Frontiering Talk

Many consumers are frustrated when wanting to interact with corporations. Phone calls met with “please hold” notices, or emails that get a “thanks for your input” reply, but nothing further.

Getsatisfaction is trying to solve these challenges by providing a place where consumers and marketeers can communicate. They call it “people-powered customer service” and allows consumers a platform where they can converse about customer service issues specific to a particular company or product.

Examples are this request on the Product “I want Sandy”, which is a pretty cool reminder service that I have been testing out.  The replies to the initial request include suggestions and claficiations from a representative of “I want Sandy“, and demonstrate how effective this is.

Participants in the conversations can include other consumers or employee representatives (declared as such), and the ability to rank useful posts enable the community rated posts to bubble to the top.

Discussions are controlled by the community, providing a freedom that is harder to provide inside normal corporate consumer response services. From a corporate view, representatives are encouraged to respond to feedback in a collaborative way.

Currently the service is free, although I suspect it gains traction they could monetise the service by either charging corporate participation on a monthly fee, or offering extended offerings that are paid for.

Perspective: More and more consumers are willing to express their opinions about your products and services, and brands that ignore these conversations do so at their own risk.

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Satisfaction - People-Powered Customer Service

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My virtual model gives consumers the ability to try things on, before buying.

You enter in your measurements, upload your face and presto .. now you can see what you would look like before purchasing. Brands such as Speedo, H&M, Sears, Lands End, Best Buy and Marie Claire are represented.

In addition, the site allows you to share and comment on saved outfits to tap into others opinions.

To expand this capability it is now offered as a Facebook Application.

The site is not the fastest, so a little patience is required, but I can see the appeal to overcome some of the unknowns about purchasing clothes. I suspect technologies like this will only get better.

It would be great if they opened up their API (for turning designs into virtual clothing), as this would allow individual designers to upload their own outfits. I also think is a taste of how you might be able to integrate selling fashion with entertainment. Imagine watching a movie, and then clicking on an actor/actress to add their outfit to your virtual model, get some input from your social network before deciding to purchase !

Tags: retail

In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage - Mobiles & Handhelds

Criticker - The TCI Explained

Don’t you hate it when you hire a DVD and it’s just not your kind of movie.

Social networks such Criticker and Filmtrust are helping and it’s no surprise that a company who’s very business is about renting movies is trying to improve the “success rate” of hire versus like ratio.

Netflix have announced a contest where the prize is $1 million, to the person or team that can create a better system for improving their movie predictions system.

I love their contest and they describe it here.

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven’t tried. We’re curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions.

So, we thought we’d make a contest out of finding the answer. It’s ‘easy’, really. We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and a prediction accuracy bar that is 10% better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. If you develop a system that we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights. But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if you share your method with us and describe to the world how you did it and why it works. To keep things interesting, in addition to the Grand Prize, we’re also offering a USD 50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. It goes to the team whose system we judge shows the most improvement over the previous year’s best accuracy bar on the same qualifying test set. No improvement, no prize.

They even have a leader board to ensure transparency of the competition, and the 2007 winner was recently announced providing a 8.43% improvement on Cinematch.

Perspective: It’s great to see companies outsource innovation in this way, and rewarding the successful innovators. There are many ways to tap into the wisdom of consumers to help with solving challenges like this, it’s just that most brands / companies aren’t prepared to let consumers in.

A new study commissioned by Nokia suggests that as much as 25% of entertainment will be created and consumed within peer communities. Coined “Circular Entertainment” by Nokia, the research interviewed 9000 trend-setting consumers in 17 countries about their digital behaviors. The study entitled ‘A Glimpse of the Next Episode’ was conducted by The Future Laboratory.

Tom Savigar, Trends Director at The Future Laboratory suggests

Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative. Whereas once the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment. Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate. We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of.”

Some of the key results were

Of the 9,000 consumers we surveyed:
- 23% buy movies in digital format
- 35% buy music on MP3 files
- 25% buy music on mobile devices
- 39% watch TV on the internet
- 23% watch TV on mobile devices
- 46% regularly use IM, 37% on a mobile device
- 29% regularly blog
- 28% regularly access social networking sites
- 22% connect using technologies such as Skype
- 17% take part in Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
- 17% upload to the internet from a mobile device

These results are not surprising, and it does suggest that it will be more difficult for brands to communicate as these trends grow.
Certainly the methods used will have to change, and recommendations from trusted communities will surely play an increased role in driving behaviour.

Listening to consumers is a key prerequisite before brands can be effective in “Joining the Conversations”.

Here’s a video poking fun at fortunes being made in Silicon valley and suggesting that the bubble is about to burst.

I know there are some crazy valuations at the moment in the technology sector, but I do feel that many of the so called web 2.0 companies have solid business plans in comparison to the first dot com boom.
Enjoy the video

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Gaming developers Activision (best known for Guitar Hero, Call of Duty and the Tony Hawk series, as well as Spider-Man, Shrek, James Bond and Transformers) and Blizzard (developers of  World of Warcraft) are merging in a deal worth $18.8 billion to be known as Activision Blizzard. 

According to BBC News, they are promoting the merger as the”world’s most profitable games business”.

The new business will be hoping to benefit from both the rise in availability of gaming consoles as well as the emergence of advertising in games.

As mobile phones and internet access from these devices gets faster, it’s no surprise that advertisers and consumers will start to interact more using them.

Perhaps this example in Japan is what we can expect in the near future. Called Chipuya Town (note site in Japanese), and modelled on the Shibuya shopping district of Tokyo, consumers earn currency by adding friends. This currency is known as Grooves and can be used to purchase accessories for your avatar, apartments and furniture etc.

What is most amazing to me is that Advertisers are paying $4,000 / month to advertise on in world billboards. Or for $8,000 a month, they can rent a virtual storefront including display of ads in and outside the store, hosting in-store promotions and even the hire of a truck to travel around the district handing out promotional material. The world was created by Japanese mobile tech company Media Grove.

Perspective: Whilst this is very Japanese, the main market being teenage girls, there are trends here that almost model the evolution of any new advertising medium. An area of interest is created where people congregate to consume or engage in it’s content. Then the area is developed with the help of advertising spend in return for opportunities to communicate to the congregated audience. I suspect it won’t be long before these worlds contain automated robotic avatar agents (let’s call them “Avaborgs”) that are programmed to market products and services. Do WOMMA ethics apply to Avaborgs? (grins)

Tags: avaborg, Mobile

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Quintura for Kids

Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors

Commuispace has released a study titled Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs, which examines the 6 social needs that people seek in social networks.

1. Expressing personal identity: online social networks provide people with the ultimate tool for defining and redefining themselves, as evidenced in profile pages on Facebook and MySpace.

2. Status and self-esteem: the need for autonomy, recognition and achievement are essential to our sense of self-worth and are fulfilled in online communities, blogs, and social networks that provide a way to develop and manage a virtual reputation.

3. Giving and getting help: people have a need to both seek and provide help to others. Mutual assistance between strangers is a phenomenon that has been uniquely enabled by the Internet.

4. Affiliation and belonging: online communities are becoming the way people find, create and connect with others “just like me” – people who share similar tastes, sensibilities, orientations or interests.

5. Sense of community: a sense of belonging or affiliation alone is not equivalent to a true sense of community. Achieving a real sense of community requires long-lasting reciprocal relationships and a mutual commitment to the needs of the community as a whole.
6. Reassurance of value and self worth. People want to be reassured of their worth and value, and seek confirmation that what they say and do matters to others and has an impact on the world around them.

These needs are very relevant for any company or brand that seeks to establish a community, and make an excellent benchmark to test the value of a social network. Meeting these needs helps to deliver trust and deeper insight into the community members, says the report.

Perspective: It’s very difficult for a brand to achieve these needs, as most offer limited expression for the community and fail to enlist the power of the social network to give and receive help. This reduces the feeling of affiliation and belonging, and the value of the community. That’s why most of the successful communities such as Shespeaks, Yelp, Minti are run by independant and passionate consumers rather than brands. Brands then try to engage interrupt the consumers with advertising clutter, treating the social network like any other content channel. Consumers want to be heard, and are ready to give help to be reassured of their worth and value. I wonder when brands will recognise this?

I like to listen to visual communications, and I am most comfortable talking while drawing images and diagrams. So the idea of a visual search engine appeals to me.
Quintura is just that. You start by typing in a search string, and then navigate across a visual cloud map to zoom into the accurate definition or meaning you are after.

Here’s the result when you search on Frontiering.

As you select related nodes to the original search string, additional words are added to the search string which refines the search, which is supplied by Yahoo.  Notice if you steer towards People, and Process you will end up with a link to ReCareering.

You can also embed the result of a search into a webpage as I have done above.

Quintura even have a special portal for Kids searching which is worth checking out.