theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

When intellectual property is the product as well as the raw material, and we are all creators

Wikipedia is going black for a day on January 18, 2012. They state their reasons here.

The words that prompted this post follow:

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

Intellectual property law is entering a new phase. It's been around for years, but in the past, it was lawyers for big companies arguing with each other, for the most part.

But now, in this age of the democratization of the creative process, the processes associated with creation have changed.

The wall of distraction: Three rules of communication that will help you get over

This morning my workout buddy told me she was so distracted thinking about all the things she has to get done, that instead of gargling, she swallowed her mouthwash. Her explanation: "I have about 3,000 things on my mind right now. Do you ever have that problem?"

Oh yeah.

One recent morning, distracted with a dozen things and dabbing at the remains of the mascara from the day before, I noticed that the eye-makeup remover smelled odd. Odd, but familiar. Fortunately I noticed that it was actually nail polish remover before I actually got acetone in my eye. (Yikes!)

It's easy to find distracted and overwhelmed people -- just get into your car and go for a drive, they are everywhere.

I could have called it the wall of irritation, because there are so many little irritating things we all need to do ... follow complicated procedures, install things on our phones, reset passwords, find forms, meet deadlines, find answers in support forums, replace broken appliances, get new watch batteries. In the face of this, the world wonders why we aren't paying more attention to our health, spending more time with our families, and making good financial plans for the future.

There is now so much information available, that we can even feel guilty if we don't find the right answer to a great many things, like the best price on a car, or the most durable washer. The information has helped, but it has also added to the great wall.

We don't even have time to be good consumers. We don't read the fine print, we don't follow the instruction manual, and we click "agree" with abandon. Is it any wonder we re-use the same password over and over, even though we know this is not a good security plan?

Three ways to get over the wall

When I think about this in the context of my clients, I always come to the same conclusions:

• Keep it short -- our attention span is shorter than ... sorry, wait, what was I saying?
• Keep it simple -- none of us have time to sort out confusing messages
• Keep it relevant -- your product/service is not the thing we are most worried about (-- unless of course, you have really made a hash of things)

How to save money on qualitative research

There's a great discussion evolving on the Greenbook blog, started by Jason Anderson with his article "The 7 BS Stories of the Market Research Business".

I don't agree wtih everything he says, however his perspective is likely reflective of what a lot of research buyers feel. And his vantage point from inside the video gaming industry (life doesn't get much faster moving than that) is certainly interesting and unique.

Be sure to check out the comments too -- some good value added material is posted by other researchers in response.

Is good research expensive? Sometimes it is. There are ways to ensure you are getting the most from your budget, however. I published an article on exactly this topic (link below).

Link to PDF: Good to the Last Drop: 10 Ways to Save Money on Qualitative Research, by Susan Abbott, published by AMA MarketingPower.com

Viral greetings: agencies have to do more than nice cards now

If you happen to work in a creative business, you always need to do something creative and clever for the holiday season around Christmas.

This year, I see that agencies are striving to produce greetings that show their social media "this-could-go-viral" chops.

I'm sure there are lots of these out there. Here are two smaller agencies that caught my attention.

Hart offers a guessing contest that had me addictively clicking on their web site to see the next clue. If you want to get involved in the guessing as well, and perhaps win a toy for yourself, check out the contest here.

BTI Brand Innovations offers a digital take on the advent calendar, with different activities on different days, here.

Seen anything especially clever out there?

A tale of two managers: what message are you sending

In the previous post, I posted two vignettes about bank managers I used to work with.

• Manager # 1 spent spare moments recycling paper into notepads to save money.

• Manager #2 made tea every morning for the tellers.

Neither one of these things seems remotely related to their job description.

My take

I was a trainee in Manager1's branch, and I asked the guy I was training with about this strange behavior. He thought it was kind of a waste of time, since notepads didn't cost much money. The manager thought he was setting a good example. However, thinking about this years later, here's what is so obvious to me:

When your shop is that busy, you can do one more deal every day and more than make up for the expense of a notepad or two.

This was a busy location. Staff had trouble keeping up. What on earth was the lead guy doing fussing with stationery? He could certainly have asked other people to do this, but probably thought he shouldn't waste the time of expensive staff. So instead, he wasted his own time.

I was the area manager for Manager #2 (i.e. her boss). So I asked her about the tea. She told me that one teller invariably disappeared at the start of the shift to make tea for everyone, meaning she didn't have everyone rolling when the doors opened. She had thought about making it an issue, but decided that she wanted to save those kinds of disputes for something truly important. Like sales and service results.

The message here was clear, actually. First, that having everyone working when the doors open is important enough that the manager will spend a few minutes making sure it happens. And second, that making the staff happy was important. Servant leadership.

Everyday life calls for these decisions

Whether you are leading a group of volunteers or a staff of hundreds, understand that every action you take sends a message. Where you spend your time. Where you spend money. Where you don't spend time. Where you don't spend money.

What message are you sending these days?

 

 

A tale of two managers: the challenge of leading in an experience world

We don't talk about it a lot, but the customer experience has a lot to do with the people at the front.

The people doing the work, and the people leading or managing them.

I was thinking recently about some of the things good leaders do, and the things poor leaders do. And this put me in mind of some bank managers I used to know.

So herewith, stories of two managers. Both doing something very hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves stuff. Opinions welcome. In the next post, I'll share my views on these situations.

Manager # 1

This branch was in a busy shopping mall, and I worked there as a trainee for a while. We were busy enough that I got in trouble for booking too many appointments for the loans officer I was training with. He reminded me that we needed to take a break for lunch, or we wouldn't get to eat. An important lesson.

The manager there, like all branch managers, was under constant pressure about managing discretionary expenses. From time to time I would see this guy in the stationery room using something called "padding compound" to make up scratch pads from paper recycling to avoid the need to buy them. I'd never seen this stuff before, and I thought it was pretty interesting.

Manager #2

This branch was in a busy plaza, right beside a major grocery store in a commuter community. It had long opening hours, both evenings and weekends, so they ran three schedules. The manager used to make tea every morning for the tellers about 15 minutes before the doors would open.

I found this out because I was there once in the morning before the doors opened, and the manager said we needed to stop our meeting for a few minutes to go make tea. I found out that this was a regular part of the manager's daily routine.

Your views?

So... what do you think? Both stories are about how a leader chose to spend a few minutes of time on a regular basis. And everything a manager does is observed by staff, whether you know it or not.

The New Experience Economy virtual conference - free and interesting

ClickFox sponsored a webcast presentation on Nov 10 that provides free access to 19 great thinkers on customer experience (and me).More details about the event, the sponsor and the speakers are here.

Registration is free, and the video is very good (thanks Skype)!

Some of the remarks that caught my attention:

- Beth Smits from BestBuy talked about not letting metrics and measurement take over as the only way you think of success. She believes that every customer interaction needs to create loyalty, not necessarily revenue.It's a balancing act for business to find, and stay, in this sweet spot.

- B. Joseph Pine II talked about how we must not get too stuck on innovating the products, because innovation in services is the cutting edge of differentiation

- Kerry Bodine from Forrester talked about the emergence of experience as the way to dominate markets in the current decade, and put this in context of trends of the past, where the best distribution or information led to market dominance

- I pay homage to Steve Jobs by reminding us all that "not sucking" is not enough -- we need to strive for much more than that (around minute 13 in the main video)

Really interesting approach, and I look forward to seeing more of this kind of information.

Thanks Tom Huston of ThoughtLead for the invitation to participate!

 

 

Going global in a small way with no help from the bank

I have a couple of trusted suppliers that are in the USA, while my business is located in Canada. This seems so easy so much of the time that it always comes as a shock when it isn't.

Such as today, when we wanted to send a small payment.

Good electronic options are few and far between.

• A check/cheque -- well yes, I guess so, but we would need to open a US dollar account, and it doesn't come up that often. Plus it goes by mail, and cross-border mail is always slow now (security measures perhaps?).
• A bank draft -- also seemed kind of slow, so we were looking for an electronic option.
• Electronic e-mail money transfer? Nope, only available within the domestic banking system.
• A wire transfer -- what we did today, but it cost $30 and took the better part of half an hour to execute. Then the bank told us it would take 3-5 business days. (Seriously). 
• PayPal -- probably what we should try next time.

This is frankly pitiful. I know that large organizations have better options than this.

The rest of us anxiously await the 21st century to arrive for small enterprises.

The future of computing according to Microsoft: too much StarTrek, too little reality

Future of computing according to Microsoft video

I was reading @techrepublic's take on Microsoft's video of the future of computing, which was interesting, but left me incredulous about a couple of things. 

All of this cool information at people's fingertips -- no reference at all to the creation of content, just the usage of it. When I looked at all this information that businesspeople were manipulating, totally absent were the folks slaving away to create all these awesome graphics. Also absent were the links to information gathering that would need to be present in day to day operating systems of all sorts that would gather this in-the-moment useful data.

Where's the advertising?

More to the point, from the marketer's perspective, none of these applications had any obvious commercial involvement, such as sponsorships or advertising. People in this video search and find with no spam, just useful and well-formatted information organized in highly logical ways. Like the recipes, for example. If only.

So, this version of the future is kind of the StarTrek future -- remember how money never seemed to be an issue for anyone at all? No advertising present anywhere. No intrusive interruptions with sales calls or unwanted messages. Consumer culture had disappeared.

What about biometrics?

Another major trend that is missing for me is the biometric connection. A lot of people are tracking their own biometrics, and there are apps and online communities dedicated to this topic. I would have thought I would see some evidence of my devices helping me track these things automatically -- such as the woman travelling being reminded about her jet-lag strategy, or something like that.

What about smart films?

The see-through refrigerator door was nice (especially when your fridge is as tidy as theirs!), but not as interesting to me as window film that can be adjusted as to opacity (not there). Smart films are something that we would expect to be seeing a lot more of soon, but not present in this world.

So for me, it was all about "what your handheld and tablets might look like". [Okay, those looked like smart films, maybe] Sad to see that keyboards and the accompanying ergonomic strains are not expected to improve.

Antiseptic

Is the future of computing really going to be this antiseptic? I sure hope not. [Except for maybe the translating-enhanced-reality glasses, which were pretty cool.]

If you really want to see the future of computing, I think you would be better off checking out some of the best scifi and speculative fiction. It's still way more out there than this video.

Co-creation strikes again: Everyone wants their own charity now

I have been noticing a trend of people launching their own charities and aid foundations lately. 

The narrative goes like this. It starts with a story about someone who has just returned from a trip to [pick one: Africa | Nepal | India | Middle East] and discovered people there who could benefit from some aid.

They then announce that existing aid organizations don't seem to be working, for whatever reason, and so they are starting a new one.

This story is followed by a letter to the editor of the [pick one: newspaper | magazine] decrying the launch of yet another charity by a celebrity or otherwise noteable individual, who should instead be working with existing charities. Said letter is often from a director of an existing charity.

Here's what I think is going on.

• Existing charities want your money, not your ideas
• People want to contribute more than money
• They particularly want to feel connected in a personal way, to make a personal impact
• When faced with personal knowledge of problems and a compelling need to help, their efforts to become directly involved through existing channels lead nowhere
• So they launch their own organization

Net result is a fragmentation of aid efforts that is likely to continue. The number of new private foundations is skyrocketing.

Here's a good example: socks for Japan. A more serious effort is Room to Read  New ones are popping up constantly.Selena Gomez wants to start her own charity. Christina Applegate launched one. We could probably come up with about 50 similar organizations without too much effort, right?

There are now programs to teach you how to do this, such as this one offered by Global Volunteer Network. You too can "be the change" and "become a social entrepreneur".

A few organizations seem to have found ways to engage people more directly without losing effectiveness. Habitat for Humanity is one -- they actively engage donors in real activities beyond the chequebook.

Political parties, by the way, appear to be having the same problem -- no one wants to just give money. People want to be heard, have influence, be part of creating the ideas. But few organizations are set up for that, and probably most don't really want to be that collaborative.

Co-creation. It's not going away, it's spreading.

Image: The image above is Colin Glassco, who started his own charity.

Bathroom blogfest: finally, a hotel bathroom with sufficient towel racks

I believe I have finally found a hotel bathroom that has enough towel racks. Not a fancy hotel, mind you -- the kind of affordable place a road warrior stays in.

This may sound like a silly thing to you. However you have probably seen those signs they all have that say something like: "Help us protect the environment, please reuse your towels". These signs usually have a cuddly looking mammal on them, llike a sea otter, perhaps. Or a rainforest image. You know what I mean -- all green-enviro-feelgood stuff.

Most of us reuse our towels at home, of course. We hang them on racks to dry. Said racks are often in short supply in the hotels in question.

This hotel has the racks, because they are actually handrails for the handicapped. This hotel does not advertise itself as a place for the handicapped, disabled and elderly, but it is well equipped for them.

The shower has no step-over, you could roll right into it if you wanted to.

The door has two peep-holes, one at standing height, one at sitting height. Wide doorways complete the picture.

We keep hearing that the population is aging. It's nice to see that some organizations are actually responding to this trend.

Bathroom Blogfest: what bathrooms say about culture

Once again, for the week leading up to Hallowe'en, your intrepid bloggers are holding the Bathroom Blogfest. A full list of participating bloggers is shown below.

Bathrooms and culture

I've been thinking how much bathrooms -- our rituals around them -- tell us about who we are and what we think about things.

The bathrooms I wrote about earlier in the Third World represent the basic fundamental beginning of our "cleanliness = godliness" orientation.

But most of the bathrooms in modern homes go far beyond this. They are the place we prepare ourselves to face the world.

I look at the master bathrooms in new homes which are often palatial -- the master suite is practically self-contained, lacking only a kitchen. These make me wonder -- are parents no longer welcome in the rest of the house? Is family life so focused on children now that parents need a place to escape? Any thoughts on this?

The bathroom stuff -- lots of goop required to face the world

I look at the stripped down elegance of many of the bathrooms in decorating magazines and wonder where these people will put all their bathroom "stuff". Pick any single category, and you will find you have quite a lot of "stuff" to store in the bathroom. Shower products alone in my house fill every corner of the space in the shower-tub: multiple shampoos, conditioners, shines and glazes, plus body wash (for me) and soap (for him), as well as razors and buffers. The hair care category extends to dryers and brushes, gels and styling aids stored elsewhere.

Then there's the oral hygiene stuff -- ranging from mouthwash to tooth whitening preparations, toothbrushes, flossers, waterpicks for the committed...

There are the products we keep for days we are sick, becoming sick, worried about becoming sick, or recovering from being sick.

I haven't even started on cosmetics and skin preparations. I have a little drawer that just contains nail polish and related goop.

If we walked into an aboriginal encampment in the deepest Amazon jungle, and found there in their tents dozens of gourds containing different types of goop to slather on the body and hair in highly specific sequences, we would probably laugh. But we are no different, really, are we?

With our creams, gels and rituals we arm ourselves to face the world.

 

 Bathroom Blogfest participating bloggers

Name	Blog Name	Blog URL
Susan Abbott	Customer Experience Crossroads	http://www.customercrossroads.com/customercrossroads/
Paul Anater	Kitchen and Residential Design	http://www.kitchenandresidentialdesign.com
Shannon Bilby	From the Floors Up	http://fromthefloorsup.com/
Toby Bloomberg	Diva Marketing	http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/bloomberg_marketing/
Laurence Borel	Blog Till You Drop	http://www.laurenceborel.com/
Bill Buyok	Avente Tile Talk	http://tiletalk.blogspot.com
Jeanne Byington	The Importance of Earnest Service	http://blog.jmbyington.com/
Becky Carroll	Customers Rock!	http://customersrock.net
Katie Clark	Practical Katie	http://practicalkatie.blogspot.com/
Nora DePalma	O'Reilly DePalma: The Blog	http://www.oreilly-depalma.com/blog/
Paul Friederichsen	The BrandBiz Blog	http://brandbizblog.com/
Tish Grier	The Constant Observer	http://spap-oop.blogspot.com/
Elizabeth Hise	Flooring The Consumer	http://flooringtheconsumer.blogspot.com
Emily Hooper	Floor Covering News Blog	http://www.fcnews.net/category/blog/
Diane Kazan	Urban Design Renovation	http://blog.urbandesignrenovation.com
Joseph Michelli	Dr. Joseph Michelli’s Blog	http://www.josephmichelli.com/blog
Veronika Miller	Modenus Blog	http://www.modenus.com/blog
Arpi Nalbandian	Tile Magazine Editors' Blog	http://www.tilemagonline.com/Articles/Blog_Nalbandian
David Polinchock	Polinchock's Ponderings	http://blog.polinchock.com/
Professor Toilet	American Standard's Professor Toilet	http://www.professortoilet.com
David Reich	my 2 cents	http://reichcomm.typepad.com
Victoria Redshaw & Shelley Pond	Scarlet Opus Trends Blog	http://www.trendsblog.co.uk
Sandy Renshaw	Purple Wren	http://www.PurpleWren.com
Bethany Richmond	Carpet and Rug Institute Blog	http://www.carpet-and-rug-institute-blog.com/
Bruce D. Sanders	RIMtailing	http://www.rimtailing.blogspot.com
Paige Smith	Neuse Tile Service blog	http://neusetile.wordpress.com/
Stephanie Weaver	Experienceology	http://experienceology.blogspot.com/
Christine B. Whittemore	Content Talks Business Blog	http://simplemarketingnow.com/content-talks-business-blog/
Christine B. Whittemore	Smoke Rise & Kinnelon Blog	http://smokerise-nj.blogspot.com/
Christine B. Whittemore	Simple Marketing Blog	http://www.simplemarketingblog.com/
Ted Whittemore	Working Computers	http://www.kinneloncomputers.com/
Chris Woelfel	Artcraft Granite, Marble & Tile Co.	http://www.artcraftgmt.com
Patty Woodland	Broken Teepee	http://www.brokenteepee.com/
Denise Lee Yohn	brand as business bites	http://deniseleeyohn.com/bites/

 

Electronic gift giving: the challenge of the e-reader

My husband is an avid reader, and always likes getting a book as a gift. Selecting said book can be a challenge at times, but at least I always have a fall-back category.

I gave him a Kobo e-reader last year for Christmas, after watching him lug around the 1,300 page doorstop that is A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth.

I was delighted to find that Kobo has ffigured out how I can give a specific book as a gift.

 

My only gripe is that I need to be logged in to an account to figure out how to do this. Except I do not have a Kobo account, because I don't (yet) have my own e-reader. And GIFT is not on the top menu, which of course it should be... I had to actually choose a book to figure out I could give it as a gift. These are minor problems, however.

This is still not quite as nice as being able to give the physical thing, like a card that looks like the book, but it's an excellent start.

I would prefer to pass a physical object as the gift, and then get the excited look, hug and kiss I deserve. Instead, I will have to say, "Sweetie have you checked your e-mail yet today?", which is not nearly as much fun.

 

 

Guerilla research: finding insights on a tight budget

I frequently find myself speaking on the phone to someone who wants to do some great research, but they don't have a budget.They are freaked out when they find out the costs involved, before they even pay the researcher! and who can blame them -- I find the costs a bit of a freak-out myself.

Today I was speaking to a very nice fellow working in a program to help recent immigrants get work in their field -- it happened to be conservation work (i.e. environment) so I wanted to help.

Here is more or less what I suggested to this individual:

• Do the recruiting yourself i.e. arrange to get the right bodies into the room at the right place and time

• Skip the official focus group facility If you're running a single group discussion, and you have few dollars to work with, you don't need it. You need a nice room with a table and some chairs. Or a living room (which is where focus groups started!)

• Live without a report. Take good notes, listen carefully to the moderators's debrief, or record the whole thing and have good notes typed up. Reports take time, and that time is expensive. On a small project, it might not be necessary.  Do I value analysis? Of course I do, and some of the best stuff only comes from wringing the source data until it begs for mercy. Do you need this for gathering simple feedback -- no, you don't.

• Treat the researcher's time like it was an audience with the Queen Have a well prepared set of objectives, don't have a lot of meetings, and make it simple for them to help you in an efficient way. That is the only way to keep costs under control. Unfortunately, small projects often work the opposite way -- there is more back and forth, more contact, more revisions, more time spent explaining things.

• Work with someone less experienced Everyone needs to get a start. If you are not creating new positioning for a major brand, you probably don't need massive amounts of experience anyway. 

• Finally, if you really have no budget at all, check out methodologies designed for lay people Appreciative Inquiry is my favorite. You will find a lot of great resources online and free about this method, and I think it works quite well. Can a skilled individual use these tools better than an amateur -- well yes, of course.[I'm not a carpenter, but I can still use a power saw. I don't try to make things beyond my skill level I go slow. I read the manual and do exactly what it says.]

My question for the world at large -- how do we help small organizations get the insights they need with the limited resources they have?

Webcast on Creativity: Finding Aha moments

I'm headed to the annual QRCA conference in October, and am particularly looking forward to hearing a presentation on creativity from Dr. Joanne Brunn, who studies this sort of thing, and also has a lot of practical, real-world experience.

Fortunately for you, this particular presentation will be webcast (free). Here's the topic description:

Why is it so hard to get to that Aha moment? Creativity is often misunderstood and may seem overwhelming to put into practical use. However, we all naturally follow the creative stages of preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Through understanding these research-based stages of creativity, you will learn how to identify and manage the stages to encourage creativity. The stage that often gets neglected or outright prohibited is incubation – yet that is the major factor in getting to that Aha moment of illumination. Come and learn practical and fun ways to best take advantage of everyone’s natural creative flow.

To find out more and register for this Q-Cast, click here. These sessions are archived and can be viewed later if you miss the live session.

This event is unusual in that we don't allow a lot of veiled "pitching" -- presentations are usually excellent. So if you can't be in Vegas at the conference having a great time, you can take in some of the cool learning, and it's even free.

I'll be speaking as well, so will have to contain my partying. [I have a 9 am slot on a Friday, so wish me luck!]

The future of social media for customer loyalty

A really good question was posed on the Focus Network about where social media and customer loyalty is headed.

“What's the role of social marketing in customer loyalty today? What about a year from now?”

Here's what I think, and what I posted -- what do you think?

Permit me a short anecdote first:

This week I experienced problems with my e-mail and Blackberry synching. I use a hosted exchange service, and went to their web site to see if there was a notice about a system outage (there wasn't, or at least not where I was looking).
After wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on, including being abandoned by their chat support, i finally searched the company on Twitter. There I saw any number of people grumbling about the server outages.
The company was not responding very rapidly to the Twitter talk, and chose not to engage with any of the individuals who posted about problems. They posted about once a day, saying they were working hard to fix the problem. I noticed that others who were irritated were posting links to review sites where they had newly created negative reviews about the company's service.

This kind of behavior is surprising in 2011, but it will be toxic in 2012.

Service problems are one of the opportunities that any organization has to demonstrate that they put some commitment behind their brand promise, whether that promise is appliances that work, friendly flight attendants, or excellent hosted server support.
Every business needs a strategy to respond to customer issues and problems expressed in social media as part of their loyalty strategy.

The larger the business, the more rapidly an issue can escalate -- remember the Domino's pizza YouTube debacle way back in 2009? Domino's had done nothing -- it was two employees -- but they nevertheless experienced damage to their brand and their business.

The communications environment is now a social environment. Thinking about social media as somehow "different" is no longer a productive point of view, because it is completely pervasive. Even your print campaign has a QR code in it, which is likely linked to a site offering social possibilities of some kind. Hotels have QR codes on their front doors with "Like" stickers. So the physical environment has become a virtual link as well, and we will see many more examples of this.

One critical first step for organizations: Ensure you can respond quickly and effectively to problems that arise where your customers are communicating about problems in social media channels (Twitter, Google+, wherever). Implicit in this is needing a real-time monitoring strategy which usually involves putting a listening platform in place (e.g. Conversition, Radian6, etc.)

In the future, social media efforts in larger organizations are going to become much more mainstream in terms of media planning and measurement. They won't be in a cubbyhole by themselves in the leading organizations, they will be part of integrated brand and customer communications.

Opting out isn't an option, because it will create negative impressions. When you see a business with no website today -- even a small business, like an upholstery shop, you form an immediate impression of them as somewhat backwards.
A major enterprise with a poor presence on major social media platforms will soon communicate that they are behind the times.

We are so used to communicating through multiple channels, that I do think customers will start to wonder why they can't communicate with their bank or telecomm carrier this way. So the call centre of the future is likely going to have to figure out strategies for other kinds of channels, not just telephone, e-mail and chat on the company's web site. It might be chat via Facebook, for example.

I don't see the complexity of the environment diminishing at all. There will be more options, as well as greater risks. But also, greater potential rewards for those that choose to invest in experimenting and learning. It's still the frontier, and the patterns of behavior are shifting rapidly.

If you want to follow the thread on Focus, click here.

Confirmation messages: a nice touch and a good example

There is a local retailer of housewares and small home appliances that works very hard to set themselves apart from the national chains, called Cayne's.

We recently bought some soda chargers (for making your own soda water) via their web site. Here's the nice confirmation e-mail they sent. First time I can ever remember getting anything like this.

If you combined this with Dell's order status updates, you'd have something really spiffy.

These folks do a nice thing with pets as well, which I have written about here.

Can BankSimple live up to its promise of "not sucking"?

BankSimple is a new internet-only banking offering. Not quite a bank, but more like the front-end of a bank, linked to actual banks. So something like Mint, but with transaction capability.

"Our core brand value is 'Don't suck'" according to CEO Josh Reich, as reported in Fast Company. On their web site, the vision is a bit more conventional:

• Real service, real support     
• Putting people, not policies, first   
• Mobile from the ground up
• No surprise fees ever
• Plain, simple language

Other Internet Only Banks

It's an interesting idea, but certainly not the first attempt. ING Direct was created with a very similar philosophy. There have been a few other internet-only banks that started and folded. These were all actual banks, however, with all of the regulation and capital requirements that entails.

A few that come to mind:

President's Choice Financial -- not quite internet only, because they have grocery store kiosks. Still rolling.

BizSmart -- had a few kiosks in what is now Staples stores. Targeted to small business with a free checking offer. Closed a few years ago and folded into their parent, CIBC.

Bizner -- an internet only bank targeting small business launched by RaboBank. Very innovative offering, especially their linkage to online accounting software. Folded back into RaboBank in 2010.

Swift Financial -- a branchless bank focused on small business launched in 2007, and made it as far as 2010 with that model. Their vision was documented by CEO Ed Harycki on YouTube. They are now doing business as Swift Capital, and appear to be only in the business of factoring merchant receivables. I really thought their model was cool, but they've changed their strategy.

The fact that others have tried this actually confirms the market need, in my view. So eventually someone will get something together that is robust enough to make a profit long-term.

The challenge of "not sucking"

I did find the "doesn't suck" line just a wee bit arrogant, however. If only it were so simple. I guess the rest of the industry is filled with people who don't really get it, or don't care? 

New innovations like this do force the rest of the industry to stay on the game and keep making their experience better, and that's a good thing. If these folks can stay focused on serving one segment really well, perhaps they can survive over the long term.

Resources

A bank that doesn't suck, by Tim Fernholz, Fast Company, July/August 2011

What is Bank Simple? by Jim Bruene, NetBanker, May 2010

Swift Financial Launches Product to Increase Small-Business Access to Capital -- company press release, August 2010

Online only banks list 2006, Bankwatch, -- a good list of the leading online only banks at that time. Only a handful are still around with the original business model.

 

 

Capturing every dollar of sales: what I learned from my fight with a bottle of white

I'm out of town for a few days getting creativity training. [With luck, the content of this blog will improve as a result.]

My room here is equipped with a microwave and small fridge, so I thought I would just eat in the first night. I had a pleasant trip to Trader Joe's, a place not available in my home town. Joe supplied a nice salad and a frozen butter chicken entree.

Since I was economizing on the meal, I decided to splurge a little on a nice bottle of white wine, Toasted Head chardonnay. It had a cork. I knew I had a corkscrew in my suitcase (checked, of course), but it is one of those kind you have to pull.

Sure enough, after half an hour of back-straining pulling, the cork had moved not a millimetre.

I headed to the grocery store across the street, which has an ample wine department. A couple of aisles of lovely wines. And one type of corkscrew, same kind as mine.

The chardonnary is still in the fridge, awaiting the prince to pull the cork.

My observation is that this grocery store is likely missing the opportunity to sell corkscrews. They sell frying pans. They sell egg flippers. But not a decent corkscrew.

Must read article: Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy UK on how to measure advertising

Every time I talk about advertising measurement as a 'black art' I get objections from people telling me how their normative metrics are well tested and very useful, blah, blah, blah. Let me be clear here: I do qualitative testing on advertising, and I'm not too positive on that approach either.

Why so negative? Well, there is a lot of good evidence that our actual preferences and behavior are not all that well related to what we say.

A brilliant article, "Questioning the Nature of Research" reports on an interview with Rory Sutherland, chair of Ogilvy UK, who makes a strong case that our current measurements are not strongly rooted in behavioral economic theory.

Sutherland's point is not that research is a bad thing in general, it's that the current norms for how research is done on advertising don't work.

...as you get closer to the point of decision, there are factors at work which never really appear in conventional market research. They are contextual factors, social factors. No-one in any research group would ever say, “If there are four brands of shampoo, I’ll buy the one that has most bottles on the shelf”

This is true, by the way, not just of survey research, but also of qualitative.

The best qualitative research approaches come at the topic from right angles -- indirectly. Like a magician's deception, we want to focus your attention on something so that you respond as naturally as possible. Or we try to mimic the actual circumstances of your decision. Still, no self-report in the world is as good as watching a thing happen. Or setting up experiments that show you what is actually happening.

What we have learned from behavioral economics research is this: "Your preference is a product of your behaviour and not the origin of it." If you customarily go to one drycleaner, you will be able to provide a rationale for that choice, (e.g. quality, service) which is likely to have little to do with the real reason (e.g.location).

A useful and thought-provoking article to get your synapses back to school and making new connections.

 

Innovation in Government: Calgary raises the bar

On a recent visit to Calgary, I was impressed to learn about their parking meters. [Okay, I'm weird, but hear me out.]

Excited about parking. Really.

My business colleague input his license plate, then paid, but didn't have to march over to put a piece of paper in his car. This definitely got my attention. Then he told me he could add more money using his cell-phone!  I asked how the system was controlled, and he told me that cars with automated cameras drive around checking the lots. [So even that part is pretty automated!]

This was cool enough, but here are a few more things I learned about ParkPlus later:

• You can find out real time availability of parking spaces in city lots, and even get an RSS feed if you need it.
• You get a discount for a small car, because it takes up less room in places that are flexible, like on-street parking. Now that is seriously cool.
• Because the system is ticketless, they can collect parking fees from scooters and motorcycles. [As a scooterist myself, i kind of like the free parking I get in my home city Toronto, but governments need the bucks, so this is still a cool idea.]
• You can actually set up an account with them, and fund it, which you can then use your cell-phone to access

It's a pretty cool web-site, with well organized information, very clear, and looks pretty user-friendly.

Then I found out about their main web site.

It's not just their parking meters -- they are doing things with their web site that are even cooler. Here's the City of Calgary home page. Pretty, isn't it? So clean, so simple looking.

The image background revolves through a series, but the Bing-like search page, powered by Google, has the one search box.  It's not stuffed up in the corner, saying, in effect, "if you can't find what you need, you can try this". It says "how can i help you?" A bold step for a government institution.

There's an interactive map, a news feed streaming at the top of the main page, a calendar, and numerous other cool things. Every search I tried loaded with blinding speed. Who would suspect a municipal government showing leadership in web site design?

As Ivor Tossel said in a recent Globe + Mail article (how I learned of the web site),

"In the age of Google, most government sites still work like Yahoo did a decade ago."

To find anything in most city web sites, you need to know how the city is organized, so you know what department to look in.

My own city's site tries, but doesn't make it. See the screenshot below:

 

I did three searches on the site, and each one took me to a different landing page with different navigation structures. It would be much easier to just use Google, and not even try navigating through the city's structure.

I loved Ivor Tossell's conclusing remarks:

"The solution that Calgary adopted may be most remarkable as an act of institutional humility. Governments are big, complicated machines, and their instinct will always be to make a show of all the things they do. But Calgary’s site advertises nothing except its interest in what the citizen is looking for. Usefulness is the best municipal service of all."

My take

It's nice to see innovation that benefits taxpayers, isn't it. Have you seen any lately?  I love to have your comments, and publish anything that isn't outright spam.

 

People that put you on hold: is there anyone that doesn't?

Reader Lindsay Willison sent me her article "10 Companies that Always Seem to Put You on Hold", naming basically any organization that a consumer is likely to call for service, ranging from the phone company itself to your insurance company, your cable provider, and even your health-care service.

Then there are those of us who no longer answer our own phones (guilty) because 80% of the calls are an unqualified* sales call.

I've met a number of people recently who carry two smartphones, one for family and actual friends, and the other for work. This way they can stream not just the calls, but also the e-mail. This shows just how polluted the phone lines have become with dreck of various sorts.

And it's not just the phone either -- I find that chat support if kind of like this too. There's one person chatting with multiple customers, and you have to twiddle your thumbs waiting for them to come back. (How many people can one person chat with I wonder?)

We like to complain about this, but really, what's the alternative? Because we sure don't want to talk to someone who doesn't know and can't help.

What might help:

• Sending a digital signal to your phone that shows you where you are in the queue
• Telling you where you are in the queue
• Not repeating that my call is important
• Letting me opt out of music by pressing a number key  "press 1 for soft jazz, 2 for sales pitches**, 3 for complete silence"

More troubling, I find, is that after 15 minutes of doing something else while on hold, when the agent finally arrives, they are all focused and in a hurry, and expect me to be able to kick my brain rapidly into gear. And who can blame them -- they're being judged on a pile of metrics that relate to speed.

I'm not sure what the answer is here. What's your take?

____________________________________________________________________

*Unqualified sales call meaning I'm a poor prospect for their service and the whole thing is a complete waste of time for both of us because I'm not going to buy anything regardless of the quality or the frequency of the pitch.

**Okay, call them product updates if you want

Decision Fatigue: it wasn't your imagination

You know what happens when you have to make too many decisions -- it's exhausting.

Science has now proven that this is true, even when the decisions are very important. John Tierney reported on research conducted by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University in a recent New York Times article. Their research showed that the possibility of getting paroled depended more on what time of day your case was heard than other facts.

If judges, who are used to long periods of concentration, can be affected by this phenomenon, imagine how challenging an extended shopping trip is?

Ego Depletion

Another scientist, Roy F. Baumeister, developed the idea of ego depletion, which appears to be at least part of the explanation for what is going on. The process of making decisions involves self-regulating behavior. And our capacity for this is not unlimited -- to the contrary, it deteriorates and needs regular re-charging.

Some of the specific scenarios discussed are well-known overload situations, like choosing items for a wedding registry, or selecting fabric from a choice of thousands for a custom-made suit.

At last, the explanation for the hideous choices suggested for gifts at wedding registries -- the couple in question were exhausted, or they would never have selected that $150 gravy boat.

More difficult for the poor - because they have to make more tradeoffs

One very interesting finding reported on is that shopping is even more tiring for those of limited means, because they have so many more trade-offs to make. The drain of 'willpower' that results from this constant need to make trade-off decisions leaves less energy available for activities that might alleviate poverty, such as studying or starting a micro-business.

Other research confirms that people will spend more money in some shopping situations if faced with expensive decisions after their energy stores are depleted.

Implications for designing a better customer experience

We run an ethical blog here, so we're not going to help you extract more dollars from exhausted decision-makers. Plus, we know that people will often choose NOT to decide, and just walk away, if they are faced with too much choice.

A better way to look at this situation is to understand that people will benefit from taking a break when faced with a lot of decisions and trade-offs. Food also helps to restore our capabilities.

You could build a small break area for your clients where they can have a coffee and cookies before they finish choosing automobile options or mortgage options, for example.

Another strategy to reduce the distress would be to simply reduce the number of choices by presenting customers with a limited set that is most suited to their situation.

For yourself, when you feel fatigue setting in, go for a coffee and a muffin, it will help you regain your ability to make sensible choices. And you won't wind up with a bunch of costly crap that you wonder why you bought.

Resources:

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue, by John Tierney, The New York Times, August 17, 2011

Delivery: Your customer service is only as good as the last contact

We recently bought some new appliances. Good sales experience. Then we had to deal with delivery.

The delivery window? All day.  (Have these folks not heard of cell phones?)

First problem: Two rather rude individuals arrive, and say they know nothing about a stove, but have a refrigerator.

Then they try to move the fridge in without taking the front door off.

After they leave, we have several bangs in the wall and moulding to touch up. Then we discover a few things that have been knocked off the back of the fridge, little bolts, and plastic thingy, that sort of thing. No idea where they belong.

Very poor response from customer service when we phone to try to locate the missing stove.

Stove finally gets delivered. Again, they want a full day delivery window. Older and wiser, we take the front door off ourselves (as well as putting it back on ourselves.)

Stove arrives, and these delivery guys are at least civilized.

However...

The somewhat better delivery experience does not quite wipe out the unhappy memory.

Our sales guy has apologized, and makes vague noises about "doing something" for us. But nothing happens.

So. We now join legions of others who hate the whole appliance purchasing thing.

Depsite a pretty great sales experience, I'm not sure if we would choose this retailer again.

My take

Profit pressures have pushed things like delivery service down to the cheapest possible option for most companies. The net result is that you get what you pay for -- people who are ill-equipped to represent your brand, and who may actually damage the total customer experience. And they are often the last people to see the customer.

Is anyone doing this better? What have your recent experiences been like?

Sugru - cool stuff to modify your own stuff

I stumbled across this interesting new product call Sugru.

It's sort of like plasticine with a purpose -- it hardens at room temperature into a soft, pliable, silicone rubber. It adheres to lots of materials, and you can form it by hand. (Don't you just want some already??)

Quite apart from the cool factor here, and the general usefulness of such a product, I think it could be awesomely good for design purposes.

Here's how we could use Sugru to support our own innovations:

• Watch the web to see what people are doing to modify products, especially YOUR product
• What new features are people making to standard products, such as bicycle pedals?
• How about giving people some Sugru in a customer innovation lab or workshop, and asking them to modify your product?
• Send people home with some Sugru, and visit their house a week later to see what they've done with it

The photo at top shows a great example of what I'm talking about, from one of my favorite innovative web sites, Instructables.

It's a camera that has been modified so it's easy to hold by a child, and won't easily break when dropped. The fun colors are just a bonus.

Here's the lovely video from the creator that tells you all about it.

 

 

Computer tinkering is dead: The new digital divide

In the previous post I confirmed that personal computing isn't really dead, it's just a popular headline.  However, something else is changing. Computing is so pervasive, that a new digital divide is becoming more apparent. It's the divide between users and experts, which is getting bigger all the time.

Computer tinkering may be dying.

Let me put forth a couple of observations, and see if I can pull them together.

Nugget #1: Parents of anyone under 18 often assert that their children know a great deal about computers and how to "program" them. They say this because their kids showed them how to use basic features on a device.

Nugget #2: In research projects with teens and young adults, I have often found that teens are not actually better at "programming", they are just more comfortable. They are equally, if not more, frustrated by web sites that are badly organized, for example.

Nugget #3: Devices with poor user interfaces continue to baffle most. My favorite example is the portable projector, (now that nobody seems to have VCRs anymore.) Before a meeting where there will be slides projected, there is always a tense moment when we learn a) how to turn on the projector, and b) whether it will project what is on the laptop.

In the last century, when I got my first PC, you had to develop some facility with DOS to use the device. I had an early version of Windows (3.0 I think), which I hoped would remove DOS from my life, but didn't.

It's very complicated, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Software executive Ray Ozzie said in Dawn of a New Day, that the personal computing environment has become hugely complicated for all of us:

as the PC client and PC-based server have grown from their simple roots over the past 25 years, the PC-centric / server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity.  This is a direct by-product of the PC’s success: how broad and diverse the PC’s ecosystem has become; how complex it’s become to manage the acquisition & lifecycle of our hardware, software, and data artifacts.  It’s undeniable that some form of this complexity is readily apparent to most all our customers:  your neighbors; any small business owner; the ‘tech’ head of household; enterprise IT.

Pinnacle of complexity reached

Things have reached something of a pinnacle of complexity, to the point where even backing up your data (a modern moral imperative) has become a major challenge, far from the point and click simplicity promised.  And that's just one example. I recently tried to move my iTunes from one desktop to another, and was astonished at the difficulty of this task. We could come up with hundreds more examples easily.

We can no longer hope to resolve any significant computing issue ourselves unless we happen to have advanced training.

Young people are no different. They do not know how to "program" their devices, they are just more comfortable using them. They are willing to poke at things until they work, rather like kicking a vending machine. Their parents may believe this is "programming" because the parents are unable to figure out how to use basic functions of devices, such as texting, especially when models change.

Cloud computing to the rescue

There was time you could tinker with your car -- that is long gone, because cars are far too complex, and are stuffed with computers.But driving, actually using the car, is getting easier. And the cars are getting smarter, so they look after us better -- they help us manage braking in slippery conditions, for example.

I think the time where us normal folk could do much tinkering with our computers is fast disappearing, and this is likely to be a great relief to many. Cloud computing options have shifted the complexity to someone else, which is as it should be.

The net result is this, however -- actual ability to "program" things -- to tinker and such -- is going to become even more of a geeky specialty than it is now.

Implications not clear - what's your take?

I'm not sure what the implications of this are, actually. But would love to hear your take.

Personal computing isn't dead, it's just gone pervasive

I've been seeing a flurry of articles on the future of personal computing -- they bubble up on a regular basis -- that say something like "The PC is dead." You have to admit it's a great headline.

The latest to catch my attention was this one: Engineer of original IBM PC declares end of PC era, in TechRepublic. Mark Dean, the engineer in question, is quoted thus:

PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device — though there’s plenty of excitement about smartphones and tablets — but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress.

Author Jason Hiner's take is that:

computing is no longer about a box but is being absorbed into everything and is now about creating experiences that connect people and enable them to do work wherever

Fox News already reported the death of the PC in early 2011 from the Consumer Electronics show. Others had reported it earlier, and still others (such as Steve Ballmer) argued that it's not really dead.

So is it really dead or what?

I'm not sure anyone cares. The real debate seems to be about the form of a computer, which is probably not something that consumers think about much.

What we are really experiencing is such a pervasive presence of computing ability that we don't even think about it as computing ability. Cars that lock their doors on their own, and keep their lights on while you go in the house, for example. Information accessible from so many devices, that when we see a screen of some sort, we kind of assume it is connected to the web.When it isn't, invariably you see someone pushing the screen looking for a reaction that isn't forthcoming.

Form factors (fancy term for the way stuff looks and works, what components it has to use) are changing, definitely. I don't think things like keyboards are disappearing though. I don't think big screens are disappearing. What is disappearing are the limitations of devices -- we're going to be able to go all mix and match.

What is likely changing is that the divide between users and engineers is becoming more entrenched, and more permanent. More on that in the next post.

Resources:

Early computing in pictures - Royal Pingdom, kind of an interesting technology site

The PC is dead - Fox News - January 2011

The PC (as we know it) is Dead - MSNBC - June 2011

Dawn of a New Day, Ray Ozzie's blog - Chief Software Engineer at Microsoft from 2008 to 2010 -- this is a more nuanced article. Long, but interesting. October 2010

 

 

Nice article from Christopher Elliot on Bnet @YourService on phone service horrors from most businesses.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/customer-management/5-things-you-should-never-say-on-the-phone/952?promo=713&tag=nl.e713

Talking to customers: It matters exactly what you say

"It does not matter what you say. It only matters exactly what you say."

Amazing speaker Warren Evans said this in a training session I recently attended. And it is so true, isn't it? Warren was talking about professional speaking. But this is also true in the customer experience business.

Let me give you a recent example. I was approaching a longish line at the airport (is there any other kind?), and the staff person monitoring the line pointed and said to me, "You should go over there". I explained that a previous person had told me to come to this line.

Going through my head is... do any of these people know what they are talking about? Am I going to wait in the wrong line? Maybe I should just forget about buying the upgrade.  More discussion. Finally he says to me, "Yes, they can help you here, but this is a long line. The agents over there can also do this, and there is no line up there."

Good intentions, right approach, not well executed. Instead of making me feel that I was getting excellent service, I felt mildly annoyed. But I was actually getting pretty great service, wasn't I? It just didn't make that impact.

It matters exactly what you say.

What's your take? Has anyone said exactly the right thing to you recently? And how did it make you feel?

Missed opportunities: when you do something good for customers, make sure they know

I buy lots of stock photos for use in my work -- either to illustrate concepts for people, mock up new ideas, or to enliven my client reports.

When I got a good-for-one-day-only offer from iStockphoto to get a 15% discount, I was interested and clicked through.

The problem:

• Landing page did not make the discount clear. I thought I was looking at regular prices, and that the discount would show up later
• There was a coupon code box, but no coupon code. More confusion
• When I paid and confirmed, I thought that I would see some kind of "you saved $x" notice. Nope.
• Thinking that I didn't get the discount I was supposed to, I made an enquiry of customer support.
• 8 days later, I received an e-mail response "The coupon was already built into the site when you made the purchase, that is why it does not appear as an additional discount on your receipt."

The mistake here, often made, is the assumption that I am so familiar with the regular price that I would instantly see the discount. The landing page did not make it clear I was getting anything special -- it looked the same as always. So an opportunity to make a little wee splash was missed.

The other odd thing was that this offer arrived on a national holiday. So only us poor fools who were working would receive the offer, and we had to act on it immediately (I think -- the offer wasn't crytal clear on that). Alll I wanted to do was finish up and go play, but instead I had to add something to my urgent to-do list.

My take:

When you do something nice for customers, make sure they know. Don't assume it's obvious.

Reader participation:

Are the "special offers" you get actually special?

Are you capturing the insights of the Introverts?

Our society has a strong bias in favor of extraversion -- those who are energized by being around others, who can process information quickly, and blurt out opinions as fast as they can blink. But there is a sizable minority of the population that does not fit this pattern -- people with a preference for introversion.

I wrote recently on the NewQual Blog about the advantages of online asynchronous research methods for capturing the insights of Introverts. And boy, this really resonated with people!

A couple of people sent me private e-mails [as introverts would do, not wanting to be loud and out-there, for the most part].

It's not just qualitative research that suffers from this problem -- virtually all marketing research does. Consider the telephone survey, where you are asked a battery of questions, many with multiple choice answers or agree/disagree scales on relatively complex topics.And you need to answer pretty much immediately.

A lot of online shopping has time limits that test our patience -- we have to choose among options quickly, or the system "times out". But with many options to choose, even the speedy must find it challenging to react quickly enough.

For more on this topic, check out the other article here:

Introverts get their day: When discussion forums and bulletin boards can be more inclusive

What's your take?

Is the world stacked against introverts? Does anyone give you enough time to consider before expecting you to choose, react or opine?

To probe or not to probe: Active listening versus poking with sharp thingy

More and more qualitative research is happening online. One of my favorite tools for this is the discussion forum, also known as a bulletin board. This is an asynchronous environment -- everyone is not necessarily present at the same time. [I so wish there was a better word for asynchronous!]

It's not quite the same as face-to-face. In person, if I hear something intriguing, I might ask, "Can you say more about that", or something similar. This is known, in researcher parlance, as a "probe". Although we try to make it gentle -- drawing out more information and ideas -- sometimes I think it feels more like a sharp poky thing.

In the discussion forum environment (asynchronous), you definitely can probe and ask follow-up questions.  The technology support for making this easy has improved a lot – we can now flag things, send a mobile message, or e-mail to the respondent.

My approach on this has changed a lot over the years -- I try to be more of an active listener, and less of an inquisitor.

Treat participant energy as a scarce resource

I treat follow-up questions as if I have only a very limited number I can use, and I must use them only when really important.  Here’s why:  I really love it when participants start to engage with each other.  But they do this less if I’m constantly butting in.

Not only that, but asking people to go back to something they said before is sort of like trying to rewind a conversation by hours or days — people have moved on. The energy is now somewhere else.  So you spend a lot of participant energy asking them to go back.  When people do go back, their responses are often not worth the cost in energy.

The virtual head nod

Probing does have one clear benefit — it shows people you are listening.  And listening is hugely important.  Participants see what you say, and see whether you are listening and understanding them or not.

If I don’t have a definite need to follow-up for additional detail, I sometimes restate what I am hearing, just as I might do in a F2F discussion.  This approach generally results in feedback from the participants that they really felt “heard”, which is so important.  Who wants to talk to an empty room?

The virtual head nod is even shorter — just an indicator that I’m there, reading and listening.

The challenge

Clients distracted by other work may log in and read something intriguing that happened earlier in the week. Then they want me to post a follow-up.

To keep everyone happy, I tend to bring this kind of thing back in with a fresh topic later on, rather than ask people to go back.

I do make my presence regularly felt, as often as possible given the demands of eating and sleeping, but limit the number of probes.

There is another school of thought that you can run these projects with no probes at all — I think that would produce significantly reduced output. However, there are some new DIY qualitative platforms that essentially take this approach. There is no active listener.

What’s your view?

Does this resonate with anyone out there? Either as a participant in some form of interview or discussion, or as a moderator of same.

Portions of this were previously published on the NewQual Blog.

The one most important referral: What great salespeople can do for you

In one afternoon at a shopping mall, I met three amazing salespeople.

After many years of service [some might say loyal, but truly, appliances are not loyal, they are stuck with you] it was time for us to replace our stove and refrigerator.

Like all other consumers of major appliances now, I looked online to try to thin out the field of considered brands and models. I remembered driving all over town the last time we bought something big [a tiny deep freeze and a washing machine], and finally ending up at Sears. So this time, we decided to start with Sears.

Amazing salesperson #1

We'd had a good experience with Edgar, the guy who sold us the freezer and washer, and hoped to see him again. No luck - he was off that day. But it was okay, because another guy with a very similar approach helped us.

1  You are as good as the last sales experience people had in your store. Every experience needs to create at least one referral -- where the client refers themselves back to you. If you can't get that one referral, you've got a problem.

It's a fine balance between attentive help, and someone that is so intrusive you can't look for yourself and talk to your spouse about what you see. This guy had the blend perfectly. I expected him to push the house brand -- he showed it to us, but when we said "nah, that's not for us," he moved on.

2  Shoppers are tuned in that you might be favoring one item more than another. And that's okay, as long as you don't go too far. See point #4 for more.

Through all of this looking, I was so impressed at the product knowledge this guy had at his fingertips. Even though I had spent a lot of time looking at things online, he was way ahead of me.

3  Many people have done their homework.They have researched online. They have looked at Consumer Reports. Can your sales staff keep up with them? Can they actually add value?

Everyone pushes their insurance package now. It's ubiquitous. Even the rechargeable batteries from Future Shop can be insured. So I knew the pitch was coming. But when it came, he made a recommendation that made sense. Then he offered some unique tips like this one: print a little label with the date the no-claim warranty rebate comes due along with the number to call, and stick it inside the fridge so you won't forget to call and get your refund. Nice idea!

4  Transparency is important. People have finely tuned BS detectors now.

Amazing salesperson #2

When we left the store, poor but happy, we didn't plan to make any more stops. But we did pop into H+M to pick up a DVD for the evening.  That's when we met amazing salesperson number 2. She wanted to be sure we knew about the BOGO. So we went and picked up a second DVD. Her enthusiasm for the DVDs, and subsequent recommendations for other products kept us engaged and buying.

5  Really helping people is invaluable. There is so much choice, that someone who can help you find what you need makes the whole thing fun.

Since we were in the store longer as a result of this, I remembered that I needed prizes for a project. So I bought some gift certificates. This person turned at $10 sale into a $100 sale with very little effort.

Amazing salesperson #3

Walking through the mall back to the car, I was offered some hand cream from a kiosk in the mall. You guessed it, I just met salesperson #3. She offered to show me a miracle. That's a hard offer to turn down, especially when the person has your actual hand in theirs. I walked out with a manicure kit for myself and two more to give to people (you wouldn't want to miss out on the special offer now, would you?).

6  Even the hard sell can be interesting if it is done in a charming way. Use the classic sales techniques, but bring freshness to them.

I told the last salesperson, "You're wasted in cosmetics. You should be in real estate." Her reply, "I want to sell luxury cars."  And I bet she will! She had crafted a script for herself that was entertaining and hard to avoid. She had figured out compelling ways to demonstrate her product. And she was charming throughout. I had to tear myself away before she started in on the facial products!

I left the mall optimistic for the future. These three people, working in roles many would consider dead-end jobs, had brought thoughtfulness, brains and professionalism to the task. They appeared to enjoy their work. They were trying to help people at the same time as making their numbers.

It showed, and it worked.

What's your take - would you refer yourself back to the last store you shopped in?

The Age of Creativity: Fashion Co-creation

Infographics are a great way to communicate ideas -- they give you a snapshot of something really quickly. The one below is about fashion co-creation.

I've written on co-creation and customization before -- in transit design, maker communities, fashion and design, online sites like Google maps, more products and designs. It's a trend that continues to build in so many ways -- so I was intrigued by this fashion co-creation infographic sent to me via MyFashionSales.  It has some great examples, a few I hadn't seen before.

Even better, it meant I discovered the charming writing of the MyFashionSales blog. And I also checked out a site which you simply must investigate -- submitinfographics -- which has a lot of terrific infographics -- including many user-generated graphics. Another veritable hub of creativity.

We are just surrounded by creativity everywhere -- new ways to communicate, new ways to share ideas, new chances for everyone to participate. Someday the era we are now living in will be called the Age of Creativity [unless someone thinks of a better name. Maybe you?]

And aren't we lucky to be living in this time? The Age of Creativity.

 

Relationship marketing: how to start rethinking it

In the last post, I suggested that most relationship marketing strategies are hollow at the core, and are really a pretty label for direct marketing tactics. Which is fine, but don't call it a relationship. This post looks at a different approach based on research in the public relations sector.

In my research work, I often find myself seeking a stronger framework to support my approach and recommendations to clients. [If you want to be a great consultant, not just a good one, you need to make clear and focused recommendations. Yup, it's scary stuff.]

I came across a wonderful paper recently by Dr. Linda Childers Hon at U of Florida and Dr. James E. Grunig at U. of Maryland: Guidelines for Measuring Relationships in Public Relations. [Download the PDF] Sounds pedestrian, but isn't.

Outputs is the immediate result of a PR effort -- such as getting newspaper coverage. Outcomes is the longer term measure of whether the activity and outputs are making any impact on perceptions of the target audience.

Six Dimensions of Relationships

Hon and Grunig make a case for six dimensions of relationships that can be measured, which they define as follows:

Control Mutuality

The degree to which parties agree on who has the rightful power to influence one another. Although some imbalance is natural, stable relationships require that organizations and publics each have some control over the other.

Trust

One party’s level of confidence in and willingness to open oneself to the other party. There are three dimensions to trust: integrity: the belief that an organization is fair and just … dependability: the belief that an organization will do what it says it will do … and, competence: the belief that an organization has the ability to do what it says it will do.

Satisfaction

The extent to which each party feels favorably toward the other because positive expectations about the relationship are reinforced. A satisfying relationship is one in which the benefits outweigh the costs.

Commitment

The extent to which each party believes and feels that the relationship is worth spending energy to maintain and promote. Two dimensions of commitment are continuance commitment, which refers to
a certain line of action, and affective commitment, which is an emotional orientation.

Exchange Relationship

In an exchange relationship, one party gives benefits to the other only because the other has provided benefits in the past or is expected to do so in the future.

Communal Relationship

In a communal relationship, both parties provide benefits to the other because they are concerned for the welfare of the other -- even when they get nothing in return. For most public relations activities, developing communal relationships with key constituencies is much more important to achieve than would be developing exchange relationships.

The paper provides questions that can be used to measure on a Likert Scale, such as "This organization treats people like me fairly and justly".

Are you seeking Communal when you are actually offering Exchange?

I found these definitions, and the questions proposed, quite thought-provoking. I believe one of the significant disconnects people experience in their relationships with large enterprises have to do with the expectation of a Communal Relationship when the other party is operating on an Exchange Relationship model.

For example, some providers of research platforms seek loyalty from people like me. But my loyalty is almost completely related to performance and pricing -- in the absence of those elements, I would move to other providers, despite having good interpersonal relationships.

The lack of control is an important issue in some business categories: financial services (especially lending), telecommunications (those cell phone contracts!) and health care come immediately to mind.

Better as a thought-starter than a measurement framework?

Not everyone agrees that this form of measurement is the pinnacle for public relations practitioners. See the article by Kim Harrison below.  This is a very valid point -- I am working on a project right now where the client wants to generate new ideas for PR events that will result in actual new customers for the retail stores. That's a very crunchy measurement. 

However, I am jazzed about this model as a thought-starter. Perhaps a touch-stone. And maybe even useful for thinking about things like brand advertising efforts.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any experience with this model?

Resources

More on Likert Scales  http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/scallik.php

Kim Harrison, Cutting Ede PR Blog. The Myth of Relationship Building as the Key Measure of PR http://www.cuttingedgepr.com/articles/relationship-building-pr-measure.asp

Seeking another way of looking at relationships

So much BS is written about relationship management in the current era of consumer power that you need a power-shovel to find any gems in the smelly stuff.

Part of the challenge is that most of what you will find is tactical -- "here's what you need to do" -- and is not necessarily informed by a guiding philosophy of any kind.

We went right from Permission Marketing and The Cluetrain Manifesto to "How to make a killing with E-mail marketing".

The challenge with focusing exclusively on tactics is that you will quickly find no basis for making your tactical decisions. For that, you need some kind of a strategy.  In developing a strategy, you will quickly find yourself trying to back your way into some sort of guiding philosophy.

I went questing for some meatier material to support a current project, and came upon a gem of a report about relationships and how to measure them. 

See more in the next post.

Resources

Seth Godin's influential book, Permission Marketing, published 1999, has principles that seem to have been forgotten in the age of better targeting tools. What people seem to want now is HOW TO MAKE AN ABSOLUTE KILLING WITH EMAIL MARKETING !  Interestingly, the book is actually titled "E-mail marketing for Newbies", but Amazon kindly provided the marketing phrase. [Maybe they read the book. I confess I did not.]

The Cluetrain Manifesto, by David Weinberger, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and Jake McKee is also available free online. Or you can buy it from many retailers if you prefer a hardcopy read.

 

 

The post-consumption era: this is the real end of the world you need to prepare for

There was lots of collective fun-making when the recently predicted end of days did not come to pass. "Rapture photos" were posted (empty clothes in amusing places), and there was a frenzy of Facebook status updates monitoring the fun.

The real Armageddon for most of us will creep up more slowly -- it's the shift many are predicting to a post-consumer culture.

Consumer Culture is the water we swim in daily

If you live in the affluent societies of the first world, the dominant culture is a consumer culture. A nice definition is available on the AQR website:

A culture may be understood as a pattern of beliefs, values, meanings and customs shared by a group of people, often existing at an implicit or taken-for-granted level. Consumer culture suggests that consumption - the act of buying goods or services - is a cultural activity, one imbued with meaning and driven not just by practical or economic factors. Mapping and exploring the business implications of these cultural meanings is one of the principal functions of qualitative market research.

Consumer culture is not the only thing going on, but it's a big part of our individual and collective mission to make meaning.

If you doubt this, here's a simple self-test for you -- name the first 10 brands that come to mind.

For most people, this exercise quickly becomes complex, especially if done in a group. Are you a Tide person? Are you defined by Crest? By Apple? By Mercedes? By Prada? By Black + Decker?

Global Alarming -- the forces driving change

There are signs that things are changing. Terrorism and the uncertainties it has brought to all of the first world (we now get to share the terror with the rest of the world, who never stopped experiencing it), is thought by many to be an important driver of cultural change.

Our increasing awareness that the planet cannot indefinitely support this level of abuse is another important driver.  It's not just air pollution now, or the holes in the ozone layer -- we have an abundance of environmental issues that are concerning: overfishing, extinctions, climate change, water shortages, melting glaciers, and peak oil, to name a few.

The global recession is another key driver here, adding an immediate need for many to look at their individual lifestyle and decide what is important.

What it all means for business and marketing

A nice piece of work from David Carlson called "Closed Wallets, Closed Minds" looks at this phenomenon from the designer's perspective. "We are increasingly suffering from consumption fatigue", says Mr. Carlson. Companies that want to be part of this change, rather than a victim of it, will need to "listen to what the consumer wants, rather than tell them".

Mr. Carlson posits that a relationship economy is forming, but admits none of us can really see the future.

Only the future will tell if the climate of anti-consumerism is genuine, or if we are only on a pause between mad bouts of bag filling.

It's a beautifully constructed report, as always, and will get you thinking -- as it did me.

What's your take?

What signs of change are you seeing? I love to hear your comments, thoughts and observations.

How to save on qualitative research

No matter how large your research budget, you probably wish you had more. Here's my list of ways to save money on qualitative research -- some more obvious than others. You can get a PDF of the full article, with more details on each method, here.

Here's my top 10 ways, in brief:

1. Keep a tight focus on objectives
2. Reduce the number of participants
3. Cut the travel
4. Manage the number of markets you touch
5. Manage back-room catering demands
6. Decide if you need transcripts, video and other goodies
7. Work with realistic deadlines
8. Remember that the screener is not a survey project
9. Consider your written report needs
10. Be a valued client, easy to work with

These are times when organizations need insight more than ever to compete, but every
expenditure is under scrutiny. A collaborative approach with a skilled researcher will help you
get more for your research dollars without sacrificing quality of insight.

Resources

This piece was published by AMA in their newsletter as "Good to the Last Drop: 10 Ways to Save Money on Qualitative Research".  You don't need a subscription to read the article, and there's a nice PDF here.

Keeping things in context: what can happen in 5 years, and what it means for planning

I was doing a client debrief today related to a long-term technology project. Things in the planning stages will take years to build and launch -- 3 to 5 years, most likely. I wanted to help the client team remember that our research looks at where people are at today -- their expectations and experiences. But the planning needs to be out where people are headed, not where they are today. Such a cliche, right? But true.

Customer expectations are constantly moving. These days, customer expectations are moving fairly quickly.

We did a little exercise together to think about what has changed in the last five years. Here was the list I prepared for them.

5 Years ago: May 17, 2006 – what has changed since then:

• Netflix introduced downloading of video Oct 1, 2008
• Kindle launched Nov 19, 2007
• iPhone released June 29, 2007
• Nintendo Wii – November 19, 2006
• Facebook opened to non-students – September 26, 2006
• Google bought YouTube for $1.65 B October 9, 2006 (YouTube launched Feb 14, 2005)
• Twitter launched July 2006

When you think about what you or your company needs to deliver in the future, you might ask yourself what has changed in the last few years in the relevant dimensions in your industry. Then springboard from that into the future.

Some of these changes were so profound that it's hard to believe they are so recent!

What would YOU add to this list?

Digital overload continues - watch for continued improvement in curation tools

It won't come as a surprise to you that you are indundated with information - we all are.

Still, the recent study "Digital Lifestyle" published by Magnify.net and reported by MediaPost shows some daunting stats.

Half the responders are connected from wakeup to bedtime.

Close to half say they are unable to answer all e-mail. [No, it's not just you. I feel better now too.]

Other problems reported included ignoring family and friends, missing important news, and even missing appointments.

There is a huge opportunity here for tools to help us curate, and people to help us curate.

Just for fun: What's your personal solution to digital overload?

Better Social Media: take your game up a notch

I'm preparing a presentation for a fall conference about how to take your social media presence to the next level. In this case, the audience will be consultants who specialize in qualitative research and ideation, but I think the principles will be broadly applicable.

The thing is, a lot of speakers on this topic today -- and I saw one another one recently who just published a book on the topic, supposedly a major expert -- are still at the point of telling people who to accept as a friend on Facebook, and why you need a LinkedIn profile. Well, the colleagues I'm addressing are doing all of that -- they've got a blog, they've got a Slideshare account, they're on Twitter.

(If you're thinking -- hey Susan, it's not like you're some kind of guru on this topic... you're right. I have a few months to obtain sufficient guru knowledge to help my colleagues. And help myself in the process. And help you too, right? There's nothing like a presentation deadline to help you get focused about learning something!)

Long story short: I'm going to start posting links here to articles and resources that make sense to me.   You can contribute, and if you do, you'll get full credit, including a link to your blog, website, LinkedIn profile or Twitter feed (whatever you want).  Just add resources by adding a comment below, and if I like the resource, I'll add it to the list.

When the list gets long enough, I'll shift it over to it's own page.

Content, Tone and Personality

"Building Online Trust: 7 Tips for Being Authentic Online", Alice Hansen, Inc. Magazine. (http://www.inc.com/guides/201104/how-to-build-online-trust-by-being-authentic.html)

Great advice on how to show authenticity and build credibility through how you talk (e.g. selective disclosure), and what you do (use a real name). Great advice for major brands, but would apply to anyone building their personal brand. I started using my real name in most comments online a long time ago, and I wish more people would do that.

"Six Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation", by CB Whittemore, Content Marketing Institute Blog. (http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/05/how-to-manage-your-reputation-online/)

CB is always worth reading for her practical approach to the art of social media and customer engagement. In this article she shares ways to monitor your Google search results, develop digital profiles, set expectations for your content and responsiveness, and develop content ideas.

"Five Things to Avoid Doing On Your Business Blog", by THOMMA, Blue Volcano Media Blog. (http://www.bluevolcanomedia.com/2011/05/16/5-things-to-avoid-doing-on-your-business-blog/)

Five great tips, all rules I've broken, but try not to. My favorite to avoid: talking only to yourself. Sporadic posting is a problem many business blogs have -- if you can't post regularly, you should rethink the strategy. (Yes, I've been guilty!)

 "How to Build Your Reputation on Social Q&A Sites", by Aliza Sherman, Gigaom Collaboration. (http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-to-build-your-reputation-on-social-qa-sites/)

Quora, Focus, and Namesake are all profile building tools that work on the principle of experts sharing answers to business questions. If you have seen LinkedIn Q+A, these sites are very similar. Aliza Sherman provides a good description of each of these sites, including the type of people and quality of conversation.

http://www.quora.com/

http://www.focus.com/

http://namesake.com/

I keep discovering more of these social Q+A sites -- I'm sure they exist in every category or vertical. 

http://technologymarketers.com/marketingAnswers/

Metrics and Measurement

Klout (http://klout.com)

Klout is a social media tool that measures your influence on others. Their algorithm is heavily associated with Twitter, and tracks how many people include you in a list, how many retweet your posts, comment on your content, and so forth. Very easy to use, and pretty interesting.

Useful tools

Paper.li (http://paper.li)

Paper.li will take a feed of your Twitter subscriptions and condense it into an easy-to-read newspaper, such as the Susanology Daily. The service is completely automated and catching on quickly. You can choose to automatically retweet your creation, as I do, or you can just use it to keep up. Note that this paper is about the people YOU follow, which is what makes it so cool.

Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/)

 

Scoop.it is another content curation tool - at the time of writing it is in beta mode. It requires some active curation on your part -- you select topics and give them key words, and then Scoopit delivers a set of content you can choose from. A downloadable bookmarklet lets you easily add content to your topics. You can subscribe to the content that others curate, as well as offering your own content. Here's a sample I created in a few minutes: http://www.scoop.it/t/building-profile-with-content-marketing

How To Articles

"How to Add YouTube Videos to Your Site or Blog", Karen Rubin, HubSpot Marketing Blog. (http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/13057/How-to-Add-YouTube-Videos-to-Your-Site-or-Blog.aspx)

Simple video on video.

 

  "How to maximize the value of SlideShare", KIT, SlideShare Blog. (http://blog.slideshare.net/2011/05/04/how-to-maximize-the-value-of-slideshare/ )

SlideShare is a great tool that should be part of anyone's content marketing strategy. You can easily repurpose content, and the medium has content in it's DNA -- it's not about finding a date, or posting a joke, it's about learning. The article has links to some good tips. One biggie: if you want more viewers, you probably need a longer slide-show.(But not a long boring show, a long useful show!)

The virtues of simplicity, clarity, obviousness and elegance

This is an interesting analysis of the Steve Jobs phenomenon -- and speculation about whether Apple is actually his greatest product.

However, the thing that most stuck with me was actually how John Gruber captured the essence of the product philosophy: "Simplicity. Clarity. Obviousness. Elegance."

If we all made those four words our mantra for a week, our work would surely benefit, and so would the lives of our customers, clients, consumers. Thanks for those four words, John!

http://www.bnet.com/videos/the-steve-jobs-effect/395402?promo=664&tag=nl.e664

Wonderful list of haiku about the insights business at Frankie Johnson's excellent blog.

http://www.researcharts.com/2011/04/poetry-in-research-haikumr/

Fascinating that so few lines can often capture more truth than even a long and intimate conversation. When forced to distill to essentials, we can't really be banal. Wait... that's almost a haiku!

New Qualitative 101

Greenbook, in conjunction with my buddies at QRCA, have just come out with a directory of New Qualitative providers.

Quite apart from the fact that I am listed in it... you would find it useful for a few other reasons:

• Great basic articles telling you what you need to know about various methodologies. Well written by experts Betsy Leichliter and Jay Zaltzman
• Details and contact information for the major platform providers
• Listings for researchers experience in these methods

You can get a hardcopy for $29, but check out the digital version for free, here.

There's also a blog (I'm writing there too), which has some fantastic contributors, all people who've done a fair bit of heavy lifting in new methodologies, and will be sharing best practices, new ideas, and whatnot.

It's good news to finally have a resource in one place, and I'm sure it will grow as providers seem to be expanding continually. Many of these providers were simply lost in the giant directory that has everything from survey sample to focus group facilities listed.

So now we have resources in one place, plus information too. And that's just great news for practitioners and clients!

 

Conversation in slow motion: How to observe a bulletin board focus group

I'm currently moderating an extended online B2B project involving business execs in a discussion forum. It's somewhere between a bulletin board project and a community, because the same people have been involved for several weeks.

It's demanding for me, but hey, I designed it, so I only have myself to blame.

But extended online qualitative is really challenging for the clients, who have many demands on their time in a typical workday. When the data really starts to build, after a few days in a project, keeping up can be overwhelming.

It's all well and good for me to have insights and distill them into nuggets of wisdom. But they're as good as useless if the client doesn't learn anything. And the best place to start the learning is in the backroom, just as it is with F2F research.

Here's what I've learned that seems to help people engage:

Tips to help the team stay engaged, and help your moderator manage.

[1] Log in early and often

The first day, it often feels like nothing is happening. Team members who logged on expecting activity can get discouraged, and when they look at the transcript later, it can feel a bit depersonalized, and a lot overwhelming.

If you log in frequently, you will see the same ebb and flow the moderator sees. Some topics attract immediate interest, others are slower to build. It’s easier to see where participants are spring-boarding off others’ ideas. Even though the transcript is time-stamped, seeing the evolution is a richer experience.

[2] Schedule team meetings to review insights

One team scheduled daily debriefs in a conference room where they projected the discussion and talked, just like they would in a backroom setting. Snacks included.

[3] Divide up the work of observing

Assign individual team members to cover off one or two segments in a multi-group discussion forum, then report back to the team on their segment. Another approach is to divide up by days (or weeks, for longer projects).

One project team held a group meeting where they projected the evolving discussion and reviewed interesting things together, just as they would in F2F research in the backroom. What a great idea! 

[4] Add comments

Observers can usually add comments to the transcript that are invisible to participants. This is a great way to capture a budding idea, and can help the moderator see possibilities for probes.

[5] Ask for follow-up probes right away

The faster we can ask a follow-up question, the better. Going back more than one day in a discussion tends to sap the group’s energy, and often does not work anyway.  Have a plan in place for how you will direct these to the moderator, to prevent frustration on both sides.

As a moderator, I may make the decision to bring something back in later to the discussion -- even days later. Or I may know that the topic already came up earlier. So if the moderator doesn't respond to your request, try not to get frustrated -- they are likely not ignoring you, just trying to manage the flow in the best possible way.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this article were previously published on the NewQual Blog as Bulletin Boards from the Backroom: 5 Tips for Observing a Conversation in Slow Motion.

If you haven't seen the NewQual blog or directory, you should check out this new resource: NewQualitative  The directory (finally!) brings together all the providers of online research platforms, and it's a good place to discover other resources and content.

Bye, Bye Flip! But there's other fish in the sea

Yesterday, I was heartbroken to learn Cisco is shutting down the Flip Video line of business purchased from Pure Digital in 2009 for some $590 million. Even though Flip has more than a quarter of the market for such devices, video inside phones is a bigger market.

Why do I care? Well, Flip was a cool tool to send out to research participants to record their lives. It was good looking, and charmed people into contributing amazing self-ethnography.

Not only that, I've been using it to record instructions to research participants, and to create Digital DNA (TM), a video distillation of key research findings suitable for executives with ADHD. [Which is basically all of them, right?] 

Leftovers from projects have been quickly snapped up by other household members.

So ... what to use instead? Because not every participant in qualitative has a video phone, or knows how to use it, or how to upload from it. I went looking, and here's what I found:

Laura Heller writing for Forbes lays out a few alternatives here: Miss the Flip?

She likes the Sony Bloggie, which does indeed look like a possibility. It looks simple to use, it's colorful, and it's cheap (important for us volume buyers!), plus it has the flip-out USB connector. Sometimes Sony doesn't play well with other systems, however, so I'm not giving them my heart just yet.

She also mentions the Kodak products, also inexpensive and good-looking.

Okay, sigh of relief. Maybe life as we know it is not over. But I'll always love Flip for its innovation and elegant good looks. Flip, you stole my heart, and you'll always have a place there. I might have to buy a custom printed one before you're gone for good.

Your take:

What are your favorites in this category? And which would you rather receive as an incentive to participate in a research project? Inquiring minds want to know.

Resources:

Best-buy has a nice explanation about these cameras here.

Using Facebook to engage with consumers: keep it simple

New media channels are becoming as complex as the old media channels were. Actually, scratch that -- I think they are more complex, because they are interactive and dynamic.

So the things that work for blogging (or general content marketing strategies), let's say, don't necessarily work for Facebook marketing.

 
Buddy Media just released a study suggesting that successful FB marketing strategies in some cases are counter-intuitive.They looked at two weeks of FB activity for 200 of their clients to come up with the strategies discussed.

Here are a few of the things that caught my attention:

• Wall posts of 80 characters or less had 27% higher engagement rates (likes, etc.) than longer posts. 80 characters is not a lot -- a Twitter post is maximum 140 chars -- so keep it short.. A short post, almost by necessity, has to have something useful in it, like a new product launch, a sale, etc.

• Full-length URLs do better than shortened URLs -- 3 times better. The report suggests this is because readers know where the URL will take them. Note that URL shortening is virtually a necessity in Twitter, so this is also different.

• Posting outside business hours (referencing Eastern Time) creates higher engagement than posting during business hours. Considering how many businesses block access to social media sites, this isn't all that surprising. What IS surprising is how few of BuddyMedia's clients are posting outside business hours -- 60% of the posts in their study were between 10 am and 4 pm.

• Thursday and Friday are the best days to post, followed by Sunday (see graphic above). The report shows some differences by industry which are quite dramatic. For example, Sunday is when people pay attention to automotive. Food and beverage is highest on Tuesday. Fashion is highest on Thursday. Their advice: study your own patterns.

• Soft-sell key words seem to work best, but direct and simple calls to action get results. Do you want people to click "Like"? You need to ask them to do that.

You know that phrase, "conventional wisdom"? It doesn't have any relationship to new media. Test and learn should be your mantra.

Resources

Download the Buddy Media Facebook study here.

I learned of the Buddy Media report from Marko Saric's very good blog, How to Make My Blog

Trust in the digital era: Epsilon e-mail breach triggers notices from big brands

We've received four notices so far this week about Epsilon's e-mail security breakdown -- everyone from Abe Books to Best Buy has been saying sorry. The notices are a good idea, and probably necessary for them to limit / mitigate liability (in certain litigious market areas).

But I found these e-mails fairly alarming, especially when they kept coming.

But wait... there's more

Turns out that only 2% of total clients were compromised, and it was just e-mail addresses, according to Epsilon's press release. Initially, this felt reassuring, but then I started wondering... what does 2% really mean, when you are operating on this scale?

Elsewhere in the Epsilon website, I learned that they can send "15 million dynamic messages in one hour, or more than 40 billion emails a year."

Turns out that 2% of their clients amounts to about 50 companies, many of them of significant size -- according to this list. (I guess they used the 2% of clients number because the e-mails number was just too big and scary?)

So, finally I know why I am getting so many heartfelt notes from celebrities offering to help me improve my body parts, and have better date nights.

Resources

PC magazine posts more information here about the topic, and offers the suggestion of using a specific e-mail address for online shopping purposes.

But this solution means... if i actually want value-added e-mails and offers from a trusted business I deal with (e.g. Best Buy, for example, or perhaps a hotel or airline), I then have to wade through a ton of spam to get it.

In the era of self-serve, the problems people call you about are not ordinary

Large organizations gather lots of statistics. Such as who calls the call centre. And what their problem is.

When they encounter a frequent problem, they do one of three or four things:

- they fix the problem (design feature, assembly instructions, whatever it is)

- they create self-serve options on the web site to help the customer fix the problem (such as tracking your package)

- they create an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file to deal with the problem

- they put a message on a phone recording to tell you the answer (such as what hours the store is open)

All of this is done to reduce the number of enquiries about simple stuff, and (hopefully) to make the experience better.

This has led us to an interesting situation -- all of those problems that used to be dealt with by people are now dealt with by us. By definition, what's left is uncommon problems.

So have a little respect for your front line call-centre staff, because they only get the difficult stuff. You may not be training them that way, but that's their reality.

My take

I was thinking about this again because I am speaking to some service quality professionals at the end of the month. And I think this is one of the things they have to contend with. We've actually solved many of the obvious service problems. What's left is not all that straightforward.

Is DIY research going to put us all out of work? The debate rages on!

There's an interesting debate raging around about Do-It-Yourself Research. I posted this comment earlier today on Power to the People, an article by Joshua Hoffman on the Research Access Blog.

As a quallie, I am well aware that lots of people think what i do looks not just easy, but dead simple. Relatively few clients want to do their own, although some do. The usual reason appears to be cost, from what I can see, as recruiting is no faster or slower for them or me.

I find client's analysis of qualitative is usually of the fast kind -- first impressions. If they did more analysis, many of them could come up with what i come up with.

The real issue for me is more one of raw capability. People who have the capability to do from an analysis perspective what I do certainly exist inside client companies, but they are typically senior managers and executives, and are primarily in a managerial or strategic role.  If client companies were prepared to hire people at a senior level to do this work, they could likely obtain great results.

A couple of other things are often missing when clients DIY on qualitative. The longer the person is in the job, the less breadth of exposure they get, the less ability to bring in contextual learning from a broad base of clientele. 

For some methodologies, it could be difficult to get people to tell you the unvarnished truth -- i say this because even as an independent, I (and my colleagues) often have to go to some lengths to assure people of true anonymity in their feedback. I struggle to see how this could be done by an employee.

I also -- as do many consultants -- spend a truly massive amount of time and money on my professional development every year. I attend conferences, I speak at conferences, I attend training events of various sorts, I participate in several professional organizations, I read widely.

My clients, on the other hand, are as busy as small mammals, scurrying on their wheel, often without the time to really think about anything in depth. Their voicemail says they are "in a series of meetings", and that menu rarely seems to change. Of course they have access to learning opportunities, but most are mandated by the company, not chosen by themselves for what they bring.

Even large research organizations have relatively few qualitative people involved in the world outside the corporation, which I would guess to be for cost containment reasons. They send one person to a conference with the idea that they will share the learning.

There is a lot to be said for people who strive to invent new things every year to compete. If I worked inside the client organization, I might not feel the same level of pressure to keep up and be inventive to get ahead. It would be easy to fall into patterns. As it stands now, I am constantly trying to figure out how to either add more value, or ratchet down the third party costs somehow.

Finally, I think the cost argument is upside down where qualitative is concerned. The senior people in qualitative would be prohibitively expensive to hire on a full-time basis, with the benefits and associated overhead.   Just think of the lost productivity in meetings alone!  

It is great to see the tools getting better to do technology-supported qualitative. I love it. I hope that the price drops, as surely it must if DIY is going to take off. Because feature-creep in online research has led to price creep, when it should be going the other way.

Some of the things raised in this article and others are relevant to the qualitative world as well.
* I wish that I could have more access to the learning from the CRM system when i am in the planning or reporting stages. I think clients themselves are struggling to integrate and effectively use all their many sources of data.
* I wish for better long-term collaboration. The best do it, the rest should.
* I wish for better semantic analysis tools -- not to replace me, but to make the work faster and cheaper.

But the good news in all of this is that clients want and need insights. And they don't want to pay 24 carat prices for fool's gold. And that's a good thing for those who can embrace the new reality.

What do you think about all this? I would love to hear your comments, and I know others would too.

[Hey, if nothing else, you can avoid writing that report. And that's gotta be good, right?]