This article was originally published in Research World Magazine‘s March/April 2012 issue. In it, Andrew Needham, Face CEO and Founding Partner, discusses what needs to be done for social media analysis to provide real research insights.

“Will Social Media Replace Surveys as a Research Tool?” This Advertising Age headline from March 2011 sent ripples through the industry. Joan Lewis, the top research executive of Procter & Gamble, the world’s biggest research buyer, predicted a dramatic decline in the importance of surveys by 2020 due to the rise of social media.

Technology can also help researchers extract more meaningful insight from the data by moving beyond analysing conversations by volume and doing more to understand the data’s impact and influence – its ‘visibility’. This requires weighting the data using specific algorithms for each social media channel. Furthermore, all current social media mining tools look only at content, and overlook context and behavioural data. This means that most of them are not making the most of the data feast. When it comes to community platforms there is much that can be improved, but integrating social media data in real time is key. Real value comes from mapping the data onto the rest of the research toolbox.

These innovations need to come thick and fast because clients want to be able to connect the dots between different data sets to better project what is going to happen in the future. To do this effectively requires more human analysis and consulting working alongside technology. The industry needs to look outwards so it can attract different types of people with different skill sets. Finding researchers who are also technologists, or technologists who are also social anthropologists is difficult, but we are going to see a greater mix of technological skill sets with more traditional ones. This mix will lead to the development of new methodological frameworks, powered by technology, to help gather and analyse those game-changing insights in a consumer landscape that is changing so quickly.

As Joan Lewis said, “When we’re doing it, we need to do it well. It’s really been easy for people to take the idea that the world is changing as an excuse to do really poor work. And there’s no excuse.”

Here are 3 areas where as an industry we can add real value to the new social marketing process:

Return on Engagement Specialists

The rules for this new model of marketing are still being written and this has led to a position where many digital agencies are still marking their own homework. With the larger investments being made in this space by brands, research agencies are well positioned to play the role of objective analytics partner. As researchers we should be offering clients advice on developing KPIs for their social media activity, helping them to design the right measurement framework, and making sure they select the right tools for social data collection. Beyond simple measurement, researchers also have the opportunity to help clients develop return-on-engagement models that demonstrate the link between behavioural data and the impact on the things that clients really want to measure, e.g. consumption.

Fanbase Analysts

Many companies are learning to listen to the conversations related to their brands and competitors. However, there’s more to social media research than tracking conversations by keywords. Brands are social entities. People establish connections with them (cognitive, emotional, functional) and these connections foster further connections to other people. As brands build audiences online, it is increasingly important to understand and map audiences and the content and passions that connect them. When brands understand their social audience they can design content and strategies to engage them more effectively. Research agencies will have an increasingly important role in helping brands segment their social media audiences and give strategic advice on strategies to engage them.

Content Co-creators

Generating content that people want to share is a difficult business for brands as the traditional advertising creative process is disconnected from the communities they want to engage with.

To create social ideas that have the potential to be loved and shared by people in communities it is important to involve them in the creative process. This is why co-creation as a methodology of developing and refining content will become increasingly common over the next few years. Involving consumers in the production and creative development of content via MROC and co-creation sessions is a process that plays to the strengths of community researchers and those planners with great facilitation and social media expertise.

Data Should be Beautiful, Playful and Enlightening

1. We live in an era of of information overload and huge complexity we need help to make sense of it all.

Continue Reading the Article Here

What is mobile money?

It’s important to think about the category as “mobile money” rather than simply “mobile payment” or “mobile wallet”. What’s at stake is much bigger than just transfering your credit card to your phone, or simply replicating the functions of a wallet (payment, loyalty cards & receipts) on a mobile device. The technologies available – smartphones, geolocation, the development of 4G and widespread wifi, and of course NFC – mean that what’s possible is in fact much greater: re-imagining the whole human-money interface.

What’s this mean? It’s about looking at every way in which we interact with money, and thinking about the transformations in user experience that are possible if we make it mobile. The transactions up for grabs are many and varied:

• payment in a shop (of course)
• paying a friend back for the taxi ride last night
• checking to see if your credit card payment has gone out
• transferring money immediately before making a big purchase to ensure your account doesn’t go overdrawn
• adding up your receipts to see how much you’ve spent on eating out this month
• calculating whether you’ll be able to get a mortgage
• buying a flight (or just a coffee) with reward points – mobile money encompasses stored value, not just legal currencies
• getting a discount email like Groupon and redeeming that online
• searching for the cheapest iPad retailer online
• or searching for a local restaurant offering a discount 2-for-1 deal
• …and much, much more.

Making it mobile doesn’t simply mean “available on my mobile phone screen”. The mobile phone is a smart, location-aware computing device, carried almost always within a metre of our bodies, which is always connected to the internet and keeps us always connected to the people we know. Taking full advantage of these properties is what makes mobile money fundamentally transformative. The word “revolutionary” is overused in business, but making money truly mobile is a much bigger deal than the rise of credit cards in the 1960s, the last biggest step-change in payment methods.

Challenges

There are however some substantial challenges in rolling out mobile money to its full potential. Here are five:

1. Money is a difficult sector to innovate in

Regulation is a big hindrance on start-ups in the money space: there is both legal incumbrance and a cultural resistance (aka trust) to companies taking risks, trying something new – and perhaps not succeeding. The big incumbents are also an obstacle – banks own the central customer account (current/checking accounts), and Visa,  Mastercard & Amex control payments.

Building new back-end processing systems is very difficult, and even the big over-the-top players (PayPal, Google Wallet) are essentially innovating on top of existing card payments i infrastructure. Dwolla – a New York peer-to-peer (P2P) money startup – is worth a note here, for one that isn’t.

2. What’s happening with NFC?

NFC stands for near-field communications. It’s a type of radio communications – like wifi or Bluetooth at a different frequency – that allows for short-range (10cm) communciation between devices and tagged objects, other devices, and merchant terminals. It is ultimately the key way contactless payment will be delivered – although it’s worth remembering that mobile money means a lot more than just in-store payment.

Unfortunately NFC uptake is moving extremely slowly. So far there are only a handful of NFC-enabled handsets in the UK, and many of them are unappealing low-spec phones. The big player is of course the Apple iPhone, and so far there’s no news as to when or how NFC will be implemented on this device.

Without a standardised technology, merchants are naturally unwilling to invest in NFC payment terminals so these remain in a few chain stores only – MacDonalds since 2003; Pret A Manger, and so on. We’re 5+ years away yet from “leave your cash & card at home”.

3. UX benefits of mobile payment in-store

One eye-opener for me about our US trip was just how annoying magnetic-stripe payment really is. US banks haven’t been able to agree on a Chip & PIN standard (as in Europe). As such payment requires the merchant taking the card away (a security risk) and two stages of receipts. NFC payment would clearly be much quicker than this, providing a clear driver for consumer uptake. However, it’s got minimal speed and thus user experience benefit in Europe over the faster Chip & PIN.

4. Trust

Many commentators rate the chances of the over-the-top tech players (mainly Google, Apple, Paypal) as ahead of the banks. Despite some bank mobile apps getting rave user reviews (RBS and Natwest’s mobile banking apps) and a strong move from Barclays Pingit on peer-to-peer transfers, there’s a suspicion that banks are likely to stick to “mobilifying” what they already do, rather than really innovating and reinventing the category. That transformative capacity – and also slick UX design – would seem to be more the property of the tech companies.

But PayPal has a trust problem: we see consistent and frequent stories of how it freezes people’s accounts for months without explanation or recourse. That’s infuriating when it’s your tool for P2P and small-merchant payments – it’s completely untenable if they’re operating your current account. There’s also increasing consumer suspicion of just how much Google knows about us – so giving them access to our finances may be a step too far.

5. Who’s actually thinking big enough?

This was the core insight from a fantastic solo SXSW presentation by Omar Green, Director of Strategic Mobile Initiatives at Intuit, the payment technology firm. He talked about “creating a mobile wallet worth having”, and said he thought the company who would “win” mobile money would be the one offering every transaction listed above and more.

As suggested above, the risk is that too many of the mobile money launches we can see on the horizon are thinking too small. Credit cards on your phone and no additional functionality – so what’s in it for me the user? A couple of dozen big-brand partners rather than available everywhere – so why use? There will certainly be some early adopters who’ll take-up simply to be first and look ahead, but they’re a minority. Strategically banks, MNOs and tech firms need to recognise that these standalone offers must only be stepping stones to something much bigger if they’re going to get any real traction. (Barclaycard have had an NFC credit card since 2003. No-one cares.)

Omar Green had a vision of what mobile money could be that I’ve not seen from anywhere else in the industry. The goal is a seamless money experience addressing our fundamental financial and emotional needs – balancing the books, saving for the future, feeling in control and feeling like we’ve spent our money wisely.

Question is, how seriously will the various mobile payment and wallet apps launching this year will really address these?

As someone who has been working on the idea of making brands human by plugging them into the fabric of society, today I definitely couldn’t miss a session called “Brand As API” hosted by Peg Faimon and Glen Platt from the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, Miami University Oxford, Ohio.

The premise is clear and simple, and extremely agreeable:

“As brands finally begin to deliver on the promise of a 1-to-1 relationship with their customers (through social media, mobile, and data-driven tools), it is critical to develop a new foundation for that relationship. This requires brands to leave the “broadcast relationship” and, instead, build a relationship sharing communication, innovation, and the very product/service itself. Insight into this relationship can be found in the structure, language, and use of APIs (Application Programming Interface). APIs provide a set of rules – a language for connecting to data and services. To remix. To build. To leverage. To extend. Many API calls provide explicit metaphors for the ways brands can connect to customers. Generally, the API relationship provides insights into the role of brands in the customers’ life. This conversation will explore these metaphors, share case studies, and work to build a language for better connecting consumers with their brands.”

You can look at the full presentation below and get the details on how they think a brand as API might work.

The main idea behind the concept of the Brand as API is that it would allow to open up the Brand, its assets and its services and allow people (consumers, businesses, developers) to do things with that Brand, from playing with the contents and the identity of the brand all the way down to designing products and services.

Peg and Glen went on discussing the key elements of an API and how they relate and map against new ways of building meaningful relationships between brand and consumers.

While this is completely agreeable and sensible, the idea of the Brand as API as crafted in this presentation still seems to rely on two assumptions:

1) The assumption that people want to do stuff with that Brand, pulling information and data assets off a Brand in order to create something custom. And while we know this is true, we also know this only applies to a very small percentage of the user base of the Brand.

2) And the mother of all assumptions: the belief that the relationships consumers have with brands are primary while we know that consumers’ most valuable relationships are with other consumers, and what brand CAN try and do is fit in those relationships in a meaningful and/or useful way, i.e. as social currency or enablers/problem solvers.

It seems that while the analogy between brands and APIs has got incredibly long legs, we are still looking at it from the wrong perspective: the brand perspective.

What if, instead of focussing on what the API allows the user to Pull we start focussing on what the API allows the user to PUSH, meaning allowing the user to ingest a controlled and owned selection of brand-relevant personal data into the brand API such as user context, passions, interests and behaviours?

What if I could feed for example my location data to the API of my mobile network operator (plugging in my mobile gps, Foursquare or Sonar data) and get the most customised international plan based on my travel habits?

And what if consumers could ‘sell’ this personal data to brands? Consumers used to pay brands for products. We are now heading towards a future where digital data abundance means brands are going to pay consumers for their personal data. Users get customised offerings while remaining in control of their personal data, brands increase their relevance by investing on live audience intelligence rather than push strategies.

This is why I believe the biggest added value of a Brand API lies not so much in the ability to provide a Brand-to-User stream of data rather in its ability to manage a bi-drectional stream of data, where the user can shape the brand around itself using the vast amounts of personal data he is in control of.

And this is why i believe the biggest and most important asset of a brand API is not the Brand Essence, rather the User Profile.

Such an API would not be shaped around the brand but around the user and his needs. And effectively it would be an Audience API rather than a Brand API. Something that could sit at the centre of the business and power any decision the business has to take, from innovation to marketing to CRM.

But the thing is, in order to be plugged into the fabric of society brands probably need both, or even more than two APIs. Like any other social product/service out there.

So we’ve taken a moment to gather 5 events that researchers attending SXSW should go to. These events will shed light on the state of digital and its implications for the plugged-in market research and innovation agency. You can bet we’ll be attending!

1. Brands as Patterns

What makes a brand in a digital world where there are no beginnings or endings? Campaigns, one of the cornerstones of branding, don’t work quite so well anymore. But while patterns and fixed rules help maintain a brand image, they can also make a brand seem out of touch with what is currently affecting its customers. This panel will debate about how brands should behave in the digital world.

Relevance to Researchers: An guide towards developjng brand positioning that work for the new, empowered, social media consumer.

2. How to be yourself when everyone else is faking it

We are often pushed to use our real identities online, such as on Facebook. However social media makes it easy to consciously present a specific version of ourselves online. Add in that using our real identities can make it easier for repressive governments to control people, and the question gets stickier. This presentation will dip into the debate surrounding authenticity and privacy online.

Relevance to Researchers: Helping us understand how people are negotiating their identities through social media – of relevance not just for social media researchers, but anyone needing to connect brands with their consumers online.

3. How Your Data Can Predict the Future

We now have access to tons of data. From what consumers click on to who they share it with, from where they discover brands to where they become disillusioned with them, there is a wealth of data available to researchers these days. This data can be used to make predictions for marketing and advertising, but this presentation will also ask what else we can predict. Happiness?

Relevance to Researchers: The Holy Grail of much research is predicting consumer behavior. This panel will not only look at how “big” social data can help provide insight into prediction, but also how brands and advertisers can connect emotionally with consumers.

4. Cool Hunting and Cool Farming with Social Media

Are we about to see another burst in human civilization similar to that of the advent of agrarian society in humanity’s history? MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence is now actively researching “cool hunting” and innovation. Beyond the efforts of academia, this panel will discuss the practical business applications of pattern recognition and trend prediction.

Relevance to Researchers: This panel will take a different look at the challenge of prediction, covering theories and academic insights balanced with real business experience. Market researchers can learn from academia, but we must always balance it with the needs and experiences of our clients.

5. I May “Like” You, But I’m Not in Like with You

How much is a “Like” on Facebook actually worth? This presentation will look into what makes people value something, and how brands can capitalize on this. All the while, it will ask how much people value their relationship with the brands they interact with online.

Relevance to Researchers: Just like brands, researchers are using “Likes” and other online actions as demonstrations of support. But how much do these actions really reveal about the consumers’ values? Researchers can also benefit from a greater understanding of how to really judge consumer actions online.

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.