The video project sets out to help people discover and understand the “real story” of ethnographic interviews, helping students learn about why we interview, what it looks like, how to make the interview effective, what looks good, what looks bad and all the other stuff you would normally find out through trial and error, only hopefully now there will be less error.
The project has led Kristy and Gabe to talk to experts on the subject of ethnographic interviews including Dori Tunstall, a design anthropologist at UIC, and Colleen Murray, an ID Alum who works at Jump Associates. Their interviews serve as the narration to examples of different situations such as in-home, man on the street, shop-alongs, and expert interviews. Besides the experts, other students were asked to contribute stories of good and bad user interviews they have been involved with as well as tips and tricks they’ve learned.
I recently read that shopper marketing strategies are being affected by how customers behave online. From this article, Connect the Dots at the Hub:
Our conversation with consumers and shoppers today is one way; we send them our advertisements and promotions. But we now live in a conversational culture because of the internet and what it’s allowed people to do. If you want to get to know anybody, you have to have a conversation with them. Shoppers and consumers want to have conversations with brands that are relevant to them. Much of this conversation is happening online. That’s where engagement starts. We’ve got to be able to bring that conversation back into the brand experience and back into the brand idea to refine it in a continuous feedback loop.
So, we are now not only witnessing conversations between brands and customers online, but the transference of behaviour from the online medium to the offline.
When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? If they say, “to make money,” then they will fail because currency in the social web is found in both relationships and content. If they say, “to grow our business,” they’re just saying, “to make money,” in a nicer way. If they say, “to participate in the conversation,” which is the more appropriate reason to be involved in the social web, then why on earth would they not measure success by the value of the conversations they have?
The ROI for social media engagement conversation is an old one that continues. It remains unresolved, as Clients who are accustomed to traditional quantitative measures as “proof” are still questioning the effect of social media efforts. It’s the classic case for Marketing 1.0 - let the statistics rule you! In my 20 years as a qualitative researcher, I’ve often been challenged about how “representative” is the story, insight and recommendation, especially in the early days. That’s now changing thankfully, with Clients often relying on the stories that emerge and anecdotal evidence that allows them to make more incisive decisions around brand strategy.
I see a parallel in how Clients approach social media - they are expecting adaptations of the same old marketing metrics (TRPs, GRPs, RFM, LTV, etc). We’re at the beginning of the curve today with social media. When I meet more traditional marketers, they tell me they are really Web 2.0 savvy and transferred their attention to metrics like clickthrough, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, lead generation, opt-in, churn rate etc. While these fulfill one need, I do not believe they really aid either an evaluative or predictive model for success.
This is why. The social media space is different, and in understanding this, I’m hoping Clients will value the stories and conversations more. Folks launch products and services in alpha and beta - and often they remain in beta. Products, services and brands come and go and we see a huge plethora of new launches. Even for more traditional brands, there are new options available to explore in the social media space every day. It’s a particularly tricky area, especially when organizations are using free social media tools which do not provide detailed analytics to them - perhaps there is a business model in this
The pace of change is really rapid, both in the behaviour of brands on the web and in terms of customer behaviour. At the intersection of these, are dynamic social media tools which enable forming of a relationship between marketers and target audience; sellers and buyers; producers and customers. And this relationship is expressed as a conversation enabled by social media tools, which themselves are so many, quite complex and confusing and change rapidly (eg. we are seeing a lot of the conversation among a certain group of early adopters moving to Twitter today).
Of course, statistics have their place, and we need to build some common standards and new parameters (eg. is “friend” a metric today?). I’d like to change the discourse to exploring measures for the value of conversations. The challenge is that with the pace of change in all aspects of the relationship, can a “measure” of today’s performance help us predict what’s coming tomorrow? How can we quantify human interaction, imagination and energy? How do we track the feedback loop? How do we measure the value of conversations, that builds this relationship, in such a manner that it delivers not merely evaluative but also predictive insights for marketers?
Wish I had the answers :). Some of the tools I use some of the time to track conversations include Google Blog Search, Compete, Google Analytics, Twitter and apps developed around it, Technorati (although it’s not as responsive and accurate as it used to be), searches at Social Networking Sites, Alexa, Digg, Stumbleupon. Trendpedia is cool and allows a comparison with your ‘competition’. There’s quite a lot of discussion in the PR blogworld around metrics and tools of measurements, but I don’t see as much around brand marketing. I can only throw out some suggestions around what needs measuring, based on my experience of more conventional marketing and research, my own explorations into social media, and on assimilating blog posts around the topic I have been reading for a while now:
Participation
where are the conversations around your brand happening? who’s participating? what are people reading, sharing, discussing, critiquing? are you/is your brand situated in these conversations? are you present? are you accessible? Engagement
have the number of conversations around your brand increased? how are you assessing the quality of these conversations? are people negotiating shared meaning? what elements of your brand or offering are being discussed - are they core or peripheral? what stories are emerging that suggest empathy and relevance of your offering to your target audience? how strongly is your brand anchored or situated in these conversations? would they exist without your brand? are you listening and engaging in these conversations wherever they exist on the web, across different social media tools? are you aggregating them? are you acting upon suggestions and helping solve problems? Influence
you represent the human face of the brand - what social interactions are you able to influence around your brand or area of expertise? does this enhance your stature in the industry today? are you being talked about more? are you/is your brand or organization being seen as a thought leader? are you being invited into industry conversations? are you or your brand/company just popular or do you have influence with the target audience you most care about? [see these posts on measuring influence and popularity by Shel Israel and Gavin Heaton] Imagination
has your brand captured the imagination of people? are people riffing on it, playing with it, creating avatars of it that you never imagined possible? what’s the emotional quotient? are they being able to bring their own life positions into building possibilities for your brand? what’s the ‘delight’ quotient that you derive from these conversations? what creative stories are you hearing/seeing/watching about it? what stimulus are you providing them to inspire their imagination? how open are you in these efforts? Energy
on the one hand, are you able to harness all of the above - participation, engagement, influence and imagination in a manner that keeps your brand alive and vital? what are the conversations around the value your brand is creating in their lives? is your brand able to keep up with the energy of its users or audiences, which shift and morph ever so frequently? what senses - visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, kinesthetic are the more dominant in the conversations - are you aware of what elements of your brand are anchored in these expressions? are you learning something new to help you drive your business forward? are you following/talking to passionate users who are breathing every moment of the direction your brand is taking and helping you evangelize? Loyalty and stickiness
are your engagements in conversations with your TG a fad or do they sustain and build over time? what is the personal investment your users display in their discussions around your brand? do they enjoy ‘hanging out’ with your brand or you?
Represented as a diagram:
Much has been written and discussed around engagement, influence, participation and loyalty. These measures seem to be evolving - web analytics and cool companies like Radian 6 are doing some of it. However I haven’t seen much discussion around brand conversations that inspire imagination and energy - a little ironic when they form a large portion of conventional marketing wisdom around brand health! These I believe would make for differentiators and unique propositions for your brand. And they are best expressed anecdotally and through stories and perhaps more difficult to quantify.
Organizations need to develop their own benchmarks along parameters that are important to them and against a set of goals so that they are able to track effectiveness of their social media ‘campaigns’ over time.
How would you add to/edit/modify this list? I’d also love to hear about tools or frameworks folks in this space are exploring, using and developing!
Measurement Camp is an “open source movement measuring social media” - a nice collection of measurement resources and case studies there.
Manuscrypts has a good analysis of the Obama brand in his post Change 2.0:
But social media, after all is a tool. Yes, a tool which can take the brand to great heights, but only if it has a strong product/brand at its foundation. And there lies the brilliance of brand Obama. Adage has a great article by Al Ries on the attributes that made Obama’s campaign a colossal hit - Simplicity (of the keyword - change), Consistency (create and maintain the positioning of ‘change’ agent, so that the word is associated with him more than others), Relevance (forcing the competitors to fight on your comfort ground). I was also very impressed with this article on afaqs by Vijay Sankaran, which gave 10 lessons that marketers could learn from Obama. Excellent lessons all, i especially liked the one about relinquishing control.
James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news — and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy.
. Thanks to @gauravonomics for pointing to this on Twitter.
I remember in a post on my reflections I had referred to insect societies as a metaphor to describe the interdependence and decentralized approach we took with the South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog. And had also stated there:
Today, I believe that no crisis on this scale or magnitude will ever be handled again without sms, blogs, and wikis. That social tools will become a natural extension of rapid adaptation to chaotic conditions.
James Surowiecki also talks of the dark sides of blogs and social networks - one of the dangers of spending a lot of time on the internet is that the more tightly linked we become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. The network starts to shape your views - which has a lot of benefits, but the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the Wisdom of Crowds - the danger of a circular mill. Surowiecki talks of a circular mill of death where ants march in a circle, thinking they are following the leader, but actually just going around and around until they all die. He states as an example, memes that emerge from the blogosphere.
As I observe the progression of social media, I do feel we are more than ever, grappling with this paradox. There is no doubt in my mind that the Wisdom of Crowds as Surowiecki describes it can be huge. It has been transformational for me personally and professionally.
However, what I’m also seeing is less jazz play and improv in the blogworld, as we did in the early days ofconversational blogging. We read the same stuff, we link to the same stuff - we did that then too - but there’s so much blogging today that it’s becoming almost impossible to escape following the echo. The economics of the market has begun determining what we blog about. Communities and networks (like with the social media and PR blogger scenes), while helping professionals in the space form frameworks and value for clients, are making many of us shy away from truly independent thinking as we seek easy answers and smart ways to convince our Clients to ‘buy’. We’re very good at re-framing and recycling the same stuff and we’ve learnt to build and manage our Whuffie to market ourselves in a post-scarcity economy. And we’re looking for easy answers.
I look through my GoogleReader and I see only a few posts with interesting original thinking in them today. Or maybe the gates of attention are allowing very little to come in? Twitter has exposed me to a whole lot of new and interesting people and thinking, and has replaced my GoogleReader as my dashboard for the day. It’s definitely my hangout space today. But I am greedy and don’t want to lose the breadth of good stuff that comes through in my newsreader.
So how do we resolve this - adopt the good from our networks and yet break away from the circular mill?
Preoccupation with whuffie + easy answers = the circular mill of death?
It’s a trap I am falling into. I don’t really have a solution. Should I be following more people on Twitter - this scares me! How do I find more diversity today? That wow and magic and flow of serendipitous discovery in my early blogging days just isn’t happening enough today. In my view, what the Wisdom of Crowds should mean is a collection of individuals with independent thinking that is allowed to emerge and grow in the collective. We’ve got to guard against excessive averaging out, imitative behaviour and aggregation. I’m just going to keep looking for the mouse!
The Info Activism camp (http://www.informationactivism.org), to be held in Bangalore, India from February 19th to 25th, helps advocates to make the best use of information, communication and digital technologies to achieve their objectives. The first-ever international camp on Info-Activism will feature 120 participants, picked through a competitive selection process, and who will not only learn but also share skills and techniques to aid in the process of advocacy. Workshops, group discussions, interactive sessions and live demos, which to a large extent will evolve from participants’ proposals, are all part of the one-week programme.
If you want to learn more about the camp, please write to infoactivism@tacticaltech.org
The organizers were involved in the AsiaSource camps - I can guarantee you lotsa fun and learning! Here’s a pic from Asia Source 2 as a sampling:
“Last month 26 women from around the world took a moment to write an inspiring sentence. Each woman has shared something unique - please take the time to read the message on each slide.”
In his short ebook: Fishing Where the Fish Are - Mapping Social Media to the BuyingCycle Chris Brogan offers up some good practical advice on social media approaches, tools and strategies. Relying on stories and examples, it’s a good demonstration of effectively communicating strategies to:
1.) Find the Customer - listening tools, search.
2.) Be There Before the Sale - profiles, presence.
3.) Be (or Empower) the Influencer - blogs, platforms.
4.) Shift Behavior - (this isn’t tool specific. More below.)
5.) Warm Up the Funnel - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
Interesting intersections between YouTube, qual research and ethnography. Visual observations and reporting have always been very powerful in research. Some recent explorations and projects around this:
YouTube as a Qualitative Research Asset: Reviewing User Generated Videos as Learning Resources
by: Ronald J. Chenail, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida [Source: The Weekly Qualitative Report Volume 1 Number 4 October 27 2008 18-24]:
YouTube, the video hosting service, offers students, teachers, and practitioners of qualitative researchers a unique reservoir of video clips introducing basic qualitative research concepts, sharing qualitative data from interviews and field observations, and presenting completed research studies. This web-based site also affords qualitative researchers the potential avenue to share their reusable learning resources for all interested parties to use.
Lots of cool links in the pdf on qualitative research on Youtube - videos on introduction to and overview of qual research, data generation and collection and reporting of findings.
Forum: Qualitative Social Research - online journal designed to promote discussion and cooperation among qualitative researchers from different countries and social science disciplines. 3 issues/year.
International Journal of Qualitative Methods - the journal’s goals are to advance the development of qualitative methods, and to disseminate methodological knowledge to the broadest possible community of academics, students, and professionals who undertake qualitative research. 4 issues/year.
The Qualitative Report - a peer-reviewed, on-line journal devoted to writing and discussion of and about qualitative, critical, action, and collaborative inquiry and research. 4 issues/year.
Case in point for an Open Access movement in this field??
It’s festival time here and I am baulking at how much people spend on celebrations, rituals and the accompanying firecrackers that are driving me crazy. It makes me so furious sometimes that people who have to work so hard and live a hand-to-mouth existence, just blow up their money like this.
Then I remembered this incident a couple of years ago - I remember really shouting at this lady who helps clean my house (yes we do have help to clean and cook here in India), who wanted to borrow money to conduct a series of religious rituals in her hut during one of the festivals and call all the neighbours etc. I began explaining all the logical reasons for using the money in more ‘productive’ ways. I tried explaining to her the difference between religiousity and religious rituals - and although I am not a believer, I do respect her right to believe, but not throw away money on wasteful (in my perception) rituals. She wouldn’t listen and I was losing my temper with her and was at the point of refusing to give her the money.
Then she just broke down and said to me simply:
“Didi (big sister) - all I have is my faith, it keeps me alive - don’t take that away from me”
I thought you might benefit from some of my background research on these topics. And I’d appreciate your help in curating this list by providing more details and submitting additional cases.
>> Last update: 14 September 2008
>> Total brands: 226″
Sampad Swain put a lot of effort into ranking Social Media Blogs in India - he’s taken some flak on twitter for ranking a nascent sphere which is in fact collaborating to raise the status of the industry here, rather than competing!
Beth Kanter is helping spread the word, and forwarded this email to me - it’s a competition for participatory learning. They’ve opened up the competition to international applicants, including India. If there are any bloggers and networkers in India (and other countries mentioned) who reach the nonprofits and educators who are using social media and doing participatory learning, do apply and spread the word!
2008 DIGITAL MEDIA AND LEARNING COMPETITION 2008
$2 Million Competition
Focus: Participatory Learning
Participatory learning is defined broadly: using new digital media for sharing ideas or planning, designing, implementing, or just discussing ideas and goals together.
The second HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition is now open!
Awards will be made in two categories:
Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards support large-scale digital learning projects
$30,000-$250,000
This year we are piloting international eligibility for our Innovation Award and will be accepting submissions from primary applicants in Canada, People’s Republic of China, India, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands,Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States; collaborators can be from anywhere in the world.
Young Innovator Awards are targeted at U.S. applicants aged 18-25 year olds
$5,000-$30,000
I should be focusing on a proposal I have to submit today and designing an innovative ethnographic approach to researching latent and future needs and expectations from automotive service, but I find myself distracted and lacking inspiration. And I find myself preoccupied with thoughts of another kind. I was in Bangalore on work and met up with a cousin who has young kids in school. We were talking about how they are being taught and how they learn. Although both parents are heavy users of the internet, she said to me she wants to keep her kids away from it for as long as possible because she’s rather have them learn, synthesize and remember, than just provide them with the access to gain the knowledge. I’m a firm believer in the ‘magic’ of the web in it’s natural ability in providing us new avenues to learn and serendipitous discovery. And in the power of communities like Twitter that really help us grow as we share and learn together.
And yet, my cousin’s comment bothered me as I found myself telling a friend just last night that there are several mashups around Twitter. His immediate question to me was, name 10 - and I found myself at a loss. But in a few seconds I could provide him with a full list from the Twitter Fan Wiki. I felt a little embarrassed about the fact that I had not bothered to remember even a few!!! Similarly with a recent statistic on the future of mobile social networking - I knew I had read it but I had not remembered the exact statistic. It took a little Googling to find it. Searched. Found. Forgot. This bothers me.
As this happened, I put the question up at Twitter last night: “what’s better - access to knowledge or having the knowledge? i find often i have access & don’t bother to remember stuff. Not good!”
Here are some responses (read bottom-up):
I love the rap on knowledge, synthesis, wisdom and learning! What bothers me most is while the web is hugely useful in helping us in “learning to learn”, how much of this, as Gautam and @weaverluke suggest is being synthesized and allowed to transform into wisdom?
This morning, I set up an Open Phweet around the Future of Social Computing, triggered by Jan Chipchase’s paper called Future Social, and my subsequent feeling of reinforcement and validation around a study we recently did around the future of Mobile Social Computing. It’s been an interesting day, talking to a few people who joined my Phweet Cafe on this! Am going to keep it open for a few days more!
@whitelight007 on Twitter then asked me - what’s my take on the future of social networking. Had to keep the words to the bare minimum given Twitter’s 140 character limit so here’s what I said in two tweets and edited down here to:
“Networks based on & layered around location, access, presence & context. Those that enhance real-world interactions. Enabling choice, privacy and control”
Do you believe this is in the zone? Makes sense? What’s missing? Would you like to share your shot at describing your perception of the future of social networking in say 140 characters?
Come and discuss it! All you need is your Twitter ID and password to enter the conversation.
Volunteers on the world wide web are getting ready to help as Hurricane Gustav gathers fury heading towards the Northern Gulf Coast. I was alerted to this through tweets by Andy Carvin, (@acarvin) who’s coordinating these efforts:
Hurricane Gustav is still being described as a Category 4 storm, but meteorologists are forecasting that the storm will gain strength as it passes over Cuba and may emerge in the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 5 hurricane. USA Today
I’ve seen no such effort around the recent floods in India on the other hand, where many have died and many more homeless, but it’s very difficult to do when there is almost no connectivity in the regions affected. Here are a couple of useful blogs I found:
I’ve been helping out with the PhweetTalk - the Phweet blog and I’m cross-posting this here. I’ll probably be doing more of my blogging there for a while. And I’ve become a real Twitter monster - I update stuff I am doing very regularly there - so do check me out!
Since the public alpha launch on July 30th, we’ve been asked several times whether Phweet is a noun or a verb. We’d like to think it’s both. Phweetisms we like, even more! Here’s a collection of user-generated comments around Phweet afloat in the Twitter world and the blogosphere:
“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber & cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.” John Muir
My best friends - a couple I’ve known since my childhood days - are going through probably one of the most turbulent phases in their lives right now. Yesterday I found myself in separate conversations with them, both almost negotiating around the tugs of guilt and blame; love, failure and loneliness; remorse about the past and fragile around an uncertain future. Emotionally drained with symptoms of really low self-esteem.
Just believe. No one and nothing can change that face in the mirror without your permission.
I was on the first Phweet call! Voice call over Twitter and with many folks at one time. Conversation contained within a URL. Really worth staying up late to actually experience it. It was fantastic - 7 of us from 3 different continents all chatting as if we were in the same room. A PhweetParty!
If you’ve ever asked yourself these questions … Phweet will help!
Have you ever wished you could just Talk to your Twitter friend?
Have you ever wanted to spontaneously set up a Conference Call with your Twitter friends?
Have you ever felt irritated that you have to turn on a separate client to accept a Call?
“A Phweet is a shortURL that makes conversations and conference calls possible between Twitter friends and across other social networks. Let your friends know you are talking. Invite them to join in. No numbers, no new profiles. Simple, just start Phweet talking!”
I really do like the philosophy embodied in the PhweetVision:
Our vision is to create a more open telephony and communications environment where the users take control and are not dictated to by numbers, directory services, or tariff barriers, while retaining increased control over their privacy and presence information.
This is revolutionary really. Today Twitter .. tomorrow all social networks? Congratulations Stuart (my partner at Mosoci) and David!
Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for a New Economy, which Stuart pointed me to the other day, is a brilliant read - he talks of how the Social Web creates the Network Economy. Some of his ‘maxims‘ extracted by Robert Poynton, in the context of Brian Clark’s post on Conversational Marketing:
Because communication—which in the end is what the digital technology and media are all about—is not just a sector of the economy. Communication is the economy.
We are connecting everything to everything.
The great benefits reaped by the new economy in the coming decades will be due in large part to exploring and exploiting the power of decentralized and autonomous networks.
Technology has become our culture, our culture technology.
The migration from ad hoc use to commercialisation cannot be rushed. To reach ubiquity you have to pass through sharing.
In the marketspace of networks, value flows in webs.
When information is plentiful, peers take over. Outsiders act as employees, employees act as outsiders. New relationships blur the roles of employees and customers to the point of unity. They reveal the customer and the company as one.
Privacy is a type of conversation. Firms should view privacy not as some inconvenient obsession of customers that must be snuck around but more as a way to cultivate a genuine relationship.
"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?" Guy de Maupassant
In his short ebook: 
I really do like the philosophy embodied in the PhweetVision:
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