Customer Crossroads

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.