The testing phase of any web development project is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s really, really exciting but, on the other, it can be a torrid, drawn out affair.

It’s exciting because after a relatively long wait (doing nothing but specing, wireframing, adjusting, planning, scheduling, monitoring etc…) you finally get to see the application working, well… more or less working. It’s the gap between the test version (a bit broken, that’s why it’s a “test” version) and the live version (the version that should be “perfect”) of an app or a website that can become a nightmare for users, clients and developers alike.

With the good, the bad and the ugly side of traditional testing still in effect I have become interested in another form of testing: A/B testing. I’m going to be futile for a second but allow me to explain what A/B is all about…

A/B testing is a bit like going shopping with a group of friends. It’s much, much easier to choose a dress when a bunch of girlfriends are there to help you choose which one to buy. In A/B testing, users are your voting panel, even though they may not be aware that their behaviour is dictating future changes…

Lots of brands have adopted A/B Testing: for example, a famous case is the Google Blue study where the search giant tested which shade of blue users would prefer for hyperlinks. True story! Another example is Facebook removing the “Most Recent” option in their feed. While a large part of Facebook users (including me, yay!) didn’t feel the pain, other users were “chosen” as guinea pigs without notifications and expressed their confusion straight away.

What I quite like with this testing technique is that it follows an empirical method. It is an experiment with no precise hypothesis to guide the process; it’s all strictly trial-and-error.

As advised by Joshua Porter, ideally, changes that are to be A/B tested should be big changes to get maximum benefit. This is why, and every wise man keeps repeating this, even though testing is a love & hate process it’s extremely important to allocate time, money and resources to testing. Testing, and a fortiori A/B testing is an investment for the future of the website.

However, as always, there’s a risk associated with this investment. First of all, it takes time to develop and deploy 2 versions of your website “just” for testing purposes. But also, users may not pick up on the new online goods you’ve just released. This may happen even to the best of us – for instance – the recent announcement from Google that they are stopping the Google Wave adventure.

As explained in this blog, the world wasn’t ready for such a disruptive innovation. Clive Thompson from Wired magazine pondered that the main error Google made was that they relied on early adopters rather than focusing on mass consumers. Maybe they shouldn’t have been so picky about their guinea pigs!!

Francesco D’Orazio and Tom Crawford from Nokia will be presenting Designing relevance - How open and agile research methodologies can help complex organizations respond to change and stay relevant at the Esomar Online Research conference at Berlin.

The paper, written by Francesco D’Orazio, Esther Garland and Tom Crawford, describes the work that has been carried out by Face and Nokia within the Relevance Programme. The paper shows how a complex organization can respond to the challenges of rapid exponential change through open and agile approaches like co-creation, crowd-sourcing, social media analysis and online research communities.

Looking forward to it!

To gain traction with social media research within your company you have to help the business answer the question “what do I do with all this data?”

1. Hippos Rule – “Highest Paid Persons Rule” before you start gain buy-in from the decision makers within the company.

2. Breakout of the research silo create a stakeholder team across the company e.g PR, Customer Services, Sales etc

3. Agree KPI’s for each project during the set up and benchmarking phase for key metrics e.g advocacy, influence, awareness.

4. Knowing the strengths and limitations of your social media research system and communicate this e.g semantic analysis, source coverage.

5. Be consistent in the data that your agency provides so that interrogation and comparison over time is easy.

6. Don’t just ask your agency to provide numbers but to provide analysis with visualisations so that a wide number of stakeholders can understand the data story and have a POV on what is happening, why it is happening and help identify what to do next.

7. Set up internal workshop and training sessions to help create a more data driven culture and develop ROI models.

8. Share success stories where social media research has made a commercial benefit.

Following on from his talk at The Financial Service Forum, Andrew was asked to contribute to Argent, The Forum’s very own magazine. The article, titled A New Era of Engagement, focuses on how co-creation can help help all brands, including the financial industry, to stay ahead of their consumers.

Check out Andrew’s article in Argent below:

• The new real-time social web scenario and what does this mean for businesses

• The social employee and the social customers as the foundation of the new “pull” organization model: open leadership, distributed control, governance, ROI

• Collaborative approaches to insight generation and hybrid models for open innovation;

• Listening strategies, social crm, customer networks and social media marketing: from managing transactions to building long-term relationships.

E2.0 model, via Anthony Poncier's blog on Management 2.0 http://poncier.org

It’s going to be a day about what social media means for the healthcare market research/business intelligence professionals.

We are going to talk about social media monitoring and how real-time research and research communities can improve the healthcare industry.

If you want to have a glimpse of the topics that will be discussed have a look at the excellent PSFK report about the Future of Health in a data-driven world

In a couple of weeks time we’ll be in Denmark for NOW, a conference about cross media and how content producers and brands can collaborate with their audiences in new and valuable ways.

I will be speaking of co-creation, crowdsourcing and open models for the media industry. If you are around come and say hello!

more info at http://seismonaut.dk/konference-now-is-digital/

Face and the London Co-Creation Hub are currently undertaking a study to understand how the research industry uses social media.

The study is titled Social Media in Research and  we’re hoping to make it an annual thing. SMinR will be a comprehensive look at social media trends within in the research industry and will cover all aspects of research, from brand team ,to agencies, to freelancers.

The first step in making our study come to life is a short survey about your social media life. If you are in the research sector and have a few minutes spare we would love to hear your thoughts! The results of the survey will be published in October and we will be giving you regular updates of what we’re up to.

If you would like to take part in the 2010 Social Media in Research survey please click here.

If you would like to keep up to date with all the latest project news please follow @SMinR

In my last rant/blog about social presence, I recalled, with a bit of nostalgia, the old times when the social web was a list of IRC channels. The good old days where every freak and geek built their whole identity around a mysterious pseudonym and could create a whole virtual life (or a Second Life…).

In the “Facebook era”, where the whole point of social is (as described by one of our consumers in a recent focus group) “filling in a profile with details to build up a network of real friends”, real life and online life are merging.

Lately, more info networking rmed Facebook users have started to be aware of the privacy issues surrounding their lives on the social web.

This awareness resulted in a mass-reaction and rebellion (I’m not listing all the blogs, tweets here they are too numerous!) against the almighty Facebook. The social networking King has made rapid changes in its basic privacy settings to allow more and more data to be public/shared/used/analysed.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook by Matt McKeon – To see the full moving infographic click the image.

The point is that if early adopters and other geeks find out that Facebook privacy settings have changed, the slower majority, which probably accounts for 90% of social network users, won’t understand/know about these changes. The consequence of this is that hundreds of thousands of people are unknowingly giving away all their information.

It’s kind of like a bad dream, you suddenly realise that you’re bare naked in the middle of packed room. But this is not a dream, it has, somehow, turned into reality and it’s happening on the web right now.

In a similar story one of the biggest online communities, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, revealed an interesting change in their interface: now users’ real name are revealed on the official forums. This change goes along with a new statement in their T&Cs where all conversations (messages, public and private chat) will now on be recorded and potentially monitored. Why is that? As per Blizzard, this change aims at fighting against bullying and bad behaviours online.

Users reacted violently to Blizzard’s move, slamming them for what they saw as a pointless move.

One tech savvy user wisely commented “The virtues of protecting your privacy online are some of the most sensible tenets of the internet that the non-techie crowd is slowly learning through painful experience.”

An interesting consequence of displaying real identity is the increased risk of account hi-jacking and other identity-stealing agents. Remember when the internet audience painfully learned about “phishing”? As a result social media has become democratised and people care less. This article from Boston.com helps to explain:

Facebook accounts are attractive because of the higher level of trust on the site than exists in the broader Internet.

As a result, people are more likely to believe a fraudulent message or click on a dubious link on a friend’s wall or an e-mail message. Moreover, [fake] accounts allow criminals to mine profiles of victims and their friends for personal information like birthdates, addresses, pets’ names, and other tidbits that can be used in identity theft.

Another fair issue that has been raised is that revealing ID opens the door to racial discrimination and sexual harassment (loads of girls play WoW but there’s still a long way to go until equality and respect rule there). This is something already more or less present in the game as well as most other social networks, with the YouTube comments section being a prime example.

With all this in mind, I’m not quite sure this is the good move for Blizzard.

If the lovely WoW geeks are not happy with the whole Real ID revolution, what about other more “mainstream” users?

Actually, even with Facebook, Twitter (and maybe even Linkedin?) users are not keen in using their real ID: as shown in this study, only 51% of users are using their real name on social networks.

Overall, I think we’re not that far away from a merge between real and virtual identification, with people slowly being “tamed”. Luckily enough, legal monikers are not the norm on the web… yet?

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

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

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

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

Hello!

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

The main responsibilities for the Digital Intern will be:

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

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

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

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

All travel costs will be paid for.

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

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

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

What is your favourite online community and why?

Thanks,

Matt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The groups and tasks breakdown looked like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Presentation to the class…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing Consumer Landscape

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

Impact on Financial Services Industry

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

New Rules of Consumer Engagement

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

Some important guiding principles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What your community software is capable of

How creative you want to get with your tasks

What you want out of the research

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

Hatching Your Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Pigeon Hole Yourself

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

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

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

Moderate Everything

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

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

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

Writing Tasks for Research Communities –  The Role of Everybody

Coming Soon!