Hello!

We’re currently looking for a Digital Intern to join and aid our community and development teams. To start with this role will last 3-months but there is potential for it to be extended.

The main responsibilities for the Digital Intern will be:

1. Community on-going support

• Check and answer user emails, blog comments, etc…
• Manage the community blog (WordPress formatting, video/picture sourcing etc..) and freelance writers
• Help writing up documentation and supporting research projects
• Help with internal training on the community

2. Technical support

• Testing and bug reporting
• Knowing the platform and helping in design of new specs
• General support for the Digital Project Manager

3. Social Media support

• Help maintaining the communities presence on Twitter, Facebook etc…
• Keep an eye on communities stats and analytics
• Copywriting and proofreading for the web

This role is perfect for a graduate with a keen interest in the digital world and a desire to learn about online communities and digital projects in a marketing agency.

The successful candidate will need to have excellent Microsoft Office skills (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), excellent written English (for blog writing), confident telephone/communication skills, a keen interest in social media, an understanding of how websites run and, in a perfect world, a basic knowledge of HTML and web development.

To apply for this role you need to have access to Central London, our offices are based on Tottenham Court Road, and be available to work 5 days a week, 9am-5.30pm.

All travel costs and lunch expenses will be paid for.

To apply for this position please send your CV & cover letter to marion@facegroup.co.uk with Digital Intern in the subject line of your email

We would also like you to answer the following question in no more than 250 words:

What is your favourite online community and why?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Marion

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.

I’ve built a serious fascination for this space confined in my laptop screen (or any flat surface present in our life) and how it’s important to consider both online and offline spaces in our almost fully-digitalised environment.

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.

More recently, I’ve seen lots of reaction (here and here) on the web to this article from the New Yorker about Slackerism.

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?

Q.E.D

Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

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.

Media surfaces: The Journey from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

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.

The question that follows this is how to make the most of this abundant, constant and “incidental” flow of information and deal with the procrastinative and short-termed nature of human beings.

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 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!!

To gain traction with social media research within your company you have to help the business answer the question “what do I do with all this data?”

1. Hippos Rule – “Highest Paid Persons Rule” before you start gain buy-in from the decision makers within the company.

2. Breakout of the research silo create a stakeholder team across the company e.g PR, Customer Services, Sales etc

3. Agree KPI’s for each project during the set up and benchmarking phase for key metrics e.g advocacy, influence, awareness.

4. Knowing the strengths and limitations of your social media research system and communicate this e.g semantic analysis, source coverage.

5. Be consistent in the data that your agency provides so that interrogation and comparison over time is easy.

6. Don’t just ask your agency to provide numbers but to provide analysis with visualisations so that a wide number of stakeholders can understand the data story and have a POV on what is happening, why it is happening and help identify what to do next.

7. Set up internal workshop and training sessions to help create a more data driven culture and develop ROI models.

8. Share success stories where social media research has made a commercial benefit.

• The new real-time social web scenario and what does this mean for businesses

• The social employee and the social customers as the foundation of the new “pull” organization model: open leadership, distributed control, governance, ROI

• Collaborative approaches to insight generation and hybrid models for open innovation;

• Listening strategies, social crm, customer networks and social media marketing: from managing transactions to building long-term relationships.

E2.0 model, via Anthony Poncier's blog on Management 2.0 http://poncier.org

A month ago, I was reading this excellent guide to getting beaten up on the Vice Magazine website. I am not a massive fan of violence, but the article gives an interesting insight on how real men, as opposed to Steven Seagal, should act when engaged in a duel: it’s all about cutting down the risks of damage rather than pretending to own a black belt in karate.

To a certain extent, I think this is applicable to the way brands (or institutions) should handle their online reputation. Think about it this way: whatever your marketing department plans to do, the team is outnumbered by the opponent: a crowd of angry and opinionated internet users. From the moment you publicly expose your point of view (it can be a blog, a video or a whole campaign), you must be ready to engage in conversation with your audience, including debate, non-agreement, parody and a bit of fighting…

So with all this in mind, I introduce to you…

The Face Guide To Getting –Safely- Beaten up
on the Internet:

1. Get ready for a worldwide blast: everything spreads on the internet

The internet is the perfect medium for spreading good, funny or tragic multimedia content. So be aware that whatever is on the internet, has the potential to spread everywhere.

For example the case of Pepsi’s “Suicidal Calories” campaign: Pepsi launched a very targeted campaign for a niche anti-establishment German audience (ads for one magazine only), involving a poor Calorie character feeling lonely in a Pepsi Max can and attempting to commit suicide.

Obviously, the content spread very fast (especially the design of the campaign, which was pretty nice) and led to a massive reaction from offended audience members worldwide. Pepsi, are you really making fun of suicide?

2. It’s okay to make a mistake. Just make sure you apologise.

In the case of the Pepsi Suicide controversy, the other very good lesson learned is that it is okay to make a mistake as long as you publicly acknowledge it. B. Bonin Bough, PepsiCo’s Director of Social and Emerging Media and Huw Gilbert, Senior Manager for Communications at Pepsico immediately responded to the buzz and presented their apologies on Twitter directly to users.

The great lesson is that “With social media, this is all it takes – show your users and critics that you’re human and can make mistakes, but you’re listening to feedback” – Cheryl Gledhill, moltn.com

3. Faster faster faster: working on your reactivity is key.

I think the previous two points lead us nicely into speed: to effectively deal with online uppercuts, you better be very fast – it’s a matter of a day or two.

The Web is the fastest form of any media, you have to be reactive: catch any buzz on the internet and respond to it. Things can become massive instantly. If you’re not reactive you may find yourself added to the “case studies” of social media failures. For instance, Nestle’s well-documented struggles on their Facebook page are now referred to as the “Nestle controversy” and are probably going to be studied by business school students for years to come.

If you catch and tame the buzz quickly the effects will be a lot less painful than if you are slow… or do nothing at all.

4. No shortcuts and no cheating in the exchange (even if it hurts)

It is such a simple piece of advice but brands still don’t seem to get it. Do not remove comments. Unless it’s useless trolling or spamming, every comment must remain on the public space as you are engaging in a conversation with your audience.

As Kris Colvin explains in this article: “The spotlight is on YOU when someone is calling you (or your company) out, and you are being watched to see how you will respond. “

The fact is that if you cheat in the conversation, fatally a few users will spot it and pass the word on (rule number 1!) and the brand will be even more damaged. Transparency is key.

5. Blood spatters can’t be cleaned up without getting your hands dirty

It is not possible to delete your online reputation and start again; you can only rebuild it. Many companies with bad e-reputations panic and buy “instant cleaning packages” that contain a smart mix of SEO, backlinking, content production and lawyer fees, as good as this sounds it doesn’t delete users memories or create miracles.

Your brand cannot have a good reputation without dirty hands: you have to be present, relevant and engage with your users routinely. It’s also important to build one-to-one relationships with your audience: as we’ve seen with our communities Headbox and Mindbubble if users are interacting with brands within the social space (facebook, twitter or website…) it’s because they want a direct relationship with their favourite brands.

To conclude, if a few battles are lost, keep on fighting the war. Most companies are now aware of the impact of social media on their business. For the record, in the Nestle case, and as Dennis Howlett shows in his analysis, the Facebook disaster didn’t produce any direct effect on the company’s results. However it has been a great example of social media leverage and a great illustration of user power, influence and sovereignty in the social space.

We may joke about users being lazy, inpatient and never happy. But we do love them and really want to take care of them!

I spent 3 amazing days at the UX London 2010 conference & workshop; it was a very interesting insight into the not-so-new field of User Experience oriented design.

What is UX?

The first thing that is important to note is that UX is not just a geeky thing. By users, we mean people, as every object does pass a design test. Objects around us are not a material or a tool but a medium to an experience – their design must reflect their use as a medium.

An experience is an ethereal, subjective and intangible thing that is created through the actual existence of users.

Therefore, as a combination of users and their experiences, UX design is centered around the engagement of users with the object, across all senses.

As defined by Jesse James Garrett , UX works on 4 levels:

• Perception – using the senses
• Action – using the body (i.e. Nintendo Wii)
• Cognition – interacting with objects
• Emotion – engaging with objects

These 4 characteristics must be comprehended within an environment: capabilities of the users, constraints from the users, and context of the experience.

As you may have guessed, UX is an incredibly interesting field, but it’s also an inexact and empirical, as it revolves around unpredictable characteristics. It’s also a new field and the major challenge for UX people is to make the business understand this shift from the object to the medium and the importance of taking care of the experience of the users.

Josua Porter and Jesse James Garrett

2 ways to do UX

As explained by Joshua Porter in his lecture about Metrics-driven Design, there are 2 types of approach to UX design.

The first approach is the intuitive approach, which Porter qualifies as a daring instinctive vision.

The second approach is the “Google” approach, based on evidences, where design solves a logic problem, and where the possible solutions are tested and the winner implemented.

The evidence approach involves a “political environment” where the main goal is to get things done and where there is a hierarchy-based decision making process.

This approach creates concepts.

The intuitive approach is based on a “prayer environment” where the results can’t be tested or foreseen and the work is based on wisdom and experience. This approach creates new possibilities.

What to avoid when creating UX.

How to do you do metrics-driven UX?

Across these 2 approaches, Porter suggested the following steps for the designers in order to structure a metrics-driven UX:

1. Identify the design objectives
It’s important to think about what the site is actually meant to achieve. The tricky bit is to make sure that designers and execs are aligning their answers.

2. Map out the UX lifecycle
For this step, you have to question what actions users must do to meet business expectations.

For example, designers can break down the stages for the users to engage with the site. Once this lifecycle is defined, it’s important to focus on what is actually happening between these stages; i.e. what is happening between a sign up and a 2nd visit to the site.

3. Identify the core metrics
Once you have your steps described, designers must prioritise.

Google analytics provides some valuable data for whoever want to feel reassured about the site visits – what Porter calls “Vanity matrix”, however it isn’t enough to actually make decisions for the UX design.

When you look at the figures per steps, you can realize when you are actually losing users (disengagement). UX designers must focus on these drop offs in the funnel of actions.

Cohort analysis also help to understand the needs for a better design: you can compare across the time the engagement of the users: for example, in June, check if the users registered in May, April, Mars are still on the site and what is their level of engagement.

4. Continuous improvement of the lifecycle
This analysis of steps-focused metrics must be carried on all the time: UX redesign happens at each iteration of the site.

It’s important to bear in mind that you can always revert the site to a design that worked better!

To conclude, there are different approaches to UX design, which can both be successful. However, it’s important to focus on the right metrics that are relevant for what user actions the site is aiming at and designed for.

Crowdsouring is a buzzword that has been knocking around for a while now. There is a lot of thought, theory and ongoing conversation about it, and we’re starting to see brands begin to use it in various different formats.

But how does it work in the research & innovation world?

‘Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd… And Back Again’ explores crowdsourcing from it’s definition and gives hints, tips and strategy advice on how you can implement crowsourcing for innovation.

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