Research Communities | Face, The Co-Creation Planning Agency

Archive for the ‘Research Communities’ Category

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!

SUBSCRIBE 2 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

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

View more presentations from Face.

SUBSCRIBE 1 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

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!

SUBSCRIBE NO COMMENTS » READ ALL »

Research Communities 101 #3: Risk, Creativity and Improvisation

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

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.

SUBSCRIBE 1 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

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.

SUBSCRIBE 1 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

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.

SUBSCRIBE 1 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

Research Communities 101 #2: Online Communities, Chaos and Creativity.

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

In Chaotics (Caslione and Kotler, 2009), the authors explain how the butterfly effect has accelerated: “a butterflies wings flapping in South America now have global reverberations in a matter of seconds.”

Thanks to the Internet, information travels a lot faster than it used to. The speed and format of our communication has lead to a new generation of online ramblers, constant status updaters and amateur experts. The fluid and instantaneous way we interact online has been easily adopted by internet users everywhere, but has it made things better?

Hyper-fast communication doesn’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with reliable information – The case of Twitter and it’s reaction to the Swine Flu crisis shows how the real time media can create unjustified panic effects. On the other hand, the reactivity of real time media helped to save lives in the Haiti earthquake aftermath.

But does real time really produce quality content production? I was actually thinking earlier about how people have this erratic way of managing their internet footprint with fast-paced, superficial use of the social web. People are willing to express their opinions and share information online but a lot of what they are producing is… well… not relevant or interesting, in fact it would be fascinating to find out how many status updates have never been read.

All the web junk that gets produced everyday online leaves us with a difficult balance that we have to get right here at Face. How can we nurture our users online creativity and secure the production of high quality content in our online communities?

It’s not easy but here are a few ways you can guide people into producing the quality of content you’re looking for:

1. As seen previously, the interface must be straightforward (and avoid bugs) so people are not put off participating and do not waste time: both these elements will have detrimental effects on your users creativity.

2. The type of content & the type of feedback you are asking your users for should match: for instance, each type of content has a specific lifespan, i.e. a tweet has a very short lifespan (re-tweet in the second or it’s too late) while a movie in the imdb.com has a pretty long lifespan (it can be reviewed for a very long period of time)

3. Users should be able to communicate with each other. The interactions between individuals is essential for production of interesting content, but also essential to avoid mass confusion: As explained in this paper Internet & Face-to-Face Communication: Not Functional Alternatives about mass customization and co-design. User’s support, feedback and guidance is essential to avoid this crippling confusion syndrome that may happen within a creativity community offering a wide choice of different options/actions.

4. You must leave space for creativity. This is probably a great lesson learnt from the success of Twitter: let your users make their own rules on your site and they will adopt it. As Wired magazine put it in their article How Will Twitter Grow Up.

“Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball.”

In this excellent blog Complexity. The New World Between Chance and Choice Esko Kilpi gives an interesting overview of the Chaos Theory and compares the dynamics of the elements with users behaviour. He highlights two major rules:

1. Novelty emerges in an unpredictable way
2. What happens is by interaction – not by chance or by choice

To enhance users’ creativity, the interface & tasks must provide enough flexibility for novelty: users should be able to make trial-and-error experiments. The members of the community should be able to try, experiment and create prototypes – Like Blizzard allows WoW players to test their add-ons in real time.

The conclusion is that you can’t really control what the users will do with your tasks and your online community. You can give them the best place to express themselves, help them to find their way through it, and maybe predict on a short term what results will come out. But, no matter how hard you try; you can’t guess what’s going to happen in the long term!

SUBSCRIBE 2 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

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.

SUBSCRIBE 1 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

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!

SUBSCRIBE 2 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

Understanding the Challenges of Online Creativity

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

In her paper about the World of Warcraft and Co-Creation Myriam Davidovici-Nora explains that Blizzard’s success lays in the combination of never-ending game-play, a high level of competition and the hyper-personalisation accessed through online add-ons.

However, Blizzard’s unique model is hardly suitable for other businesses– Can you imagine EA distributing “zombie kits” for Left 4 Dead?

This conundrum leaves us with a burning question: what is the best practice to handle / entice a group’s creativity in the online environment?

The Tool is the Tip of the Iceberg
Liz Sanders, a pioneer in the use of participatory research methods for the design of products, systems, services and spaces, addressed this topic when speaking at the Copenhagen Co’Creation 2010 Summit and Seminar. She explained that tools are the tip of the iceberg: they only become effective if applied with the right mindset and the right methods/methodologies.

“In co-creation, you need to be working with the mindset that all people are creative and that they are able to produce creative things when given the tools and the stage on which to practice or perform”

Sanders: It's not what you have, it's how you use it.

Everyone is Creative
Sanders believes that we’re all inundated with many ways to satisfy our consumptive needs while our creative needs are usually ignored.

Ultimately, we express our creativity, either in DIY, craft and hobbies, or online with all the user-generated content platforms available to us on the Web.

“One of the key values of value co-creation is that it satisfies the need for creative activity while addressing the need for social interaction.”

Sanders 4 levels of creativity:

1. Doing
2. Adapting
3. Making
4. Creating

New trends in technology have helped to democratize creativity and support broad audiences who participate in creative activities.

But…

Is the web the right place for creativity and therefore for co-creation?

In his article The Web’s Third Frontier Patrice Lamothe makes a really interesting point. Reminding the reader of 3 founding principles of the Web, as stated in Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau’s initial proposal for their World Wide Web hypertext project:

- It allows anyone to access any type of document
- It allows everyone to disseminate their own documents
- It allows everyone to organize the entire collection of documents

Lamothe explains that the first statement has been accomplished with the good old web of online’s early days, and the second statement was completed with the introduction of Web 2.0.

The third and last fundamental idea is actually rolling out now:

“Among users, social networks are now making instantaneous exchange of content possible. Almost 20% of tweets sent contain URLs. Facebook puts sharing links at the top of its hierarchy of functions. […] On the technological front, collaborative systems and the “real time web” allow everyone to coordinate their views with various communities, organizing data as it is received [and, thus] broadening both the web’s basic organizational structure and the means of accessing it”

Can you be truly creative in the confines of a computer?

Understand the challenges of online creativity
Going further, Rafik Letaief, Marc Favier and Françoise Coat explain in their study Creativity and the Creation Process in Global Virtual Teams: Case Study of the Intercultural Virtual Project why the web is a perfect tool for creativity and what its limits are.

This research measures the level of creativity in global virtual teams: during 8 weeks, students from 26 different universities have been working on tasks, communicating and sharing tasks through online forums.

According to this research, the lack of focus is the first obstacle to a virtual team’s creativity: avoid multi-tasking user by launching tasks one by one.

The second barrier is the lack of participation and the missed deadlines that cripple the team with tensions. Conflict avoidance and communication blackout on the internet is more likely to happen online than in a face-to-face workshop and it’s also a blockage to creativity. The fourth obstacle to creativity is the lack of clear IP and ownership management that de-motivates users. Finally technical problems and technological insufficiency can inhibit creativity.

On the other hand, to enhance creativity, the first thing is obviously to avoid all the negative factors mentioned above.

The other factors identified are the presence of stimulating members who initiate relevant debate and help rising and solving issues. Another important factor revolves around how online members manage there time and participation levels when taking part in several projects simultaneously. Technology appropriation and the manner in which team members choose, combine, and utilize available tools is an enhancing factor for creativity.

Conclusion
Interestingly, this research emphases on the fact that the spirit of technology (democracy, freedom of expression and generation of idea) is a factor of creativity – as long as it’s used in the right conditions and context. Ultimately, the internet may be a great for co-creation as long as you keep this motto in mind: “Build the Camera Whilst Shooting the Film”.

SUBSCRIBE 2 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

Philip Nominated for MRS Award!

Monday, March 29th, 2010

We’re delighted to announce that Face Research Director Philip McNaughton has been nominated for the Best Paper Award @ the 2010 MRS Research Awards.

Philip’s paper ‘Co-Creating Insights’ was put together in collaboration with Coca-Cola’s Beth Corte Real. Documenting the findings and learning’s from our recent community, co-creation and insight work with Coca-Cola the paper was also converted into a presentation and showcased at the recent Market Research Conference 2010.

You can check out the presentation HERE

Congratulations Philip, we’re all very proud of you!

Related Links:

SUBSCRIBE 1 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

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!

SUBSCRIBE 1 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

How Researchers and Planners Should Harness the Crowd

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Listen to the crowd, but do not lose control!

Let’s be clear I don’t believe the crowd (without being very selective  about your crowd) alone can give you fully formed insights, npd ideas  and creative executions. I do believe however that the crowd and the  web should play an instrumental role in research, planning and  innovation. So here are 3 ways that the crowd should be used to help  you crack these types of briefs:

Listen to the crowd

The web hosts conversations on pretty much every subject a researcher  or planner could ever want to know about. In fact it is the biggest  research resource we have access to so start using it. There are a  number of tools including our own pulsar social media monitoring and  analysis platform that allow us to listen to the crowd. When you start  listening you will quickly find consumer problems that need solving,  what brands are hot and not and lots of opportunities to engage with  Pro-am consumers. Listening in real time to what consumers are  discussing is addictive and very powerful if it feeds into an adaptive  planning process.

Ask the crowd

Crowdsourcing is best used in the early stages of a project. Again  there are lots of platforms you can use – we have developed our own  platform that we are currently using for www.cocreatelondon.com. The  process starts by giving consumers a clear question or challenge to  respond to. What you will get back is a diverse mass of topline ideas,  thoughts and some fully rounded responses. The role of the planner/ researcher with the help of clever filtering software is to look at  the patterns from this data. What lays behind the ideas – in short what  are the insights. Insights that can be used by planners to build  platforms for innovation or communication.

Crowd wisdom

By opening up ideas in a crowdsourcing community for comment and  rating you can see clearly user-generated clusters. This engagement  amongst the community can highlight the strong ideas or themes; but  just as importantly it can start the process of collaboration and  co-creation to make ideas better and more appealing.

SUBSCRIBE 2 COMMENTS » READ ALL »

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

SUBSCRIBE NO COMMENTS » READ ALL »

The Future Planning

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

“The ad industry establishment can no longer simply tweak its offering around the edges if it is to cope. 2010 must be the year to begin a head on overhaul of the way the (advertising) business is organized” Claire Beale Editor of Campaign Magazine, January 2010

The global marketing landscape has changed more in the last 5 years than in the last 50 but that the leading agencies in terms of the way they are organized, structured and the service they offer, haven’t.

The main driver for this change has been the rise of empowered consumers. They have exposed the traditional advertising agency model as one that is out of date and struggling to help clients deal with the current consumer landscape.

“The fact is: consumers now control brands. They play with them, reshape them and even imbue them with new meaning. In the next decade, we will see a shift away from the traditional branding model of agencies and clients” Owen Lee, Creative Chairman Farm

The big question on everyone’s lips is how should the advertising and planning industry respond? What is the new model of marketing that will ensure as an industry we can help brands to navigate their way through the new consumer landscape? These questions apply as much to the brands as to the agencies that serve them. If we wanted to be sensationalist we would say that “brands and agencies must adapt or die” or putting it in a more positive way that the brand and agency leaders of the future will need to be fleet-of-foot and structure their businesses to function in a highly fluid way.

As research, brand and communications people we always felt we wanted to get closer to consumers, but for practical reasons were not able to no matter how creative we were. But now that’s all changing. Social media allows us to listen to consumers and monitor the conversations they are having around brands in real time. This offers valuable insight and understanding, but more importantly identifies opportunities to establish a completely new way for brands to engage with their audiences. The challenge for the industry is not to view social media as a channel, but to use it to facilitate collaborations between brands and consumers to innovate and co-create communications more effectively. It has heralded:

The Advent of Social Brands
New social media tools will help brands to be on 24/7: this is part of what we call “the socialisation of brands” where campaign and channel marketing gives way to “continuous brand engagement marketing”. The environment the brand lives and breathes in is always on and is always changing so brands need to be listening to and observing their consumers not just in communities but also on the web as well as involving them on a continuous basis in everything they do.

The Need for Big Social Ideas
“Big ideas” need to be a big SOCIAL ideas – one that has the power to live and breathe through what consumers do with it in their interactions with each other and the brand. A big social idea has to be able to evolve, adapt and gain new meaning through those consumer interactions. Ultimately this requires agencies and brands to embrace a more open creative approach based on the philosophy that ideas can come from anywhere: a new model which combines the creativity of experts with the creativity of consumers so that more big social ideas of better quality can be produced. This means experts have an even bigger role to play than ever before. Our recent case study with Nestle’s Skinny Cow where we co-created the advertising with Mindbubble women is a good one – in three months there are already 41,000 fans on Facebook.

The Need to be Fast, Adaptive and Continuous
The process needs to change as well; the annual planning cycle making way for real-time planning which allows brands to remain relevant and interesting to changing consumer needs, overall a more fluid, highly responsive and iterative way of planning, which we call Adaptive Brand Planning. The new imperative will be to maintain a dialogue with your consumers to harness their opinions and ideas to fine-tune your product and communications. One of the main benefits of this approach is the speed with which you can develop concepts and communications as shown by our recent work with Unilever and Axe/Lynx Twist.

Consumer Communities Will Reign
The focus on the 30 second TV spot will give way to the content and conversations that are being generated by consumers and between consumers around the brand. This will in turn produce different segmentation models where brands see consumers not just as potential customers who want to buy something from them but as people who want to have a relationship with them. Engaging and managing brand fan bases will be key: developing creative ways for engaging and managing fan bases will be critical.

A New Planning Mindset
The planner of the future will be more interested in how people interact, and how to stimulate those interactions. The sage-like planners will be replaced by people who are comfortable working in tightly knit teams of agency planners, each with their area of specialism such as social media or building and harnessing the power of communities. The line between planner and researcher will become blurred because there will be a constant dialogue with consumers that will offer insight, understanding and ideas in real time. A key part of the task will be to observe and spot these insights and ideas and use them to inspire creative experts to build upon them.

Conclusion
Consumers will be treated in a fundamentally different way. They will be given more responsibility and will be more involved throughout the brand marketing process. Co-creating with consumers as direct and active equals to deliver a range of marketing outputs will be a major part of the marketing model. Also the new generation of planners will treat consumers in a fundamentally different way. The gaming generation of young planners will be comfortable in this fast changing environment, where remaining in constant contact with your audience is more important than one-off research interventions. These planners will be the architects of a new contract between brand and consumer, founded on listening, understanding, adapting and co-creating.

SUBSCRIBE NO COMMENTS » READ ALL »

Axe Twist – An Entirely Co-Created Product

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

It’s with great pride that the Face team would like to announce that Axe’s latest deodorant, Twist, is an entirely co-created product! Using our online communities and co-creation process, Axe worked alongside consumers at every step of the marketing journey.

The Twist project began in early 2008, the initial steps of the process involved around 50 members of Headbox taking part in an online community. A smaller crack team of Headboxers from the US, the UK and South America were then selected to take part in a co-creation workshop. The agenda for the workshop, which took place in the Summer of 2008 in a very sunny New York City, was to co-create a new Axe variant that had ‘freshness’ as the key characteristic. The Headbox consumers worked for alongside members of the Axe team, the fragrance house, perfumers, Axe’s creative agencies and Face on various different concepts.

At the end of the 2 days the outcome was Twist – a fragrance that changes throughout the day.

Consumers Co-Creating in NYC

David Cousino, Unilever Consumer Marketing Insight (CMI) director, explains, “The Twist concept was born from the insight provided by our consumers that girls get bored easily and the real challenge is to keep them interested, or ‘hooked’. Using co-creation at such an early stage enabled us to engage with our target audience in a meaningful way, and deliver a new product suited to their needs and wishes.”

“In addition to invaluable consumer insight, this methodology gave us the added benefit of a much more efficient development process. By engaging key functions all at once, we were able to develop within only ten weeks a concept that had collaborative input from the fragrance experts, marketing team and creative agency,” adds Cousino

The Twist concept was then taken back online and fed into Headbox for testing and refinement. The completely collaborative approach meant that Unilever knew it would be well-received by consumers – something borne out by exceptional test scores and good initial response in its first launch market. The product has been launched in the UK and is being rolled out to the US, other European countries and Latin America.

Twist in the press:

More information on Axe Twist:

Video Case Study: