Michael Wesch is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and leads the Digital Ethnography Working Group. He was trying to find a way to describe Web 2.0 for a paper that he was writing and found that words were not quite enough - instead he created this video. Showing us rather than telling us what Web 2.0 is.
I love this video, as much for the content as for the example it sets. It’s true that some things aren’t easily explained with words, or indeed that some people find it easier to convey things in pictures or actions than words. Being creative and open in the way you describe things or allowing people to be creative and open in the way they respond to your questions can yield quite insightful results.
I know from my experience working with consumer good companies that customers often can’t describe what they think. If you want to understand what they think about your new smoothie brand, for example, some might be able to describe it whilst others might want to choose pictures that appropriate, make a short film or even draw a picture. Allowing a research process that lets people respond in these different ways is important, or indeed having an iterative process. Get some people to make films, others to put up pictures and others to describe in words. Then see how the group responds to this stimulus.
As Professor Wesch showed, social media tools and sites like YouTube allow for this kind of more creative description and development of ideas to flourish.
I never wrote about Gordon Brown’s brief appearance at NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference yesterday. Possibly because his speech, whilst impressively appearing unscripted and containing a few jokes, was more of a rallying cry than anything of much substance. If you’re interested you can listen to his speech here.
This week saw Gordon Brown with an innovation of his own. I wrote a few weeks back about the Prime Minister’s Office using Twitter as an engagement tool, now they’re using YouTube with their own channel being used for Ask the PM. The concept is simple. Every week fellow Members of Parliament can ask the Prime Minister any questions they want. Now anybody can ask him questions. All you need to do is record your question, make it non-party political and then upload it to YouTube.
Currently questions are being taken until the end of June at which point the Prime Minister will post responses. This direct engagement with the public is an exciting development and a real way of using new technologies to do old things in new ways. Rather than having town hall meetings or others around the country where people can ask questions, take it online. By doing this you open up the opportunity for more people to ask you questions, not just those who are able to and have the inclination to go to a certain place at a certain time.
And from the looks of things, the Ask the PM scheme will also be making the most of social media and social networking tools. From the end of May (about halfway through the current question submission period), anybody will be allowed to vote for questions. This ‘comment and vote’ approach is one that we’ve seen a lot recently, from Dell’s Ideastorm to MyStarbucksIdea. It can be an effective way of engaging with many people at once. Not everybody is going to want to post a question, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a question to ask. By allowing them to vote for the questions and ideas they agree with you let their voice be heard. You can find the most popular questions from the ones people ask and then respond to them, knowing that these are the ones that matter most to people.
I’m excited by people experimenting with social media. Too many people don’t. If Ask the PM doesn’t work then no doubt it will be quietly shelved. But I suspect it will work - the concept is simple and using the best of old techniques (the question and answer session) with the best of new media.
