Everything about this job has been great.

It was the result of a recommendation by Ewan McIntosh (thanks Ewan), and it speaks volumes of the value of a recommendation from Ewan that we were given the project without a pitch.

Then we found out both that the brief was awesome and that the people behind it were lovely.

The brief was to create an interactive version of the CBI’s 6 monthly climate change tracker report.

The CBI is the “voice of business” and, as far as climate change is concerned, it uses that voice to lobby the government for policies that incentivise businesses to, and reward businesses for, doing right by the environment.

The Climate Change Tracker is the CBI’s assessment of Government performance against the CBI’s priorities for the Power sector, Transport, Buildings and Industry.

The end of June saw the publication of the fourth such report, which had previously taken the form of printed booklets and PDF documents only.

The CBI asked us to develop an interactive version that allows users to drill down into the various layers of supporting information and context that underlie the CBI’s verdicts.

That we did.

But we also developed a series of four interactive visualisations of the data, each of which affords the user a slightly different perspective on the issues.

The variations in the way that the data has been visualised allow each of the three dimensions of Time, Industry Sector and Progress Rating to be prioritised.

This project represents the CBI’s first foray into the interactive visualisation of its data.

(Its potential goldmine of data).

And we await detailed feedback from the various audiences and stakeholders for this highly rewarding toe in the water.

To date, this year I’ve been involved in four major research projects and our primary research process typically consists of two parts:

The quantitative phase (where we plan an online survey, spend weeks cutting the data in different ways, identify patterns and trends and develop “sketch personas”) and then…

The qualitative phase, a series of telephone interviews and occasional focus groups; the end-goal being a detailed digital strategy piece accommodating trends, complete personas and short, medium and long term digital recommendations, mapped back to a business ROI.

Quantitative data and designing online surveys

Following a recent mobile usability event, I got chatting to a mobile specialist who positively flinched when I mentioned quantitative data. I realise “market research” is a dirty phrase in some circles, but hear me out before you dismiss the science completely. For a start, some clients are better than others at collecting data, so these online surveys are an important starting point in even detailing the general profile of their customers/fans/enquirers. Secondly, it’s not just about the numbers. Depending on the warmth of the data set, we get some fantastic comments, which not only make for interesting presentations, but also provide the necessary framework to design the discussion documents for the telephone interviews. Finally, we actively look at response feedback (rate & quality of feedback) for each survey, so we’re always evaluating if there’s a better way to ask a question, what works as a pre-set answer and what needs to be open text. We nearly always leave an “other” field for each question, even if we think we’ve identified all the possible options. Essentially, when we design such audience insight mechanics, we know we don’t always know what we don’t know.

Still with me?

Qualitative data and telephone interviews

I compared this process of interviewing consumers (and sometimes other stakeholders) recently to a “box of delights” rather than “boxing up people”, because it’s about capturing stories and experiences, rather than trying to generalise behaviours, though of course there is an element of that. Personally as a planner and a particularly people-focussed one, this almost feels like method acting to me because I spend weeks at a time organising interviews, conversing with interviewees, playing back the recordings and for brief periods of time I become immersed in these personas, so much so that it isn’t always an easy or comfortable process shifting between projects.

The importance of gaps and shadows

Even with the telephone interviews, we’re still relying on a certain level of awareness from consumers about what they do, what they absorb and what they’d find useful. So much of what we do gets absorbed into our subconsciousness, safely locked away from the probing questions of market researchers. The challenge (for us) with consumer interviews is that they don’t always know what they don’t know, particularly with industries where the choice between the competition is either ambiguous or minimal. The challenge for clients when presented with “we don’t always know what we don’t know” and “they don’t always know what they don’t know” is that they’re then faced with a recommendation into the unmapped territory of continuous audience insight and integrating a dynamic feedback loop, rather than the quick-fix solution they were hoping for. That’s not to say that quick-fix solutions don’t come out of research, they do… lots of them, but in a difficult economic climate, increased online sophistication, increased competition and greater digital complexity, meaningful digital solutions go beyond an iPhone app and Facebook.

A serendipitous find this morning generated this video clip from “Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner”, which highlights some of the problems around consulting consumers (and internal stakeholders) on the direction of innovation.

According to Adage our latest recruit has one of the hottest jobs in marketing.

Deana Burke has joined us to provide full time community management for one of our major clients.

As the Adage article states, there is a growing interest in the community management function from clients in diverse industry sectors. This isn’t too surprising given the increased emphasis on all things social. If an active presence on platforms such as Facebook is part of your digital communication strategy then community management skills, if not the recruitment of a community manager, will be a hot topic of conversation.

Wordle tag cloud of Deana's CV

Deana has moved to Scotland from New York and brings with her a strong track record of overseeing social campaigns and programmes of various shapes and sizes. This includes managing a community of influencers for TNT (US cable TV channel), plus community management for animal welfare organisation The Humane Society, the US Forest Service, Pepsi brands including Mountain Dew, and GE Appliances. She also managed a private brand ambassador community for Snapple.

With Deana on board our involvement in things social will extend beyond strategy and content provision to the day to day, sleeves-up management of these spaces.

Exciting times.

Why aren’t all things mobile as high a priority for marketers as they perhaps “should be“?

I was invited to address this topic as guest speaker at yesterday’s Mobile Monday lunch in Edinburgh.

In addition to sharing my own views, based on observation and anecdotal insight, I conducted a survey of Blonde clients to canvas their opinion on all things mobile. Twenty people kindly completed the questionnaire and provided some very useful additional insights.

These responses come from clients in a variety of sectors – Financial Services, FMCG, The Arts, Public Sector, Transport and Retail.

The individual respondents all have smartphones of some description and all use these for a wide range of “high order” tasks. So if anything is holding mobile back in these organisations, it certainly isn’t any lack of familiarity with the functional potential of mobile devices.

Here are the results of that survey. Remember when viewing the quantitative charts that the sample size is only 20. I suspect that the verbatim responses to the open-ended questions will be of most interest.

It may be that the text size on some of the charts is a bit small to read within this blog post. Perhaps better to view at a larger size on the Slideshare site.

Being the “Tail End Charlie” or the rear gunner in a second world war bomber was a lonely and exposed position.

Strapped into a glass bubble at the back of the plane, you had to deal with whatever got thrown at you.

And “whatever” usually took the form of faster moving, better equipped people with hostile intent.

Can you see where this is going?

Working at the sharp end of social media for a brand or organisation can be just like that.

Exposed in a glass bubble, having to deal with whatever gets thrown at you.

And it all happens fast, in very real time.

And just ask Nestle and BP about hostile intent.

Indeed, I bet the social media and PR people at BP feel like a right bunch of tail end charlies right now.

An official social media presence for an organisation isn’t an experiment or a toe in the water. It’s an invitation and an obligation.

You’re inviting dialogue and you’re obliged to respond.

That obligation to respond can be discharged well or badly.

Doing it well is partly about the aptitude of your social media people.

But it’s also about infrastructure and integration.

Your Tail End Charlies might be exposed in their glass bubble, but they shouldn’t be isolated.

If people are going to ask for T-shirts, you should have (cool) T-shirts ready to go. And you should have a well-oiled process for getting them out quickly.

If people are going to ask where to find your product in Falkirk or Frankfurt you need to have the answer at your fingertips, and/or the direct line number of the person who can tell you.

If your organisation’s customers can find you in social spaces, it’s odds on that they’re going to complain to you in social spaces.

That should have been anticipated and there should be a procedure in place to deal with it.

Done well, every social media obligation turns into an earned media opportunity.

Done badly…

Domino’s Pizza has been running a promotion with Foursquare whereby anyone who elevates themselves to “mayor” of each outlet can claim a free pizza.

This is one of many such branded offers on this location based social network which some are people are billing as “this year’s Twitter”.

(Aside : If, at the end of 2010, Foursquare is an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook, has a significant proportion of dormant profiles, and a minority of super-users who post most of the content, then it will indeed be this year’s Twitter.)

Here’s how the Domino’s promotion worked in practice for a friend of a friend of a colleague when he tried to fulfil the promotion in a Domino’s outlet in Shepherd’s Bush.

“Hi, I’ve just become mayor of this shop. Can I have my free pizza please?”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Come back later when the manager is in.”

The Tail End Charlies of social media aren’t just the people posting tweets and Facebook content, it’s anyone who has a role to play in keeping social promises or responding to social requests.

Don’t just think fans, followers and free advertising. Think infrastructure, integration and fulfilment.

IRN-BRU’s Bruzil campaign went live today to coincide with a press launch event in Glasgow.

It represents a cunning plan to catapult the Scottish football team from non-qualification for a certain major football tournament in 2010 to winning the thing in 2034.

What if the Scots were to make babies with the Brazilians and breed a Samba McFootball team of world beaters for 24 years time?

Well the results might be something like the series of films that will be released on the IRN-BRU site over the coming days.

The films were produced by our friends at The Leith Agency and the first one, released today, features “big” Bobby Carlos.

The site also includes a couple of applications, the first of which allows you to take a spoof DNA test to assess your suitability as a prospective Bruzilian parent. The other is a simple but funny Bruzilian name generator that gives you an idea of what it would be like to play alongside Rabaldinho, McKaka and the other stars of 2034.

A cunning plan.

And.

It.

Might.

Just.

Work.

Keith Rankin has joined Blonde as Head of Search.

He is just back from a year travelling. His search (geddit?) for enlightenment included several months in South East Asia, including an ascent of Mount Kinabalu on Borneo. At 13,500 feet, that made him the highest Rankin (geddit?) sightseer on the island.

Prior to that Keith did lots of clever things at Fast Web Media in Manchester. His clients included The Premier League, Carling, Grolsch and PA Sport. Whilst there he picked up several awards including a “Best Use of Search” for Carling at the 2006 Revolution Awards.

Keith brings with him not just proven expertise in search engine marketing, but also a keen interest in optimising content on social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

As well as being good at what he does, Keith is a culturally and philosophically aligned with the people-first thinking that characterises Blonde work. We all just clicked (geddit?) during the interview process.

That’s probably enough. Small prize for the best search related pun in any comments.

The new Harrison Parrott website went live at the end of last month.

Harrison Parrott (”HP” to their friends) are one of the world’s leading classical music artist and project management agencies. As we have discovered they are also a highly principled, ultra-professional, appreciative and engagingly eclectic group of people.

The new site is the product of a rigorous development process that included Scenario Planning, persona creation and brand definition.

Scenario Planning is a proprietary tool that uses a combination of stakeholder workshops and spreadsheet number crunching to directly relate user goals to business objectives. This allows us to objectively prioritise functionality and content via a process that is jointly owned by all of the key decision makers.

The planning for this project included primary research amongst various audiences including orchestra promoters, record labels, journalists and musicians. These audiences presented us with a sometimes contradictory set of insights around attitudes to all things social, technology usage, and the role of agency websites in their professional lives.

The process of reconciling these insights has resulted in a site that is finely tuned (no pun intended) to be fit for commercial purpose whilst offering a clean, efficient and intuitive user experience.

It has also resulted in simple but innovative features such as a notebook facility that allows users to create a personalised list of artists as they browse the site. These lists can be saved, printed or shared by email via a unique link. The notebook is already proving to be a popular feature both within and outwith the agency.

So there you have it. We clearly enjoyed the project and working with the HP team. This is what they had to say about us.

“Impressed by their work for Sadler’s Wells, Edinburgh International Festival and Dilettante Music, we found Blonde to be an energetic and responsive agency. Their proposal for the redevelopment of our website was fresh and creative, but clearly focused on what we were trying to achieve. Asking the right questions to ensure they understood our business and our culture, they delivered – on schedule – a clean and striking site which is easy to use and features innovations that work for us and our users. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop our digital marketing strategy with this highly professional outfit.”

Antonio Orlando, Marketing and PR Manager

“Vast amounts of money have been wasted on evidence-free initiatives.”

So said a senior figure from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine during an interview on Radio 5 Live this morning.

He was arguing that government decisions affecting the provision of emergency medical care have been based on myth, wishful thinking and a desire to play to the (voting) gallery.

The myth in his view is that of accident and emergency departments being clogged full of people with minor injuries, who would be better treated in walk-in centres and by GP’s.

The combination of a myth such as this, that many people will be predisposed to believe, and a political desire to be seen to be doing something innovative was, he contended, a recipe for inappropriate strategy.

Surely such a thing could never happen in the realm of digital marketing.

Perish the thought.

Perish the thought that digital strategy would ever be developed on the basis of wishful thinking and a political desire to be seen to be doing something innovative.

Unfortunately though a significant amount of digital marketing is indeed innovative but inappropriate.

It’s based on myths that people want to believe.

The myth that people will willingly participate in your marketing plan, creating and distributing content on your behalf, and expecting little or nothing in return.

The myth that describing a piece of content as viral will magically make that content go viral.

And so on.

A people-first planning approach, ideally including primary research into the social technographics of specific audiences, is crucial to ensuring that digital strategy is underpinned by insight and truth.

And not on myth.

This has kind of slipped out under the radar in the midst of all the election noise and yesterday’s widespread reporting of the Facebook f8 developer conference.

But this is significant.

Forrester have launched a new Word Of Mouth analysis tool called Peer Influence Analysis. (Non-subscribers will be able to read an excerpt only).

This builds on and augments their Social Technographics profiling tool that we already use extensively as a framework for properly understanding and analysing the relationships that people have with technology.

Blonde has used Social Technographics data and Social Technographics methodology on numerous occasions to ensure that our strategic thinking is underpinned by insight rather than wishful thinking.

Peer Influence Analysis stands to add another layer to our people-first planning approach. It will allow us to quantify and analyse word of mouth dynamics based on statistically robust, quantitative, sector-specific data.

It adds to the existing Technographics surveys questions that measure “influence impressions” in social networks and “influence posts” on blogs, in blog comments, forum posts, ratings and reviews.

Based on early U.S. data there are some interesting findings.

Peer to peer influence impressions are of a significant scale – in fact the number of “influence impressions” is 25% of the number of paid for online advertising impressions over the same period. Given that a p2p impression will have more influence than an advertising impression this is a big deal.

A small minority of people (6.2%) generate 80% of influence impressions. And 13.4% generate 80% of all influence posts.

Forrester calls these people Mass Connectors and Mass Mavens respectively.

“Mass” being the operative word.

6.2% of the online population in America is 11 million people.

You can’t target these people individually.

That’s why Peer Influence Analysis could be really powerful. It should give us sector-specific insight into the demographics and technographics of Mass Influencers and allow us to develop robust word of mouth content and seeding strategies.

We look forward to UK specific Peer Influence Analysis data becoming available.

A further summary of the tool is available here on the Groundswell blog.