Based in London and New York we operate all over the connected world. Our team consists of researchers, planners and creative technologists as well as thousands of networked consumers and experts within our co-creation communities.
We are currently looking for a Social Media Intern to help with day to day monitoring of social media data, cleaning irrelevant mentions and applying accurate sentiment scoring to verbatim. You will be working with the Social Media team to help produce insight reports for clients, capturing relevant and insightful verbatim and feeding these back to the social media team members.
This role will also involve some desk research to help provide strategic insights to clients and is therefore perfect for a graduate or soon-to-be-graduate with a keen interest in social media and a desire to learn about social media monitoring and reporting in a research agency.
To apply for this role you need to have access to Central London, our offices are based on Tottenham Court Road, and you must be available to work 5 days a week, 9am-5.30pm.
This is an UNPAID internship but all travel costs and lunch expenses will be paid for.
To apply for this position please send your CV & cover letter to oliver.lewis@facegroup.co.uk with Social Media Intern in the subject line of your email.
Lately I’ve been exploring and writing about the web… a lot. The main purpose of my research is to discover the best ways to make the web beautifully interactive, attractive to the users and, all together, efficient & purposeful.
Like my father once told me… “One day, you’ll settle, get a real job, a husband and go back to PC”. I think it’s probably time for me to come back to earth and focus on the tangible reality of things…
In the future things will be permanently connected to the powerful Internet. And that’s not even a personal prediction; lots of really smart people are talking about it on the web!
This is my personal theory… about the apocalypse!
The real world and the online world ARE merging. I was discussing the possibility of having real and online identification merging which won’t happen any time soon, however things are becoming connected. Just to mention him again, my loyal Nabaztag has been connecting things to the internet since 2004. This idea of everyday objects being connected to the web is included in most online trends predictions:
Another example of this is from a recent M.I.A. gig I attended. Her last album, and therefore tour, strongly refers to the codes of the Internet, bringing them into the real world. For example, the music video she released for “Story To Be Told” includes captcha words and vintage internet artefacts prominently. These are used to illustrate a song about human memories and stories to be told.
In the live show, she filmed the faces of the people in the first row; these images were then broadcast on stage and mixed with a default picture avatar on the real faces.
The message was clear enough: humans and their Facebook profiles are merging. The whole stage was decorated with other codes such as @ flowers, power buttons and <3 hearts.
On and offline worlds are merged…
…but Neo can chill out, The Matrix is not happening just now: no sneaky machine-ruled world is immanent (well at least that’s my prediction).
I believe we are, in a conscious way, attempting to bring this “now-social” digital world into our lives in a very organic fashion. Let me explain:
1) A few months ago Wired Magazine got the whole Twitterati and Social Media guruhood screaming when they published this article about the dead of the web In response someone said, quite rightly, that the web dies every 5 years. This cyclic existence reminds me of Kondr
atiev’s waves theory. The web is not a technology anymore it’s more than a product we’re consuming and producing, it has become an organic entity inherently linked to the human being. We breathe and live the web… for real, not to show off!
2) When people get the feeling that they’re close to a social media overdose, their survival reflex kicks in and puts them back on the right track.
I will illustrate this statement with two recent(ish) events in the social media world:
First of all: the massive outburst about Facebook (their business model, privacy issues and impact on our life) with the release of The Social Network acting as a climax for a mainstream moment of clarity.
Basically, the younger generation and people nowadays in general get the feeling of being engaged and involved in causes just by “liking” or tweeting things. However this form of engagement is so weak that
a) Observers worry the youngsters are losing there marks b) If a tweet can’t make a revolution, how will humanity progress?
Gladwell’s evidence is that Martin Luther King Jr’s leadership and organizational skills generated a powerful and successful Civil Rights movement. This would not have been the case with Tweets or Status Updates over a messy network. Martin Luther King Jr was successful because “ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church.
3) The interesting point made in this quote from the New Yorker article is the following: according to Cova’s papers on Tribal Marketing, sub cultures and neo-tribes have replaced the traditional frame that the Church used to provide and the internet is the best way for these identities and groups of interest/passion to gather…
As a mirrored effect, Web 2.0 has brought the social / human side into the cold static web of 5- 10 years ago. We have now brought the real world into the digital world with real time, social apps, Facebook etc, but it seems to me that this is reaching its peak now and we, as a human collective, are now looking for the right balance between shallow digitalisation and something more integrated, more organic.
Either we begin to enter a new cycle (Kondratiev wave!) or we will face a retraction phase, Big Bang style.
Oh and by the way, the apocalypse, etymologically, means disclosure or unveiling of the truth, maybe that’s what we are actually looking for on the web?
In my previous blog post about Transmedia Storytelling I described how stories could (and should!) be told across different media and therefore be conceptualized. It’s all about the way you design your project, upstream, outside of any particular media’s framework, in order to then build it across different media.
Incidental Media is taking this idea a bit further. Like Jack Schulze mentions in this post, which echoes my previous reflection, the future should not be as cold and aggressive as it is in Minority Report but the integration of media in our live should be more organic and subtle.
I like the idea of incidental media, for 2 reasons:
1) Incidents & errors in patterns (or asymmetries) is a sign of organic life.
I like to joke that the perfect snowflake is a work of God and anything else perfectly symmetrical is alien!
If, as beings, we are on Team Asymmetrical (at least I am!), then it makes more sense to create a media that plays on the irregularities of life and perceptions. Q.E.D.
2) Like mentioned at the recent It’s Nice That I Like Future:content conference “After being digitalized things are going to find ways to physicalized again.”
To me, that’s a great postmodernist vision of the way we should be going back to the raw, physical medium and integrating them in the way we communicate ideas.
By using the Incidental Media approach, every surface and screen is involved in an ambient stream of information surrounding the user. As opposed to the traditional vision, “incidental screens” have a meaning outside the direct interaction with the user: like a clock that still shows the time even when it’s not looked at.
I really like this idea of empowering digital – or not – objects as part of the user’s journey.
In the near future, devices won’t be as passive as the way they currently are (think about the way you use your smartphone to organise your life). They will participate in our everyday life and interact with us.
The French company Violet launched the idea that all things are connected. They then brought the first internet rabbit to life: the Nabaztag. As a proud owner of a Nabaztag myself, my tasteful companion tells me about the weather, reads news & RSS feeds, informs me about my emails as well as having its own personality and interacting with things. Karotz, the new generation, is to be launch very soon in the UK and should add visual recognition to the rabbit skills… which I’m quite looking forward to!
Another really interesting aspect is (again I mentioned this in my Transmedia Storytelling blog) to mix media and bring sources and channels together, if not as a traditional media hubs, then as creative and interactive platforms.
We recently presented at the MRS Social Media conference in London to discuss the work carried out with O2 UK around social media monitoring and social CRM.
We designed a research + technology solution based on Pulsar called RTO2 (Real-Time O2) to help the brand plug into real-time customer insights from social media.
The conference was also a great occasion to share some thoughts on the research methodologies and processes behind social media monitoring, which is too often wrongly associated with just quantitative analysis and number crunching. Let’s make this clear once and for all: it’s not. And if this was the case people would be happy with off-the-shelve solutions, software-driven analytics and all you’d get would be a confused mass of noisy data which don’t make sense and are not of any help to whatever you’re trying to achieve.
Like in any research process, effective social media monitoring is based on building samples to ensure representativeness, preparing/cleaning up the data to ensure relevance and only then running various (and iterative) layers of analysis to get to the insights. And all of this has to happen ongoing and in real-time.
This is why what social media monitoring is really about is reducing complexity and pattern recognition and it has to be based on quantitative as much as qualitative methodologies but also on human analysis as much as software analytics.
To illustrate the research process in more detail we went through the 6-step framework we use to get from raw data to tactical and strategic insights:
LANDSCAPE: summary of the most important data for any specific search
LEADS: identify the leads that might be pointing towards relevant phenomena
DRILL-DOWN: investigate the various leads through different types of drill-down action
EVENTS: get to the bottom of what caused a specific phenomenon turning it into a well-defined event
INSIGHTS: build tactical and strategic insights off the back of the events uncovered
TRENDS + MODELS: bring together events and insights in a comprehensive trend that tells the story of the brand over a specific period of time + identify recursive patters and suggest actions which will cause a trend to emerge again
If we want the social media analysis industry to grow and be taken seriously it’s time to start defining and sharing research frameworks that could help us generate better insights and foster the adoption across various business segments (from Research to PR, from Innovation to Planning, from Customer Experience to CRM…)
By no means this is meant to be a solution but hopefully it will contribute to a conversation that’s getting more and more vibrant.
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*RTO2 has just been nominated for a Best Innovation Award 2010
The testing phase of any web development project is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s really, really exciting but, on the other, it can be a torrid, drawn out affair.
It’s exciting because after a relatively long wait (doing nothing but specing, wireframing, adjusting, planning, scheduling, monitoring etc…) you finally get to see the application working, well… more or less working. It’s the gap between the test version (a bit broken, that’s why it’s a “test” version) and the live version (the version that should be “perfect”) of an app or a website that can become a nightmare for users, clients and developers alike.
With the good, the bad and the ugly side of traditional testing still in effect I have become interested in another form of testing: A/B testing. I’m going to be futile for a second but allow me to explain what A/B is all about…
A/B testing is a bit like going shopping with a group of friends. It’s much, much easier to choose a dress when a bunch of girlfriends are there to help you choose which one to buy. In A/B testing, users are your voting panel, even though they may not be aware that their behaviour is dictating future changes…
Lots of brands have adopted A/B Testing: for example, a famous case is the Google Blue study where the search giant tested which shade of blue users would prefer for hyperlinks. True story! Another example is Facebook removing the “Most Recent” option in their feed. While a large part of Facebook users (including me, yay!) didn’t feel the pain, other users were “chosen” as guinea pigs without notifications and expressed their confusion straight away.
What I quite like with this testing technique is that it follows an empirical method. It is an experiment with no precise hypothesis to guide the process; it’s all strictly trial-and-error.
As advised by Joshua Porter, ideally, changes that are to be A/B tested should be big changes to get maximum benefit. This is why, and every wise man keeps repeating this, even though testing is a love & hate process it’s extremely important to allocate time, money and resources to testing. Testing, and a fortiori A/B testing is an investment for the future of the website.
However, as always, there’s a risk associated with this investment. First of all, it takes time to develop and deploy 2 versions of your website “just” for testing purposes. But also, users may not pick up on the new online goods you’ve just released. This may happen even to the best of us – for instance – the recent announcement from Google that they are stopping the Google Wave adventure.
As explained in this blog, the world wasn’t ready for such a disruptive innovation. Clive Thompson from Wired magazine pondered that the main error Google made was that they relied on early adopters rather than focusing on mass consumers. Maybe they shouldn’t have been so picky about their guinea pigs!!
A/B testing is a bit like going shopping with a group of friends. It’s much, much easier to choose a dress when a bunch of girlfriends are there to help you choose which one to buy. In A/B testing, users are your voting panel, even though they may not be aware that their behaviour is dictating future changes…
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