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Co-creating With Oxford’s Finest.

Friday, July 9th, 2010

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!

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The Face Forum: 9 Lives

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Last week Face descended on The Groucho Club to run our latest Face Forum. The focus this time around was 9 Lives; specifically, the lives of young British people aged 16-24. The late teen/young adult demographic is one that is particularly significant for many brands. However, this is a demographic which is shrinking over time. As a result, the need to understand and engage this demographic is more pressing than ever.

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

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Cello Associate Conference: The Research Industry’s Ticking Timebomb

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

I was invited to speak to the Cello Associate Conference last week at Somerset House – the first of what will be an annual gathering of Cello’s potential future stars. The main focus of my presentation was that as an industry we are sitting on a time bomb. I brought some drama to my session by asking 3 volunteers to diffuse three dummy time bombs (by cutting one of three wires) that were boxed and wrapped while the remaining audience counted them down in just ten seconds. Of course people realised they were not real but that the message behind them very much was.

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:

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New Rules of Consumer Engagement: Co-creation

Friday, June 25th, 2010

There was almost unanimous agreement at the FS Forum in St Paul De Vence over the challenges facing the Financial Services Industry. They were described in four words: trust, reputation, transparency and engagement. There was also serious acknowledgement that the consumer has a vital role in helping the major brands from the industry to meet these challenges. There was a sense too amongst some of the delegates that in the words of Simon Clift the recent CMO of Unilever they felt “behind the consumer” and that this is a very uncomfortable place for a brand or organisation to be.

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.

Face @ Financial Services Forum 2010

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Innovating For Emerging Markets & How Co-creation Can Help

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

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:

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Research Communities 101 #4: What is a Task?

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

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!

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Face Forum: 9 Lives – 22nd June

Friday, June 4th, 2010

it’s time for another Face Forum, 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 at the renowned Groucho club on Tuesday 22nd June at 6:30, see the attached invite for more information. There will be plenty of beer and wine flowing and we’ve checked to ensure the night doesn’t clash with any England games!

We hope you can make it and feel free to bring any colleagues that would be interested. Just send me an email if you are interested

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?’

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

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New Things Are Afoot At Face!

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

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!

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Co-Creation – More Than Just Idea Generation

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

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.

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Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd …And Back Again – Crowdsourcing for New Product Development

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Crowdsouring is a buzzword that has been knocking around for a while now. There is a lot of thought, theory and ongoing conversation about it, and we’re starting to see brands begin to use it in various different formats.

But how does it work in the research & innovation world?

‘Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd… And Back Again’ explores crowdsourcing from it’s definition and gives hints, tips and strategy advice on how you can implement crowsourcing for innovation.

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Measuring Mental Wellbeing – Cello Conference 2010

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Yesterday Philip headed down to the Cello Conference to present the results of a very unique and interesting project. Sharing the stage with co-author Claire Wood (Leith), the duo presented their findings from an extremely innovative project with mental wellbeing charity SeeMe.

The presentation entitled Measuring Mental Wellbeing revolves around young peoples attitudes to mental health both from the perspective of those who have experienced effects of mental health conditions (both first and second hand) and those who have not.

What effect do lifestyle and the attitudes of those around us have on mental wellbeing and how can we best understand this?

See Me (a government funded organisation tackling the stigma attached to mental health conditions in Scotland) wanted to determine current attitudes amongst children and young people. A collaborative approach with Face and Leith helped identify sensitive attitudinal data for which the results which were frightening, emotional and revealing in equal measure. These insights have informed a comprehensive communications and media strategy for See Me Scotland.

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Digital Innovation for the Arts

Monday, April 26th, 2010

This morning we took part in the latest Digital Salon and Surgery at Farringdon’s Free Word Centre to talk about digital innovation for arts brands and organizations, discussing how they are innovating to meet contemporary digital challenges.

It was a very interesting session with a packed panel of six speakers discussing the topic from various angles and presenting some great case studies like the upcoming Chromaroma Oyster Card game (below) and the recent RSC Twitter production “Such Tweet Sorrow” supported by the 4iP fund or ‘NT Live’, a new initiative from the National Theatre which enables live performances to be broadcast onto cinema screens across the UK and worldwide, as well as the NMC Music Map and the cutting-edge ‘PureDyne’ project, an Open Source Linux operating system and multimedia toolbox maintained by the Goto10 Collective.

We talked about our open innovation approach and adaptive brand planning model, how Arts organizations could benefit from real-time research, crowd-sourcing and co-creation and what this all means from a broader cultural perspective. I guess one of the most fascinating implications of taking this approach to the arts space is that it makes the progressive switch from creation to emergence models quite blatant. Understanding the radical change in the role of experts/curators and artists into the cultural ecosystem and understanding what open processes mean in terms of cultural innovation (leading/reacting, educating the audience/learning from the audience, creating new markets/feeding into existing ones) are key questions for the Arts but are totally relevant for the FMCG brands and the technology innovation ecosystem too. So I guess a Creation vs Emergence post is on its way!

For now, thanks again to Arts Council England, IT4Arts, Open Mute and Digital Salon for having us today, it was fun!

Chromaroma Visualisations from Mudlark on Vimeo.

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Research Communities 101 #1: Are Research Communities Really Communities?

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Over the coming months we are going to be taking an indepth look at the world of research communities and what lies behind them. Every week we’ll be touching on a new subject, topics will range from management to task conception, online creativity to relationships. Ultimately we are hoping to produce an in-depth, robust and infomative guide to online research commnunities; Face’s very own Community Management 101.

With online communities becoming increasingly popular in research circles and brands continuing to transfer their qualitative work online, the role of research communities, community managers and research teams is evolving.

As community functionality grows and new tools become available it’s very easy for clients and research teams to get carried away and throw everything at communities using all tools to the max, just because they can.

In this series of blogs we are going to explore the best routes for community managers and research teams to effectively use online community tools and create an interesting environment in which users can complete research tasks without pressure, tedium or stress.

And it is this I am going to start with, the environment; the website; the research tool; and whether you can actually, credibly, call it a community.

Are Research Communities Really Communities?

Research communities have always come under criticism for using the term ‘community’. Some people see them as forced gatherings using a research tool, rather than true natural communities and are therefore undeserving of the name. Some of the arguments against research ‘communities’ include:

• They are not organic
• People are usually incentivized to participate
• It is not a part of users natural internet journey
• They have start and end dates
• The community disappears when the project ends

To a certain extent I can understand these criticisms as, from an outside point of view, research communities must seem like a load of panel girls and boys being put on a website and told to complete tasks for a certain period of time.

However, I am a believer that at the core of every community there has to be a common goal, interest and/or belief, something that inherently binds the people within together. It is for this reason that I believe that research ‘communities’ can actually exist, rather than just being a couple of words shoved together to make a cool sounding buzzphrase.

It’s a fine line between research community and a website where research takes place. There are a couple of things you must do at the start of a project to ensure you start user engagement and interaction early.

Creating Your Community

If you bring together a group of people for a research project they automatically have unspoken commonalities before the activity begins. Usually in research projects people are recruited as they share similar demographics, opinions or personality traits. These instant similarities are one of the two main things you need to rely on to begin the transition from research project to research community.

The other reliance is you, the community manager, it’s your job to take the lead and encourage community behaviour. Initially by stating the commonalities between users and encouraging them to interact through tasks based around similarities.

It is these early tasks, and their wording, that will ultimately determine whether you are the facilitator of an online tool or the manager of an online community.

The wording and crafting of tasks is the most important thing when running a community as it not only ascertains your research outputs but also determines how your users will engage and for how long. Being able to create research tasks that are fun and exciting is a vital skill when running a community and it is this skill that I will begin to explore in my next post:

Writing Tasks for Research Communities – Part 2: What is a Task?

Coming Soon!

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We’re In Research Magazine…

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

We have a nice juicy feature in April’s edition of Research Magazine! Entitled The Sweet Smell of Success the piece is a case study about our work with Axe/Lynx on Twist, the fragrance that changes. Written by Face Managing Director Job Muscroft the article explains the inner workings of the Twist project and the importance of involving consumers in the marketing process.

It can be found on page 32 & 33 of this months Research Magazine.

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Real Time Research, Where do you Start?

Monday, April 12th, 2010

2010 seems to be the year that the market research industry and its clients have started to embrace the web as a real time listening/research tool. So, if you are looking to get involved in social media monitoring research where do you start?

The Face team used a number of off the shelf services that provided limited insight so here are some of the initial questions we asked ourselves when we started to develop our in house real time research tool – Pulsar, that you might find helpful:

What are your objectives?

To start with you need to ask what role is real time research going to play in the business and specifically which stakeholder teams will need to engage with the findings e.g research, marketing, pr, customer service, CSR etc.

Possible objectives could include:
• Marketing & PR : monitoring marketing & PR impact on real time on-line reputation
• Innovation: monitor consumer conversations for product problems, work arounds and solutions
• Planning: track brand stories and map influential individuals, blogs and sites in your category
• Consumer Immersion: monitor, tag and cluster consumer conversation to uncover new consumer insights
• Customer Service: flag up negative and positive posts and enable internal teams to respond directly

The Internet, it's big, make sure you know what you're looking for before you dive in!

6 Criteria of the system

You will then need to consider the following 6 criteria when thinking about the specification of the system that you want to use:

1. What’s included in the data sets?
Does it cover blogs, Tweets, reviews, forums, etc? what countries does it cover? Importantly what does it NOT cover?

2. Where is the content coming from and how is it harvested?
Is the data taken from 3rd party providers or is the data collected in-house. An important point to consider if the provider offers the ability to go back in time over and above 6 months as data is regularly dropped out by 3rd party providers and thus provides a diluted view of days gone by.

3. How is the data cleaned and prepared?
What process does the provider go through to manage duplicates, spam, forum threads, etc. You don’t want to be double-counting or duplicating responses to customers.

4. How is the data organised or segmented?
Is the remaining content relevant to the business questions being asked? What are the base, volume and discussion sources being included for classification? How is the data being segmented so it contains the most pertinent consumer discussions around your specific area of interest?

5. How is the data being analysed and are actionable insights delivered?
Is sentiment purely done by automated technology or by human analysis, or both? Can the system help you determine what the important topics are that lead volume or drive a particular sentiment? Does the system use an influence index of some sort to identify key persons around sectors/conversations?

6. How actionable are the insights and how should they be implemented?
Is there a consulting service so that information and data can be transformed into insight? the web is constantly evolving and is an ever changing form of media and many organisations need to rely on the expertise and experience of a well seasoned research team. While data can be informational, consumer generated media insights are powerful building blocks that can be used to transform and prepare an organisation for the changing digital landscape.

Co-Creating Co-Creation @ the MRS Conference 2010!

Friday, March 26th, 2010

On Wednesday this week I had the great opportunity of co-presenting with Beth from Coca-Cola and a handful of other agencies operating in the co-creation space at the MRS conference in a shared session called Big Brand Co-Creation. Sharing the stage with us were Hyve & Nivea and Sense Worldwide & Discovery. It was a great session that we all saw as a chance to collectively raise the profile of Co-Creation as a discipline and show the extent to which it has come of age as a discipline within the industry. Each of us was charged with showing a slightly different dimension of co-creation, highlighting the scope and variety of the ways it could be used to achieve great things with big brands.

The emphasis of our paper was on taking co-creative principles of collaboration, real time, speed & open-ended thinking into a traditional insight focused brief, highlighting how co-creation was not just about bringing new ideas into a business, or a party trick for something fun and low risk, but could actually be applied at the heart of the insight function, aimed at building a complete foundation of insight. You can see the paper here….

Co-Creating Insights – Face/Coca-Cola Mrs Conference Annual Conference 2010

View more presentations from Face.

As part of that session we were all charged with coming up with our own definitions of co-creation, and to tell our own story about the roots of co-creation, and to start to talk about its future, and to imagine its future together. This got me thinking about the best way to visualise the story of co-creation, and I came up with idea of a tree, where the roots were some of the drivers & trends behind the disciples, the trunk was the core principles and practices and the branches all of the potential different applications.

So over the next few months, I am going to start building the tree, piece by piece with a series of pieces aimed at showing first the roots, then the trunk and finally the branches, hopefully with a view to creating a complete picture of my take on co-creation.

Watch this space for more…

Finally just to say thanks to all at MRS for organizing the session, and great to see co-creation continuing to rise up the agenda. Long may it continue!

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Co-Create London – Initial Results

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

London is one of the biggest cities in the world; it is a massive player in the world’s finance, fashion, business, party, retail and social media industries. It’s a place where dreams can be made and literally anything can happen! But even though London has an unlistable amount of good points and amazing opportunities, it’s not perfect.

So on 24 February 2010, to compliment the launch of The Hub, we also unveiled a new initiative called ‘Co-Create London’. This is aimed at addressing the Capital’s main issues and annoyances by listening to the people who know the City best – the general public. Whether they’ve lived In London their whole life or just passed through, Co-Create London is asking people to answer a very simple question – ‘What Would You Do To make London A Better Place?’.

In just 3 weeks we’ve had loads of buzz worldwide; people have approached us from other countries asking about rolling it out in their cities and we have been covered across all the London blogs.

To date we’ve received over 300 ideas and 3000 votes on a vast range of topics including transport, crime, poverty, education and the environment. A couple of weeks ago we ran a Co-Creation workshop bringing together Londoners who have contributed to the Cocreatelondon.com website with experts to turn their ideas into positive and real solutions.

The aim is to continue the process of idea generation through crowdsourcing and co-creation workshops as well as to spend time honing concepts into well thought through solutions that can be implemented. These will go to a public online vote, with the idea that the solutions obtaining the most votes presented to London Mayor Boris Johnson.

The outputs from the workshop, which were presented on Thursday at the London Co-Creation Hub launch, can be seen below.

BeSpoke Lanes – Cycle Paths running along side railway lines

Cycling in London is very dangerous and a lot of people are put off the pedal as they are scared of cycling on the streets. Railway lines provide direct access to the city and some of them have enough room to incorporate a cycle lane running alongside them.

BeSpoke Lanes work as cycling highways running alongside railway lines. By paying a small amount via your Oyster card at the beginning of your journey you can access the BeSpoke cycling lane. This money goes towards the upkeep of the cycle lanes via adopt-a-mile groups. The adopt-a-mile groups look after a certain section of the cycle path ensuring its upkeep and keeping the area clean and tidy.

Youth clubs and local artists can also get involved and make the BeSpoke Lanes look great, there is also potential for advertising space. It will rejuvenate the rail side and provide a safe route for people to access the London from its outer limits.

Enterpride – Turning disused properties & spaces into accessible cultural & retail hubs

London is full of disused and run down space especially post recession, why not allow these spaces to be occupied by start up businesses, artists, creative individuals and educational workshops.

Enterpride will facilitate the transaction between landlords willing to volunteer their property & Londoners wanting to use the space. Those occupying vacant spaces will have access to the property until they can afford to rent it, or an established business is willing to pay for the space. If users of the Enterpride scheme have their current space bought by an established company they will be assigned a new one. The only cost Enterpride occupants will have to pay are the business rates which are minimal.

Enterpride will not only give new businesses, initiatives and educational workshops the opportunity to have their own retail, gallery or exhibition space but it will also rejuvenate neglected areas. This in turn will encourage established businesses, residents and consumers to explore new places and bring money to otherwise ignored areas.

Swap Stories – A Book Swap System for London Underground

Public transport is boring; Swap Stories makes your commute more interesting and lets your imagination go on its own journey!

Swap Stories is a book swap system initially starting in tube stations to encourage Londoners to read more. You can get involved by making a small Oyster card deposit via the Swap Stories book dispenser. You can then pick a book of your choice or get a random book chosen by the dispenser. Swap Stories relies on trust and honesty, you can only take a book if you bring one to swap.

The scheme will be run in conjunction with libraries, charity shops and 2nd hand bookshops. Volunteers will vet, check and add the books back into the system. There will also be opportunities for publishers to sponsor stations and areas. Theme days or weeks (Charles Darwin week, Romance week etc) could take place and short, one journey‚ stories could also be written by famous authors or commuters and added into the Swap Stories system.

To check out all the Co-Create London ideas and submit your own visit www.cocreatelondon.com

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The Co-Created World of Warcraft

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Myriam Davidovici-Nora is a researcher at Telecom Paristech engineer school in Paris. She studies online consumption, production and new business models to supply digital contents. In her latest paper The D ynamics of Co-Creation in the Video Game Industry: The Case of World of Warcraft she explores the dynamics of co-creation in the construction of video games, using World of Warcraft as a case study.

For the neophytes, World of Warcraft is a Mass Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMPORG) created by Blizzard in 2004. Currently it has 11.5 million subscribers, and owns 62% of the MMORPG market. The great innovation Blizzard introduced when releasing World of Warcraft (WoW) was the ability for its users to improve the game.

WoW In a nutshell: When players subscribe (and agree to pay a monthly fee) they create a character and join an entirely online world. They then evolve in this environment by either, completing quests and killing computer-controlled monsters (Player versus Environment or PvE), or they can fight against each other (Player versus Player or PvP). They gain experience, money and objects (looted from the kills’ drops) and they can improve their character, trading and gearing up. Players can also join groups; these groups are composed of a very precise set of players with different skills and roles (tank, healer or Damage per seconds).

Christmas is Celebrated in the Game

WoW’s main point of difference and strength is the large after-game life with the community on and offline, the adaptability of the game allows players to constantly adapt the interface with third-party built add-ons.

Blizzard’s strategy involved players from the very beginning of the WoW adventure, inviting users to test the game on closed Beta. They also outsourced specific design and innovation tasks to consumers: they provide players with toolkits to build and test their add-ons directly in the game, thus enhancing user experience and loyalty to the game.

This innovation process has a dual benefit: it helps WoW to ascertain a great understanding of its consumers and plan the right upgrades, as well as offering a very segmented gaming experience that meets every gamers’ need, from casual to hardcore.

To facilitate the innovation process, WoW is built on a double-layered organisation mixing private and collective incentives. The first layer is a community of add-on developers, under an open source software (OSS) development model, and the second layer is the private firm, Blizzard, that privately develops the gameplay under copyright terms.

Why do player develop add-ons for WoW?

The motivation is collective-centred: killing the final boss (that ugly big monster at the end of a mission) requires in-game information management (life, mana, aggressiveness or aggro, hit rate etc..) both at individual and group level, and the use of adequate and common tools, provided by add-ons… developed by the users themselves.

Two major communities are sharing the add-on market: Curse and WowAce. These communities help developers and users to share add-ons, information, feedback and screenshot in a virtuous circle of innovation. To increase the network, the two sites are sharing a common library of commands. These add-ons are downloaded for free from the community website, thus by peer-to-peer (P2P) which considerably increase both downloading efficiency and awareness of the brand (word of mouth).

Some Potential Co-Creators at Blizzcon

Blizzard’s model is based on a constant innovation of gameplay to maintain the attractiveness for WoW’s high-level players. Across the last upgrades and patches, Blizzard deployed several bug fixes, added new festivities (special days such as Halloween or Christmas are celebrated in WoW), or new features like the Achievement System (“horizontal” rewarding system across all the “vertical” activities such as missons). Another important leverage tool to keep high-level players engaged is the opening of new realms. These types of changes are implemented according to the players’ feedback, either through the online community directly linked to the Blizzard offices or during the Blizzcon – a massive annual convention for the fans.

However, Blizzard actively controls actions and monitors the site with Game Moderators and employees involved in the game. The company focuses on any artificial increase in the economy of the game, server instability and access of a third party player to one’s account. Add-ons like bots (automated programs) or script like one-click actions are forbidden. The transaction of WoW content for real money via eBay or a personal website is prohibited (even though common practice unfortunately) and Blizzard reserves the rights to close account of unscrupulous players with no warning.

In her paper, Myriam Davidovici-Nora gives an incredible insight into this new hybrid innovation model that developed the world most famous video game. It’s not only a great read for any WoW lover who wants to understand the conception of the game, but also an amazing case-study of the innovation and co-creation process.

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