Good ideas for any of us strategist types to keep in mind when logging a study. Or, meetings! Or, really any time you’d want to take notes about something. Check out these great reminders from Life Hacker!
Lindsey’s Insight
Do’s and Don’ts of Germany
I’m getting a few pointers on German etiquette for my contextual interviews in Deutschland next week – check out the do’s and don’ts!
I joked about Klout last year when I found it through Google and it said I was influential in things like Vampires (to be fair, I had just watched two of the Twilight movies and did tweet a few times about #teamjacob and #whyisbellasuchawhiner… and #jacobsabs) – it was a laughable moment.
Klout is touted as this new badge of ‘something’, be it cool or influence or popularity, and as such, it also (naturally) comes with perks. In addition, the article points out how Klout scores now bear weight on your job prospects. People trying to raise their Klout scores via Twitter (*Note: you can gain Klout points from other social networks, but since I shunned Facebook, I only can talk about Twitter) have to accomplish two things: One, they have to tweet a lot more. And two, their tweets have to be more focused. I imagine, overall, that my tweets and yours are pretty focused on your interests or what you find interesting. However, what baffles me is that people put effort into this to boost their scores or become minor thought leaders concerning certain topics.
This section of the article made me cringe: “Lee once took a vacation during which he had no access to the Internet. This made him uncomfortable. ‘I was worried that brands couldn’t get in touch with me. It’s easy for them to forget about you. And I knew my Klout score would go down if I stopped tweeting for too long.’” This guy was actually concerned that the brands couldn’t get in touch with him – is this really what brand loyalty is all about?
While I get the application of Klout, I do not believe that it is as relevant or powerful as it could be. It’s also why I advocate for qualitative, in-person research, human to human. That’s not to say that this kind of research doesn’t have its purpose, but it should be an add-on, not a driver. Klout scores could be applied to a greater body of knowledge – it could be actionable once we understand who users really are, within a certain scope.
What I appreciated most about this article was Stevenson’s last paragraph: “The un-Kloutiest’s thoughts, jokes, and bubbles of honest emotion felt rawer, more authentic, and blissfully oblivious to the herd. Like unloved TV shows, these people had low Nielsen ratings—no brand would ever bother to advertise on their channels. And yet, these were the people I paid the most attention to. They were unique and genuine.” I couldn’t agree more.
The idea of putting customers first is not a new one. In fact, it was the start of the 20th century when Harry Gordon Selfridge coined the phrase “The customer is always right.”
But customers have never been as powerful as they are today in the social media age.
The potential damage that can be done to a reputation on social media raises the stakes higher than they’ve ever been. A new era means new ways to collaborate with and serve valuable customers. It’s time for companies to stretch beyond customer satisfaction surveys and stop relying on demographic research to determine how their brands should interact with their customers. It’s time to start talking to customers, one on one, in order to understand who they are and how to wow them with a product or service.
Today, more and more companies realize they must spend time and effort to really get to know their customers. If one person has a bad experience, news travels at lightning-fast speed. They will post their woes to their friends, contacts and Twitter followers.
“If we knew someone had 50,000 Twitter followers, our call centers would escalate their call for support,” someone once told me.
That’s certainly understanding the power of social media, but the goal should be larger: to make sure the customer experience is as good as it can possibly be to avoid all complaints in the first place, whether public or private.
The Case of Qwikster
Netflix clearly underestimated its customers last year when it announced it would rename its DVD-distribution service Qwikster. Creating separate charges for DVDs and streaming video would almost double prices. Plus, a high schooler already owned the Twitter handle @Qwikster, indicating even worse foresight.
The day Netflix announced Qwikster, online conversations spiked almost 300 percent. Seventy percent of the chatter was negative when emotion was tied to the posts. Netflix stock dropped 20 percent. $2 billion in value evaporated in eight hours. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled their service. The customers had spoken — Netflix abandoned the idea, and the CEO apologized.
On the flip side, if consumers love a product, store, brand or experience, they will shout it out into their vast digital networks. Take for example, musician Tommee Profitt, whose love for Target led him to record a music video using his iPhone 4S.
A New Take on ‘User Experience’
Since today’s customer truly is king, with powerful communication tools right at their fingertips, companies have to pay more attention to the overall “user experiences” they are creating for people. User experience, or UX, is a broad term used to describe all aspects of a person’s experience with a system or brand.
User experience research and testing helps companies “put the customer first” in all aspects of their businesses.
In today’s many-to-many world, consumers group themselves, especially online, largely based on values, interests and aspirations – not by sex, race and age. In this scenario, companies must understand their consumers’ behaviors and motivators – the why behind their actions.
An example: A company in the financial services industry came to my firm, User Insight, to get to know its customers better. Based on the demographic and segmentation information, this client believed that people chose banks according to life stage. After spending hours one on one, in consumers’ homes, interviewing them on how they choose a bank, we discovered that it wasn’t about their sex, age, race or stage of life at all. Instead, we found three groups based on values and behaviors: customers who preferred to bank online, those who like a branch nearby, and those who want a banker who knows them by name and handles their complex finances.
Getting insights from the customers who will actually use the product at the end of the day allows a company to focus on the core experience these customers are looking for. It’s not about “if” someone can use a product; it’s about “will” they use the product. The key today is serving up the right content at the right time in the right way. Consumers have many ways to interact with a brand; understanding how they want to do that will make the brand successful.
Smart companies should be willing to seek out and accept the tough love they need to serve consumers and manage change well. They also need the right people to guide them who are passionate, pleasant and collaborative. Putting time and effort into quality user experience research can mean healthier businesses, happier customers, and fewer reputation-flaying diatribes online. Because in today’s social media age, user experience matters.
User Insight’s story begins with Dr. John Morgan. John had a vision – a vision to make user experience more accessible to companies. Dr. John Morgan spent more than 20 years spearheading user research around the world for IBM. Over the course of his career, John recognized opportunities for improvement as usability and user experience evolved. In 2001, he took the next step to realize his vision by founding User Insight. Below, Dr. John Morgan discusses the evolution of user experience and his vision for User Insight for the next 10 years – Enjoy!
Need some motivation to exercise? Make a game out of it! This is a really interesting concept to me. Oftentimes, lack of motivation is what kills someone’s intentions to get in better shape. And games are a powerful motivator for many! When they’re well designed, they hit just the right spot in the reward center of the brain. Today, the same principles that B.F. Skinner used to get pigeons to keep pecking a key also keep people dropping coins into slot machines and performing repetitive tasks in online games. It’s nice to see that someone’s figured out a way to use it to get people to be more active and make money at it to boot.
Apparently the ‘next big thing’ in the ever-evolving arms race to advertise to you as much as possible is an Australian startup called Social Loot. The essence of this organization is that you can earn money by promoting products to your friends through their social media streams. I’m sure on the advertiser’s side it sounded wonderful – people with similar interests can be ‘brand advocates’ for the products they love, thereby forming a stronger connection and higher likelihood for a sale, while getting a bit of extra compensation for their opinions. Celebrities partake in this form of electronic product placement, so why not give the average Joe a chance to cash in on the same thing?
On the consumer side, that just sounds horrible – it’s really spam of the most invasive kind. While a lot of spam advertisements are easy to ignore because they aren’t targeted or are obviously an ad, communications promoted by the likes of Social Loot require a bit more energy to work out.
It’s all just really exhausting… continuing my thoughts from last time, I spent a lot more time with Pinterest this week to see how invasive the spam had gotten – and to my dismay some keyword searches were over 90% spam. I’ve had to alter my browsing behavior there – I have to look at comments, likes, and repins to determine the validity of a link, and even that is something I’m sure they’ll eventually start spoofing.
All this just makes it hard to sort through the good and bad data, and makes me not want to use whatever service that doesn’t use a robust spam filter. I have a feeling that Pinterest’s days of usefulness are numbered for me, and if any of my friends start telling me that Product X is really awesome through my email then their days with me might be numbered too.
Rachel’s Insight
Recently, I ran across this Fast Company article and video about kids’ reactions to cigarette packaging. The video embedded in the article is disturbing but also very powerful as a way to illustrate the point that design and branding matters – and it affects our kids and what they take interest in (good and bad) - http://bit.ly/IK39xl
Michael’s Insight 
Lindsey’s Insight 
Rachel’s Insight 
