Recently, Justin Pearse, editor of New Media Age magazine, wrote a leader in which he argued that social media is not a black art and therefore shouldn’t be treated as such by some of the people practicing it in the UK. He quite rightly called for a greater level of professionalism in this area and I agree that this is a call we all need to pay heed to.

Our own experience of conducting social media projects for our clients has led us to believe that existing standards for good research and design practice are being ignored by many of those designing and delivering social media campaigns – not only in the UK but around the world. When we have been engaged by clients to carry out social media research and measurement we have found that a great deal of the advice we are providing has had to focus on rectifying basic flaws in approach and process due to agency poor practice.

The standards that are being dropped relate directly to the fundamental skills that exist in new media. Basic research, design, implementation and measurement practices are often, if not always, completely ignored. Design standards for new media like ISO18529 for example, that have been created and fastidiously adhered to by mainstream agencies, are now simply being ignored by a new breed of social media companies. From our own perspective as customer experience consultants, the fact that social media strategy is often being set and implemented without any real understanding of the customer is short-sighted.

Simply by applying the process illustrated below based on ISO 13407 would result in significant benefits:

The ISO 13407 process is based on good user-centred design principles and we believe it can apply to social media research and measurement. The continuous process describes the following:

1. Research target consumer: Unless the work has been done to properly segment the audience and define the customer a campaign will be untargeted.

2. Create and test concepts: Just because social media measurement is hard and few carry it out it does not mean we can ignore the impact of bad campaign design on our audience. Concepts should be tested and refined before launch.

3. Implementation of campaign: Measurement strategy is all to often considered post launch and should be part of the implementation process. What will success look like? What and how are we going to measure?

4. Measurement: If we have established a measurement strategy and are collecting feedback the most important concern is that the feedback is acted upon and the campaign refined and enhanced.

Following what is considered best ISO standard design practice is an effective way to create winning social media campaigns. Using process and rigour doesn’t mean we have to stop being experimental, but only by starting to behave like offline marketing agencies, who embrace and fully involve the specialists in their fields when a new format emerges, will customers on both sides of the fence get what they need.

This article was written as part of the April newsletter

According to the noted neuroscientist Baronness Susan Greenfield, the human brain until the age of ten has the capacity to learn at astonishing rates in comparison to later years. No-one really knows how our learning process is slowed after the age of ten, but slow it does. It is almost as though it has programmed itself, and now just needs refining.

However, Baronness Greenfield points to a recent study of digital media in Australia, where children under the age of 16 whose use of digital media, in particular heavy texting, was compared to a control group of non digital using children. The results conclusively prove that the children who text a great deal were quicker to respond to questions during an IQ test than the non-texting children, however they got more answers wrong than the other more considered children.

She highlights the fact that the texting children were more inclined physiologically to respond quickly, as though conditioned by the digital media culture to get information out as quickly as possible, but without fully understanding or considering the impact of the information they were delivering. These desensitised digital-children may behave very differently as adults from the group who are not so digitally savvy.

Greenfield likens our development of digital media and its impact on physiology to that of the tobacco industry, the creation of a product that makes us feel good without the proper research to understand what impact it has on our physiology.

It is true that digital media is being created in isolation of real consumer behavioural psychologists, or even a firm basis of consumer research. So what can we expect?

A favourite example of mine is Twitter – an always on medium with a clear lack of tweets coming from those with a journalism background or with reliable sources. This makes data governance difficult when dealing with half-truths, downright lies and mistakes. Last week for example, the Home Secretary tweeted about a haul of 10m tonnes of illegal cigarettes, which he then retweeted to say should have been 1,000 tonnes. However, few would have questioned his original tweet. What does that say about our information system?

The creation of the world-renowned and reliable BBC, was hailed as the free-world’s greatest independent news achievement, with people tuning in from all over the world to the World Service. However it has become less important to the new generations of digital users.

The overload of poor information is desensitising the masses to the news they receive. There is so much data to take in that our brains cannot assimilate it all, question it, and add our own moral judgement to the information. Hence a deeper emotional intelligence is not being reached, and desensitising occurs.

To create a truly understood statement, campaign or brand, a greater understanding of the new media consumer is required, from the youngest to the oldest. This necessitates an analysis of their cross-channel media consumption, regardless of source, and then a tailoring of that message, depending on assimilation level of the information/data received. If brands can understand this – and act on it – they may well be on the path to success.

At a high level it means that there are currently few people creating the content on the social media sites, but a great deal consuming the content that is created. On the one hand this could be explained as behaviour that should be expected. As general consumers have not hitherto intended to submit journalistic quality copy until social media’s advent, so they may be quite rightly reticent about producing content for public consumption.

On the other hand, as we learn to communicate in a different way through the use of social media, we will learn through time that we can produce content without fear, and mass adoption will occur.

With social media on the increase across the globe, there is just an excess of personal information we are divulging on blogs & SN profiles. “Overshare” is Webster’s New World Dictionary’s word of the year.

Overshare (verb): to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval.

That mass adoption will, and is leading now in the US to “Oversharing”. The description above lead us to a new challenge with social media. According to Forrester’s 5 Eras of the Social Web, we are currently in “Social Colonisation”.

Forrester’s 5 Eras of the Social Web

Social Colonisation is about having a shared ID between social media – so when you update a Twitter status it updates your Facebook profile automatically and more than that, it can be done from a mobile app such as Twibble for Blackkberry.

The timings that Social Media commentators at Forrester are putting on it’s 5 eras of the social web are all obviously dependent on the apps and technology being built. So far they are looking appropriate, seeing the take up of shared ID and so we are already in the 3rd era of the social web. A good way to explain the social context and the last phase of commercialisation of the social web is to look at examples. WAYN and Flirtomatic are good examples of commercialisation. WAYN makes money for its customers on the platform by allowing them to “sell” on information about places to visit, and Flirtomatic has one of the most successful flower-purchasing shops on the web to complement its single flirting platform.

But my favourite example must be how Simon Cowell lost an estimated $4m from NOT understanding the social web. When the unofficial Susan Boyle video appeared on Youtube (shortly after the show aired in the UK and added to Youtube by a TV fan from Newcastle) Simon Cowell’s production company should have had a buzz-tool running with contestants from the show as keywords, but they didn’t.

They had no idea that the viewed video on Youtube had reached a staggering 1.2m people after a few days. Nor did they then after a full week react correctly. They ought to have submitted an action to Youtube to remove unauthorised video of Britain’s Got Talent, submitted their own version with a post reel ad outlining the UK telephone number to call to vote for Susan Boyle in the final; thereby making at an average call value of 55p, and 44m views of the video somewhere in the region of $4m on worldwide calls. Some social media purists may argue that taking down videos is not on, however, good content that has to pre-reel ad to break the experience would have been accepted by the masses, as they would rather have good content than shoddy sound and images.

Who’s good at social commerce?

[Images of WAYN and Flirtomatic home page]

Who’s doing this? Can newspapers start charging for online content work?

The Guardian considers charging for content:
LONDON – May ‘09: Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, has revealed that the newspaper publisher is considering charging for content in some specialist areas of Guardian.co.uk

News International
NEW YORK – April ‘09: News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch has led calls for newspapers to charge for online services.

Who else is making money from Social media?

Who’s good at facilitating this?

[Images of Blast Radius, Buddy Media and Friendfeed home page]

Mash up payment system

[Images of TipJoy home page]

Interlocking Social Media – making it pay

Brands need a strategy around social media, and the understanding needs to permeated throughout the organisation if it is to work.

NB: Since this article was published, News Corporation, publisher of The Sun and The Times, has said it will begin charging for all online content within one year.
Read article by UTalkMarketing

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There has been more written about the iPhone than any other technology gadget in the last ten years. How do I know this? According to PC World’s 50 greatest gadgets of all time, the others on the list don’t even come close.

The iPhone achieves a staggering 315m Google search results, where the Nintendo Wii has 239m, and the Sony Walkman 3m, it’s fair to assume that it is a gadget which creates a good deal of buzz.
However not all that buzz is generated by people enamored by the iPhone. In April Virginia Heffernan: a US Journalist at the New York Times wrote a personal account of her experience: “Why I hate my iphone” It is an article written by a well-heeled journalist, and one we should take note of. She opens with an introduction into the heady world of the iPhone enterprise and how it requires so much attention, organisation, explanation, praise, etc.

“I was late to get one – and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe my hopes for the iPhone curdled in the time it took for my perfectly good T-Mobile plan to expire so I could switch to balky AT&T and purchase one. But I had bided my time. And, really, my enthusiasm survived right up to the moment at the AT&T counter, post-sale, when a saleswoman transferred my address book from my battered BlackBerry to the sweetie-pie iPhone.
“Can you set up my e-mail too?” I asked. She handed me the phone and told me what to type. Pressing her good nature, I asked if she’d do that part too, since I wasn’t yet handy with the iPhone’s character-entry system – the D screen-based simulation of the qwerty keyboard.
She gave me a hard look. Truly, as if she was supposed to be on the lookout for people like me. “It’s your phone,” she replied briskly. “It’s time you started typing on it.”

It is disappointing that the Apple store experience has not been transferred into the AT&T store where she purchased the handset. The Apple store would have delivered a better “out of the box experience” – they may well have had a pre-charged up handset for her – and they would certainly have helped her transfer her data onto the iPhone, as well as showing her how to use it. Apple store staff are trained in each of the Apple products, and staff are encouraged to understand them inside out. The staff are even called “Creatives, Geniuses” or “Specialists” as opposed to sales assistants.

“I didn’t trust myself either, there were warning signs. I didn’t rush to explore the phone or load it up with apps. You can see I wasn’t thinking clearly. To answer the phone, I had to touch the screen. Years of not touching screens – so as not to smudge or scar – made me wary. But I brushed the “answer call” and up came fragments of my mother’s cheerful voice. AT&T no doubt works like a charm in other areas, but as I’d been warned, it wasn’t so hot on holding calls where I live. I let it drop her. I hunted for a keypad to call back, but it was gone.”

The next example she gives in her dalliance with the iPhone is about learning how to use the device’s keyboard. It points out an issue we have with the way we use technology – Behavioural Psychologists call it “Learned effects” – the fact is that once we have learned how to do something – it takes a great deal of time to relearn it, and for some, that is time best spent elsewhere….

“The morning after my sleepless night of charging the phone, a text message arrived from a colleague, about breakfast. It came up in a little dialogue bubble, as if we were characters in a comic book.
Now I had to reply. My throat tightened. “Running late,” I decided on. “See you in 15 min.”
What came out was this: “Runninlate. See you in 15 Mon.”
And so the iPhone made suggestions. Did I want to say Ride? Ripe? Ruin? No. I wanted to say Running. I refused to fight further with the smug phone. Off sailed my text – the work of a blithering idiot.
The failure to appreciate the iPhone was all mine. But I decided not to dwell on that. “I thought you might be back,” the AT&T saleswoman said as I walked in the door. “So?” I said. “You were right.” With some satisfaction, she took the iPhone, and I walked away with a new BlackBerry and money to spare.

Does one person’s experience make a universally popular device unusable? No, of course not, but unfortunately the iPhone does expect a different kind of human interaction, and one that takes some time to get used to or “learn”. Above all else – if a device is not intuitive, as I would argue the iPhone is not, then it needs to be taught. When the iPhone is sold in non-Apple stores you rely on the non-Apple staff to sell the product, this dilutes the brand experience.

These two research methodologies are quite distinct approaches that are used to understand customer behaviour through very different practices.

Quantitative research largely revolves around the precise analysis of numerical data: numbers of visitors to a particular website, clicks on banners, time spent reading pages, frequency of referrals – that sort of thing. Quantitative data can be ripped directly from weblogs, but it can also be gained through the structured, objective questioning of a large sample of users of a given service or product. Such surveys produce statistics, calculations, formulae, margins: ‘facts’.

Qualitative research attempts to explore and understand conceptions, attitudes, behaviours, interactions and of course experiences, of individuals and smaller focus groups. Data collected is largely non-numerical, more in-depth, more subjective, and more tailored to circumstance. It must be analysed and interpreted through observation and judgement, with results dependent to a great extent upon the skill and experience of the consultants.

Broadly speaking, quantitative research attempts to objectively nail down universal, repeatable rules for perceived trends, whereas qualitative research tries to subjectively develop a rich understanding of behaviour.

The market research community has been conducting both quantitative and qualitative research since the First World War, when Cadburys won the government contract to provide chocolate to the troops by researching the needs of this new market. Now, in 2009, the global market research industry is set to spend $40 billion, according to Research magazine.

The fledgling experience industry that we operate in certainly has its issues. It is young, fragmented, undisciplined, varied in methodologies, ungoverned by a single guiding body and threatened by a perceived lack of credibility. I believe this has to change, and fast, if our industry is to be taken seriously by the marketing directors accustomed to seeing only the enormous sample sizes typically generated by purely quantitative market research.

At Foviance, our strength is our experience, our ability to specialise, and our judgement about when and how to engage our clients in surveys, panels or web analytics work. I believe that more than any other organisation in our industry, we have the varied skill set and broad abilities to combine both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in innovative, synergetic media research practices. And with 43 of the Top 100 FTSE already on board as clients, I’d say the industry’s top marketing directors agree.

The home gaming scene is pretty much dominated by three consoles – Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. Handheld devices such as the Nintendo DS Lite, Sony PSP and the LeapFrog Leapster 2 have some say in the market, but the big three account for over 70 percent market share. Over the past three years, an increasing number of Generation Y console owners have begun chipping and using their consoles to hop over walled gardens and make the most of open access. The risk of breaking an extremely expensive games console through chipping no longer holds so much fear for gamers who have seen console prices plummet.

In the right, or wrong, hands, a chipped Xbox 360 Elite, for example, is an extremely handy device, not just for downloading and sharing illegal software, but also as a formidable gaming platform. And with its 120GB hard drive, PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon processor, Falcon 65nm chipset, USB 2.0 ports, 100Mbps Ethernet and Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g adapters, the same casinos and gambling services that are open to PC users are accessible in glorious widescreen straight to the living room. Piracy is rife through illegal downloads and emulation of all manner of other platforms. So is access to adult gaming services.

It’s not just Xbox owners of course. I recently heard that large numbers of early adopter 30-somethings were getting together to play poker in a whole new way, using wireless controllers on Wiis in their living rooms. Because it’s illegal, and perhaps because it’s easier to stay in denial, internet gambling companies haven’t yet opened up their eyes to the fact that non-PC gamers are enjoying their services. The question is then – are they actually missing an opportunity here?

Gambling developers have become used to the idea that their offerings are only used by people with a keyboard and a mouse. Sure some of them develop for the smaller mobile screen, but they have sidestepped the enormous implications that monetising living room games consoles might bring. These early adopters, outlaws or not, very possibly represent the green shoots of a whole new audience, a new way of interaction. Current gambling portals might look pretty snazzy on a PC using an exacting pointing device, but I’m betting they’re very hard to navigate with a Wii controller. Sooner or later a developer is going to be first to tweak their UI to exploit these new players, and then what? Where could it lead? Ultimately? Legitimately? Well, shopping, social media, you name it really.

Of course when this step comes, customer experience agencies will inevitably have a role to play in educating gaming companies on the access trends of a new user base. The new revenue streams are obvious, and could soon be legally tapped – perhaps somebody should start preparing the ground work.

In one scene the lead character, Jamal, is seen at work in a Mumbai Call Centre (ostensibly for a mobile phone company) and for those who have never been to see a call centre, it was a highly enlightening experience. The main character Jamal, is a Chai-boy (tea-boy) in the call centre, and is seen taking tea into a daily training session where the call centre staff are being instructed in the day’s plot in Eastenders, thus ensuring they are able to converse with average Brits! A rather crude and clichéd scene, but amusing nonetheless.

Then, Jamal is seen helping out a friend by taking over his seat and answering a call. The call as you can imagine does not go well, the customer asks where she has called as she is calling from Kingussie in Scotland and he replies “ah….I am just down the road (he looks around the room for inspiration and spies a poster of Big Ben and Parliament Square)…at Loch Big Ben!”

Well, it’s played for laughs in the film, but there is a very real lesson here that we need to take heed of, our customers can sniff out a lie, and brands should be measuring the impact of the channels on the customer experience. I bet the call that Jamal hangs up on would not have been recorded, in a typical call centre, or highlighted as a negative customer experience for the customer in Kingussie. This focus on customers across cross-channels is essential in difficult economic times, the more customer-focused brands may do better than others!

It is obvious to draw parallels between this theory and how much effort our own industry puts into soft-launching and stress-testing online systems before unleashing them live on the wider community. Is it possible that similar attention to modelling by our investment banks and a reduced emphasis on getting to market as quickly as possible to reap the highest theoretical returns, might have avoided much of the mess we are now in?

In our experience, there are no shortcuts that can replace the benefits of thorough modelling and testing. We are experienced, working with financial service organizations and employ a range of financial modelling systems when creating products for that sector, regardless of the type and scale of banking application. We test, and retest with customers, conduct user surveys, and run real-world modelling. We listened to the top decision-makers from all sectors of global society at the annual Economic Forum in Davos back in January when they warned of just such an oversight, and we learned. Why didn’t the finance institutions and regulators do the same? Is it possible that they got ahead of themselves, bending over to product guys in order to reach a perceived sweet market as rapidly as possible, rather than following a risk-averse approach?

We work with high-profile financial clients like Barclays to ensure their online customers are provided with easy-to-use, highly secure, no risk products. Of course we are somewhat fortunate in that internet service modelling is logical and predictive – thanks to artificial server loading techniques we can run scenarios that see services oversubscribed by 100 percent and so on. But we also run pilot schemes, test groups, live tests, plus continuous testing and modelling post launch. We find real users to test products, and we ensure they are able to deposit and withdraw real funds long before products reach a wider market.

It appears that the investment banks we all rely upon simply skipped all these logical steps, going straight to market with poorly thought through products. Take the US public credit situation – if loans to citizens had been thoroughly modelled, it is probable that the disastrous toxic loan situation could have been avoided altogether. It’s important to ask the difficult questions – what if 20 percent of citizens can’t pay their loans back? What happens then?

Perhaps it is true that if organisations take the time to research, and model critical products and services carefully and thoroughly, they might miss out on early financial opportunities from time to time. But surely these steps should be considered vital, if not mandatory, to ensuring a solid, risk adverse financial landscape?

Earlier this year, researcher firm Cutter Consortium narrowed down the motives of businesses choosing to block social media to three key reasons: security concerns, productivity loss and bandwidth ‘hog’. Senior consultant San Murugesan claimed that “to ban or not to ban social networks at workplaces is an ongoing dilemma” but also highlighted the fact that social networking simply reflects modern communications trends, and by failing to embrace it, businesses could well be making costly mistakes.

In business, we cannot fail to realise the benefits of mass communications of any medium, US President Rutherford B Haynes said of the telephone in the early days: “An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?” Just like social media the telephone was soon usurping face-to-face communication, just as social media is doing the same to the voice-to-voice communication of the telephone.

It is essential we embrace new technology if it is user-led, working out how best to exploit it safely for our own brand means.

Analyst organisation Beyond Analysis believes 2008 will continue to witness a great deal of evolution in the way in which social media is used, particularly regarding its impact on business. Strategy director Will Beresford has said that the customer experience in particular will only be enriched by data found on the social web, often superseding traditional sources and research tools, such as questionnaires and focus groups. Certainly, opinions and discussions circulating social media platforms are having an ever greater influence upon our purchasing decisions and our brand perception.

A good example of a company exploiting social media effectively is www.zappos.com, a US online shoe retailer. At Zappos all 429 of its employees, including the CEO, have a Twitter account. But instead of merely uploading a few words around where they are (like I do), they use it to better inform customers in an open forum. They share information about where their stock or order is, as well as any updates on other issues. If you log into the Zappos section of the Twitter site, you can see all the Zappos people communicating with their customers.

Publicly displaying information like this can be a dangerous game, but if you aim to be a transparent organisation, and get your customers loving you for you openness – then why not use media which they are most comfortable with, instead of creating long call centre queues or websites support quests that lead nowhere.