about real-time research and how brands need to try stay in front of their consumers rather than chasing them.

Sharmila then took the students through how Face make sense of all the information Francesco had given them and what exactly we do to contain it within a process that is robust, manageable and keeps people at the core. She explained the pros & cons of crowdsourcing, online communities, Peer-2-Peer research and co-creation before revealing our approach and what makes it work so well for us.After a short break it was then the students themselves who took the floor and feedback what they had learned in the online research community.

Francesco (slides 1-38) and Sharmila’s (slides 39-end) presentation…

All the presentations we saw were fantastic, as expected, and the analysis very in-depth (bearing in mind they only had one task to work with each!). The students understanding of research communities was outstanding considering the small amount of time they had been exposed to the technique. Both the Face team and Catherine were very impressed with the outputs we received and we have taken a lot of them onboard as we continue to tweak and improve our research communities.

As the students settled back into their seats it was time for yours truly to step up. My presentation was a brief introduction into the world of online communities, with a more in-depth look at research communities and community management. I had to whizz through it due to time purposes but it was an excellent experience letting the great business minds of tomorrow know all about what I do. Hopefully they learnt something!

My Presentation to the class…

The final activity we did with the class was a practical exercise to show, on a very small scale, how co-creation works. Borrowing an exercise from Stanford University (that we edited a lil bit) we asked the students to work with their partners and design the perfect wallet.

Using co-creation techniques the teams of two worked together generating ideas, sharing insights, building on thoughts and ultimately designing a wallet that they would be proud to own. After all the groups had designed their wallets, it was voting time.

We asked all the students to vote for their 3 favourite wallet designs. Due to quality of the output this took quite a long time but by the end of the voting phase we were left with three clear winners. The designers of the most voted for wallets were than asked to take centre stage and pitch their idea to the rest of the class. All three groups performed admirably, detailing every aspect of their design and thought process. As the students took their peers through each wallet it really hit home how far co-creation can take you in such a small space of time.

With the wallet exercise at its conclusion and everyone exhausted after 3 hours of Face fun it was time to call it a day. We thanked the students for their hard work, both prior to and during the class, packed up our things and made our way back to London.

Living inside the Face bubble sometimes it becomes easy to forget that what we do is unique and cutting edge. Getting out of Midford Place and sharing our thoughts and methods with young people eager learn is always a brilliant experience, but presenting your passion at Oxford University really is next level.

On behalf of myself, Francesco, Sharmila and the whole of Face I would like to say a massive thanks to Catherine Dolan for giving us the opportunity, Marie Johnstone-Louis for her help and the whole class for letting us come and talk to you, I’m sure we’ll be meeting you again very soon… in the world of work!

So, how did we go about finding out about the lives of this demographic? We commissioned nine people, aged 16-24 to make films about what their lives are like in the year 2010. In addition, we also ran an online community with our Headboxers, and posed the question: “If you had to leave yourself a message for yourself in 10 years time, to remind you what it feels like to be your age in 2010, what would it be??”. From both, we discovered a wealth of information about this demographic, and it’s clear that, whilst many things about being young stay the same, a lot of other things are also changing.

It proved an incredibly enjoyable and thought provoking night, which gave many people a lot of food for thought. On a side note, this was Face’s first foray in using Prezi. However, it most definitely won’t be the last. Whilst still a work in progress, it is clear that a lot of potential lies in using Prezi as a presentation medium.

Check out the Prezi for the night without video clips below, if you would like to see the full presentation and check out all the media from the 9 Lives project please head over to out 9 Lives site – Click Here

Part of the reason we are sitting on a time bomb is the consumer landscape we operate in on behalf of our clients is changing very fast. We all know that Web 2.0 has given consumers the confidence and the ability to take more control of the relationship they have with brands. Or put another way, Simon Clift the ex CMO of Unilever said recently in an FT article “we (Unilever) are behind our customer and that is a very uncomfortable place for us to be”

Many of today’s brands and companies are struggling to keep up with their consumers. One of the main reasons for this is because of fast changing technology and what this allows consumers to do in terms of their interactions with each other, the brands, products, services they consume and the speed with which they are able to do so. A good example is the launch of the recent Xbox Kinect where the screen becomes the interface and the impact this has on TV participation is limitless. Similarly the introduction of flexible screen displays that are so supple, so thin and light you can carry them where ever you go while consuming almost zero power could only be a few years away. So, the big question from all of this, and the one we are constantly asking ourselves at Face, is what does this mean for the research industry, and what do we have to do to help our clients get and stay ahead of their consumers.

The answer to this question in its broadest sense is “Plus ca change c’est plus la meme chose” – or “the more things change the more they stay the same”. Change is the only constant and these are the five things we need to do in order to deliver on this mantra:-

1. Must be fast, agile and deliver insight in a continuous way
For the first time there are huge amounts of qualitative data about our customers that we can access in real time, on the web for free. Using our proprietary tool Pulsar we are able to observe and to listen to what consumers and customers are saying on the web about a particular brand/product/service. It is not just being able to see what is being said where, when and by whom but also being able to measure which conversations (and so who of your consumers) are having the most influence. This also helps us to identify your 1%ers.

2. Must adapt skills
The second is that as researchers we need to adapt our skills to meet the new demands… netnography – our ability to combine ethnographic research with the tools available on the web is a good example. As a business it also means we need to recruit different types of people with the skills that meet these new demands as well as train our current employees with these new skills.

3. Use technology to lead
We need to lead in the use of technology to help us become quicker and more responsive in the ways we gather insight about our clients’ consumers. And this does not mean replacing human analysis – to the contrary, the role of the researcher has become even more important than before because of the need to find real quality from the huge quantities of data that are out there – it is the combination of both on-line and off-line approaches that deliver deeper, richer and more meaningful insight.

4. Introduce new tools and methodologies
This means we have to keep challenging the way things are being done now and look to new and different methodologies that make the most of technology to help meet the challenges of the fast changing consumer landscape. At Face we have inverted the traditional research approach of starting with qualitative research and then going to quant by starting first with large numbers of consumers and then honing things down in a more qualitative way. To do this well it is vital to integrate on-line and off-line methodologies within that process because it produces more ideas of higher quality.

And this means changing the role of the consumer – treating them as active equals in this process; giving them as much responsibility with direct involvement throughout the entire process separates Co-creation apart from more traditional research/marketing methods. As a result it is proving a more robust process than other approaches clients have been using.

5. We must keep innovating
Face’s journey started with the launch of Headbox, a year later we launched Mindbubble, six months after that we launched Pulsar and later this year there is more to come…

If we do all of the above then we will ensure that we continue to help our clients stay ahead of their consumers and we won’t be caught with the proverbial time bomb going off in our hands.

Check out the presentation that I gave at the Cello Annual Conference:

Changing Consumer Landscape

This is to be expected as the consumer landscape is changing fast. It is common knowledge that the advent of Web 2.0 has given consumers the confidence and the ability to take more control of the relationship they have with brands. It has given rise to the term “empowered consumers”, a new breed of customer who have a strong belief not just in their own voice but also in their own creativity, ideas and self-expression. It is no longer about what your brand does to the consumer but what consumers are doing to and with your brand.

Impact on Financial Services Industry

This trend manifests itself in the Financial Services Sector in a number of ways. The first is that the empowered consumer of today sees openness as key to building trust and accountability with the brands they engage with. This is critical for banking brands where events from the last two years have seen trust and fairness eroded. This has been picked up by the FSA’s ‘fairness’ objectives where banks are now being tasked to provide fair products and deal with customers in a fair way. Secondly there is a drive to streamline consumer interactions and make customers lives easier by combining products. The social web will have a big impact on financial services marketing, sales and business communication processes with demand from consumers for new service designs and interfaces. This will enable consumers to draw upon a wider base of advice from places such as twitter, opinion aggregators and financial forums and will lead to real time customer service becoming a top differentiator. And finally customers are moving away from conventional advice channels (IFAs, banks) and moving more towards peer advice because social media has made this possible in ways that were not there before.

New Rules of Consumer Engagement

All of this calls for a new set of rules for consumer engagement and requires the industry to look outside its own category to the world of FMCG and Technology to find better ways of involving consumers in the research and innovation process. And they won’t have to look too far or too hard as the idea of co-creation – doing things with people not at people – has been embraced by the likes of Unilever and Nokia for a while. Co-creation takes consumer involvement to another level by bringing brands and consumers together on the same level and involves consumers at the beginning of the process rather than at midway or at the end. This can take place in on-line communities or offline in workshops or both. It is through our co-creation communities for young people namely Headbox and for women aged 25-50, namely Mindbubble that we have been helping Unilever to co-create a range of new products. The most exciting example has been our co-creation of Axe/Lynx’s 2010 variant in terms of both the product and also the fragrance – something that has never been done before – which was launched globally earlier this year.

Some important guiding principles

As with all new approaches though there are some significant lessons that we have learned along the way. The first is that when you are bringing leading edge consumers together with brands it is vital to have a coherent and well structured process that gets the best out of your combined creativity so that it delivers better outputs. The second is that within this structure it is important to have a mix of online and offline methodologies because they produce more ideas of better quality and are able to involve consumers more quickly in what you do. It is why we have inverted the traditional research approach, starting the process by gathering quality insight from thousands of consumers rather than just a few. Our proprietary tool Pulsar has allowed us to listen and to observe to what consumers are saying in real time on the web as well as measure the influence these conversations are having. Being able to combine qualitative and quantitative research in this way means we are able to help brands respond much more quickly to the speed, volume and quality of consumer interactions that are taking place with their brand, product or service.  And finally the role of the consumer is critical; treating them as active participants in this process and giving them as much responsibility with direct involvement throughout the entire process. If the Finance Industry wants to stay ahead of their consumers and the fast changing landscape they occupy then they would be wise to adopt the principles and philosophy of co-creation.

According to the IMF emerging market economies will contribute 70% of the worlds economic growth by 2014. In fact Brazil, India ,China & Russia (BRIC) represent the vast majority of this growth while in comparison the G7 nations including US, UK, Japan, Germany, Canada, France & Italy will only achieve 13%. In fact when you look at data for most categories it is clear that compared to the developed world emerging markets are experiencing massive growth. For example Euromonitor data shows that while the soft drinks market is declining by 10% in Western Europe India is seeing growth rates of 15% and Argentina is growing by a massive 25%.

Clearly there are big opportunities for brands to take advantage of this growing consumer demand by launching existing and new products – but of course it is not that easy.

Take Kelloggs as an example who in 90’s launched Cornflakes into the 900m Indian consumer market with a modest ambition of gaining 2% share which if achieved would be bigger than their existing US sales. However it bombed badly Cornflakes achieved just £7 million worth of sales in 3 years. Kelloggs failed to understand that in India breakfast is a religion! It is freshly prepared in the morning predominantly hot and spicy, plus milk in India is always boiled and consumed hot which has the effect of making your Cornflakes soggy and horrible to eat.

Pampers also had a difficult start when they launched in China in the late 90’s with a cheap plastic version of their US product. Again this giant brand was arrogant and failed to understand that Chinese parents brought up their children differently. They potty train them by 6 months and that they care so much about softness of their skin they do not put their children in nappies at all preferring to use a kaidangku… see below…

From our experience working in these markets it is crucial that marketeers discard their western lens and avoid the temptation to see npd process as just an extension or replication of their current business. Put simply you need to invest in developing deep consumer and cultural understanding.

This is why co-creation with consumers is so useful when entering an emerging market.

Cultural Immersion - by working directly with consumers in emerging markets to develop npd concepts global marketeers quickly understand the values and motivations that drive purchasing decisions

Language & Codes - when marketeers start to bring early product concepts to life with consumers it is incredibly useful in uncovering the tone and cultural codes that will appeal and just as importantly those that will turn off consumers

Brand Positioning – co-creation with consumers is a very effective way of exploring what role a brand can play in a new market helping to answer key questions: what new products can it accommodate? can this brand work across socioeconomic groups? do we need to localise the brand in anyway?

Product Stretch – innovating with local target market consumers enables marketeers to understand how well existing products will resonate in local markets and can help tweak and refine features and packaging to optimise them for the new market

For more information on co-creation and emerging markets take a look at these related articles:

• What Is Co-creation & Why Do It?
• New Things Are Afoot @ Face
• Face in Business Week – Co-creation: Not Just Another Focus Group
• Axe/Lynx Co-creation Case Study – The Sweet Smell of Success

Whenever a community is setup there is a reason for it. There is a predefined output that is desired and it has been determined that an online research community is needed to gain that output. It is now up to you to work out how you are going to make your goal a reality.

The traditional way is to break your desired output down into as many tasks as you think you need to reach the your target. Now this is all well and good but what exactly is a task and how exactly do they help you to get where you want to be?

What is a Task?
In very simple terms a task is a question/project/challenge you set your community members to complete.

Building your tasks up and making them interesting, engaging and practical is vital to making sure your community is successful. Tasks represent your interpretation of the client set brief; they are your way of achieving the desired output. Tasks are critical to getting relevant feedback and need to be crafted with care if you are to achieve your community goals.

This is why I believe a task can be anything and everything you want it to be.

Every community is different, therefore, the tasks within that community are going to be different every time. You as community manager in collaboration with your research team need to make the call on how you think your tasks should be planned out and how they appear to your community.

The format of your tasks take depends on a few key factors:

What your community software is capable of

How creative you want to get with your tasks

What you want out of the research

Most community software has basic web 2.0 tools – message boards, diaries, blogs, polls etc and it is really easy as a community manager to let these task formats to take president when writing your task plan.

Hatching Your Plan

If a research community were a body, the task plan would be the brain. Pumping out direction to the community via the community managers (who are the heart of the community, if you were wondering!).

The task plan binds the research and community elements together and sets out exactly what you want to get from the activity. It is the lifeblood of everything you do during the research and if it isn’t properly considered the success of your community will be seriously under threat. Traditionally researchers write the task plan but if you want it to work for a certain community it should be written with the input from community managers.

A task plan consists of a set of tasks that you are going to ask your community members to complete. A good task plan will make it clear to the users what they are being asked to achieve and it gives the community managers guidelines of what they need to gain from the research as a whole and each task individually.

As we have already stated your tasks, and therefore your task plan, are going to be different every time but there are certain things you will need to consider every time you begin thinking about a new task plan:

Who are your users? Where are they from, how creative/tech savvy are they? What do you think they will and won’t react to?

What output do you need from this community and the tasks individually, how are you going to get what you want?

How can you make the tasks flow as a journey that the users are a part of, how can you make what you’re doing exciting for them?

Do not funnel users answers before they have even begun to complete your tasks, it is easy to steer and guide users subconsciously. By all means give them examples of how you would like them to answer but stay neutral.

What can you do to stimulate your community members, too many words = boring, how can you liven up the tasks with visuals?

It is really important that you and the approach you want to take is enforced on the tasks you want users to complete. Your creativity and vision should be driving force behind the task plan, not the task formats.

Don’t Pigeon Hole Yourself

A lot of the time creativity and creative thinking can get lost as you are too busy trying to pigeon hole your tasks into a certain format. It is the ultimate sin as a task writer to start off by setting out how many of a certain task format they want to have in a research community.

To really achieve your output you need to build your tasks freely and without the constraint of different formats.

Write your tasks first and then when completed to the standard you want, apply the suited format. Things like message boards, blogs, diaries etc are very open and adaptable, you should use them to fit around your tasks not the other way round.

Moderate Everything

As a community manager you are the closest point of contact to the community. You are closer to it than research teams, clients, stakeholders and the community users themselves! You know what is good for the community and what is not, you know what they will react to and what they won’t; this is why you have to be a moderator of tasks and content as well as users.

If you do not think a task is right for the community let the research team know, and give them advice on how to adapt/change it to make it appropriate for your users. Do not be afraid to let researchers know if you think something needs to be tweaked, they will be happy for the input, as it is their results that are being enhanced.

The role of researchers, community managers, clients and users is something I am going to explore in my next blog:

Writing Tasks for Research Communities –  The Role of Everybody

Coming Soon!

It’s Face Forum time!

After the fun and heated discussion at our last forum (Do Brands Really Need Agencies?) we thought it was time to take a step back from the business world and get the people who really matter involved. The title for this forum is:

‘9 LIVES – how does it feel to be 16-24 in Britain today?’

Over the last month we have been working with members of Headbox (our online community of 16 -24 years olds) to discover what is it is like to be aged 16-24 in 2010.  What is important to them, what pressures do they face, how do they feel about the future and, most importantly to you, what does this mean for brands? All of this is brought to life through Headboxers videos, pictures and words.

The event promises to be incredibly rich with an opportunity to discuss the topic and findings. We are holding the event on Tuesday 22nd June at 6:30pm. There will be plenty of beer and wine flowing and we’ve checked to ensure the night doesn’t clash with any England games!

If you would like more information on The Face Forum and would like to come along please email lucy@facegroup.co.uk

Are the days of online anonymity over?

Last week, the new paid for site for The Times and The Sunday Times have been launched. Many many lines have already written about whether this is a good idea or not. However, one of the things that has been most interesting about the new sites, are that they will not allow anonymous or pseudonymous names to be used when comments or messages are posted.

The Independent is now following in a similar vein, stating:

So we have changed our logins to encourage comments from individuals or even official bodies using their Facebook or Twitter accounts – with other options for Yahoo or Open ID log-ins. There is also a Disqus option, where your account must be validated through your e-mail.
Independent, 24th May 2010

The rationale behind them is to encourage community dialogue, and limit the level of cruelty that is readily in evidence on many sites where anonymous and pseudonymous names are allowed (anyone who has trundled through the various commented on posts on The Guardian would probably agree).

On a wider level, does this force online commentators to become responsible for the words they broadcast? For a long time, online discourses focused on the freeing nature of anonymity that could be afforded to people online. In the early online days, this presented a landscape where people could play at being someone else, and put out whatever they wanted to online. At the end of the day, this wasn’t you, it was just an online construct.

However, this argument has begun to feel increasingly dated over the past few years. As the internet has become a normalised channel for communication and conversation, the idea of this existing as an “unreal” or false articulation of who you are appears to run in counterpoint to how many people engage with the online world. It can’t be argued with that anonymity can often lead to heightened levels of cruelty and vitriol, providing a platform for people to say things they would never say in a face-to-face situation. This can’t be a good thing for the cause of meaningful, open and honest debates and conversations happening online.

Time will tell as to whether these steps by News International and The Independent mark a turning point in the ways in which we engage online. However, they at least stake a claim for the fact that the words we put online are as powerful (and potentially damaging) as those we would choose to say to people face-to-face.

When Face set out on its journey to change the world of research and innovation 4 years ago we did so on the belief that the rise of the empowered consumer was going to change the media landscape forever. And we have been proved right.

We recognised that brands needed to find new ways to deal with the same old research and innovation problems. We pioneered the co-creation approach based on a new philosophy of doing things with consumers rather than at them.

This required a fundamental shift in clients research approach, moving them away from thinking of consumers as passive respondents and seeing them more as active participants in the research and innovation process. In this sense we would like to think that we lead our industry to a place where the approach of co-creation has now become widely accepted. But we would not have got there if it were not for the perspicacity of a brave client – a certain Ana Medeiros who was the Global Research Manager of Lynx/Axe at the time. It is fair to say that we both lead each other to a new horizon where the consumer was placed firmly at the centre of a new marketing model.

As I predicted last September in my blog – Co-Creation Will Create a New Breed of Agency, the debate around new industry approaches has moved beyond research and innovation into brand planning and communications. The world of advertising has been slow to react. It is why we were one of the founding members of the London Co-Creation Hub.

It is a debate that has been picked up by the outgoing Marketing Chief of Unilever, Simon Clift. In April he warned of a “lost generation” of brand managers who do not understand the web and social networks. In his final interview before retiring he said he believed public relations agencies were best placed to profit from the rise of Facebook and Twitter, as traditional advertising agencies struggle to adapt to the digital world.

Clift - Brands Need To Catch Up With Consumers

It is not just PR agencies that are moving into the space traditionally occupied by advertising agencies it is everyone, from research to experiential companies; they are all in on the act. And the reason for this is we have all recognized that the consumer is at the heart of the new marketing model not the brand. As Clift remarked “We are all learning. Unilever is ahead of much of the competition but behind consumers, which for marketers is not a comfortable place to be.”

He is absolutely right. A lot of us are behind consumers and it makes for a very bumpy ride  – they are the ones leading the media industry to a new approach, one that is based on doing things WITH not AT. We have a duty both as clients and agencies to the consumer who are, after all, our ultimate customers to develop a new marketing approach that meets their needs more appropriately.

This is not going to be easy but we have to start now. As Clift says it “requires a cultural change for companies like Unilever. We have to listen to genuine customer concerns. Companies aren’t set up for that”.

The worry is they need to be and fast.

1: What is the opportunity

The most important place to start is to consider whether your innovation brief is driven by consumer insight, consumer/market trends or a new piece of technology, or a combination of the 3.  Context is king in successful innovation; your brief should outline the sources that point to an opportunity for innovation. This part of the brief should include detailed information on the brand, key market trends, target audience, and any new ‘technology’ that might be being involved.

It may be that you are not at the stage when you truly know what the opportunity is, in which case the brief should highlight the need for further primary or secondary research to identify and articulate the opportunities for innovation.
2: What is the scope?

With a clear area of opportunity in mind it is then important to outline the scope of the project. Be clear what type of project this is, for example, is this incremental innovation where you need to tweak an existing product to widen appeal or breakthrough innovation where you are aiming to launch a completely new product or service. This is usually closely related to the time period involved, so are you looking to fill a long-term pipeline, generate short-term wins, or a combination of the two?

The scope should also include details of key internal and external milestones that need to be hit, any internal or external constraints on the nature of the innovation and the final outputs. Importantly your expectations on the number of final innovation ideas you are looking for need to be added.

3: Outputs & Screening Process?

Having articulated the scope it is crucial to communicate the specific screening process that ideas will need to go through and the format of outputs required. If like many large companies there is a quantitative benchmarking and screening process for innovation concepts outputs will need to be written and visualized in a specific format. If there is no formal screening process in place then highlight the need in the brief for the agency to specify KPI’s and a process that will evaluate innovation outputs.

4: Who is in the Stakeholder Team?

Clients play a huge role in the innovation process as the marketing professionals and brand guardians. You have to understand what performance the business needs from its portfolio of brands and products, the problems that those products face in delivering this and the way marketing communications can be applied (alongside the other weapons in the mix) to get the results needed. To get the most out of an innovation brief, the process requires a diverse mix of stakeholders. Be sure to give senior stakeholders a role in the project so they can move the final ideas through the business, while on an operational level specify the role research, product, marketing technical and outside agency teams can play on the project.

5: Practicalities


To finish with there are a few guidelines that will help give your brief real impact. Trying to keep your brief to a maximum of 2 sides of A4 is incredibly useful.  Images and visual stimulus helps to get across key points across and avoiding too much internal jargon wherever possible really helps to avoid confusion about what the brief really is.

Recently I was having an interesting conversation with a friend who had travelled a lot. By travelling, I mean a 4-month road trip across 2 continents. He was telling me how he was held at the Kenyan border; not allowed to cross until the daily armed-convoy arrived. Bandits regularly attack people in the area so no one is able to cross unassisted.

The convoy was scheduled every day at 10am. And every day at 10am bandits attacked it. So, with this in mind, my friend paid the local authority $10 to get a convoy on the spot for his car and cross the border straight away. No bandits attacked him but his 4×4 broke down in the middle of the journey!

The point is that danger is not always where we think it is – and that’s why it is sometimes worth taking a risk.

Far from Kenya, in the world of online creativity, what kind of risk can be taken? How can it be managed?

In my last community blog I explained how creativity flirts with chaos. It is important to leave some unanswered questions in order to give users the freedom to tell their own story, either with the actual web application or within the co-creation task plan, to get the most of their creativity.

This uncertain space leaves two interesting areas to watch out for:

Managing the risk induced by creative tasks/environment

It’s perfectly fine to use your live community to test pilot ideas. However, it’s a massive source of uncertainty and risk, as you cannot plan for how long your pilot idea will need in the test environment.

For example, a new type of task to be performed online, across different cultures, may need lots of time in order to fully understand its strengths and weaknesses.

You can foresee the risk but, at the same time, you can manage it: it’s very important to keep a log of issues and document the lessons learnt.

The community and its users may teach you much more than any theory as each project and group of people will have different behaviours, especially if your work is cross-cultural. For instance, we noticed that Brazilian users were using the commenting feature on blogging tasks much more than our UK community usually does.

Miles Davis - Helping Us Be More Creative Online

Enhancing creativity through risk and facilitate improvisation

On the other hand, there are interesting components when opening the door to risk and leaving some space for users’ creativity.

As explained by Liz Danzico during her lecture at UX London 2010, in the situation of a co-creation session, there is an overlap between the creator’s actions and the consumers. This overlap is the place where improvisation happens.

Illustrating improvisation with the example of Miles Davis’ Modal Jazz, Danzico explains that the improvisation performed by the jazzman isn’t exactly what one would compare to a boundary-free space where anything is possible.

She explains that improvisation must have a proper frame that she defines by the following elements:

Improvisation is in the present – as a real-time co-creation with the audience that must be involved all the time

Improvisation is detectable – it requires no pre-knowledge (think about Davis jazz versus Chopin’s work)

Improvisation is responsive – it defines its own parameters

Improvisation is additive – all offers are accepted

Having set this frame, the major challenge that is left is to break with the traditional focus on design (as web app interface design) and turn your attention to the users.

As No Pants Day proves people are ready to improvise.

Because, in the light of the social movements or happenings (for example No Pants Day – see above) people are ready for improvisation and it’s our mission, or even duty, to facilitate it and allow them to release their creativity.

Well I’ve been a bit quiet of late on the blogging front. But its been for all the right reasons!

We’ve been really busy  in the last month or so doing lots of new things, having lots of new experiences and extending our methodology to increasingly diverse briefs and markets.

In last month we’ve done two really exciting projects that I feel are worth sharing and demonstrate our fervent belief in our methodology.

First we’ve been off to India and Australia to work on a ground breaking global brand re-positioning project, for which we pioneered a co-creative approach, delivering a new brand footprint and equity creative brief.

While most traditional agencies and clients would employ a safe, traditional focus group methodology or appoint a big, corporate consultancy, we stayed true to what makes Face Face – intimate, direct and equal interaction between clients and consumers, running workshops in Delhi and Sydney.

We spent 2 days in each market working through a series of co-creative exercises designed to explode and explore 2 potential positionings and allow the consumers to really show us what they want to see and how they want to interact and relate with the brand concerned.

The result is a final brand positioning that is completely consumer centred, exploded, explored and refined, already validated and ratified, and a creative brief that is significantly tighter and more informed than ever before. Less testing required, less risk and uncertainty, and a fuller, earlier understanding of the parameters and possibilities inherent in it.

Secondly, on a similar brief for another client, we have further adapted our methodology to create a more mobile option for co-creation, extending it out of the tried and tested workshop environment and into a more modular, in home environment.

By developing and tailoring our co-creative exercises to work in a more traditional focus group sample structure and setting we can better accommodate problems where regional difference and range is a core consideration for answering the strategic problem at hand. It is also a great option for audiences or subjects where working in a  large group may be inappropriate or uncomfortable.

Co-creation is increasingly becoming one of those marketing buzzwords that any old agency is bolting on to their “offering” and saying they can offer, but it takes the years of experience Face has working directly with clients and consumers to be able to truly stretch the methodology and exploit the incredible potential in it.

Here’s to another year of projects that allow us to push the boundaries…. it’s so much more interesting that way!

We may joke about users being lazy, inpatient and never happy. But we do love them and really want to take care of them!

I spent 3 amazing days at the UX London 2010 conference & workshop; it was a very interesting insight into the not-so-new field of User Experience oriented design.

What is UX?

The first thing that is important to note is that UX is not just a geeky thing. By users, we mean people, as every object does pass a design test. Objects around us are not a material or a tool but a medium to an experience – their design must reflect their use as a medium.

An experience is an ethereal, subjective and intangible thing that is created through the actual existence of users.

Therefore, as a combination of users and their experiences, UX design is centered around the engagement of users with the object, across all senses.

As defined by Jesse James Garrett , UX works on 4 levels:

• Perception – using the senses
• Action – using the body (i.e. Nintendo Wii)
• Cognition – interacting with objects
• Emotion – engaging with objects

These 4 characteristics must be comprehended within an environment: capabilities of the users, constraints from the users, and context of the experience.

As you may have guessed, UX is an incredibly interesting field, but it’s also an inexact and empirical, as it revolves around unpredictable characteristics. It’s also a new field and the major challenge for UX people is to make the business understand this shift from the object to the medium and the importance of taking care of the experience of the users.

Josua Porter and Jesse James Garrett

2 ways to do UX

As explained by Joshua Porter in his lecture about Metrics-driven Design, there are 2 types of approach to UX design.

The first approach is the intuitive approach, which Porter qualifies as a daring instinctive vision.

The second approach is the “Google” approach, based on evidences, where design solves a logic problem, and where the possible solutions are tested and the winner implemented.

The evidence approach involves a “political environment” where the main goal is to get things done and where there is a hierarchy-based decision making process.

This approach creates concepts.

The intuitive approach is based on a “prayer environment” where the results can’t be tested or foreseen and the work is based on wisdom and experience. This approach creates new possibilities.

What to avoid when creating UX.

How to do you do metrics-driven UX?

Across these 2 approaches, Porter suggested the following steps for the designers in order to structure a metrics-driven UX:

1. Identify the design objectives
It’s important to think about what the site is actually meant to achieve. The tricky bit is to make sure that designers and execs are aligning their answers.

2. Map out the UX lifecycle
For this step, you have to question what actions users must do to meet business expectations.

For example, designers can break down the stages for the users to engage with the site. Once this lifecycle is defined, it’s important to focus on what is actually happening between these stages; i.e. what is happening between a sign up and a 2nd visit to the site.

3. Identify the core metrics
Once you have your steps described, designers must prioritise.

Google analytics provides some valuable data for whoever want to feel reassured about the site visits – what Porter calls “Vanity matrix”, however it isn’t enough to actually make decisions for the UX design.

When you look at the figures per steps, you can realize when you are actually losing users (disengagement). UX designers must focus on these drop offs in the funnel of actions.

Cohort analysis also help to understand the needs for a better design: you can compare across the time the engagement of the users: for example, in June, check if the users registered in May, April, Mars are still on the site and what is their level of engagement.

4. Continuous improvement of the lifecycle
This analysis of steps-focused metrics must be carried on all the time: UX redesign happens at each iteration of the site.

It’s important to bear in mind that you can always revert the site to a design that worked better!

To conclude, there are different approaches to UX design, which can both be successful. However, it’s important to focus on the right metrics that are relevant for what user actions the site is aiming at and designed for.

One recent muggy evening, a troupe of Facers (now there’s a collective noun for you) headed over to the Royal Geographical Society for a talk by Edward Tufte, one of the leaders in theory about information design.  We didn’t appear to be the only ones, considering the theatre was filled to the rafters, resulting in standing room only for some poor, tardy souls.

In the end, the talk failed to live up to very high expectations, as much of the content trod familiar ground from Tufte’s books, particularly Beautiful Evidence and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  However, it is always useful to be re-told principles that anyone working in fields concerned with conveying visual information should always try and enact.

One of the key things I took away from the talk is that the medium for communicating information should always be the most useful medium for conveying that information.  As Tufte asserted, don’t try and think how you can communicate information in a multimedia way, but think about the best way in which your specific information should be communicated.  I think the majority of us working in marketing can often be guilty of focusing on the medium rather than the data, and it is good to continuously ask ourselves: is this the best medium for what we are trying to communicate?

To finish off, Tufte delivered a diatribe about Powerpoint.  I think the majority of us who have wrestled with the peculiarties of Powerpoint can empathise.  However, this was part of a wider point that Powerpoint is not the best medium for conveying complex information.  Sadly though, this is what ultimately ends up being used for the majority of such data communication.  Here at Face, we’re currently looking to utilise other mediums such as Prezi, which can allow us to tell richer, non-linear stories in our work.  Hopefully the stranglehold of Powerpoint will soon come to be a thing of the past.

Related Posts:

• How Social Media Is Changing Design
• Why Researchers Should be Using Infographics
• Thinking With Eyes and Hands: How Data Visualization is Making us Smarter
• How Fortune 100 Companies are Using Social Media #infographics

Over the course of my time working in research, and specifically co-creative research and innovation, it has become apparent that we often focus solely on the development of ideas in co-creation. This makes sense. Clients are looking for better ideas and concepts from these types of sessions, at the end of the day. However, it is often easy to forget that these sessions provide a hot bed of insight.

I was recently facilitating a co-creative innovation workshop where this became startlingly apparent. This session provided one of the few opportunities for the client team to interact directly with their customer base. While they gained a clutch of interesting ideas, they left also feeling they knew so much more about their customer base than they did before.

Whilst it can be argued that many clients can get this as readily from attending discussion groups, there is often more that can be gained from the unique situation of a co-creation session.

For a start, moments of insight may not happen in the way you expect them. You’re not just asking people questions in a room, geared towards delivering insight. Instead, gaining insight can happen in a way that is much more akin to osmosis. Just by getting up close and personal to consumers in a room for one or two days can give you more than you ever anticipated by way of insight.

This is why, whenever we do co-creative sessions, we increasingly challenge clients to find out more about their customers, just by hanging out with them, or giving them specific tasks. This can be in the form of briefing them to find out things about people in the room during the lunch break, or just spending their coffee breaks together, rather than instinctively looking to check messages.

At the end of the day, co-creation is about delivering better ideas, but it’s also about finding out more about the people who really matter – your customers.