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.

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.

Changing Consumer Landscape

This is to be expected as the consumer landscape is changing fast. It is common knowledge that the advent of Web 2.0 has given consumers the confidence and the ability to take more control of the relationship they have with brands. It has given rise to the term “empowered consumers”, a new breed of customer who have a strong belief not just in their own voice but also in their own creativity, ideas and self-expression. It is no longer about what your brand does to the consumer but what consumers are doing to and with your brand.

Impact on Financial Services Industry

This trend manifests itself in the Financial Services Sector in a number of ways. The first is that the empowered consumer of today sees openness as key to building trust and accountability with the brands they engage with. This is critical for banking brands where events from the last two years have seen trust and fairness eroded. This has been picked up by the FSA’s ‘fairness’ objectives where banks are now being tasked to provide fair products and deal with customers in a fair way. Secondly there is a drive to streamline consumer interactions and make customers lives easier by combining products. The social web will have a big impact on financial services marketing, sales and business communication processes with demand from consumers for new service designs and interfaces. This will enable consumers to draw upon a wider base of advice from places such as twitter, opinion aggregators and financial forums and will lead to real time customer service becoming a top differentiator. And finally customers are moving away from conventional advice channels (IFAs, banks) and moving more towards peer advice because social media has made this possible in ways that were not there before.

New Rules of Consumer Engagement

All of this calls for a new set of rules for consumer engagement and requires the industry to look outside its own category to the world of FMCG and Technology to find better ways of involving consumers in the research and innovation process. And they won’t have to look too far or too hard as the idea of co-creation – doing things with people not at people – has been embraced by big companies for a while. Co-creation takes consumer involvement to another level by bringing brands and consumers together on the same level and involves consumers at the beginning of the process rather than at midway or at the end. This can take place in on-line communities or offline in workshops or both. It is through our co-creation communities for young people namely Headbox and for women aged 25-50, namely Mindbubble, that we have been using to co-create a range of new products. The most exciting example has been our co-creation of Axe/Lynx’s 2010 variant in terms of both the product and also the fragrance – something that has never been done before – which was launched globally earlier this year.

Some important guiding principles

As with all new approaches though there are some significant lessons that we have learned along the way. The first is that when you are bringing leading edge consumers together with brands it is vital to have a coherent and well structured process that gets the best out of your combined creativity so that it delivers better outputs. The second is that within this structure it is important to have a mix of online and offline methodologies because they produce more ideas of better quality and are able to involve consumers more quickly in what you do. It is why we have inverted the traditional research approach, starting the process by gathering quality insight from thousands of consumers rather than just a few. Our proprietary tool Pulsar has allowed us to listen and to observe to what consumers are saying in real time on the web as well as measure the influence these conversations are having. Being able to combine qualitative and quantitative research in this way means we are able to help brands respond much more quickly to the speed, volume and quality of consumer interactions that are taking place with their brand, product or service.  And finally the role of the consumer is critical; treating them as active participants in this process and giving them as much responsibility with direct involvement throughout the entire process. If the Finance Industry wants to stay ahead of their consumers and the fast changing landscape they occupy then they would be wise to adopt the principles and philosophy of co-creation.

cardboard heads simulating a packed room at Minibar, London

Over the next few weeks Face Wired , Face social media planning sister agency, will be speaking at a couple of workshops and seminars in London and Milan. If you are around and want to catch up, here’s the low-down.

The first one is a two-day workshop at Multimedia Management series hosted by Mediaset and IULM University in Milan, where we will be talking about Social Media Monitoring, Data Visualization and Social Media Planning. Access to this series is unfortunately closed but if you are in Milan and want to talk to us give us a shout or DM me on twitter @abc3d

The second one is Open Business “Web Business Toolbox” in London, where the focus will be more on Social Media Strategy for web companies and startups in general. This series is open but the organizers told me it’s already sold out. However there’s time (apr 14) and someone might drop out so if you are interested do sign up to the waiting list.

Also, this coming Friday is Minibar time again, the monthly face to face for internet professionals in Shoreditch. The coming one is all about Augmented Reality. We will be there enjoying presentations from Micazook, Worksnug, Augmented Planet, Ambient Industries. And having a few friday beers. If you are planning to make it, make sure you RSVP on meetup. See you there.

End of Face wanders bullettin.

It’s all about Real-time intelligence, collaborative research and adaptive brand planning, which we think are the three elements that make Research 3.0 different.

The presentation covers:

• Measuring and monitoring online conversations about brands to assess brand influence and brand visibility
• Applying qualitative analysis to determine research parameters and add meaning to quantitative findings
• Identifying the conversation hubs and the influencers across a wide range of channels
• Using crowd-sourcing and co-creation methodologies to achieve research, innovation and planning objectives
• Building iterative models for feeding real-time insights and consumer inputs into the existing marketing process

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

Following on from the success of our Web 2.0 Women forum earlier this year we thought it was about time we opened up another hot topic for debate. The last Face Forum revolved around the key question ‘Do Brands Need Agencies?’ On the 18th of November we have been joined by friends, experts and clients at the Groucho club to discuss what it takes to stay relevant and true to your consumers, how to engage the crowds in research innovation and planning and what are some of the tech trends for 2010 and beyond. Here’s a quick summary:

Relevance
The real-time social web has changed the way we communicate giving us the tools to get and share information at a pace we have not experienced before. This has made the web the richest insight field we have ever had. How can you harness the power of the world wide wave for research, brand planning and brand engagement? What are real-time research and adaptive brand planning? And how can they help your brand stay relevant?

Crowds
Barely a day goes by without a website, campaign or competition cropping up, promising to harness the collective wisdom of crowds for the benefit of brands. Peperami even ditched Lowe to ask the crowds. But is bottom-up really enough? When did crowdsourcing cease to be a means to an end and become an end in itself? Join us to discuss a hybrid model where crowd-sourcing and co-creation are used as complementary methodologies.

Trends
We asked 3000 19 to 25 years old young adults about their consumption habits, media and tech diet. The Forum will be the place where we present our latest Techtribe report, uncovering youth trends that will soon start migrating to other audiences

It was a great night! Here’s the presentation that kick-started the discussion, join in and tell us what you think

wom uk espresso briefing @face

Brands are increasingly realising the importance of integrating word of mouth into everything they do. They get that it’s essential for nurturing consumer relationships. They understand that referrals are key to ROI. They’ve heard exciting examples of companies who’ve built their success on conversational strategies. But how on earth do they fit WOM into their existing marketing mix?

On 8.30am, Tuesday 24th November, we will present on‘Monitoring and analysing WOM in real time to enable adaptive brand planning’.

CEO and Founding Partner Andrew Needham, and Head of Social Media and Planning Francesco D’Orazio, will look at how to:

- Measure and monitor online conversations about brands to assess brand influence and brand visibility
- Apply qualitative analysis to determine research parameters and add meaning to quantitative findings
- Identify conversation hubs and influencers across a wide range of channels
- Use crowdsourcing and co-creation methodologies to achieve research, innovation and planning objectives
- Build iterative models for feeding real-time insights and consumer inputs into the existing marketing process

As always, the briefing will be totally FREE and kick off with half an hour for coffee, breakfast and networking at 8.30am with the talk starting at 9am and questions and discussions afterwards until 10.30am, all at INSIGHT RESEARCH GROUP offices, 11-13 Charterhouse Buildings, London
EC1M 7AP. Last month’s presentation from Matt Morrison was a big hit so be sure to register for this one now via julian.ferguson@womuk.org – members get priority booking.

The video of the session will be uploaded in the next days on the WOM UK blog. Same for the news about the upcoming November Thought Leaders session that will feature Dr Martin Oetting, Chief Research Director at European WOM marketing network trnd, presenting his doctoral dissertation on ‘The Ripple Effect’ – how companies can spread WOM by treating their customers like their best employees. Watch this space.

The Guardian study combines existing thinking around what makes people influential with a new piece of qualitative and quantitative research – including an expert panel involving WOM UK Council members Steve Barton from Advokator and Ivan Palmer from Wildfire. This mass of data has been used to develop a communications planning tool in the form of a database which helps companies and advertisers to understand the type of people they’ll want to target to ensure their content is rapidly and widely spread. Click through for the presentation on Slideshare below.

Read all on the WOM UK blog

Drawing on his own experiences in high tech as well as hundreds of interviews with consumers, researchers and marketing executives, Emmanuel will discuss proven techniques for stimulating buzz.

It’s another morning session lasting until 10.30am at Ogilvy & Mather, 10 Cabot Square, Canary Wharf, E14 4QB. Free to WOM UK members, £10 for everyone else; email julian.ferguson@womuk.org for a place

We will be attending, come by to say hi!