Here’s a quick overview of a recent audience research project we did for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

The brief was to understand the online behaviours of three key audience groups, with a view to engaging with them around travel advice. The audiences were all British citizens and broken down into the following profiles:

1. 18-25 year olds who go on single sex group holidays, beach holidays, hen and stag trips etc.
2. Independent travellers, mainly going on gap years and adventure holidays
3. Over 55s, who have or may plan to move or retire abroad

Using Google Ad Planner, I chose ‘Search for placements’ and selected ‘All Domains’. In answer to the question, ‘How should your results be ranked?’, because I was looking for general online habits, i.e. the most popular websites for each audience, I chose ‘Audience Reach’. If I was looking for niche, highly targeted sites of particular relevance to this audience, but with much lower traffic and reach, I could have selected ‘Composition Index’ at this stage.

After clicking ‘Start Search’, I was able to input audience details. Aside from the obvious ones like Geography and Demographics (age, gender, income, education), some of the most useful here are:

• Online Activity
• other sites your audience visits: if we know they visit your company website already, you can put that in. Or you could put in your competitor, or a potential partner. Or just a very popular website that we already know our target audience visits en masse.
• keywords that your audience searches for online: this can include interests, hobbies, products or brands etc. or if you want to reach an audience at a particular time, put in things they’d be searching for related to that experience, e.g. in this case, ‘beach holidays’ would be an example – it’s not a general ongoing ‘interest’ of the audience, but they would be searching for it at the time we’d want to reach them.
• Interests – these are things more specific to an audience’s ongoing personal interests, hobbies, things they like in general, rather than being specific to a certain time in their life or position along a consumer journey.
• Topics – if you want to know the top sites overall for an audience, leave this one blank. But if you know you want to know what social sites an audience uses, or top sites within a particular genre, you can filter it here. For social sites you can select ‘online communities’ and more specifically if you need to, ‘social networks’.
• Where possible use the ‘search’ option in the menus as they are often vast and you could miss what you’re looking for if you try to browse

Once you’ve got your results, you can select the top sites and turn these into a graph, or export to Excel and do it there. Here’s my results for audience 1: single sex group holidays – top ten sites, ranked by the percentage of the audience that visited the site in the past month:

Repeating the process for all audiences allowed a comparative graph for the top ten of each:

In this case, and as is quite often the case with broad audience segments, the top ten sites for each audience were found to be extremely similar, with all audiences undertaking the following online activities:

• Socialising on Facebook
• Watching YouTube videos
• Reading email (Hotmail and Yahoo)
• Reading BBC news
• Chatting with friends on MSN
• Gathering information from Wikipedia
• Shopping (Ebay and Amazon)
• Reading blogs (Blogspot)

Although similar, we were able to identify key insights setting the audiences apart:

The above two insights could feed into a strategy to communicate with these groups through different tactics.

We did the same analysis specifically for the top travel sites for each audience, which will allow us to focus our efforts for any campaigns or partnerships on sites particular to our selected audience.

And repeating the analysis for top social sites produced the following results (email, casual gaming, file sharing and software sites were ignored):

So (perhaps unsurprisingly?) the top four social sites across all audiences are consistent (Facebook, YouTube, MSN, Blogspot). Perhaps this is surprising to some, for the older age group?

We can learn more from the key differences between the audiences:

From the above research we were able to inform, and support, our recommended engagement strategy for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

Any concerns about whether the suggested campaign platform is right for the audience can be allayed, as the proof is right there in the data…

It’s been amazing seeing the event grow and develop over the past four years, so big respect for our friend Jack Murray from Mediacontact that puts the show on. The community that Jack brings together is full of clever sparky Irish people – always fun to spend time with ‘em.

I learnt loads from the other speakers, and it was particularly cool to see the Brighton digital community so well represented along with Antony Mayfield and Matt Locke, and to meet the hilarious Hugh Garry (ex-Radio 1) and magnificent Olivia Solon from Wired UK, and meet super-node Herb Kim ahead of Thinking Digital in a few weeks time.

Anyway, I am wittering and have stuff to do, so here’s the pictures of what I talked about – my first attempt at shaping a talk around the book I’ve recently written called Culture Shock :)

As such, this has created an opening here at NixonMcInnes for someone to cover my role while I’m away. It’s an amazing opportunity to work with the loveliest people I know.

We’ve had some fantastic candidates so far and the window for applying is only open until the end of this week.

We’re looking for someone who knows their PM onions inside out, can work as part of a team here, know when to prod (and when not to) and is keen to work in a democratic culture like ours.

The role is varied – and includes managing pitches, projects and internal initiatives from inception to delivery, keeping a sharp eye on budget, deliverables and quality. Alongside the PM stuff, the role involves working with the entire team, owning company wide resourcing to ensure that the company continues to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible by ensuring the right work gets to the right people at the right time.

The critical stuff we need is:

_Brilliant people skills are essential – you’ll be working with everyone in the business
_At least 5 years experience managing digital projects and programs
_Ability to manage multiple projects in one go
_Solid client handling skills – knowing when to be firm and when to be soft
_Risk identification and mitigation
_The usual office skills – spreadsheets a must
_Sound knowledge of the social web
_Good web skills – you’ll be using a number of online systems

We’d love to hear from you if this is something that interests you – you can read more about the role and apply via Wired Sussex.

Collaborative technologies, like Jive Software, IBM Connections and Newsgator, have come amidst the fanfare of a new and better era of corporate performance. They herald the emergence of a unique class of organisation: a brave new world where social technologies permeate all business functions to drive collaboration, learning and innovation.

But for every success story documenting how these technologies have generated a tidal wave of excellence across the organisation, there are also tales of disappointment and woe.

Frustrated internal comms managers puzzle over their impotent efforts, wondering why these new technologies haven’t spawned the slick ‘networked enterprise’ they’ve heard so much about.

Why, now that the sparkly social technologies of promise have been implemented, are the productivity statistics not peaking? Why aren’t employees seizing the opportunity to connect and share? They’ve had the training, damn it! And there are clear ‘how to’ guides on the intranet AND posters on the all toilet doors. So why the hell isn’t this stuff working?

The answer, more often than not, is culture. A simple little word that represents a deep-rooted, complex medley of attitudes, behaviours and values that flood the veins of every organisation.

If earnest corporate values are divorced from the reality of how employees behave, ambition really means Machiavellian politics and feedback is synonymous with criticism, even the most advanced collaborative technology is doomed to fail.

Neglecting to consider or, even worse, ignoring corporate cultures in which cooperation and sharing is not the norm, is a huge mistake when implementing collaborative technologies internally.

These technologies exist to facilitate, not fix. They bring company culture into sharp relief. Whether that’s through outstanding results and world-class performance in highly networked companies, or eerily quiet online workspaces that generate disappointing outputs in those that are less used to cooperation and sharing.

The lesson for internal comms is to focus on people and behaviours before technologies. Work with change management to start influencing broken working practices and guide the leadership team in exemplifying the change you’re looking for.

Shiny new collaborative technologies won’t fix your business, but engaged employees will.

I’ll be exploring some of the ways organisations can encourage positive cultural change, so if you’ve got any helpful tips or examples, please post below :)

Image courtesy of Marcin Wichery.

State of the Innovation Nation:
April 2012

At NixonMcInnes, innovation is a process that leads to the creation of things (product/services) that bring value to our community and support our mission.

Our community is made up of ourselves, our clients, our network and the wider world.

the 5 second healthcheck

Why green?

• Because the AT boys are on fire – building, planning, organising and responding to requests
• Because everyone seems to be churning stuff out, sometimes quite quietly and under the radar
• Because I’m in a good mood and feel positive

What could we do better?

• Always – Tell the world, be confident and congratulate ourselves!
• Use the website to tell the world about the great work you’ve been doing
• Finish off any innovations previously reported, package them up, tell the company what you’ve done and then add them to the Experiments section of the website

April’s Innovation highlights

from Steve

• This month I’ve spent a little bit of time playing with the Chatter API. This is born out of my own frustration with not being to update Chatter while I’m on the move (the official iPhone app doesn’t support the version of iOS I’m running, and Seesmic crashes whenever I try and “chunt”). So far, I’ve authenticated with Chatter, and updated my status from my own app (“Mega Chunt”).
• Next steps: create an email channel so anyone can update Chatter via email. After that… who knows? Update via SMS p’raps? Or even Yammer :)

From Ollie

• Started the Big Data Brighton meetup, which has so far attracted 38 signups. We hope the meetup will enable people from all backgrounds to learn more about the Big Data movement, including the business benefits, as well as technical stuff. Ollie’s been able to line up a couple of speakers for the first meetup (from Amazon and DataSift), and, with help from Lou, has put together a press release, which was picked up by Wired Sussex. The first meetup is slotted (tentatively) for early June.

From Edd

• Bieber Fever Metre. We learnt more about the d3 visualisation library and helped us develop a relationship with Pusher.com, the realtime web guys. It also helped clarify our position as technical innovators within the company and how we can integrate the rest of the team into these developments. This might culminate in a hack day but definitely more testing-the-water within the company.
• Git workflow. I wrote a big guide for AT on how we can use the Git source code management tool. This will help us become more productive and ease the switch from SVN to Git that we would like to make, as well as helping us use and contribute to open source projects easier / earlier
• Social Business Platforms. Along with Lou, we wrote a lovely presentation on Social Business platforms and presented it to the team. This helped everybody get up to speed on the technology and tools that our clients could be and are using.
• Hack days service description.This has helped solidify our thinking and gotten us a few steps closer to announcing our hack days offering.

From Ross

• Created and delivered a TEDx talk on the growing ubiquity of devices, and the questions that this poses. Innovative because it’s a new talk, and the event was about hidden wonders and new stuff.
• Lead a workshop with Brighton Fuse, working towards making a two year social research programme more social. Innovative as it links us closely with the academic community, and it’s not been done much before.
• Introduced ‘treats for tweets‘ – a Pavlovian master-stroke combining behaviour change, reward, and sugar.

From Clive & Steve

• We went to see Shoreham Port Authority to provide consultancy around ‘things that tweet’ – and to explore the potential to collaborate on a Internet of Things/Open data project. Clive is following up!

From Jenni

• I am using Frugal Innovation thinking in designing the response to Pan Macmillan’s brief
• I am exploring how we can develop an Open Innovation offer with Andrew Sleigh

From Will

• Held the third Social Business Session with fantastic presentations from:
• Mark Sears, Them Big Oak Trees on ‘why social business should be at the heart of your brand’s purpose’
• Rob Warwick, on ‘complexity and social movements’
• Dan McQuillan, Goldsmiths, on ‘activism and the social organisation’

(thanks to Flickr user Flying White for the image)

At NM we’ve known Giles (Palmer, founder & CEO) and the team since day one, and so it’s been great to see their profile rise and the team grow. A large part of this growth has been within the new business and account management teams, and it was this part of the business that we recently worked with for two days of training. We do a lot of training for clients but this was different; normally training is with a customer service team, or a PR/marketing function, and we are sharing digital expertise. But Brandwatch are already digital experts, so what could be teach them? Well, the brief was clear – to equip the new business and account management team with deeper consultancy skills.

Giles, along with Naomi (head of new business) and Caroline (head of account management) were keen to get the teams thinking in a more consultative way, understanding the context in which Brandwatch would be used and what problems it might solve. As social business consultants, we’re used to understanding client needs, using questioning and frameworks to build a complete picture, so on day one Caz and I introduced the team to SPIN, a technique that uncovers:

- Situation – what is happening? What does the client do? What internal & external factors are at play?
- Problem – what are we trying to solve?
- Implication – what happens if we don’t solve the problem? What’s the impact for the individual, and for the organisation?
- Needs/payoff – what happens it we solve it? What does success look like?

It was awesome to really break down and explore the different steps, and encourage the teams to share examples of where they’d had these types of conversations with clients, and when such information would have been really helpful. It was also great for Caz and I to spend time with a similar but entirely different team, facing familiar challenges but also sharing familiar passions and excitement for working in digital.

We made the day super practical and used real-life client examples to bring typical conversations and challenges to life; for example we explored the typical role of a customer service team within a large organisation, using our experience with clients like Nectar and First Group. Together we discussed typical characteristics of a customer service team, typical challenges they face and what types of fundamental benefits Brandwatch could offer.

Good sales people ask good questions. And then they listen to the answers. The SPIN technique gave us a starting point on the questions we need to ask our clients to really understand their requirements, the better to meet them.

The session on documentation then gave us further tools to craft our response to their requirements. A really useful day, and delivered with levity and good humour!

Naomi Trickey, sales director

Day two was focussed entirely on documentation, the rationale being that client documents can sometimes get overlooked, but are great records of a shared understanding and can really help set the right tone for working relationships. Splitting the day into three, Louise and I went through new business, account management and pitch documentation, for each one exploring what makes for a good document from a client point of view, and from a Brandwatch perspective.

We also explored common barriers to good document production; like at NixonMcInnes and in any other business, the Brandwatch team are subject to complex and constant demands, both internally and externally – setting aside time to create a compelling pitch can be tough and so we discussed how templates and internal resources could be utilised.

Like day one, day two was a lively day full of debate; in addition to the creation of three robust templates for use in future, it was great for the team to take some time out and discuss what Brandwatch meant to them, and how they wanted to convey this. There were differences in style and approach among the team, but the culture shone through which was great to see.

As a growing company, you don’t often get time to stop and think about the processes and practises you’ve developed as a team. Taking the time to talk about how we approach our client relationships was super useful – especially as it allowed us to understand and learn from the different approaches that exist within the team

I can’t imagine doing this type of training with anyone other than the NixonMcInness crew because we trust their approach and knew that they understood us and our product. We’re doing an overhawl of our documents now to take on the feedback from the day so it was definitely worth while!

Caroline Goodwin, head of account management

In summary, working with Brandwatch was a great learning experience for me, and a lot of fun. It was also something that I’d like to do more of in future, either with Brandwatch directly or another kind of digital agency; I think in supplier-land there’s an innate sense of competition or secrecy, but as an industry of people doing overlapping types of work, and facing similar challenges, it’s always rewarding to openly discuss things and learn from this.

Back in 2001 Marc Prensky described the difference between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants as those who have grown up with digital technology in every aspect of their life, whose brains (he argued) are wired differently as a result, and an older generation who struggle to ‘get it’ and are distinguished by their behaviours (he calls them ‘accents’, things like going to the internet second as a research tool).

The focus of his work was on learning and he described how educators would struggle to reach this new type of student – he said that education needed to be reinvented from the ground up. It was a powerful argument and the ‘Native’ has gone on to pop up in design thinking and future gazing ever since.

But the Natives/Immigrants metaphor is now 10 years old. At the time it was published there was no Myspace, Facebook, Youtube or Twitter. Mobile phones looked like this

So instead of this blunt typology, David S White and Alison Le Cornu last year proposed a continuum of behaviour between ‘Resident’ and ‘Visitor’.

They’re based on the two extreme metaphors of the web as a ‘tool’ to get things done and as a ‘place/space’, where people hang out in an area common to them, projecting aspects of their identity, and the massive difference in motivations between the two uses.

I particularly like the assertion that for the residents, UI designers are like town planners and architects:

Just as physical, geographical places have architectural characteristics and town planners can make a real–life city more, or less, user–friendly to navigate, so software designers are responsible for the navigability of platforms, and Facebook users are familiar with the frustration of suddenly ‘losing their way’ when the platform is upgraded and changed.

White and Le Cornu say that people are on a continuum somewhere between the two extremes of ‘Visitor’ and ‘Resident’.

Visitors are on the utilitarian end of the spectrum, they use the web as a tool to get stuff done:

We propose that Visitors understand the Web as akin to an untidy garden tool shed. They have defined a goal or task and go into the shed to select an appropriate tool which they use to attain their goal. Task over, the tool is returned to the shed. It may not have been perfect for the task, but they are happy to make do so long as some progress is made.

They add that in the extreme, the visitor is worried about privacy, wary of setting up a Facebook page etc.

Residents assess the value of their time online as much through the relationships they gain as much as knowledge:

Residents, on the other hand, see the Web as a place, perhaps like a park or a building in which there are clusters of friends and colleagues whom they can approach and with whom they can share information about their life and work. A proportion of their lives is actually lived out online where the distinction between online and off–line is increasingly blurred. 

The simple thing that makes this so much more useful than other metaphors for online engagement, is that it’s a continuum (not a binary distinction between two extremes, or a subset of clearly defined types), that we all sit on and may move along.

It recognises that, like all of our behaviour, we are slightly different people depending on where we are, what context we’re operating in (e.g. professional vs personal) and what we’re expecting to get from being there – that there’s a spectrum between visitor and resident that we operate in, that may be completely divorced from age or technical skill.

Thanks to Aleks Krotoski’s great Digital Human radio doc for the tip off. If you didn’t catch it, I recommend doing a listen again, and tuning into the next one.

[Quick note: I first put this post up (a rougher version) on my personal blog, but a chat with Ross and few others made it clear that the Resident-Visitor thinking has interesting implications for loads of aspects of social business, from customer services to adoption of internal social tools. Hope you find it interesting.]

Like Caz, I was also at the Finextra Social Media day last week and I was also inspired by the social business panel and, in particular, Giles Andrews from Zopa’s comments on trust.

As Caz effectively outlined in her post, Giles distinguished between ‘hard’ trust, that is; trust in bricks and mortar, big vaults and legacy systems, and ‘soft’ trust, that is; trust that the organization is working with your best interests in mind and is listening to your feedback.

The big banks have traditionally done very well in gaining our ‘hard’ trust but have fared less well in winning our ‘soft’ trust.

Until recently this didn’t matter too much.

As long as we felt our money was safe and secure we could put up with some bad service.

As long as we didn’t have any other options we had to put up with some bad service (all banks were much the same right – they all offered much the same products and treated us in the same way?).

Things aren’t quite the same these days.

The financial crash not only further eroded our ‘soft’ trust in these institutions it also made us wonder how safe our money really was – suddenly our ‘hard’ trust in banks was in question.

In recent years we have also seen the rise of many disruptive start-ups that are evolving core banking services and threatening to disintermediate the big banks from their customer base.

As Giles explained with regards to Zopa, these start-ups are inherently more social – they often use social technologies to deliver their services in new and innovative ways.  They also have a tendency to be smaller and, not being hindered by hulking legacy systems, they can be more responsive to customer needs, evolving their products and services quickly to meet those needs.

This gives the start-ups ‘soft’ trust with their customers – customers tend to like these brands and the social elements of their business help them to feel invested in their success.

Off the back of this and by delivering on their service and product propositions, these start-ups have also been able to build ‘hard’ trust.

For example, Giles reports that Zopa offer much better returns than traditional savings accounts but they also run the lowest risk unsecured loan book in the UK.  This shows consumers that security is no longer solely the province of the big banks.

This is a massive threat to banks right?

Perhaps, but it could also provide them with an opportunity.

Rather than trying to replicate these start-up services and models, it makes more sense for banks to partner with these 3^rd party disruptors.

This route means the banks can offer new value to their customers but also piggy back on some of the ‘soft’ trust these new companies have accrued whilst simultaneously shoring up the ‘hard’ trust in their systems by facilitating the delivery of these new services.

This is not a new idea.

Aden Davies argued the same point about back-end banking systems in his recent post ‘Please stop calling them dumb pipes’.

And Elizabeth Lumley and Brett King got into a very heated debate on Finextra recently debating the pros and cons of legacy infrastructure.

Make no bones about it, banks need to take these digital disintermediators very seriously for sure, as they pose a serious threat to mainstream banking.

But Banks also need to start thinking about working to their strengths.

They need to start thinking about developing their models to allow for these disruptive services to be included in their own businesses so that they develop partnerships that work to combine the best of both worlds for their customers.

(Thanks to Joe Shlabotnik for the image)

*sorry.

On Wednesday, I was at Finextra’s Social Media Day in London where Ross was moderating a panel on social data.

The most interesting part of the day for me (surprise, surprise) was the panel discussing social business. Social business in the finance industry is fascinating because the two terms together are a bit like chalk and cheese.

So what role does social business have in the finance industry?

I think the fact that banks and social don’t really fit together at the moment says a lot about the opportunity for banks to become intrinsically more social.

One of the guys on the social business panel was Giles, CEO of Zopa (you know – that p2p lending service).

He started talking about trust and, for me, this is fundamental in becoming a social business. And, for banks, this is arguably their biggest obstacle.

Giles said that customers used to trust their banks because they are giant secure buildings with massive safes and cctv. This is ‘hard trust’. The thing that customers didn’t buy was that the bank had their best interest at heart, which he referred to as ‘soft trust’.

Recently that ‘hard trust’ has started disappearing too, as consumers started realising that their cash wasn’t actually as safe as they thought. This is why new people-centric start-ups like Zopa are becoming incredibly successful and are starting to threaten the traditional banks – because they are building ‘soft trust’ and are gradually gaining ‘hard trust’ as they grow and develop.

Of course, this is great for small, agile companies such as Zopa.

But what about the larger  banks who are under constant criticism by the wider  society?

This was something the panel didn’t go into much detail about and I think that’s because the term social business is still being thrown around without much meaning attached to it.

When we talk about social business, we mean making social fundamental to the way the business runs.

This means getting more people involved in the creation and development of products and services, but also listening and learning from people within and outside the business to help it evolve.

This is the real opportunity for the financial services industry. There are some examples within the industry where brands have taken small steps towards this end goal – crowdsourcing customer feedback using first direct Lab, customer service teams using social at Barclays, internal collaboration at Citi and IBM’s employee blogging culture for example.

Of course, any steps towards the wider socialisation of the business within this highly controlled and restricted industry are great leaps towards progression.

(Thanks to GViciano for the image)

Like most good conference tweets, it sounds pithy and rousing, and while I like the sentiment, I also want to give it a serious poking.

The implication that – by definition – a ‘for-profit’ organisation lacks a purpose beyond chasing profit is wrong. If the people that keep you in existence (customers, employees) don’t believe you have a purpose, how are they going to believe in your future? You’re just not sustainable. When profit becomes your sole purpose, you don’t have long left.

Ideally, every organisation would be setting out to create shared value beyond the two parties in a transaction (I like Umair Haque‘s idea of “meaning organisations“) but we’re all not there yet.

So, while I can believe that the purpose of most not-for-profit organisations may be more up front – they don’t have exclusive rights to purpose, and I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend they do.

The not-for-profit label is crap. At best it’s boring and meaningless, at worst it reinforces a them-and-us mentality with the private sector. It almost insinuates that any organisation that makes profit must have nefarious intentions. Even worse, it nearly justifies lower wages for those working in the sector.

But I also know that the people I work with in the not-for-profit sector (generally) have a pretty good clarity of purpose – of their organisation and how their work connects to it. Personally, I think that’s something to be celebrated.

When I started thinking about all of this, I desperately wanted to come up with a better, cleverer and shinier label for non-profits that took profit out of the equation.

I realised that rather than just come up with another label that differentiated between those out to do social good, and those out to generate profit, it would be better if all organisations had a crystal clear and credible purpose in the world that everyone – especially employees – could believe in.

The more pin-sharp and credible that purpose was, the more people who contribute to it, and the more people who benefit from it, the longer it’s going to last.

And then, the issue of whether there was profit involved would be irrelevant.

Just a thought.

Last weekend our very own Ollie Glasses want to learn about D3, a cool library for visualising data on web pages. It does all sorts of out there awesomery, Ollie stripped it back to basics with a rolling bar chart, and then lit a rocket under it by combining it with the Twitter streaming API and our chums Pusher.com, a platform for adding realtime functionality to websites.

The result is a site that tracks the volume of Tweets about Justin Bieber per second. Of course this could easily be applied to any search term, Bieber just happens to be a good test candidate due to the average volume of around 100 Tweets per second.

The app is formed of two parts, the server and the client. The server is just a simple Python script that sits on Heroku, it connects to the Twitter stream and counts the incoming tweets. Every second we send the current count to pusher and reset the counter. Meanwhile on the client side we have a simple webpage hosted up on S3. A bit of javascript connects to Pusher, awaiting any updates sent to them from our server, when we receive an update we add the data to the end of our D3 chart. With a bit of magic we can make it adjust the scale of the chart according to the maximum currently displayed. It’s a pretty simple demo but shows some good principles of the realtime web.

So what else could we do to this? We can display any kind of arbitrary data that is offered in real time. Some examples might be:

• Displaying rolling activity of a KPI.
• Displaying the volume of traffic across your network. Be that a network of pipes, computers, phones, socials.
• Displaying your latest customer support queries as they come in.

The code is up on Github, so please feel free to fork and tweak for your own needs. (There seems to be an issue where we mostly receive the figure 102, I’m not sure if this is a Twitter issue or with our code, any hints on why this is would be great).