After having struggled for years to reduce its phone support load, Loftus Photography turned to Oddcast to implement a virtual sales rep, enabled with artificial intelligence, to assist potential customers. The avatar, named Kathleen, was taught to respond to user questions with context-sensitive spoken answers. The results were huge: a 50% increase in sales productivity due to reducing the time needed for an average phone consultation, as well as increased customer satisfaction. Click here to chat with Kathleen and see for yourself.
I often get asked to explain why SecondLife (SL) is more than just a geek and sex fest. Millions of people have visited this virtual world only to give up and abandon their avatar on day one (over 10 million according to Wikipedia). I don’t blame them. SecondLife isn’t ready for the mainstream. And nor is it SecondLife per-se that’s important.
SecondLife isn’t the future of life online. But what it is is an indicator of the kind of behaviour online that may soon become as mainstream as YouTube. SecondLife is really a live innovation of means of interacting online. It is used by a relatively restricted number of people and often quite fanatically by these. It isn’t mainstream and couldn’t become so until we all have significantly better computing power at home.
This is what makes SecondLife so exciting. It’s difficult to visualise what it represents; what virtual worlds will become online. It’s the same as how difficult it was to imagine what the internet would be like when the web was just a couple of computers connected together.
I think that the innovation that is being developed through the use of SecondLife will bring real change to our behaviour online. A company will make the innovation leap necessary to extend avatars and virtual worlds to the mainstream. I don’t know who, when or how this will be done, but the ingredients and beheviours typical of innovation are present and so it will happen.
Today I came across a company that shows one potential development of integrating virtual worlds into our online experience. RocketOn turns the entire web into a virtual world where your avatar travels with you. And as you read a page you come across the avatars of others’ who also happen to be visiting. Could this be the future of forums? Or online communities? I think it’s a fantastic idea and it seems pretty well executed (see the Techcrunch post) and watch this video to get an idea of how it works:
I had my first real experience of using crowd-sourcing to solve a business problem last week. We’re working on the design and concept for an online community that will be public later in the summer. The community is going to be covering an exciting topic and one that should appeal to a broad range of the target audience. What’s even better is the client is enthusiastic about sponsoring a community about the issues, rather than it having to be overtly product-led.
So this week we were briefing the designer to mock-up what the site will actually look like and we realised we needed a name. We started to brainstorm some ideas, but then I remembered reading about namethis, a new service from Kluster. Namethis is a collaborative product naming service and it works really simply.
As somebody looking for a name, I describe what I want named and pay $99. The project is then open for 48 hours.
As somebody suggesting names, I can just enter a name (including an explanation if desired) and it is then added to the short list. All users of the site earn points and can use these points to ‘invest’ in names they think might win.
When the 48 hours are complete, the site calculates the best name based on these investments and a bit of maths. The person who suggested the top three names earn money, as do the people who invested in them. In total $80 of these $99 are paid out (although users are only actually paid when they have earned more than $50, so I would imagine many of these rewards are never cashed in).
The process is simple and quite exciting. Within minutes of putting up our brief, we’d had a handful of suggestions, and in the full 48 hours 401 different names were nominated. Okay, so some of them weren’t quite right, and a few would suggest a website of a rather different nature, but we got more names than we might have got if we’d stayed in that room and brainstormed for an hour. And because the names came from over 300 different people, there was real variety there.
You can’t see on the site which are the more popular names, so any ‘investments’ you make are purely because you personally think the name is a good idea. So the winning names should be the ones that the majority of people who contributed to the project, independently, think are good names. So I was excited about the results.
When the results came I think we quickly decided we wouldn’t be going with the ‘winning’ name. It’s not a bad name, it just isn’t right for us. The second-placed name was one we couldn’t understand (was it a person’s name? was it a place?); and the third a Greek Goddess. So we probably won’t go with any of these. But of the 401 names that were suggested there are some really good ones and we’ll be suggesting a couple of these to our client.
So, what did I learn from my experience? First, namethis appears to have a large number of users from the US, so the names suggested often seem ones that might work better in that consumer market than in the UK. A second learning would be how important it is to get your brief right. This can, of course be difficult. In a real-world brainstorming scenario, you tend to refine and revise the brief as the ideas come in. You have a two-way dialogue that wasn’t possible on namethis. This might have helped, I could have said that some ideas were great but wouldn’t be quite right for us and then given reasons. This would have helped subsequent users to suggest or invest in different names.
But was it worth it? In terms of the quantity of names suggested I think so. There are some great ideas that I know we would never have come up with. And for $99 it was probably cheaper than the opportunity cost of four of us spending even half an hour brainstorming.
It’s Bill Gates‘ last day at Microsoft today. Somebody today told me that they thought he was the greatest entrepreneur ever. Whether you’re a fan of Microsoft or not (and I should confess I’m an Mac user!) you can’t deny the impact he’s had.
So if you want to know what Bill’s going to be doing now, or just want a bit of fun for a Friday, take a look at his leaving video.
A new study from ExpoTV shows that 55% of consumers want an ongoing dialogue with brands. The study investigates how brands and consumers interact, and in particular how consumers want brands to engage them. And the results are exciting. In addition to the 55% wanting an ongoing dialogue, 89% of respondents said they would feel more loyal to a brand if they were invited to take part in a feedback group
These results mirror our own experiences, where involving people in a true feedback process has positive impacts on loyalty and advocacy. The ExpoTV survey looks into this in more depth and shows also how consumers will spread this positive message.
Of those who have a positive experience, 92% said they would recommend the brand to somebody else. Perhaps more striking from the perspective of generating buzz, 60% of people said they would tell 10 people or more about a brand they liked and a third would tell 20 people or more. There is a lot of willingness to create buzz and word-of-mouth for a brand that you like. There is a real strengthening of positive feelings when a brand engages a consumer. And there is a real willingness on the part of the consumer to take part in such engagement.
These are the building blocks of a really successful word-of-mouth and advocacy campaign. People want to be engaged and if you do it, this will only have a positive impact on feelings towards the brand.
For every 100 consumers about 55 want to engage with you. And nine out of ten of those that you engage would feel more positive about you as a result. So from any group of 100 customers that you try to engage in a feedback group or online community, 50 would be more loyal to the brand as a result.
From these 50 people, about a third (or 16 people) would tell more than ten people about the brand (so at least 160 people from our group) and another third would tell more than 20 people (so at least 320 people from our group). So as a conservative estimate from those 100 people you try to engage:
50 of the original 100 become more loyal to the brand, and tell a further
480 other people about how positive they feel about the brand.
This survey helps us to understand motivation for taking part in an online community or feedback group, and the benefits it will cause.
As a conservative estimate, these results suggest that for every 100 people you try to engage in an online community, 50 will leave more loyal to the brand and a further 480 people will hear about this loyalty through word-of mouth. That’s a huge impact for engaging a relatively small number of people.
There is a real willingness on the part of the consumer to engage with brands, and a real and demonstrable benefit to the brand of them doing this.
Last night, I was actually a participant in a focus group. This was a new experience for me. I’ve seen groups before, even moderated a few, but never sat in the respondent’s chair. The group was about a trade magazine I subscribe to and it was clear that the brand wanted to understand where else we got news and comment from, how we ranked this magazine compared to others, and then to test some new concepts with us.
Focus groups are a useful research instrument. I’ve used them lots in the past and our sister company, FreshMinds Research, does focus groups for clients all the time. Last night I was just reminded that they’re not always the answer to a client’s needs.
Focus groups work when you’re looking for getting a small group of people to give instant reactions to and feedback on a product. Or to explore people’s attitudes to an experience of event. They don’t allow for reflection and so really suit a situation where the brand has quite well developed ideas that they want to audit or assess.
Last night’s group was a great case of where more reflection was needed. We were presented with a range of potential new formats for the magazine, sections that might be included and layouts. Each time, it was described verbally by the moderator and we were asked if it was a good idea or not and then encouraged to talk about it. As a respondent, this was actually really difficult to do. I had no time to think about one idea in any depth before we moved on to the next one. I don’t think we were able to give reasoned and intelligent responses beyond a simple “sounds good” or “not really” when presented with these ideas.
This is where online research communities can really come to the fore. They allow a longer and more reflective engagement between the brand and the respondents. In fact they’re no longer just people responding to stimulus, but members of a discussion. You can show material at an earlier stage in development and get the community members to discuss and brainstorm ideas over a longer time period. Allowing people to contribute when they have an idea and something to say, rather than dictating responses in a short time period one evening after work.
Online research communities are a great way of letting people reflect and allowing the brand to understand why they react as they do to stimuli. If people are against a concept it may not be the concept as a whole but just one aspect of it, and you’re most likely to find this out if you engage in an iterative process with them.
But most of all, focus groups rely on the participants having ideas on demand during a relatively short period. This works where the group is focused, and about reviewing and commenting on already developed ideas. But last night I was left with that awful experience where I thought more about some of the concepts we were shown on the way home. I had ideas that I had no outlet for. The research engagement was over and so any ideas I had afterwards were not taken onboard.
The French have a phrase, l’esprit d’escalier, which means the thought you have after you’ve left a room and it’s too late to say it. There’s a real danger of this feeling with focus groups. Online research communities, on the other hand, provide a way for these kind of thoughts to be captured as part of the research process.
At the E-consultancy Future of Digital Media conference last week the focus was on two magic words “relevance” and “engagement”. In Ian Jindal’s stimulating and lively talk he correctly pointed out that marketing hasn’t actually changed much, even though where we choose to communicate our messages may have. Consumers are at saturation point so the only thing left is for companies to get better at attracting customers from their competitors. The ‘How’ was the focus of the day. There were three themes:
engaging customers around content using publishing techniques
how to add a layer of social discovery around your brand
finding ways to manipulate data to do our marketing for us
Many Intermediaries, product manufacturers and retailers are developing strategies around multimedia content to engage customers. Thomas Cook showed a particularly impressive video of their new 360 degree marketing strategy, complete with store front touch screens, co-browsing between customer and agent and every conceivable video clip you could imagine to show you what your resort will be like when you get there (which somehow I felt took the discovery out of it). The issue for most companies with this approach is the sheer cost of it and the skill sets needed to become programmers and publishers, as well as focus on your core business. The other issue was that there was one viewpoint that appeared to be missing from the strategy – the customer’s! Thomas Cook is still in broadcast mode.
The jury was out when it comes to engaging customers effectively using social network sites like Facebook. Brands are just not managing to attract the levels of fans they would like and I believe that it’s because people are, well, hanging out with friends and simply not in buying mode. Companies that have developed non intrusive, useful and engaging tools like Mydeco’s Roomshare seem to be having more success. Considering 56% people go to a brands home page to check out information first, it might be better to find a way to encourage people to stay there. For sectors like Insurance, where aggregator sites like Confused.com and cashback sites like Quidco.com have contributed to a reduction of customer lifetime value from 3-5yrs to 1-2yrs, the focus has to be on finding better ways of retaining their customers once they are delivered to their door.
Understanding data is essential to running any business and more importantly what action you take from looking at it. The new kid on the block is APML or attention profiling markup language. It is a common standard to describe your interests, likes and dislikes and how much each means to you (weighting). The idea is that your attention profile is owned by you and is portable so you can decide which websites you want to share it with for more relevant surfing. Currently Amazon is the only company doing a good job of recommending to us what we’re interested in but they own your profile and the process isn’t transparent. In theory it’s a great way to reduce information overload but it feels like a very long way off, if at all feasible. When I think about how I tag my del.icio.us bookmarks with words like ‘cop’ (which to me means community of practice, not policeman) and when I think about how often I change my likes and dislikes, it feels like someone is going to have to do a lot of work to maintain this profile (either me or a very clever programmer). I would love to hear your thoughts on this whole area!
Don’t get me wrong, as data fragments into smaller, accessible pieces, there are many innovative ways to play it back to your customers in really useful ways. Some good examples that add a valuable social layer for customers include the new AMEX Members Know community where members can see the most popular hotels and restaurants based on anonymous purchase data and Flickr’s use of the Exif data hidden in your digital photos about which camera was used to take a photograph which is the served up as a league table of the best digital cameras. We’re going to see a lot more of this.
I tend to agree with Simon Waldman of the Guardian who commented that sometimes qualitative measures like “Why are you on our site and did you get what you came for?” are equally important. Having conversations with your customers might just reveal what they actually want from you!
I watched the Panorama documentary on the BBC last night about Primark. For those not in the UK, Ireland or Spain, Primark specialises in fast and cheap fashion. They make cheaply priced versions of high-street and cat walk fashion and aim to get it to their stores within weeks of the original outfit first being seen. They claim their cheap prices are due to cost effective production, fast stock turnaround, the fact that they do no marketing and the volumes that they sell. The BBC tonight claimed otherwise.
The documentary followed Primark’s supply chain back to it’s origins, in India. Here, rather than being ethically produced as the company claims, some of Primark’s suppliers are outsourcing production to forced and child labour.
The veracity of the BBC’s claims don’t matter. Programmes like this can be damaging for a brand. The story was leaked to the press beforehand, and tomorrow I’d expect that most newspapers in the country cover the story for people to read on their way into work.
In this kind of scenario, it’s critical how a brand responds. The way Primark were allowed by the BBC to respond, was typical for this kind of TV investigation. They didn’t get right of reply, couldn’t appear on camera to discuss the issues, answer questions or give their perspective. Rather parts of their response to the allegations were shown at the end of the show, although I gather from Geoff Lancaster, Primark’s Head of External Affairs that they were not given any meaningful right of reply to the show. This is disappointing.
This approach to engendering a debate is very traditional. The brand is not really allowed to engage with the programme, with the issues it raises or with the people that watch it. They just get to tell us what they’ve done. After tonight’s show I, like many people, logged on to forums on the BBC site and across the web. The programme had raised lots of really interesting and complex issues. Was Primark really to blame, how did we react to their response to the programme, had we ever really thought before how clothes that are this cheap were made, should we boycott Primark or campaign for them to change their practices.
In none of these discussions was Primark’s point of view presented. The programme prompted a fascinating discussion. I think there is a real debate to be had. We need to understand how our clothes are made and the processes and checks that the brands make. If, as Primark claimed, it is true that only 0.04% of their produce was potentially outsourced to child or forced labour I’d love to hear more.
I have lots of questions for the brand and would love to hear their perspective. Sadly they weren’t given the opportunity to hear mine or tell me theirs. This is a real shame. Information is critical and when you are wanting to influence and change people’s minds you really need to be the one contributing to and even controlling the information they hear. An honest and open conversation would make a real difference.
At the end of tonight’s show, a range of Primark customers were talked to and shown the footage of the factories and production of the garments. Asked how they would respond they all rejected a boycott. Saying this would achieve nothing. Rather they wanted to engage with the brand and discuss the issues with them, influencing them to be more ethical.
Customers have changed; they want to engage. Programmes like this often don’t allow brands to truly start to engage. It would be great if they did, and if the brands continued this engagement afterwards.
When people think of user-generated content they often think of the media or publishing. Videos on YouTube, spoofing TV shows or films, and content responding to and expanding upon journalistic or editorial articles abound. But UGC is certainly not limited to these areas. In fact it can work best on any topic where some individuals will have developed a specific interest in or knowledge of the area.
The medical industry is one that sees a lot of UGC. A search on YouTube finds thousands of videos of people talking about their illnesses, from cancer sufferers to people with bullemia. Support groups are flourishing and people are finding that sharing experiences and content online is sometimes easier than face-to-face. Talking about your experiences to video and uploading this to YouTube for others to respond to and comment on is probably easier than discussing it in real life. The internet and social networks probably offer access to a greater number of fellow-sufferers than even a local support group might offer.
Beyond support, people can use social media and user-generated content to help understand their illnesses. The supposed danger here is that people will self-diagnose and that this may be incorrect. At the same time, you’d expect that privacy issues would prevent any meaningful and useful exchange of ideas. But in fact, user-generated medical content is a vibrant example of how the social networking and online communities can be powerful for exchanging information.
A report by Jupiter Research in 2007 showed that 20% of Americans turn to others online for information about medical issues. They are clearly not shy of seeking or giving advice, even on more personal issues. They use sites such as OrganizedWisdom, a Wiki-style community, to share information they have and get information they need.
The concern over the accuracy of this information still stands, with worries about non-medical professionals sharing information that people use to self-diagnose. But research by the British Medical Journal in 2004 found that in the online support communities it studied only 6% of content was incorrect. If this replicated across all medical content online then it would probably be among some of the more accurate user-generated content on the internet.
User-generated medical content shows that people are willing to share and are accurate when they do so. Even in a more niche and potentially risky area such as medical advice and disgnosis, the quality and usefulness of user-generated content is high.
The New York Times launched a beta version of TimesPeople over the weekend. It’s their first step at adding a social layer onto their site - a recommendations service and mini-social network. It’s works rather simply:
Find ‘friends’ in the database or by importing contacts (currently only from gmail)
Recommend or share articles that you enjoy or that you think that your friends would enjoy.
It’s the beginnings of a social network and maybe even an online community, and it’s great to see the New York Times add a social layer like this, but I really hope it’s the first stage of a broader social media strategy.
The opportunities for publishers to leverage the power of social media and social networking is huge. Sharing and recommending articles is just one of the things that people might want to do with a publisher brand and is also something that might be better done elsewhere. I can share articles from any site with my friends on Facebook; I can recommend news and content on Digg. I don’t necessarily need to do this in a site that is controlled by just one publisher.
What I want to do as a publisher site is to make the most of the content my brand produces. Understand what people enjoy reading, get them to comment on it, gather data on them and build a real understanding of what they do and think. I want to combine my editorial content with the UGC created by my readers. Get them to contribute to my content and enter into debates with other readers and the authors. I want them to rate content and by this I can know which of my authors produce content that is of most interest to the readers.
There are some publishing firms doing really interesting things at the moment. I met a large B2B publishing firm at a conference recently who award bonuses to writers based on the ratings their articles get on the site. The BBC News site has been developing, organising content by theme, engaging readers with comments and exchanges and making it easy for people to take their content with them to other sites.
TimesPeople seems to be a simple social layer added over the New York Times’s main site. I’ll be interested to see how successful it is, and to see how it develops. Will people actually use this comment and recommendation tool, or will they continue to do this in other ways and through other networks? Will the social elements of the New York Times grow to include some of the more exciting things that publishing firms can do?
Publishing is about content and content is about opinion and debate. Social media and social networking allows publishing firms to provide the stimulus for debate and provide the online community where this debate can happen. It’s going to be exciting to watch as firms develop in this area and TimePeople could be a first step in this direction.
