Pulsar | Face, The Co-Creation Planning Agency

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Face: A Co-Created History – Part 2

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Mindbubble was launched in 2008

At the beginning of 2008 Face’s online qualitative research communities began to gather pace. First, net giant Google teamed up with us to create a three-month immersive research community with teenagers. The community focused on the future & relevance of internet search and produced some amazing insights that are still thought highly of within Google. Following on from this Doritos commissioned us to create a community steering group with the intention of helping the brand open up their communication and develop a clear social media strategy for their ‘You Make It, We Play It’ crowd-sourcing campaign.

In the Summer of 2008 we worked alongside Tango in a combined online and face-to-face co-creation project. The aim was to define the planning and positioning of Tango for their 2009 re-launch. The project was successful and led to the release of ‘Tango With Added Tango’ in May 2009 and provided the backbone for the overall Save Tango campaign.

Tango With Added Tango - A Co-Created Product

By this time social media had spread across many demographics, and it was quickly learnt that co-creation could be applied to any audience, anywhere, at any time.

With this revelation firmly at the front of our mind we started to explore the relationship between women, technology and the internet. This exciting new space was already being asked about by clients who were interested in how they could use Face’s approach to get closer to women, the gatekeepers of family life. The result of our interrogation into this subject was the original Women & the Web 2.0 Report.

The results of this were astounding, much like youth in previous years, women were creating a niche for themselves, finding their own space on the web. The knock-on effect of the report saw Face engage a group of women both online and face-to-face to build the first co-creation community for women, Mindbubble!

It was an instant hit. Boots were the first brand to work alongside the Mindbubble ladies, co-creating new products for their make-up lines. Following in the footsteps of Boots came Surf, Knorr, Dove, Comfort and Air Wick, all wanting to harness the power of the opinionated and creative Mindbubble ladies.

Moving into 2009 and we did not rest on our laurels, the natural restlessness within the company lead to the development and launch of Face Wired. Designed to develop the potential of co-creation in the planning sphere, Wired immediately teamed up with The Carphone Warehouse to help develop their social media strategy. The Carphone project included the use of Pulsar, Face’s brand new real time research tool.

Pulsar is Face's Social Media Immersion Platform and Methodology

Pulsar enabled Carphone to get even closer to their consumers and listen to what people were saying online. The speed and accuracy of Pulsar meant that the results could immediately be plugged into innovation and planning movements.

By this time, the floodgates were open; the size of the team had quadrupled and Midford Place, Face’s headquarters, had become the epicentre of everything co-creation. Community, Social Media and Co-Creation projects were coming in thick and fast and as our ambitious goals were beginning to be reached, another organic step was taken, adapting the co-creation process for advertising.

Next up… Part 3: Say Hello to The Hub

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Face 2010: From The Rebirth of Insight, to The Death of PowerPoint

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

At Face we don’t like standing still; partly because we are always looking to improve and do things better, and partly because as the world changes we need to change with it. 2010 will be no different, and we are bursting with new ideas for products, communities & projects. Here are our predictions about the research & innovation business in 2010, and a sneak preview of some of the things Face will be up to.

1. 2010 the year when research goes truly mobile as smart phones become commonplace and research on the go starts to catch up

Face will be developing a smart phone application that allows us to conduct research more effectively on the go and in real time

2. The year when the research industry embraces & empowers consumers as researchers, to truly reach the parts that researchers cannot reach – peer2peer research shows what the industry looks like turned inside out.

Through our communities Headbox & Mindbubble we are training consumers to act as researchers within their own peer groups going undercover and asking the questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask.

3. The year when Tech Research & Innovation begins to learn from FMCG research in terms of innovation and product development. Why? Because the consumer is now the subject & not the object of technology.

Face is launching our own tech community in 2010, aimed at engaging tech leaders in insight and innovation work

4. The year that social media & the web as a source of insight is finally taken seriously. Everyone wakes up to the fact that the greatest source of data is around us all the time – it’s just a case of harnessing it. No more excuses.

Face launches 2 new real time research products – Pulsar Snapshot & Pulsar Tracker – designed to monitor and analyse conversations and interactions around brands & categories in real time.

5. Co-creation & communities go east – increased confidence in the methodologies takes them firmly out of the west and into Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia & South Pacific

Face is launching community platforms & co-creation projects in India & Australia, building on existing platforms in China, Russia, Thailand, Philippines & Indonesia.

6. Death by Powerpoint becomes death of Powerpoint, slowly, slowly. One day soon. We won’t be crying.

Face will be emphasizing visual clarity & simplicity in terms of outputs and making more and more of our debriefs / output material available online as an ongoing treasure trove for clients

7. The year that the industry embraces communities in their ongoing insight, innovation & planning cycles, enabling them to work in the real world as their brands become as social as the people consuming them are!

Face has developed an adaptive brand planning process that helps Insight, Planners & Marketing people to keep their brand planning dynamic, organic and always on!

8. The year of the rebirth of insight. Researchers realise that processes like Co-Creation, Communities & Crowd-sourcing are not just there to play with, but are serious methods of getting better result, especially in the day in day out job of getting clients closer to their customers.

Face is doubling the size of its insight teams and putting actionable insight at the heart of everything we do

So, 2010, some big challenges & quite a journey ahead but a truly exciting time for us and the industry as a whole. Look forward to going on that journey with you.

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Do Brands Really Need Agencies?

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Do Brands Need Agencies? | Face Forum, Nov 09

View more documents from Facegroup.

Following on from the success of our Web 2.0 Women forum earlier this year we thought it was about time we opened up another hot topic for debate. The last Face Forum revolved around the key question ‘Do Brands Need Agencies?’ On the 18th of November we have been joined by friends, experts and clients at the Groucho club to discuss what it takes to stay relevant and true to your consumers, how to engage the crowds in research innovation and planning and what are some of the tech trends for 2010 and beyond. Here’s a quick summary:

Relevance
The real-time social web has changed the way we communicate giving us the tools to get and share information at a pace we have not experienced before. This has made the web the richest insight field we have ever had. How can you harness the power of the world wide wave for research, brand planning and brand engagement? What are real-time research and adaptive brand planning? And how can they help your brand stay relevant?

Crowds
Barely a day goes by without a website, campaign or competition cropping up, promising to harness the collective wisdom of crowds for the benefit of brands. Peperami even ditched Lowe to ask the crowds. But is bottom-up really enough? When did crowdsourcing cease to be a means to an end and become an end in itself? Join us to discuss a hybrid model where crowd-sourcing and co-creation are used as complementary methodologies.

Trends
We asked 3000 19 to 25 years old young adults about their consumption habits, media and tech diet. The Forum will be the place where we present our latest Techtribe report, uncovering youth trends that will soon start migrating to other audiences

It was a great night! Here’s the presentation that kick-started the discussion, join in and tell us what you think

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VENUE UPDATE!! November Espresso Briefing: how to use real-time WOM analysis for adaptive brand planning

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

wom uk espresso briefing @face

Brands are increasingly realising the importance of integrating word of mouth into everything they do. They get that it’s essential for nurturing consumer relationships. They understand that referrals are key to ROI. They’ve heard exciting examples of companies who’ve built their success on conversational strategies. But how on earth do they fit WOM into their existing marketing mix?

On 8.30am, Tuesday 24th November, we will present on‘Monitoring and analysing WOM in real time to enable adaptive brand planning’.

CEO and Founding Partner Andrew Needham, and Head of Social Media and Planning Francesco D’Orazio, will look at how to:

- Measure and monitor online conversations about brands to assess brand influence and brand visibility
- Apply qualitative analysis to determine research parameters and add meaning to quantitative findings
- Identify conversation hubs and influencers across a wide range of channels
- Use crowdsourcing and co-creation methodologies to achieve research, innovation and planning objectives
- Build iterative models for feeding real-time insights and consumer inputs into the existing marketing process

As always, the briefing will be totally FREE and kick off with half an hour for coffee, breakfast and networking at 8.30am with the talk starting at 9am and questions and discussions afterwards until 10.30am, all at INSIGHT RESEARCH GROUP offices, 11-13 Charterhouse Buildings, London
EC1M 7AP. Last month’s presentation from Matt Morrison was a big hit so be sure to register for this one now via julian.ferguson@womuk.org – members get priority booking.

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Introducing Pulsar, Face Social Media Monitoring platform and Methodology

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Pulsar, Face Social Media Immersion Platform and Methodology

When working on consumer immersion using ethnography, a relatively small panel is the only way forward. Clearly if you are a good researcher the results are very insightful. However, we’re nevertheless talking about involving 10, 20, 30 consumers, whose opinion will shape the outcome of the project and ultimately your strategic decisions.

Now, as far as ethnography and netnography are concerned and as far as the sample is representative, you still have to admit that you are basing your decisions on the opinions of an incredibly small group of consumers.

Now, what if you could do qualitative consumer immersion involving thousands of consumers?

Well that’s exactly what social media finally allows us to do: for the first time millions of opinions and conversations are available online in an endless, and mostly open, insights field. The problem is, how do you listen to so many opinions without losing the quality of the ethnographic approach over the quantitative reach of your antennas?

You need a good social media monitoring technology and a sophisticate methodology that will allow you to track, mine and understand massive buzz clouds. And that’s what we’re doing here at Face using Pulsar, our social media immersion technology and methodology that allows us to turn thousands of conversations into rich insights: quantity into quality.

Using APIs, tracking technologies, semantic analysis and social network analysis tools, Pulsar allows us to measure:

The Brand social media presence: How many conversations about you are going on over a certain period of time? When is the number of messages peaking? And why?

The Brand Quantitative and Qualitative visibility: Knowing the plain numbers of your social media presence isn’t going to help you unless you know how influential these conversations are. This is why Pulsar weighs the messages using our quantitative visibility algorithm and then assess the sentiment of these contents to tell you what part of your visibility is negative, positive and neutral.

The Topics, Issues and Perceptions: What are these conversations about? What are the emerging issues? How is your brand and your product/service perceived? What are the values that are most associated with your brand?

The Brand Social Network: Where are these conversations being held? What are the most influential sources? What are the channels that you should target?

The Brand Influencers: Finally, who are your influencers across blogs, forums, news sites and social networks? We then feed this insight into the planning process to get the most out of the crowdsourcing and co-creation processes.

We have been working on a number of new projects using Pulsar and some case studies will follow soon. In the meanwhile, if you feel like immersing in social media do get in touch!

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