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Innovation, MRS, Planning, Social Media, sxsw

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5 Panels for Researchers to See at SXSW

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South by Southwest (SXSW) is huge. The festival itself has Music and Film tracts, as well as the Interactive tract that we are attending. But even within the Interactive tract, programming covers a range of topics, from social media, big data, content management, application design, and usability design, amongst many other topics. It’s hard to choose what to go to amongst the plethora of great programming.

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.

hills showing patterns of erosion

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.

http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP992462

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SXSW – Research Twitter-style

  • Date March 15 2011
  • Posted by Job
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Face’s Job Muscroft checked out Twitter’s Mark Tramell discussing Twitter’s research methods.

Tramell’s talk on day 2 of SXSWi was billed as “Stop Listening To Your Customers”, but a more accurate description of the Twitter approach would be Don’t Ask – Just Watch.

Tramell discussed Twitter’s methodology, and gave a five-stage process for understanding where their service could be improved:

1. Twitter have a single minded philosophy – to observe current user behaviour and then, as Mark puts it, “reduce friction”.

2. When they find a user friction point they will look for current user work arounds or hacks and investigate their validity on a larger scale.

3. Sprint to prototype, developing a live demo of the new service for users to trial in a matter of weeks.

4. The trial is a user clinic format where the design and development team come together and watch face to face to see how users interact with the new service.

5. In the final stage, iteration, they repeat the user clinic process up to 16 times before they go live with a new service.

The role of research at Twitter is crucial as pretty much all of their product development has come by learning from their users what works and what doesn’t. By watching how people use the site, Twitter have developed numerous functionalities including the now invaluable #hashtag, @reply and lists.

There is something very powerful in the way Twitter approach research and I think any researcher should ask what prototypes we can build (going beyond concept boards) to help consumers show us – rather than tell us – what they want.

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, Conferences, sxsw

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SXSW – In The Loop: Feedback Loops & Behavioural Change

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Face Community Manager Chris Harding sat in on Aza Raskin’s talk on Behavioural Change and came away with the Mozilla Labs co-founder’s one secret for successfully modifying behaviours – both online and off.

The key to all behaviour modification is to produce feedback loops. In other words, if people understand that a certain behaviour produces a certain result when it’s performed, their inclination to carry out that behaviour is dramatically influenced.

Feedback loops come in various forms, but ultimately most loops fall into one of two categories – either positive or negative. Positive feedback loops reinforce a behaviour by providing reward each time the criteria are met. A great example of this came in a study involving kids left in a room with a marshmallow. They were told that if they didn’t eat that marshmallow for 15 minutes, then they’d be given another.

Quite apart from the weird behavioural ticks that the tortured-looking kids develop to deal with delaying their gratification, it’s noticeable that once the kids understand that their actions (or lack of action) will have short-term positive consequences, their usual tendencies (to wolf the marshmallow as soon as look at it) are modified.

However, these immediate feedback loops can be negative. Raskin brought up the example of smoking – a reflection of his interest in healthcare as founder of Massive Health – to show how some feedback loops are negative. The immediate positive feedback from smoking – the effect of the nicotine – influences behaviour much more than the incremental feedback loop of later health issues. Raskin believes that we can massively improve our own health by changing the feedback loop and, thereby, our behaviours. This has been proven to work by dieters. If one writes down everything one eats, the hard evidence of gluttony induces a negative feedback loop – guilt – and influences behaviour. Raskin would take it further, though.

For example, I imagine almost everyone reading this blog has been guilty at some point of failing to finish a course of antibiotics. As soon as we’re on our feet again, they tend to slip into the background as our lives (and beer) beckon. This is a risky business and slows recovery. So Raskin wants every course of antibiotics to prescribed with a shot in the finger which produces a large brown splodge. The mark reacts to the chemicals in the antibiotics and will only fade once the entire course has been taken – this short-term feedback loop reinforces the positive behaviour of finishing the antibiotics by providing reward.

In an online business sense, the instant feedback that a customer receives directly affects their tendency to conduct transactions on your site. Amazon released data revealing that for every 100ms of reduced load time (less than half human reaction speed) sales increased by 1%. The annoyance of longer loading times, even at a sub-reaction speed level, directly modified behaviour and reduced the tendency to spend at Amazon.

For Face, this reinforces the knowledge that our platforms need to be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible. Feedback loops are also relevant in how we engage our users. To encourage the best possible content, there needs to be an ongoing system of reward for consistently high-quality input. These rewards needn’t necessarily be monetary – in the online world kudos and respect is almost as desired as renumeration, hence the presence of “like” and “recommend” buttons on nearly all of the most engaged online communities.

Blog, Conferences, sxsw

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SXSW – “How Not to Design like a Developer” & “The New Frontiers of Social Gaming”

  • Date March 12 2011
  • Posted by Marion
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In the second of our SXSW Interactive blogs, Face digital project manager Marion Renoux digests her first day of conferences. She dragged herself away from the eat-as-much-as-you-like breakfast buffet for “How not to design like a developer” with Chrissie Brodigan @ Mozilla & “The New Frontiers of Social Gaming” with Brian Reynolds, chief game designer @ Zynga. First up, “how not to design like a developer” and, after the stars, “the new frontiers”.

In “How Not to Design Like a Developer”, Chrissie was discussing the challenges of open source projects and how to facilitate a better collaboration between developers and designers, especially crucial in the context of open source projects.

Although the Face digital team is not working on an open source model, Chrissie made a pertinent point about the best practice to follow in order to reconciliate feature development and user experience:

1. Be careful with workaround: developers think about workarounds as a way to speed up the project completion, but it’s completely wrong from a UX point of view.

2. Even if you give the best layered Photoshop file, without proper documentation and walk through there’s a high chance the design will be misinterpreted in development.

3. Designers are guilty of being trendy, while developers build for the future: better find a good compromise between both directions.

4. Designers must practice a team friendly version control – like developers do with version control and code review – because, for example, you may want to rollback to an earlier version of the design, or get new designers to pick up design and make it better

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Brian Reynolds was happy to surrender secret of a successful social game – for instance the worldwide known Farmville.

To be honest, I’ve always abhorred this game and all the stupid updates I would get in my Facebook feed. Between you and me, I’ve quite frankly considered defriending people playing too much of a farmer for my taste…

However, this presentation made me reconsider my opinion on the game. After some polite rambling on how Facebook changed the face of the digital world (I don’t know why every talk has a part dedicated to how The World has been revolutionised by The Social Network) Reynolds presented Social Gaming with another angle: basically it’s not the gaming aspect but the socialising aspect that matters.

So here are the secrets he revealed for a good social game:

1. Give the game away for free. The idea is that because the social game is based on people interactions, you must not restrict its access and everybody should be able to participate/socialise/engage with no monetary barriers. However, upgrades are paid: give away the blades, sell the razors (a bit dark but quite an efficient metaphor)

2. Let people express themselves and don’t block their creativity. Even better, give them the tools to create.

3. Obviously always let the players share and socialise because what they really want to do on Facebook is to learn about their friends and secretly shout “Remember me! Start a conversation, I’m lonely!”

4. Learn from your users. They may interpret and appropriate themselves with your game in a different way to that you’ve initial envisioned and designed it for. By observing their online behaviour you can improve the game, taking it in the right direction for the pleasure of your audience

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