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Archive for the ‘Community Management’ Category

Blog, Co-Creation, Community Management, SMinR, The Future

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Five Emerging Roles That Are Changing the Face of Market Research

  • Date January 23 2012
  • Posted by Job
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Following on from my last post – 2012 Resolutions for the Market Research Agencies – I wanted to talk more about how we make these resolutions a reality by creating new agency roles with distinctive new skills sets.

1. Technologist

The MRX Technologist is primarily responsible for keeping up to date with new digital trends and is able to help the agency develop and pilot new research methodologies. This may take the form of designing new platforms from scratch or being the lead decision maker when it comes to buying 3rd party software. Alongside innovation, the Technologist plays an increasingly important role on project teams where the research briefs are UX or Service Design Orientated.
Skills: User Experience, Digital Project Management, Data Analytics

2. Community Manager

Communities are social places and need to be nurtured by people who are experts in digital communication. With the rise of MROC’s the fastest growing role in MRX agencies is that of the community manager. In fact, most of the problems associated with bad MROC research is when the agency does not have this person on the team. The Community Manager is responsible for setting the rules of the community, setting the tone of voice, making a personal connection with members and ultimately ensuring good quality engagement with the project. The Community Manager is also increasingly leading the way when it comes to applying game mechanics to research and is growing in influence when it comes to shaping research projects.
Skills: Copywriting, Video production, Project Management

3. Social Media Researcher

Real time social media monitoring is now commonplace but many companies are still struggling to interpret the data and use it to make strategic decisions. This knowledge gap is being filled by The Social Media Researcher who is responsible for developing strategic KPI frameworks for social media tracking programmes and harnesses social media data to help answer adhoc brand, product and comms briefs. The Social Media Researcher is quickly becoming a very important role, as they are both an objective and strategic voice advising clients about the ROI of their growing digital spend.
Skills: Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, Social Media strategy

4. Co-creation Consultants

Companies are opening up and embracing more collaborative ways of working with third parties – including their consumers. Co-creation Consultants are responsible for the successful interaction between all parties on a project. Many of the touch points for this type of co-creation occur in workshop environments of one kind or another that require very skilled facilitation to get the best out of a wide variety of participants. Co-creation Consultants cover a wide range of disciplines, most often those from innovation, brand strategy and planning backgrounds.
Skills: Facilitation & improvisation, Planning, Qualitative Research

5. Big Data Scientists

We are living in the age of data, enabling companies to be more forward looking. Big Data Scientists are hot property in the research world as they are responsible for developing predictive data models & algrorithms using a wide range of data sources including dynamic social media data. Big Data Scientists primarily come from computer science, hard sciences, engineering and business backgrounds.
Skills: Mathmatics, Statistics, Computer programming

Blog, Community Management, Insights

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The New Amateur

  • Date July 12 2011
  • Posted by Chris
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In 1980 Alvin Toffler wrote of the “Third Wave“. Following on from the Neolithic Revolution, when agriculture developed to replace hunter-gatherer societies, and the much more recent Industrial Revolution – the second wave – the Third Wave was at that time in the process of obliterating the second wave society. At the time it didn’t have a name, but now it’s known as the Information Revolution or Age of Information ( a name which has seeped into popular culture), the period in which the world is no longer led by economies based around manufacture but by information economies which specialise in innovation, finance and services.

A by-product of this information flooded world is the rise of the new amateur, or the ProAm. The ProAm blurs the distinctions between the professional & the amateur by feeding off the highly accessible information online to pursue amateur interests to a professional standard. The ability to self-publish means that these amateurs often feed off information from other amateurs. The rise of the food blogging community and, by extension, the supper club trend is a great example of the freedom of knowledge sharing from one enthusiastic amateur to the next. No longer are cookbooks from qualified, experienced chefs the only source of information for culinary information – instead you can Google any recipe and be confronted by blogs and opinions on the first page.

I should declare an interest beyond my work as community manager here at Face. I am one of these New Amateurs in the food space, as I pursue my interest in cookery and restaurants through my blog. My experience has been an encouraging one, as the feedback from the wider “foodie” community through Twitter and comments has been both positive and constructive. In a matter of months I feel I’ve learned more about both the technical and cultural aspects of food than I could by reading any number of “expert” publications.

It is the rise of these New Amateurs, these ProAms, which has enabled us to work in the way we do. Co-creation depends upon people who aren’t experts in the conventional sense, but who have a better inherent understanding of the brand in question due to living in the world where the brand has relevance. As community manager I have been taken aback again and again by how savvy the consumers we work with are and how deep their understanding of branding, marketing and innovation runs.

The good news is that this trend is only just beginning as the “digital native” generation comes into its own. As those of us who have grown up around these enabling technologies become the new impetus for business, it’s going to be more important than ever to include the demographic in the development of new ideas and insights, particularly as another side effect of more readily available information is a cynicism about any perceived preaching or one-sided selling from brands. This is a new audience which expects to be talked to rather than at and listened to in turn. Simply shouting about your brand won’t work any more. In 2011, you need a conversation, not a sermon.

Blog, Co-Creation, Communities, Community Management, Crowdsourcing, Innovation, Social Media, sxsw

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SXSW – What Innovators Can Learn From 4chan

  • Date March 14 2011
  • Posted by Job
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Chris Poole gave a great key note presentation at SXSW talking about the evolution of the infamous meme making bulletin board 4chan - once described by The Guardian as “lunatic, juvenile… brilliant, ridiculous and alarming”.

4chan is one of the ugliest sites you will come across but it gets 12million users per month and has 1 million registers users. So what is the key to its popularity?

1. It is a simple concept. Upload an image and a comment and see if other people interact with your content.

2. Unlike social networks, users of the site are anonymous and have a freedom to play and express themselves in ways you just can’t on Facebook…hence some of the adult material uploaded but more significantly the large amount of art criticism on the board.

3. Only the most engaging content stays on the site meaning that people encourage others to play, comment on and adapt their content.

Poole’s next move is updating the 4chan concept by launching Canvas http://canv.as/. On Canv.as all users are given photoshop quality tools to encourage them to be more creative and it  also removes a lot of the barriers to mass participation associated with 4chan.

What struck me about the success of 4chan is how it has managed to create the perfect environment for innovation. A stripped back environment where ideas are more important than the creators and where those ideas can spread and grow without egos getting in the way. What I really like about the new Canvas concept is the potential it has to democratise crowd creativity and as someone who works in the field of innovation I find this very exciting.

Blog, Communities, Community Management, Research Communities, Research Communities 101

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Can I get a little chaos please? Complexity, Interactive Storytelling & Online Communities

  • Date February 25 2011
  • Posted by Marion
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A few years ago, I used to do a bit of comedy: I remember we put on a couple of classic French plays based on comedia del arte and one year we even created and presented a whole show based on improvisation (I swear it worked and was a great success!)

The rules of improv and comedia are similar: participants have a frame or a canvas and a few elements, but the canvas is blank and participants have to write the story.

This technique is now largely used in participative design to get the most out of the participants’ creativity.

Now I’m wondering how we can get to the next level of user empowerment.

For instance, could users or participants be involved in an interactive storyline, either in the way a social website is built or maybe, in a more specific context, in the way a research community project is held?

Why do it?

When I was at uni, we had this class called “Complexity”. Apart from lots of boring hours of lectures, we had a very practical exercise in which we analysed a complex situation and interviewed its participants. Within my group, we chose to check out the complex world of playing chess. There are methods and techniques but also a whole bunch of parameters that cannot be foreseen or analysed and mathematically resolved: for example the kind of psychological tricks you find in both chess and poker.

The world is complex: you do not know the answer to the problems we are facing. A bunch of really cool people, the self-proclaimed Bucket Brigade, give a great explanation of this fact and suggest a casual loop model to tackle the complex issues.

As you can see this method involves variables (could be our participants, their background, the stimulus, and the context e.g online community) and cause-consequences (between all the variables mentioned).

Adding a bit of complexity to the story

Back in the 80s and 90s, geeky kids were already enjoying the earliest examples of interactive storytelling with the glorious “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books.

To cut a long story short, you start reading the book like any other but at the end of each chapter or sequence of the story, you, the reader, are asked to choose between a couple of actions. You are then redirected to the page or chapter that will tell the consequences of your decisions. In these books the reader is the hero and you may die (or lose) before completing the book. This sounds quite a lot like a paper-based video game, doesn’t it?

Everybody’s buzzing about it and game mechanics can encourage participation so I wonder whether we could do the same with online communities.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly news

The bad news is that unless you’ve got a fair amount of disposable cash, it’s going to be hard to build a platform that has as much flexibility in the flow of interfaces and actions as in real life.

Therefore, at Face, we decided to give as much flexibility to the tools participants are using on our online communities as possible, and increase the fluidity of the task flow in order to give them a greater choice. And the good news is that, I believe these things have added a certain degree of complexity to our platforms.

However, to me, the ugly news comes from The Last Psychiatrist (don’t get me wrong, I love this blog!). In this article the author tells the story of a guy who was out with his girlfriend and got beaten up by a 17 year old.

One of the comments reads:

My purpose in using these scenarios is to lead you to realize that “what would you do if…?” is an impossible question because a situation doesn’t happen to you, you are the situation.

Basically if You meets Future You, then either you are (both) locked in the psychiatric ward or you’ve created a space-time warp and the world is going to implode soon (or has imploded already)

In other words, It’s quite impossible to build a Choose Your Own Life in an online community.

So what’s the point?

I think the point in adding complexity to our online communities and the way we design online tasks is to empower users. They already know what they like and what they want and who they are, our goal is to make sure they can fully express it, not necessarily by creating something new but by simply allowing them to be themselves.

Another great bonus is that giving them maximum flexibility in the storyline they want to follow should give a great leverage to their engagement. As Peter Bergman explains in his blog post, the highest motivation comes only at the right time:

“What’s important is that your moment of choice is when you are in the right state of mind — when you need the least willpower — to make the best decision.”

Blog, Community Management, Research Communities, Research Communities 101

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#ResCom101 7: The Future Of Research Communities Part 2

  • Date January 27 2011
  • Posted by Matt
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Following on from yesterdays look at gamification, socialisation and experiential, here is part 2 of our look at The Future of Research Communities:

Co-creation

The essence of co-creation is brands, agencies and consumers working together, at the same time, towards a shared goal. At the moment through tools such as online focus groups and message boards all stakeholders can work together, share information in real time and collaborate.

However again, if co-creation is going to evolve online it needs to break free from web 2.0 and new tools need to be created. Google Wave gave us a hint, albeit very complicated, about how working together online could potentially work.

This technology is obviously still in its infancy and needs a serious clean up if it is going to become mainstream and universally useable. However the thought behind it, a group of people working in a stream of consciousness, editing, sharing and collaborating instantly, is exactly what is needed for co-creation to evolve online.

This kind of approach means that a whole group of people can work together at an arranged time or co-creators can dip in, leave their feedback, build their ideas and then dip out, at a convenient time for them.

Co-creation is going to embed itself in traditional research techniques and the online co-creation tools need to catch up with the fresh, innovative offline approach.

Building

Whether it’s for traditional research, co-creation or crowdsourcing online, respondents are often asked “If you could create your perfect “insert type of product here” what would it be like?”

For those answering this can be a very difficult process. Trying to describe what you are imagining in your head is not easy. This is why tools that allow users to fully release their creative thinking should be developed and implemented. Giving people the chance to fully articulate themselves leads to better ideas being developed and better insights exposed.

As online tools develop, creative outlets will improve, which should be snapped up by research communities instantly. Basic creative functionality such as paint tools is the start to this but when working creatively users shouldn’t be pigeon holed into giving a set type of response.

They should be able to respond however they want to, whether that is creating something within the community, uploading from their own tools, describing ideas in text or a combination of all.

A submitted idea should be like a scrapbook: influences, thoughts, ideas, feedback and final submission. Covering every angle of the creative process getting as much insight, innovation and creativity as possible.

Realism

Online research communities are artificial environments in which we discuss and debate real life. Users are asked to describe their behaviour, attitude, decision-making process and thoughts towards certain subjects. The gap between the environment and reality needs to be closed in order for results to be as real and natural as they possibly can.

For a long time community members have been telling us what they think rather than showing us how they feel. This needs to change. By sending community members out into their worlds and allowing them to report back will bring a much deeper level of insight and understanding.

We should be giving audiences time (and tools) to consider responses in real life before they download their experiences and feelings in to the community. This will allow agencies and brands to get under the skin of a subject rather than just receiving superficial thoughts.

Tasks need to be integrated to increase depth and bring real behaviours, feelings and beliefs to life. This will, in turn, help the industry stop thinking of audiences as ‘consumers’ and start seeing them as people.

Analytics

Online research communities can hold an amazing amount of qualitative data; even the smallest community can generate a massive amount of content. Having access to all this content is great, but often clients would like to just get an overview of what is currently happening in the community and no more. They do not have the time to sift through all the information.

Face’s social media monitoring tool, Pulsar, has pioneering analysis tools that give brands an overview about what is being said about them online. This includes giving clients quick a overview of hot topics, key words, trends, sentiment, volume, who, what and where.

We are now in the process of converting these analysis tools for our client dashboard. This will allow both admin and clients to get a quick and comprehensive summary of what is going on in the community in real-time. Including semantic analysis, network analysis, discourse analysis, statistics and semiotics.

The use of these techniques in research communities will bring instant data visualisations to analysis. This will make digesting all community data easier, bring a bit of science to the platform and add an extra layer of interpretation to help back up assumptions.

As real time social analysis continues to progress so will the output tools for both social media analysis and online community research.

Although much of the above is a long way off in terms of being ready for launch, it does not make it any less exciting. As researchers continue to adapt the latest internet technology for research purposes we should begin to see some really innovative tools entering the arena.

Online research communities are going to be branching out into new and innovative areas and become a much more immersive and interesting environment for users. Which means better ideas, better insights and a better experience for community members, community managers and brand stakeholders alike.

Bring on the future.

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