Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

BMW posted its half year earnings at a record high this year. In fact, the company has never had a better 6 months in its entire history. For this reason, it is positive to observe the company continuing to spend some of that profit for worthy causes. But not only is CSR type activities, but rather in collective creative community platforms, such as the one just launched with the Guggenheim in NY.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile travelling idea lab that takes on the challenges of cities and urban planning with a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Also, it invites residents to participate.

It is not a new idea, but simple and timely. The trend of collaborative community projects has shown much hope and success especially in NY where such projects as the Highline have received much attention.

Check out this lovely TED Talk Julian Treasure on 5 ways to listen better.  It’s much more than just a typical “You should listen actively”-type talk.  It’s more about how we develop real understanding with each other and the world around us.

He discusses the lack of listening skills that have plagued humankind, practically from the invention of writing, and also talks about some pretty magical ways to listen better in your everyday life.  I was reminded of the You Are Listening To Los Angeles site we featured here a while ago.

Julian talks about listening positions, which planners should be well acquainted with, where you shift the attitude of what you’re listening to or the filters you’re receiving the information through from active to passive, from being critical to being empathic, from in or out of your cultural norms.  It’s a great technique to get conscious about the filters and ‘move to different positions’, i.e., develop your understanding of the topic or conversation in different ways.

What caught my attention, however, was the section where he talks about listening for leaders, teachers, spouses, parents or friends.  He uses “Rasa”, the sanskrit word for essence or juice, as an acronym for:

Receive - pay attention

Appreciate - show that you are engaged

Summarize - make sure you understood

Ask - expand your knowledge

I would change the last one to Ask/Act - and encourage marketers to examine their actions and activities to see if they are following through to truly expand knowledge together.

Are you consciously embracing listening?  Are your actions full of Rasa?

Leveraging the Foursquare API, We First, a company that calls itself “Social Branding Consulting Firm” released an app for the iPhone that allows people to thank service staff found at the places where, previously, you would have just checked in. The idea is very simple and I find it very interesting. Sure, you can just actually say “Thank you!” but for service professionals it’s probably nice to have something “on record.” In fact, it could help employers incentivize their staff. A virtual “Employee of the month” program, if you will.

It begs the question: can it ultimately change how customer service improves? I think it potentially could. Making Thank Yous social may lead to new behaviors, similar to existing recommendation apps, but adding a more human element to the whole thing. After all, when we recommend a venue, do we just recommend, say the food, or also the service? I suppose many times in fact we recommend the service and friendliness and atmosphere created by employees more than the food.

After years of digital technologies just enabling people to be more and more in control of their purchase decisions (before and after), essentially arming them for the conflict and battle with a service or sales person, this kind of idea could create a platform for human interactions that is about valuing experiences, and creating incentives for those whose job it is to create those experiences for customers.

Check it out here.

On another note:Kudos to a firm that calls itself “consulting firm” to actually create a real experience for the social space, as opposed to just analyzing and talking about the social space.

Via Jake Setlak

If you’ve tried to follow all the hype about Google+, you were probably hard-pressed to try and read all the blog posts and articles. There are just too many. But what was striking about the articles was their sameness. 90% of them seem to be about the future not about the now. Little was imparted about what to do with G+, most of them where rants about what G+ isn’t or about what it should be, or about what it could be, and of course about who will win in the SN wars. The one exception I came across was an article by Thomas Hawk about how to make G+ work for you as a photographer. Other than that, I witnessed the usual hype wave, where usual suspects of social ninjas can’t help themselves and make prognostications to leave a mark, opinion-wise, so they get a share of the voice.

The problem with that isn’t the voices or prognostications, it’s that we so easily get swept away by it that we create a reality about something in our heads that we haven’t actually experienced yet ourselves. We take the time to read all this stuff, but have little time to go and innovate and experiment.

It’s been a few weeks of excitement and tizzy and dilly-dallying. Fine. Let’s move on now and speak about experience insights, experimentation and collaborative best thinking on a new platform, not the next social media weather report. There is nothing more annoying in a playground than the annoying descriptiveness of some authority figure telling us how things are, should be, could be. It stifles application and experimentation.

Alan Wolk, borrowing metaphorically from his grandmothers cookbook, makes a great point in his blog Toad Stool

What’s needed now is a lot less prognostication and a lot more observation. Let people figure out their own best way to use the platform. Before anyone starts telling them they’re doing it the wrong way.

You couldn’t be more right, and thanks for the reminder what this is supposed to be about!

I’ve written a number of rants here on the accomplishments of the User Experience Practice. Not only in terms of being a practice that has always had he focus on the user and human behavior, but, as a result, having a complete view of people’s journey; a view that gives creative solution a visceral understanding of human behavior, as opposed to merely attitudinal consumer insights laced with flat helicopter-macro trends that ad agencies had to work with in the old days. As advertising agencies have had to learn how to go from creating ads (messages) to acts (experiences), not only was having a UX background a great asset personally, but also a key ingredient to the betterment of the communication industry overall.

However, at the same time, I also had been asking myself what the UX community is really up to. say. The last 5-10 years, it has been my impression, that, in terms of the toolset used by Information Architects, Information Designers, Interaction Designers, etc. not much has changed. Sure, UX people have adapted to doing what they do for new devices that have entered the market, but fundamentally, the process of how we go about unearthing user insights and defining and testing experiences, not much seem to have changed, including who UX people work with and how they position themselves in a larger organization.

So it is with great interest that I came across an article by the godfather of UX Jared Spool, who basically poses the question if a new way of working with new sets of skills is required. I found it interesting, but it also sounded like a late wake-up call. In the article I find a confirmation of my previous stance pure-play UX shops have been stagnant for too long. The question Jared takes on and shares with us is one that agencies (digital and fullservice) have been dealing with and solving for quite a while. While the proposed team constellation he describes makes sense, it really isn’t really news to teams in full-service and digital creative agencies that have been dealing with overlapping job descriptions, disciplines, almost unmarriable structural problems for like 10 or so years already. Those who have had the source of business, have made changes to their team structure in similar ways as Jared proposes already.

To be fair, many have failed and had to try again, and many seem to have given up, going back to an old-school model, hoping Armageddon won’t come after all, and I don’t think many figured out the magic bullet. So the article still does the job of heating a debate that needs more action, more trial and error.

Still, I think it is a great Jared shared the state of thinking on the UX team in a larger context. For, a) it shows that while there might be a (somewhat outdated) acrimony between the “ad” agencies with the UX agencies, there are actually things that keeps us from realizing full potential on both sides that we can join forces on, and b) it’s nice that even thoroughbred UXers got their wake up call to start innovating again, and maybe once more be the subject matter force behind fundamental rethinking the role of the communication industry.

That said, after realizing the potential of a new team skill structure and opening the gates to more “collections”, my dear hope is that UXers will join forces to use their skills and knowledge of micro-behavior to find new tools to create overarching behavioral insights that can be more easily used for a differentiated brand experience strategy as opposed to just user experience strategy, regardless if they are pure play descendents of the library sciences or connections planners from a reformed traditional agency world, or social media ninjas who come from the concept development area.

We are all probably damaged somehow, doesn’t mean we can’t all be good.

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

Shot entirely on the Nokia N8 mobile phone. Winner of the Nokia Shorts competition 2011.

Director: JW Griffiths

Producer: Kurban Kassam

Director of Photography: Christopher Moon

Editor: Marianne Kuopanportti

Sound Design: Mauricio d’Orey

Music composed by: Lennert Busch

(via)

“What if everyone was given free access to the sum of all human knowledge?” … This and the fact the world needs a source of free knowledge for the information age that is free of commercial interest is reason enough for Leo Burnett Germany to propose Wikipedia as the first digital, first global and youngest UNESCO’s Cultural World Heritage.

Sign the petition clicking on this link: Sign petition.

Become a fan in Facebook and share!

I recently had the pleasure of being a panelist at Kellstadt Marketing Group’s 2011 symposium: Click: Emerging Media and the Empowered Consumer. My panel covered Business Intelligence, and how managers can get CRM working in their enterprise. One of the questions the audience put forward was about how to start, and what to expect as you start to bring actionable data in.

In our discussion we compared the stages of the enterprise to the evolution of a new country or civilization - where some brave souls have to enter the wild frontier, and establish outposts to grow from. As cities develop and expand, the industry and economy evolve into new and more powerful forms, eventually becoming information-based.

The first stage is The Frontier - a scary wilderness where the enterprise functions without any structured data at all.  Some businesses have huge areas of activity that don’t collect or manage any data at all. Up until recently, many consumer packaged goods manufacturers were in this phase.  Just like the frontiers of old, this creates vast unknown areas, brimming with opportunity and ready for exploration. And it only takes one brave soul (or a group of them) to get to the next step.

Colonization - the stage where companies start to use data to make suggestions to users, or personalize experiences.  Companies in this stage are testing the waters, so just like the first colonies, there are only a few outposts - not a real support network. They are looking to provide a solid case before investing any real infrastructure money. That said, if you’re in this situation, then make sure that your operation is properly set up to prove ROI, because your ’supply ships’ will stop coming if you can’t prove that using data is a winning proposition. Many services companies get caught in this phase, with their management waiting to see proof that it makes sense to invest in anything more than a basic customer database. Once a case is made and accepted by management, then expansion into the next phase is possible.

Industrial Revolution - the stage where things start getting automated at scale. More and more of the company becomes dedicated to getting customer personal and behavioral data pulled into the stream, and infrastructure gets built on a massive scale to expand the reach of data both in the company and out to users. Some banks are good examples of this kind of enterprise - with each product group in the company depending on their customer data to excel, but tending to work in silos, without a centralized view of the customer. Just like in the actual industrial revolution, there are stories of both winners and losers. Some companies will not adjust fast enough. Some areas of the company will hang onto ‘how things were done in the past’.  Winners get to move to the next step, which is also a revolution.

Information Revolution - this is where data becomes so central to how the business operates, that the company can say that information drives the business forward.  In this economy, if you’re out of the data stream, you’re out of the picture. Due to technology advances in handling large structured and unstructured data sets, massive amounts of internal and external data get joined together to predict behavior, needs and barriers. Models are built to ensure correct customer handling, even with imperfect data, and the enterprise continues to search for what new metadata could be added to make better decisions and offers. Things change quickly in this economy (five years ago who would have predicted that social media would need to be tracked in consumer databases?), and companies like Amazon and Netflix are good examples of leaders that know that continual reinvention and innovation is crucial in order to stay ahead.

With this path to sophistication in mind, we can recommend some steps to get you from where you are to the next level in these Evolutionary Stages:

1. Know where you are. You have to be honest about ‘Where you stand Evolutionarily’.  And there are likely to be multiple, conflicting opinions in the company about how data is used. Talk to stakeholders, and avoid proclamations too early in the process. It will take time and persistence to develop a clear picture that everyone can accept.

2. Start at the top. Does your CEO know where the company stands? Does he or she agree that data can help the company evolve?  Educate through examples - showing how adding data into company operations can avoid costly mistakes, angry customers, and ineffective campaigns.

3. Make the case to evolve. Investment in infrastructure and process change must be earned. If tests and pilots are not planned to give evidence of ROI, then all the logic in the world won’t convince management to take action on data, so keep the end in mind when agreeing to how experiments will be structured, run, and measured.

4. Think big, but start small. Develop a vision of how your company could be operating if you had perfect knowledge of your consumer, and use this to guide an long-range plan. But since you know you can’t get there overnight, keep the steps in the plan small and manageable. Many successful companies value failures for what you can learn, but it’s also true that a CEO’s favorite ‘learning’ project is small, fails quickly, and delivers information that lasts.

So, are you an Information Revolution company? How are you planning to get there (or stay there)?

Bonin Bough, global director of social media and digital at PepsiCo, has a healthy attitude towards the role of social media. An attitude we’d like to see more of. Social Media is no magic bullet.

The fact that digital and social cannot rehabilitate brands or that they cannot be magic bullets seems very obvious.

Yet, these questions get asked, or at least you get the feeling that that is the expectation brands have after they finally nilly-willy accept that they need a digital strategy of some sort. This behavior makes one wonder if digital is now only seen as a lifeline for failing brand marketing. It can’t be. And indeed, if you cannot have real conversations about what your brand is strategically, what purpose it serves in the minds of people, and if you don’t work hard as an organization to remove internal barriers to allow your brand to take a fundamental stance in how it makes a qualitative difference in people’s lives, you will just end up using social media and digital channels in that very tactical way.

Thanks Bonin for saying how it is.

What is that really motivate us? Money? Well in some cases yes, but according to recent studies the answer is … well check out the video, it is really interesting (and surprising) and the conclusion is awesome: We are not horses expecting for a reward for our work, we are people!

By the way, this video is nominated for the Webbys in the animation category.