For researchers this is exciting because it means so much is up for grabs. With change comes opportunity; the opportunity to meet emerging client needs head on. One of these is how to ensure an idea has the best chance of success in the shared and created media space. It was a question that was at the heart of a recent project we did for a major ice cream brand. The brief was about launching the brand successfully in a social way in a new country with a discerning taste for ice cream. It allowed us to show how our new thinking delivers better results for brands craving success in the earned and created media space.

The 4Cs Proposition

There were four key stages to our approach that fed into each other namely, conversation, content, communities and conversion. Our model is powered by our philosophy of co-creation (doing things with not at) and technology (our social media insight tools). It is circular and iterative more of a loop or series of loops as we believe that the new marketing-cycle is no longer linear, planned over 3 years and populated with campaigns that have a beginning and an end. The role the consumer plays in each of these stages is crucial but I am just going to talk about the first two for now.

Conversation

This stage is all about identifying and understanding your key audiences within the context of the brand landscape in real time. By using Pulsar we have developed a more dynamic way to map audiences through the social web. This helped us to identify four key cohorts within the brand’s target audience. One of them we identified as the group most likely to embrace and propagate the social mission of the brand based on their passions, interests and behaviour. It was this cohort that we invited into the community and to co-create the creative platform that would best link the brand mission to content and conversations consumers were already engaged with. This stage highlights why brands need to stay on top of what’s truly important to audiences at any given time. It is less about isolated market research data and more about understanding your customers, in the moment. This requires a data processing and data analytics model that will allow a more real-time, agile and active approach to planning based on what people are doing and saying with each other as it happens.

Content

Co-creating with the right cohort of the target audience through an on-line community and face-to-face co-creation workshop allowed us to do two things very well. The first was the ability to generate a range of creative platforms rooted in genuine consumer insight that linked the brand mission to the target audience in a relevant and credible way. The second was the ability to generate hundreds of ideas within the umbrella of the creative platform that leveraged existing consumer content and enabled the brand to join current consumer conversations and activity in an engaging way. This stage showed that building platforms by co-creating with consumers is the best way to finding and sourcing potential areas of content that either already exist, could be created or added to that can inform a content strategy to support the given creative platform. Once this is in place consumers working together with the brand can populate the content areas with loads of ideas that have the potential to start lots of little “fires” some of which will take off and some of which will go out.  The involvement of consumers though means that brands will have worked out why they have permission to be in that consumer space as well as what role they can play there.

Curating diffusion

The work we did with this ice cream brand was a brilliant example of how to tackle the challenge of creating ideas that have legs in the shared/created media space. The role the audience plays in making this work is key and understanding there are many community cohorts within a target audience you can potentially co-create with and getting the right one to do this with is important if you want to be successful. This helps the brand to understand and identify those content areas within the creative expressions of the “Big Idea” that are already in play in the lives of consumers. The next stages namely Community and Conversion are all about curating “diffusion and monitoring what we call return on engagement. But more of this another time.

1. Hubs

The value of data is only fully leveraged when multiple data sets are connected. Connecting the data allows us to understand the context of the dataset and turn figures into stories and insights. MROCs will evolve to become Hubs for consumer understanding by enabling clients to overlay other data streams, such as sales

2. Co-creation

The more experience clients have with MROC, the more they will understand that the power of these communities goes beyond gamification of online research tasks. By segmenting consumers by their ability and skill to co-create we will see more consumers being invited to work closely with brands to crack strategic brand challenges.

3. Real-time

MROCs will increasingly be connecting to the social media profiles of their members, thereby giving clients access to selected areas of their real-time social data. Such data might include their status updates, their musical preferences, their Likes, the people they follow on Twitter. This will mean as researchers we will use MROC to ask fewer questions and concentrate more on actual behaviours.

4. Mobile

As smart phone penetration increases, MROC members will be able to use apps to post pictures, videos, soundbytes, status updates, respond to polls, engage in discussions and generally participate in tasks on the go. This mobile interface will enable a richer contribution from members and a deeper and more seamless connection between what they do in their daily life and what they do in MROC.

5. Smarter

Automated analytics tools will enable researchers to gain faster and deeper understanding of MROC data. This will include natural language processing software to run semantic analysis of the contents and cluster consumer feedback by topics. Machine learning will also start to be overlaid to enable more effective categorization of textual, visual and audio content. Real-time interactive visualizations via dashboard will also be adopted to spot patterns quickly and guide in-depth analysis of content.

As we develop our online community research platform here at Face, we’ve been asking a deceptively simple-looking question. Should people have usernames, or real names, or some mixture of both?

It sounds trivial, but in fact design decisions such as this can have substantial impacts on how people contribute to online communities. Should participants use real names, as clients choose this kind of research to get in touch with “real consumers”? Or – as danah boyd and Skud (note names!) have argued – can real name policies be oppressive, as in the case of Google Plus? Might pseudonyms (a) help people talk more openly about difficult topics, and (b) be a more authentic representation of social media use in the wild, outside market research?

The bigger question here is one of identity.

Social media and social networks foreground this issue by the way that identities literally have to be written and created whenever we join a new group or network. Companies such as Facebook invite us to describe our identities within pre-defined categories – age, gender, location, favourite bands, favourite brands. Others such as Twitter, offer a 140-character blank box. Our updates and public messages then continue this process of producing an image of a certain kind of person – we tweet much more about things that make us look good than anything naff or mundane.

In an excellent blog post about this “identity work”, Jenny Davis (a PhD researcher in sociology at Texas A&M / @Jup83) concludes:

“1) the social construction of identity is a laborious process;
2) the labor of identity construction must remain unseen; and
3) the architecture of social media asks us to present ourselves in explicit ways.
A tension is therefore created between the prevalence of interaction media which facilitate explicit self construction, and the appearance of a self, constructed through such media, that must appear to have organically emerged.”
Jenny Davis, ‘Identity Work and the Authentic Cyborg Self’

A very interesting argument – but one potentially resting on two implications that need to be questioned:

1. How hidden is identity construction?
2. Are identity construction and authenticity really diametrically opposed?

Two distinctive features of digital life in 2011 are Lady Gaga, and self-branding blogs. Both seek to project a certain image in order to produce a particular reaction from people – fame and career success respectively. This method – “fake it to make it”, if you will – is backed up by the sociological concept of performativity.

Social theorist Judith Butler argues that our speech and actions (performance) produce what people understand as our identities and social norms:

“Butler [explores] the ways that linguistic constructions create our reality in general through the speech acts we participate in every day. By endlessly citing the conventions and ideologies of the social world around us, we enact that reality; in the performative act of speaking, we “incorporate” that reality by enacting it with our bodies, but that “reality” nonetheless remains a social construction. […]
In the act of performing the conventions of reality, by embodying those fictions in our actions, we make those artificial conventions appear to be natural and necessary. By enacting conventions, we do make them “real” to some extent (after all, our ideologies have “real” consequences for people) but that does not make them any less artificial.”
Dino Felluga, “Modules on Butler: On Performativity” in Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.

Butler makes the post-structuralist argument that the distinction between “real” and “constructed” identities is a misnomer – the ‘real us’ is something we perform and construct. Bringing this back to social media research, the question is how far might our research participants agree that the same is true for their online identities?

We can start by asking people what choices they have made in (a) setting up their social media profiles, and (b) in deciding what content to share on a daily basis. What may be most revealing is asking people what they choose not to mention – e.g. only mentioning your activity or location if it’s interesting and a bit braggable; not sharing links to the Daily Mail horoscopes (which you’ve actually been reading for the last 10 minutes) but rather a breaking piece of news about some new Silicon Valley start-up.

Every professional on Twitter, in particular, is making daily choices about the balance of personal and industry-relevant content they want to present. This is seen as normal and good practice, counter to the idea that the work of identity construction is supposed to remain hidden. This “conscious performativity” is most visible in the case of Lady Gaga – and legions of fame-hungry contestants on reality TV shows – who take calculated self-construction to an extreme, presenting conceptualised, mediatised packages where artifice becomes very much the point.

If people acknowledge the effort they put into presenting their online identities, what does this mean for authenticity? Empirically we can see that authenticity is still valued in people’s online identities – “self-branding” is fairly widely mocked (at least in the UK) for encouraging fake and pushy personas online. But how can identity be authentic and yet also constructed and performed? Why does Lady Gaga insist that she was “born this way”?

The issue is what we mean by “being authentic”. Being “made” is acceptable – what is at stake is the sincerity of our identities. Erving Goffman’s classic text on performed identities, The Construction Of Self in Everyday Life (1959), makes this point clearly:

“When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.”
(Goffman 1959)

An insincere or cynical performance violates the trust required for social interaction, hence its taboo nature.

Finally, it is important to note that we can be authentic in different ways in different contexts. For example, James is an honest man and also kind. At the funeral of his wicked uncle, he will not be honest about his thoughts about the deceased, in order to be kind to the feelings of the rest of his family. As Erving Goffman highlights, the performance is specific to the stage where it occurs – our identities are not socially universal.

To sum up, this results in a conception of identity departing from Davis’s:
1) the social construction of identity is a laborious process;
2) we are aware that this labour of construction occurs, and do not demand self-making to be invisible
3) nonetheless authenticity is still required, specifically in the sense of sincerity
4) authenticity depends on context

So what are the implications for online research communities? A few suggestions:

1. Participants need a space where they can determine the social context for their community and construct the appropriate identities. Researchers do this with initial getting-to-know-you tasks, asking people to introduce themselves to the community, but research communities don’t tend to offer much more than this – which potentially results in ‘thinner’, less fleshed-out identities and interactions between the group. Allowing people spaces to share “irrelevant” content, e.g. in status updates, general chat or personal blogs, provides the necessary space for people to build ‘thicker’, deeper identities – and also provides more interpersonal information to help participants come together as a community.

2. Should your community use an external ID provider, e.g. Facebook? No, as this will bringswith it a pre-determined social context that may not be appropriate for the community you’re trying to build. (e.g. LinkedIn IDs won’t get people in the right frame of mind for a community about parenting.)

3. In an ongoing community, let people choose and change their userIDs, display names and avatars between projects, as a way of helping them foreground the relevant social identity (e.g. as student, or mum, or twentysomething, or Italian) for the project at hand.

4. Clients may want to see “real names”, but this may not necessarily be the most appropriate and relevant identity to foreground – some social groups (e.g. video gamers, sports teams) are strongly nickname-based.

Enjoy!

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.”

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.

We all wait with baited breath to see where the web is going to take us next. The hype surrounding new innovations such as Google Instant or HTML 5 is massive. As users we are not only interested in how the latest departures look and feel, but also how they are going to change our behaviour.

There are those who look at it on a purely personal level – how are these changes going to change my actions? And there are those who look at it from a much wider berth, how are these changes going to influence the web as whole?

As a community manager, when I try out a new user experience my mindset is immediately on whether it can help move online research communities in a new direction. How can a new technology, technique or tool be adapted and used to make a research community more engaging, more intuitive and more interesting for those who use them?

Web 2.0 has been at the core of most research communities from their conception, but as technology and its users move on research communities need to evolve to stay relevant for community members, clients and community managers alike.

So, as we continue to test our reliance on web 2.0 tools and begin to harness technology that allows us to do bigger, brighter and bolder things, where does the future of online research communities lie?

Socialization

When we first started with our online research communities we made the decision that we would not include large social elements. We wanted our communities to focus around co-creation and research, not user interaction and social media. For many reasons this was the right decision, but as the internet has evolved people don’t just want to be sociable, they expect it.

In the early days of Headbox we found that our users who worked on our co-creation projects were finding each other online anyway. Whether it be on Facebook or MySpace users were creating groups, talking about the projects and friend requesting each other, us and our clients!

There was no facilitation on our behalf, the socially proactive nature of young people meant they were going to connect no matter what. So, as our communities have grown so have the social elements, and as social networks evolve, so will research communities user interaction.

This does not mean we are going to be building our own social network. It’s more about allowing people to connect, if they want to. It’s allowing our members to share their information, find the people they are working with and building their own profiles.

As social networking tools and online sociability grow, research communities will continue to incorporate what is suitable, and no more.

Gamification

As Marion explained in her earlier #ResCom101 blog using gaming mechanics is an obvious way to increase engagement and interest. Developing league tables, points systems and badge rewards seem like a no-brainer, they make everything more fun and rewarding for users. However, this isn’t gaming for the sake of gaming, this is gaming for the sake of research.

Rivalries and competition will definitely increase the enjoyment levels for users but there is a strong chance that results may get skewed. If community members start to post responses just to take part in gaming aspects then you are not going to receive the research output you need.

Gaming mechanics will begin to play a big part in research communities but it needs to be a subtle, intelligent approach. Whether it is keeping users rewards/badges private to them or having an intelligent points system, you need to make sure that users aren’t acting unnaturally due to gaming elements.

As well as engaging users, gamification and its rewards can also help when incentivizing users, as Marion points out, sometimes the most basic rewards can be the most fulfilling.

Experiential

In research communities the reception of information is crucial. As well as being engaging, tasks need to be easy to understand or there could be confusion. If users lose interest when receiving the task the results suffer. If there is a lot of block text to read or a lot of repetition, community members are well within their right to get bored.

People prefer to intake information if it is visual, audio or both. It is a lot easier and a lot more entertaining.

Video briefings are brilliant and can cover a lot of information very quickly. Teaming task copy with physically showing users what you would like them to do is always an easy way to make sure there can be no confusion about what is expected. At the moment video briefings seem to be an every now and again thing, this will increase and they should become normal practice for community managers.

Producing engaging, visually orientated Slidecasts that allow community members to intake information as they please is one way of communicating lots information in an interesting way.

HTML 5 will begin to play a big part in this, its ability to create clean, interesting, flexible and interactive applications will help research communities move away from Web 2.0 and allow community developers more creativity when designing task formats.

The evolution of entertaining briefings and tasks revolves around users being able to complete tasks whilst they’re being briefed. Integrating visuals and the ability for users to complete tasks as they go, and at their most engaged, will make it a much more entertaining and seamless experience for users.

This is not something that is going to happen overnight but it is the direction in which online research communities are moving.

Part 2, which will be published on Friday, will be focussing on co-creation, building, realism and analytics.

To check out past posts from the Research Communities 101 click here

However, much like all my best laid plans, this massively backfired when the vast majority of the team came back with the same response!

Even with this minor setback I persevered and it really wasn’t a hard job pulling together a highlight reel, there have been so many great moments this year.

Here are 2010′s best moments as as voted for by the Face team:

1) A Co-created World?

The overwhelming favourite highlight from the Face team was the amount of international co-creation we have done this year. Whether it was Saul hanging out with teenagers in Rwanda, Esther conducting workshops in Mandarin, Danny meeting Brazilian Mums or Lucy seeing Francesco in full flow in Italy, it truly has been a global year for us.

We have now worked in 6 continents (just leaving Antarctica for the full house) proving that co-creation has the ability to transcend any cultural or linguistic barrier.

2) Pulsar and the launch of RTo2

Real-time research has been one of the hot topics of 2010, and we’re very happy to say we’ve been (literally) right in the middle of the conversation. In May we launched RTo2 (Real Time o2), a social media monitoring and analysis tool designed specifically for o2. Being at the forefront of the real time research wave has been a great experience and we’ve have learnt loads in a small period of time.

RTo2 is a bespoke manifestation of our real time research platform Pulsar, you can find out more about RTo2 and Pulsar HERE.

3) Axe Twist Hitting the Shelves

In 2008 we ran a co-creation workshop in New York City with some Headboxers from the US and the UK. They were tasked with coming up with a new variant to add to the Lynx range… Fast forward 2 years and Lynx Twist, the first ever entirely co-created product, hits the shelves.

Everything behind the product, including the name, was created, developed and designed in the New York workshop. It was a long 2 year wait but it’s amazing to see another co-created product in stores (the first was Tango with Added Tango), let’s hope there are some more to come in 2011!

4) The X Crowd

Over the last few years Headbox and Mindbubble have been at the epicentre of everything we do. The enthusiasm, intelligence and creativity of our community members really has driven Face forward and allowed us to produce some fantastic work. This is why there was so much internal excitement when we announced that we would be bringing a new co-creation community to the web – The X Crowd.

TXC is for people who live and breath technology to help tech brands design and create better products, ideas, experiences and communications. The X Crowd is currently in BETA but will be making a big impact in 2011… we can’t wait!!!

5) Conferences, Conferences, Conferences

2010 saw Face hitting the conference scene hard, whether it was spectating, presenting or hosting we really enjoyed hearing the thoughts of others and sharing our own! Some of the spectating highlights include Marion’s trip to the UX London seminar, my own visit to the It’s Nice That’s Future:Content conference.

Presenting wise it has been a great year with the majority of the Face team taking to the stage at some point to present on their passion and expertise areas. Take a look at our SlideShare page and Friday’s Top 5 presentations post to check some of our presentation conferences.

There have been several other more personal highlights too – Philip holding a real Olympic Torch in a workshop, Jess getting a job at Face after conversing with Fran on Twitter, Sharmila getting to grips with 16-24 year olds during her 9 Lives research and Lucy getting her hands on unlimited amounts of ice cream (all in the name of co-creation of course), to name but a few.

One of our other highlights this year has been the growth of Twitter, which links us nicely to tomorrow’s top 5… our favourite 5 tweeters of 2010!