We’re very proud to have had our work with Expedia mentioned by Andrew Warner – Expedia’s senior marketing director, customer marketing organisation, in Marketing Magazine. We quote:

As part of Warner’s overhaul of the marketing department, he held co-creation sessions with consumers and employees, which he says were vital to see the brand from a range of angles. ‘Brands and advertising shouldn’t just be run out of the marketing department; it’s too important.’

Warner is confident that this approach has helped Expedia create a campaign that is true both to the business ethos and its consumers. ‘One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to hire an expensive ad agency that builds up a proposition, which the company then can’t live up to in the eyes of consumers,’ he says.

Face worked with Ogilvy and Expedia to explore the best ways of expressing the new big idea proposed for Expedia’s new positioning.

A co-creative approach was utilised, bringing together consumers, the Face team and Expedia and Ogilvy stakeholders in a one-day session in London, to co-create what the key messages and tonality should be at the heart of how this positioning was to be communicated.

Ideas developed in this workshop were then evaluated and optimised in a series of discussion groups in London, Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam and Milan.  This also presented a key opportunity to understand how communication ideas would need to be developed to ensure they resonated on a pan-European level.

Our very own Saul Parker and Esther Garland went along to the MRS Brand Research Conference in Central London a couple of weeks ago to talk about co-creating a global brand positioning.

We presented our learnings from co-creating the new global positioning for Mortein last year, and aimed to dispel some of the tired old myths of co-creation by demonstrating how we had used our process to circumvent the traditional barriers cited about working creatively with consumers.

You can view our presentation above but here are some of our main points:

True creative, disruptive thinking that works on a brand (rather than product level) can just as easily be done by consumers as “experts” – it’s about giving them the right tools and frameworks.

By keeping workshop design and tasks abstract and non linear, by never explicitly exposing the destination, you can free consumers up to let go and be truly creative. And by building in divergence and inspiring disruption in design you can increase the richness of output and collateral with which to build your brand.

By mimicking the creative tools and techniques taught to professionals, and removing the focus from problem solving to game playing and story telling you can keep outputs full of meaning and texture rather than rational logic.

But finally, when it comes to brand building, story telling and myth-making really lie at the heart of this. And as such rather than try and ignore cultural norms, key to building a truly resonant brand story is capitalising on that folk narrative and symbolism and re-mixing it in a newly relevant way.

Face’s rapid growth continues with the opening of our new US office this summer. The new research team will be based in New York and headed up by Philip McNaughton. The New York office will service our growing number of US & South America based clients.

Andrew Needham, CEO of Face, says: “This move represents the growing recognition of the rewards that embracing the empowered consumer in the research and innovation process can bring and the importance technology is playing in getting closer to consumers.”

Our new US office is the first in a series of Face offices that will be opening in the next few years as part of our plan to offer a new breed of research and innovation services on a global basis.

click for a closer look at @marionren‘s great illustration

It is two days before everyone arrives at Glastonbury and time for our Glasto Goes Social predictions! Based on social media buzz around festival fashion we reckon you will see more than a few photos of people dressed like this!

Where This Came From

We began by looking at overall trends – what were the key items people were talking about taking to Glasto? Wellies came through loud and clear – but that was a bit too obvious. We dug deeper, analysing clothing mentions to understand keywords and developments over time. We could see exactly who was saying what, too. Though some fashion PRs may have been pushing silver croc-print Hunters, the black variety picked up a stronger grass-roots following.

Let’s Break It Down

Starting with the head, straw hats are a key element of people’s festival wardrobes, as befits a trip out into the Somerset countryside. So far, so Vogue, but people are also talking about customising and custom-printing t-shirts for their groups, a grassroots trend, not one from the fashion blogs.

As for the feet, people will be wearing wellies, the biggest trend of all clothing items with 600 mentions. They’re a huge 23% of all festival fashion conversations. This isn’t surprising, so let’s get a bit more specific: The most popular style will be black Hunter wellies, with a bit of a buzz around those with a shiny textured finish. Add a poncho prediction to the wellies, and this demonstrates social media’s ability to pick up the defining features of an event – the fear that Glasto will be a mudbath!

Surprisingly, Hunters was the only brand name to feature strongly in social media discussion. They can claim to be the sole fashion brand with close ties to the iconic Glastonbury. Perhaps this is a vacuum just waiting to be filled?

But rain is not dictating fashion. Buzz was much higher around shorts than skirts or dresses – and, specifically, short shorts. People are defiant in the face of whatever deluge the weather may bring, though a few are worrying about whether they’re in shape for showing so much leg!

Kate Moss may have set this trend a few years ago, but microshorts and Hunter wellies look set for another very strong showing in 2011.

The alternative Glasto outfit

Where people were talking about taking a “dress” it wasn’t so much a pretty tea frock but rather fancy dress. This year it’s less about costumes (e.g. pirates, zombies) and more about full-body suits – including wolf suits, badger suits, hazmat suits and boilersuits.

And don’t forget a silly hat to keep the sun (or the rain) off in style, and help your mates see you in the crowd.

Time to Test!

Will it turn out that expert bloggers make the best predictions? Or should you only trust a trend if it’s come from the wider Twitter community? Not only will we be analyzing photos and videos after the fact, we’ll be live-tweeting our findings as they come up on Pulsar, our proprietary social media monitoring system. Get in on the action by following @FaceCoCreation!

Once we get the data back, we’ll be announcing the conclusions to our question “Can social media be used to predict behaviour?” We’ll look at how these trends were shaped over time, what pressures impacted them, the journey they went through and the point at which they stabilised and became useful for prediction.

Last week we launched our Glasto Goes Social project, where we are testing the usefulness of social media monitoring in predicting future behavior. We thought we’d describe how we at Face go about doing a social buzz analysis project, and social media research in general. Most market researchers understand focus groups and surveys, but social media research is still new to many. The 5 steps are:

Step 1: Create Your Lexicon

This is telling your social media monitoring software what to look for. It is similar to a very complex Google search. The Glasto Goes Social Lexicon contains 324 separate searches capturing different ways of referring to the festival and different fashion brands and articles of clothing. The lexicon must be specific enough to target the particular question at hand, but also open enough to allow for the unexpected. This last is particularly important with prediction projects, like Glasto Goes Social.

We build lexicons by focusing on how the consumer talks. We start off with a simple Google search. Even the prompts from Google Instant can help us see what syntax the consumers are typing in. Google Real Time Search is also very handy when immediacy is important. Even simple Twitter Searches can be quite useful. These tools not only show us how a particular word is being used, but they also help us see similar words that we should try out next. Building a lexicon is a detail-oriented and iterative process.

Step 2: Cleaning the Data

Some of this data cleaning can be done right at the beginning by using negative search terms. We did this with Glasto Goes Social by editing out mentions of tents and tickets, important items that generally were mentioned all on their own, not in conjunction with clothing. But that’s just the beginning, but you have to leave wiggle room for the unexpected in Step 1

Unlike some other social media monitoring systems, Pulsar, our proprietary system here at Face, brings back all mentions of search terms, so there can be thousands of mentions to sort. We simplify the task by looking at the keywords. For Glasto, words like “tax” and “Arthur” are not relevant to our search, but some keywords are very relevant, like “wellies” and “hat.”

keyword search in Pulsar with added emphasis

Next you have to verify that the potential problems are indeed issues by looking at the actual results. In the case below it is certainly not relevant to our question, “What will people wear at Glasto?”

Step 3: Look at the Landscape

Once you’ve edited out the misleading results, you can begin to dig into the analysis stage. This is the fun part. The first step is to see what the data looks like and how it has behaved over time. We like to do this by looking at the Topics strata over time visualisation. This particular feature of the tool groups keywords into semantic chunks, the “topics of conversation”, and shows how these trends are developing day-on-day or week-on-week.  For Glasto, as you can see, during the second week the “Hunter” wellington boot brand became a more important topic, and “T-Shirt” began to shrink in importance.

screen shot of Pulsar’s Topics feature with added emphasis

We can also look at which influencers are more important, and how they are engaging their followers around a particular topic. Pulsar lets us identify influencers according to three dimensions: volume, visibility and engagement. Elle UK has the largest amount of visibility, but it is a person, not a company, that leads the pack with engagement.

screen shot of Pulsar’s influence by engagement feature

Step 4: Deep Dives

From here on, instead of just looking at the graphics, you look at the content. While looking at the landscape, you developed questions like ‘Why did “Hunter” suddenly become more important in Week 2 of the project?’ You may even have a hypothesis. Step 4 is when you test it.

Delve into the semantics of the individual messages and even look outside of your social media monitoring system for environmental factors. Look at how message content changes depending on the channel. Pulsar tracks blogs, social networks, images, video, news, and micro-blogs, and each channel is slightly different. Study the sentiment analysis, too. Sentiment analysis is notoriously unreliable. Computers just have difficulty feeling emotions. But there are ways around this. For instance, Pulsar uses actual people to code whether or not the sentiment is positive or negative around a particular keyword. Step 4 is when you look for the reasons behind what you see.

Step 5: Conclusions

Congratulations! You have done your analysis and it is finally time to draw up your conclusions. You have KeyNote up on your computer and are ready to present.

But if you were hoping for the conclusions to our Glasto Goes Social prediction project, you’ll just have to wait a little longer. We’ll release our predictions early next week. See you then!

This week, Sharmila and Fran were very flattered to be invited back to Said Business School at Oxford University to talk to their MBA students about all things social media and new methods in research.  Save for National Rail’s attempt to stop them getting there (we’re looking at you, Reading rail signal box), the day went really well, as they brought to life why there is a real need for new, evolving research methodologies, and the significant role that social media research can play in the marketing and research arena.  As part of the process, our group of students have now been tasked with carrying out their own social media research using Face’s proprietary social media monitoring tool, Pulsar.  We’ll be back in Oxford next week to hear the results, and we can’t wait.

credit: Brothers_Cider Flickr

Glasto is fast approaching, with all of its musical, social and artistic surprises. We wish we could go. But thanks to the rise of the social web we can still participate through social media. We can ride the build up, hear the latest reports from the festival itself and then bathe in the after-glow with the festival mashups. That got us thinking at Face. With all this data floating around, there was certainly something fun we could do.

After much deliberation and debate, discussing topics from analyzing brand sponsors to what goes into a “Festival Survival Kit”, we finally landed on fashion. We were struck by the number of people who spend each year trying to predict the key fashion trends for festivals. Could we do a better job using social media monitoring? By looking at what people are saying before the mud bath at the end of June, making predictions, and then seeing what actually happens during the weekend, we can, at least, know what to wear for the next festival, since we can’t go to this one.

Prediction is Difficult but Valuable

But this is about more than finding out what to wear to Reading. According to Seth Godin, explanations of the future are much more useful than explanations of the past. It’s relatively easy to look at past behavior and explain how that led to the current state of affairs. Lining up cause and effect is simple after the fact, but is not quite as easy to figure out beforehand. There is a science of observation behind trends analysis and prediction, but it is a difficult problem to tackle.

Looking at past behavior has long been held as the best guide to the future. One of the techniques that stock traders have in their tool boxes is a company’s past performance. Looking at how a company’s stocks have behaved in the past is often a good predictor of its future performance. But not always. The problem is that trends analysis is not always linear. If something is increasing now, it may not continue to increase at the same rate in the future.

Stock traders have had centuries to practice their trade – and yet predicting the stock market is still far from an accurate science. Though stock analysts employ many different kinds of data in creating their predictions, much of Finance is based on quantitative number analysis. Predictions can also come from more qualitative approaches, such as relying on expert judgment. However, increasingly the dependability of experts has been called into question. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki suggests that under the right conditions, the masses often make better decisions than single experts.

Social media analysis is a mixture of these approaches. It has the quantitative rigour of stock analytics, the voice of experts from their online publishing, and the aggregation of mass opinion. Rather than asking people questions, we look at how they behave by applying statistical analysis. Our main goal in analyzing the Glastonbury festival buzz is to see if this combination works. And find out what to wear at Bestival.

The Next Steps

We have already created the lexicon and started the search in our Pulsar social media buzz monitoring system.

Pulsar is busy gathering up mentions for every type of garment we could think up. We are looking for the leading brands and the festival fashion influencers.We’re even tracking different ways of referring to the festival, from Glastonbury to #glastofest. It was not an easy syntax to figure out – what do you think “buy + Glasto” would come up with? Bet you it is not what turned up. But now that the refining process is done, we get to sit back and see what the program returns. The program has been at it since Monday, 9 June, so we’ll give it another week or so before getting back to you.

What type of data do you think we will we get? That’s what we’ll be discussing next as part of this Glastonbury Prediction series. Sign up via RSS to stay on-top of this developing exploration. What do you think the issues with using social media for predictions are?

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

Emergence vs Creation

As Arthur C. Clarke put it, “It is impossible to predict the future, and all attempts to do so in any detail appear ludicrous within a very few years.” This is true for the futurist but even more so for the researcher whose challenge is innovation. We should be at once more realistic and more ambitious about it. Innovation is not about trying to describe the future, but about defining “the boundaries within which possible futures must lie”. (Arthur C. Clarke 1962)

This also means innovation should not be so much about ‘creation’, but more about ‘emergence’. Defining the boundaries of possible futures means creating the conditions for fostering the emergence of ideas that are already taking shape in the social space, but have not filtered up to the top or are not formed enough to bubble up yet. In aconnected real-time ecosystem where the consumer can be as creative as thedesigner, the new model of innovation should be listening, reducing complexity, decoding the signal from the noise, collaborating with consumers and only then defining the boundaries of possible futures.

With this mindset, in 2009 Nokia launched Project Relevance, a new research programme aimed at securing relevance for the brand within the upper end of the smartphone marketplace, with a focus on North America.

The Relevance Programme

The Relevance Programme demonstrates Nokia’s desire to continue placing consumer focussed “solutions” right at the front of their operations.

Relevance was defined as “high significance to the landscape of consumer needs, technology and business ecosystems”. North America was chosen as the lead market for this work as this was where the most advanced web and mobile web usage patterns were developing.

A ‘solution’ was defined as the combination of Device, Software, Business planning, Design and Marketing; different aspects of the innovation process that should be pulled together from the start in order to provide an optimal experience for the consumer, but aspects that in so many organisations in fact happen sequentially.

The Relevance Program shows how a complex organization can respond to the challenges of rapid exponential change through open and agile approaches. This paper describes the work that has been carried out by Face and Nokia within the Relevance Programme and will demonstrate how collaborative methodologies can lead product innovation, test products still on the drawing board or not even conceived, and anticipate future trends and consumer behaviour. The paper will also show how online, face-to-face & mobile approaches can be integrated in one project stream and how online research complements and enhances traditional research rather then being an alternative to it.

Face will be serialising the paper into parts, which will be posted daily. Check in tomorrow for part 1, looking at the business context & challenges of the Relevance Programme and the Brief.