Right. So, where do we start? Well I guess I should have sent updates from the front earlier, but I got sucked into the carnival of geekdom and couldn’t help but just enjoy it. Three days into South By South West Interactive and the first thing I feel I should mention is that I’m tired. I’m knackered infact, as if I had been working on 6 debriefs, 5 pitches and had run the New York marathon all over the same weekend. The good news is the weekend is over. The bad news is, it has gone by far too quickly.
SXSWi is the most intense conference/festival ever. And it’s not just because of the ridiculous number of panels, talks and workshops, or the mental number of parties kicking off as soon as the last speaker of the day drops the mic. I think it has more to do with the immersive nature of the experience as a whole. SXSW is basically a massive social experiment a la Zimbardo about a world, a few years out, where every single human being has totally embraced the real-time social web and is always logged on, life-streaming and constantly connected to his own tribe.
There’s no in or out of SXSW, once you are here you can only be IN: in the conference centre, on the streets, in the virtual space. It’s a total experience, a world that Tim from @madebymany yesterday described as the “Kingdom of Awesome, a metaphorical ‘State’ of hive-mind” where for one single week you’re intensely sharing and life-sharing with hundreds of people on Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere collapses into a physical space, a few blocks weird town in Texas. No wonder that the two apps that are rocking this year’s edition, Foursquare and Gowalla, only do one thing: connecting virtual characters to physical spaces.
Foursquare experienced an extraordinary day yesterday, recording a record-breaking 347,000 check-ins in one day (as in people checking in a conference room, a venue or a bar when they get there, to let their connections know that they are there). I’ve been using Foursquare for a while in London but using it here in Austin has a completely different meaning. In a context where only a few people are using it, the engagement leans towards the gaming elements, while in situations like SXSWAustin the app serves a solid social purpose.
Foursquare’s location-based sharing meets a need that couldn’t be met by any other media: facilitating face-to-face connections between people who build and manage their networks through social media, i.e. people with ahigher number of active social connections. Imagine if you were to phone, txt or generally engage, 1-2-1, with the hundreds of people you’re constantly in touch with on Twitter… One week wouldn’t be enough just to get hold of half of them.
I had the same feeling last year, when I came to SXSW for the first time and realized how different it was to use Twitter in a place where 12 thousand other festival peoploids were doing exactly the same at the same time. In a situation like this Twitter is simply way more efficient than any other available media. And it’s not just a question of scale, it’s a completely different way of existing in a social space, building knowledge, relationships and ultimately societies. You know all this. But being immersed in it is a completely different story.
So, even if every panel had been useless, every party boring, and even if it had been pouring rain for a week (as opposed to the amazingly warm summer that welcomed us), it would still be all very worthwhile. Because SXSW is not so much about SXSW but more about the community around it. It’s not about emergent technology in itself but about bringing together in one place, people who use fairly common social technologies just to see what happens. It’s about taking part in this weird laboratory of the future, where you can really start grasping what social technology is all about, what are the opportunities, what are the challenges and the dangers ahead.
Note to self: next SXSW posts, a lot shorter and with actual content/no random rumblings
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.
The latest big brand to announce a social network collaboration is Microsoft. The Windows giant are looking to incorporate Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn features with the hugely popular Outlook e-mail client. The Personal Information Manager feature will grant access to user pages, contacts, messaging systems, events and meetings on all three social networks.
By making this a reality Microsoft will go head-to-head with competitor products that currently allow users to work remotely on their multiple social networks from a single application or website (e.g. FriendFeed).
On their official blog Microsoft announced that all Office 2010 users will be able to connect their LinkedIn account with the new Outlook Social Connector tool. Microsoft have also announced a collaboration with Facebook which will see the integration of more social functions in the near future.
The LinkedIn features are currently in Beta and users can test status updates, photo upload and contact messaging. More features will arrive with the final version.
The big question that remains unanswered regards access. Microsoft Outlook, including Exchange, powers around 65% of enterprise email accounts and a lot of those companies have restricted social network access to their employees to avoid them to wasting time. What will happen when we are to update our profile status or chat in real time with our Facebook contacts directly from our corporate e-mail software? Only time will tell…
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.
Individual stats like Facebook passing the 400 million usermark or generating 6 million views per minute, Twitter hitting 50 million tweets per day, and YouTube viewers watching 1 billion videos per day are impressive on their own, but what if we looked at Internet-related stats collectively? Jesse Thomas did just that in his video State of the Internet.
cardboard heads simulating a packed room at Minibar, London
Over the next few weeks Face Wired , Face social media planning sister agency, will be speaking at a couple of workshops and seminars in London and Milan. If you are around and want to catch up, here’s the low-down.
The first one is a two-day workshop at Multimedia Management series hosted by Mediaset and IULM University in Milan, where we will be talking about Social Media Monitoring, Data Visualization and Social Media Planning. Access to this series is unfortunately closed but if you are in Milan and want to talk to us give us a shout or DM me on twitter @abc3d
The second one is Open Business “Web Business Toolbox” in London, where the focus will be more on Social Media Strategy for web companies and startups in general. This series is open but the organizers told me it’s already sold out. However there’s time (apr 14) and someone might drop out so if you are interested do sign up to the waiting list.
Also, this coming Friday is Minibar time again, the monthly face to face for internet professionals in Shoreditch. The coming one is all about Augmented Reality. We will be there enjoying presentations from Micazook, Worksnug, Augmented Planet, Ambient Industries. And having a few friday beers. If you are planning to make it, make sure you RSVP on meetup. See you there.
Tomorrow we will be speaking at the ‘Rethinking Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media’ seminar in Milton Keynes. The ERSC funded event is the forth of the series and will see us give our views on how to engage young people in market research through co-creation, mobile, social media and gaming mechanics.
In it’s own words the seminar series:
‘Focuses on young people’s consumption, use and production of media and popular cultural forms (including audio-visual, digital and online media, popular music and fashion) in the context of cultural and economic globalisation. Through sharing ongoing research and debating key theoretical and empirical issues in the field, the series aims to develop an international network that will particularly support postgraduate students and early career researchers. It also seeks to promote a dialogue between researchers and practitioners in relevant fields such as education, youth work, media regulation, and the cultural industries. The series brings together established and newer scholars from different disciplines with research users and practitioners from education, youth work, policy making and campaigning.’
We will be taking the stage alongside speakers from the Facility of Education and Language Studies, the Open University, Media Snackers and kidsandyouth.com. There will be more seminars throughout the year before the series concludes in December, to find out more, Click Here
Women, especially mothers, are gatekeepers and budget masters; they own the keys to the marvellous world of consumption, proudly sat on the throne of purchasing power. Traditionally when women are mentioned in the same sentence as video games, people will automatically think it is something to do with controlling their children’s gaming habits. However, believe it or not, women do buy video-games for themselves, as part of their own personal entertainment and are now fast becoming equal in the gaming world. So next time you come across a pretty and well-equipped female Blood Elf in World of Warcraft, she is probably a real girl and not a guy pretending to be one!!
• Why have we never talked about girl gamers before?
In the USA, 40% of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (34%) than boys age 17 or younger (18%).
The reason why women didn’t get into gaming sooner, is probably down to the repelling image of female characters in video games. Very often in a secondary role, female characters have mainly been sexualised and stereotyped, which represents a real obstacle to any identification process and therefore interest in the game.
According to Helen W. Kennedy “The console games market has traditionally been very explicit in their exclusive address to a male audience. In the late 80s and early 90s both Nintendo and Sega made it very clear that to attempt to market games for girls would threaten their real market – boys and young men. Sony’s Playstation, by addressing youth culture in general, broke with this tradition”
Fortunately, this trend has changed, moving towards a set of powerful, fit, fast and precise female characters.
The Female Blood Elf - Probably Controlled by a Real Girl!!!!
• Is there a video game type for women?
Women don’t have as much time to dedicate towards video gaming as men do. Their lifestyle, children, and household care take up a lot of time on the top of their work! They are more likely to hook up with a game where they can, jumping in and out without being blocked in long-term objectives or achievements to reach.
The importance of the pace occurs with any genre of game. For example Grand Thief Auto, even though rated as one of the most violent and offensive games, does procure instant fun and entertainment, and therefore, generally, women enjoy it.
Something that EA understood very well with The Sims, is that women like to personalize their characters and create something they can identify with. The desire to escape reality in cyberspace tends to be a common element across genders; however, women do place greater importance on the customization of characters and gaming environments.
• So what’s the secret recipe for the perfect video game for girl?
Women who are into gaming, whether for work or pleasure, gather in associations to lobby for the access of video gaming careers to women, by subsidizing loans or giving career advices to young girls. Women want to see “more women making games, and thus, to make more games that women want to play.”
In reality, the number of women working in the industry is already rising: for example 60% of the developers behind The Sims are women. However, this may not be the miracle that women are waiting for. Sherry Floyd , a game designer at SOE’s Seattle studios, comments “I honestly don’t think it’s a gender issue,” she continues. “I think it’s a marketing issue.”
In the popular subconscious, women playing video games are abnormal: games are for guys. Unless they are accompanying their male partner, females are not seen as legitimate in video gaming temples (cyber cafes, game shops etc..). For example, women are more likely to under-report the number of hours the play then men, as if being a video gamer does not fit with being a women.
In statistics, female players are shown as two major clusters: casual gamers brought in by a partner or sibling, and hardcore gamers. But in reality, girl gamers are much more immersed in gaming than the stats like to show, and it’s this ability to adapt their gaming time that the industry should focus on to attract the female segment.
Playstation saw sense and avoided the 'Shrink It & Pink It' approach
• The girl gamers are crying out loud: give us a real segmentation!
As the figures show, women are now a real sub-group of the market: why not consider them as such?
Fortunately, women can salute the corporate effort to integrate female developers, as it helped the gaming industry to avoid the catastrophe of a full “shrink it and pink it” strategy. However, there is still a gap between the current offer (both products and marketing strategy) and the real landscape of female consumers.
It always feels great to receive that confirmation email that says “Welcome to SXSW”. But it feels even more exciting when you’re going as part of the british contingent assembled by Chinwag http://www.chinwag.com/ and the UK Trade & Investment https://www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk to showcase some of the most interesting digital companies in the UK.
South by South West Interactive is the best conference and interactive media festival I’ve ever been to. For two reasons: it brings together an amazing community of people from all over the world and is a bottomless pit of food for the brain that will take until next March to digest.
Add to this that the festival is co-created: its panel picker system http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ has ensured over the years that the content stayed as fresh and relevant as possible and that the people were engaged with SXSWi not only during the festival days but throughout the entire year.
Digital Mission to SXSWi is organised by Chinwag on behalf of UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) and our wonderful sponsors are international law firm, Winston & Strawn http://www.winston.com/ and Sun Startup Essentials http://uk.sun.com/startupessentials/ .
The controversial and immensely successful release of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 video game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is particularly timely given that we are in the midst of the festive season. Modern Warfare 2, which was released in November of this year, smashed entertainment industry records to become the biggest entertainment release of all time. Within 5 days of it’s release Modern Warfare 2 generated $550 million, over $150 million more than the biggest ever 5 day gross at the box office (Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, $394 million in opening 5 days).
Banned in Russia, because of a controversial scene in which the player can choose to mow down civilians in a terrorist attack on an airport, the storyline of the game focuses on the large-scale outbreak of war in the modern world, further pushing its timely quality with the recent ramping up of the war in Afghanistan. The controversial subject matter and particularly realistic setting has set the game up one of the most talked about Christmas presents for mother’s to give their children this year. On her blog, one Mother sarcastically asked and answered: “How do we really feel about war, anyhow? After 40,000 years the evidence is in. We like it. Here’s the top toy we will give this year to our children to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.”
Upon hearing the discussions about whether Mums would buy Modern Warfare 2 for their young children, I thought about my Mum’s impact upon my early life as a gamer. Unable to conceive of getting into video games without her financial backing as a child, and baring in mind that the world of gaming had changed significantly since I was a child in the early 1990s, I decided to ask her a few questions about her interactions with games via my obsession with them as a child.
“I think I started buying you games around 8 or 9 years old. You didn’t get them immediately. You had to ask for a long time, even though your friends had them for a while, but I guess it was a point of reference for you. To have something in common with others was I think the main reason we bought you a console.
“Particularly being an only child I didn’t want you to feel left out, I suppose all mothers have that urge though. I thought it might have a positive impact on your hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, so when I first started buying them I would more or less choose the games that you got, apart from the ones your uncle bought for you! I remember I bought you Ecco the Dolphin and Art Alive because I thought the covers looked nice and I thought there might be some education value to them!”
I don’t really have any memories of my Mum getting me those game I didn’t really want, although there are lots of stories floating around the internet about Mum’s getting the wrong game for their child, especially with Modern Warfare 2 having a similar release for the Wii that is more an updated version of an older game.
I had totally forgotten about these placid and notoriously difficult games, but it was probably more its difficulty, especially of Ecco the Dolphin, rather than the fact that my Mum had chosen it. It was interesting that she choose the game purely based on the cover though, rather than play-testing it herself, as the internet didn’t exist in our world circa 1992.
I asked her what her concerns were with me playing video games as a child in general.
“Yeah I had concerns generally. I had heard stories of addiction on the radio, alongside those more extreme stories of children getting violent through not being able to differentiate between fantasy and reality and re-enacting the games that you had, but ultimately I didn’t censor you beyond the extremely violent and gore-filled games as I had faith both in my parenting ability by correlation your own ability to distinguish fantasy and reality.
“I was vehemently against buying GTA for you, all I had heard about was the violence in it, even though I knew your friends had it and you had the money to buy it yourself when you were 12 I didn’t let you buy it.”
I remember that my friends had Grand Theft Auto, one of the most controversial games that has since become a best selling series, allowing the player total freedom in a city but encouraging them through storyline to become a career criminal. I suppose the early censorship my Mum had instilled had worked as I don’t really remember having a large desire to get GTA, and it was only when the 3D version came out when I was older at around 15, that I had a desire to buy it, and my education in games in conjunction with my Mum’s early censoring had firmly distinguished gaming from reality.
This ability to distinguish even formed part of my argument when asking my Mum to buy me a game she wasn’t prepared to.
“Well your Uncle Herman would pass you down lots of games he would have, but I asked him to censor them, which he did most of the time! I’d buy you gaming magazines quite regularly; I still think to do that sometimes! And you’d usually get the same games as your friends. When it came to me actually buying games for you, you’d try and charm me!
I remember one time when we had been at the theatre seeing Richard II and you said to me ‘Can we have a look in the games shop?’ phrasing it in such an innocent way that you just wanted to have a look at what was there, but we both knew full well that you knew exactly what game you wanted!”
I too remember never once thinking ‘ah I’ll just have a look’ and always attempting to get my Mum into the games shop so that I’d have a shot at getting the specific game I had in mind.
“Once we got inside you’d keep the charm going but on this particular occasion after the theatre, with a large bout of pestering too! On the whole though you knew which games I would get you and which I wouldn’t, and once I had told you that it wasn’t suitable for you, you’d try with another game you had in mind.”
I do remember my journeys to the game shop as mostly being successful with my Mum, but I don’t think she ever bought me a game that was way out there and unsuitable.
“I would largely look at the cover then decide whether it was suitable for you, because you’d be with me most of the time I didn’t really have the opportunity to test it at home for myself, but we did end up playing one of the more controversial ones together and I got really into it.”
This brought me to one of my clearest memories as a young gamer. My Mum sat down and actively took part in scrolling beat-em up games with me. None of my other friends Mum’s did that! So it was really fun that she actively took part in them and we able to complete or get to the final round of, the two games we played the most together; Streets of Rage 2 and Golden Axe 2.
“I think your Uncle Herman gave you Golden Axe, which I really really enjoyed but although we got to the final round we never completed it! And Streets of Rage, I was iffy about the violence on the cover but I let you convince me slightly and I wanted to experience it myself to see whether it was bad or not, and in the end I ended up really enjoying it! The girl character became a fantasy me! I really loved that we got to go on a quest together, especially with the fantasy setting of Golden Axe, I trusted your ability to differentiate between the game and reality. I liked the stories too and felt a thrill at accomplishing them!
I think I ended up playing it through wanting to experience how violent it was for myself and also you asking me to play with you when you didn’t have friends round. Unless you experience it for yourself, you don’t really know what it’s about and it also gave me validity if I needed to censor it while we were playing. I guess the lack of blood and gore, despite the violence was a key factor in letting those two particular games slide, they really weren’t as bad as some of the others, and especially Golden Axe which was set in a more fantastical realm”
At this point I begin to contrast my Mum’s attitude with 16-bit graphical violence with the graphics of the modern day behemoth of gaming, and in particular the controversial level in which the player takes the role of a soldier who goes undercover as a terrorist and is encouraged to gun-down innocent civilians in an airport. The fact that this level can be skipped is in many ways an emotional plot device to get the player to dislike the bad guys of the game. Even if the player does decide to take on the level they do not have to largely partake in the shooting of civilians.
After the brief story monologue, and the in-action graphics of the game appeared, my Mum looked at me shocked at how realistically the graphics had progressed since we were playing together more than 10 years ago.
“I’m shocked at the realness of it! I’m not sure I would’ve bought you the beat-em up games if they’d been this real!”
When the shooting of civilians started happening she looked visibly disgusted.
“I don’t like how the gun was coming from my perspective, that makes it too real. It didn’t used to be like that point of view. There’s a crossover with reality here also.”
She stopped the video ¾ of the way in though, as she was unsure if she could continue. “
I’ll finish it but it’s caused me a degree of anxiety definitely, but then again I suppose I am able to suspend my disbelief as the characters walk through the bodies in a cartoony way rather than stepping over them in a more realistic way, but the wanton destruction of this game disgusts me. It made me shudder and dragged my emotions into it despite it being a game. If you were younger, I wouldn’t be buying that for you if you!”
I ask about the upcoming proposal for the Digital Economy Bill, which will make it illegal for the first time to sell 12+ rated games to children under the age of 12 and she answers with full confidence in the passing of that law.
“Yep very sensible, the media has a part to play in this because you only hear about the games that cause controversy, or I do anyway because you were my link to that world, but I suppose if you were younger now I’d use the internet more to check up on what games you wanted and maybe look for more realistic takes on reviews or multiple ones anyway.
“Games have definitely got more realistically violent since I was buying them for you, but I suppose the world has seemingly got more violent too in the reporting of violence. There’s more a saturation of violence it seems, but having said that I’m intrigued by the Wii, which my friend has a Pilates game for so I’d consider checking that our, and I get the impression that it spans generations rather than hardcore teenage gamers. It seems to have something more appealing. I think the key factor in parental control is actually experiencing the game for myself though.”
While my Mum has been musing about whether to buy herself a Wii since interviewing her, there is definitely a thread that the violence of games past went unnoticed by parents and there are plenty of examples of kids appealing to internet gaming community members to help them persuade their Mum’s to buy them Modern Warfare 2 (examples here, here, here and here). Yet in a lot of cases (well, at least in mine), Mum’s decision was often final and perhaps it needs that firmness to give children a clear sense about how to choose what games they can deal with. There is no doubt that it’s essential to censor young children to games in some form, but my discussion with my own Mum also suggests that it is possible to find a middle road, where both parents and children can enjoy games together, where censoring can become more of a behind-the-scenes issues rather than a confrontational one.
Nathan Miller is an Assistant Community Manager @ Face
Slides up from last Friday’s Open Hardware conference at Nesta Hq. It was a really interesting day, engaging conversations and some (telling) arguments! All in all, It was very useful for me to reflect on the differences between the co-creation and crowdsourcing models on one side and the opensource model/community on the other side.
Most of the friction seemed to emerge around two cornerstones of co-creation: 1) rewarding the people involved in the process 2) involving consumers as active equals, at the same level of designers, coders and creatives.
The idea of rewarding the people involved in the co-creation project with incentives (cash or prizes) was seen by some as a deal-breaker: it “kills the magic of the collaboration” and outsmarts the “love” element in the motivation. But I think since most brands are nowhere near the idea of giving away their IP and go opensource, it is fair and crucial to reward the people involved for their time and effort.
It also makes sense to remember that a big part of the opensource workforce is made of paid developers (just think about Mozilla) and I would argue that certainly they mustn’t love their job less because they get paid to work on something they consider a cause. So, I think cash doesn’t exclude love/glory/fun. As a matter of fact it probably multiplies the three of them. Or at least it would in my case (if it wasn’t clear enough already).
The second friction-generator was the idea of involving in the process consumers/users at the same level as designers/coders/creatives. Some of the coders involved thought that (non-skilled) consumers/users should just be involved as testers, once the strategic and creative work has been done by “the experts”.
This is a kind of resistance we encounter quite often over any co-creation process. It may vary in degree but the idea of having non-skilled consumers coming up with ideas and “tasking” skilled developers/designers/creatives doesn’t go down well. So, it wasn’t big news, but what surprised me was that this resistance was coming from people that live and breath in the open source world.
So I decided to dig it up. And after discussing and arguing the various points, pint after pint, one of the explanations I was given is that the open source collaboration process is based on a principle of equal contribution while the co-creation one is potentially asymmetric. So if you’re not contributing enough to the open source community, or as much as the others, you’re not going to be taken seriously and you shouldn’t have the right to be tasking other users. But again, if I look at how opensource communities work I’m not sure symmetry and equal contribution are religiously observed. Also, the presence of paid developers in the open source community kind of compromise the “equal contribution” argument.
All in all, I think it’s important to have different types of co-creators, with different sets of skills, contributing to different stages of the process in different ways. Throwing them all together without a structure, a solid process and diversified roles it’s just not going to fly. And that’s why leadership is so important for any opensource community.
Apologies for the title, we couldn’t find a better one! This deck has been recently presented at MRS New Media and Research Technologies conference and AURA conference.
It’s all about Real-time intelligence, collaborative research and adaptive brand planning, which we think are the three elements that make Research 3.0 different.
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
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’.
- 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.
“There is a magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation —the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.” This is how Graphic Presentation, one of the most fascinating books on data visualizations from 1939, begins.
Nowadays data visualization has reached exciting new levels of sophistication and beauty. But being able to do 3D interactive infographics doesn’t necessarily mean we need fancy visuals to make a point. As infographics becomes a content genre in itself, it sometimes lends itself to glorifying aesthetics and gratuitous visualisations rather than serving its primary function of empowering us with an immediate and sophisticated understanding of increasingly complex data. So, the question remains: what is the cognitive added value of images that numbers and words can’t convey?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt took time out of his busy schedule to talk about how he sees the web in looking in 5 years time. When Schmidt talks, people listen and his vision of the net is definitely something to take stock of. Check out the highlights below, you can view the entire 45 minute video here!
Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
“We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
“Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
“We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
Francesco will be heading over to the MRS New Media and Technology conference on the 19th November to join the conversation and present. Our Head of Web Research and Strategy will be discussing real time research and collaborative planning.
Research 3.0: real-time research and collaborative approaches for adaptive brand planning
Measuring and monitoring online conversations about brands to assess brand influence and brand visibility
Applying qualitative analysis to determine research parameters and add meaning to quantitative findings
Identifying the conversation hubs and the influencers across a wide range of channelss
Using crowd-sourcing and co-creation methodologies to achieve research,innovation and planning objectives
Building iterative models for feeding real-time insights and consumer inputs into the existing marketing process
Also on the bill are speakers from the BBC, Orange, Coca-Cola and Danone so it should be a very insightful look into the future. To see the full line up and get some more info on the conference CLICK HERE
40Fires and Nesta have announced the Open Hardware Conference, which will take place in the Nesta offices in London on the 4th December 2009 between 10am and 8 in the evening:
Collaborative Strategies and Challenges of Making Things the Open Source Way
This is an event to bring key projects, their participants and stakeholders together in the emerging field of Open Hardware development, organized by 40Fires in partnership with Nesta.
The 40Fires Foundation is a forum to develop energy-efficient cars, and other sustainable products, using an open source approach.
The event aims to inform participants about Open Hardware, to be a space to discuss and learn and to explore practical solutions and potential collaborations to help Open Hardware work better, for a better world.
Confirmed speakers include Christian Alhert of Minibar and Open Business fame, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of Tinker.it and I‘m going from Face. Patrick Andrews of Riversimple/40 Fires will be talking about The Hyrban, the Open Source car, Adrian Bowyer about the RepRap Project and its Community, Andrew Katz will discuss A framework for open licensing of hardware and I’m going to discuss a hybrid approach (bottom-up and top-down) to open innovation.
Women, especially mothers, are gatekeepers and budget masters; they own the keys to the marvellous world of consumption, proudly sat on the throne of purchasing power. Traditionally when women are mentioned in the same sentence as video games, people will automatically think it is something to do with controlling their children’s gaming habits. However, believe it or not, women do buy video-games for themselves, as part of their own personal entertainment and are now fast becoming equal in the gaming world. So next time you come across a pretty and well-equipped female Blood Elf in World of Warcraft, she is probably a real girl and not a guy pretending to be one!!
CEO and Founding Partner 
