Friday 19 November 2010

Ruthless Internet Blocker


Programs and browser extensions that can be used to block access to the pipe for a set amount of time all ready exist – but what makes SelfControl different is that it is completely unforgiving. Once you’ve set that innocent little timer – you’re screwed. Quitting the application, restarting your computer or even totally deleting the app will not enable you access to the internet. You have to wait for the time to expire before you can get back on.

A cruel mistress.

Thursday 18 November 2010

Welcome to Commodity Hell: The Perils of the Copycat Economy


I'm currently working on a project for Nokia looking at approaches to identify and communicate services.

It's a complicated topic — within Nokia as we have three separate operating systems and nine layers of management between me and the CEO! — and I believe must be treated as a brand architecture challenge not a services and user interface issue which is where ownership currently resides. Why? In my personal opinion the service space is fast becoming commodity hell, the need for a common and identifiable architecture to brand services has become mission critical.

The effects of imitation and commoditization are happening so quickly that we have started taking them for granted. To demonstrate this the issues I'm currently developing a series of short case studies, one of which compares the commoditized wine industry to mobile services and it's making fascinating work.

From a consumer perspective, consumers now feel the same sense of bewilderment felt amongst rows of comparable wine when visiting app stores with hundreds of thousands of apps with incremental differences. Observing brands visual identity design strategies within this space has been really insightful.

Apple iTunes is the service equivalent of 'two buck chuck'

From an innovation perspective commoditised markets have a history of being disrupted by radical new offerings. Oren Harari from FT Press observed that the fastest-growing wine in the history of America's wine industry is Bronco Wine Company's Charles Shaw wine. It is sold at the upscale Trader Joe's grocery chain, its customers are affluent and trendy, and its price is $1.99—hence its affectionate nickname "Two Buck Chuck."
While Charles Shaw might not ever be confused with a vintage collector's wine, it's good enough for the discerning Trader Joe's customer seeking a casual drink. It's certainly good enough to have thoroughly cannibalized the sales of high-priced wines and skewed the industry's entire price structure. Small wonder that a Wine Observer article noted that the "terror of commoditization…is sweeping California's wine producers."

The bottom line? Imitation and commoditization are one of the most pressing strategic challenges that businesses will face for the duration of this decade. What's been useful to me is the rich learning possible by observing how other sectors have risen to meet this challenge.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Google Net Neutrality Infographics

After posting recently about the Brian Solis' Conversation Prism I had a look into the agency behind this work called JESS3. Working hand-in-hand with Google’s legal team, JESS3 helped developed this excellent series of infographics to help demonstrate the complex and hotly contested issue of net neutrality.

Thursday 11 November 2010

I 'like' Dunkin' Donuts


In Facebook, Tabs unlock Facebook’s customization features. Whereas storefronts can take residence as a designated destination within the Facebook brand page, additional tabs can offer discrete engagement opportunities to appeal to the diverse roles of social consumers.  Like traditional web sites, tabs are the social web pages for dedicated experiences. And, not everything has to be related to marketing or promotions.

While we see many companies using tabs to increase Likes through contests and promotions, the effect of tabs are limited only by vision, creativity, and execution. Most notably, each tab can assume the position of a landing page which is intended to visualize the most current initiatives for each brand whether it’s aimed at existing or new “likes” or both. Meaning, tabs are assignable as landing pages, rather than sending people directly to The Wall, where specific content, stories, or programs are presented upon visiting the brand page.

The Facebook presence architected by Dunkin’ Donuts is designed to serve a variety of business objectives. The current landing page is promoting the “Ultimate DD Coffee Fan Contest.”


Just to the right of the this tab, DD presents Marice, a creative application that brings an espresso bean to life and encourages you to customize messages to send to friends.


To encourage customer advocacy and loyalty, DD includes a landing page for its DDPerks program. Again, the experience is maintained within Facebook. This program can scale should DD desire, to include an all-inclusive database that allows customers to access their DD account in Facebook.


I should also note, that DD also uses the left side of the page to recognize its fan of the week. Spotlighting customers is among the most appreciated and effective social sparks that ignite beneficial sharing and conversations.


This is merely a small taste of what’s possible with the structured customization Facebook supports. Perhaps one of the most understated aspects of tabs is that FBML supports website analytics code from major publishers. In my work, we often use Google Analytics to measure the activity of each page and how visitors interact and travel to and from the Brand Page.

Read more insights from Brian Solis

Wednesday 10 November 2010

Outside innovation: The P&G Partnership Hunt


Creative ideas drive growth, and Procter & Gamble is exploiting that fact by developing new products through partnerships with inventors, small businesses and even competitors.

As brilliant ideas go, the Oral B Pulsonic toothbrush may not quite be up there with the wheel. But the electrically powered product – which employs patented “sonic technology” to scour stains from teeth and sells itself with the boast that it is “So slim it makes your bathroom seem bigger” – has made plenty of profit even so.

In fact, it’s been so successful that Procter & Gamble, the company that makes it, has set out to find more good ideas just like it. A whole lot more ideas. With revenues now close to $80 billion, Procter & Gamble has come a long way since William Procter and James Gamble set up their first factory in Cincinnati in 1837 with the simple aim of selling candles to American housewives.

Today, P&G is one of the world’s biggest corporations, and over the past decade a large part of its success has stemmed from a strategic decision in 2000 to turn away from developing only its own product ideas and towards creating partnerships with inventors, smaller companies and even competitors who have come up with winning concepts.

The Pulsonic toothbrush, to take just one example, is an idea that P&G freely concedes could have taken five years to bring to market had it elected to go it alone. Partnering with a large Japanese consumer electronics group cut out numerous processes and got the toothbrush on to shelves less than a year after the project was green-lighted.

You might think that a company the size of Procter & Gamble could come up with its own ideas, but the partnership model works. Among the products now issuing from P&G are Swiffer dusters, Tide Total Care, Clairol Perfect 10 and Olay Regenerist – all of them joint ventures of one sort or another.
And that’s not counting broader strategic partnerships that the company is forging with the likes of Alibaba, the Chinese web services giant, General Mills and even the US Government’s Los Alamos defence research laboratory – where they made the first atomic bomb.


In building partnerships of this sort, little is left to chance. A formal innovation programme known as Connect + Develop, set up in 2001 to develop new businesses, follows precise guidelines to ensure that the sort of disruptions common when businesses join forces are kept to a minimum.
Thus far, C + D has shepherded well over 100 new products into stores, and with sales of these products now hitting $1bn a year, Procter and Gamble has set itself the ambitious target of tripling revenues from such partnerships by 2015.

Connect + Develop’s chief problem seems to be deterring the hordes of impractical and optimistic would-be inventors beating a path to its door. The prospect of selling an idea to Procter & Gamble inspired 3,950 companies and individuals to make formal pitches to C + D in 2009 alone. Most were knocked back at the first hurdle as Connect + Develop turned itself into a sort of multinational Dragons’ Den.

That’s not to say there is no potential for disagreement once a new idea is accepted. Quite what sort of deal P&G strikes with its junior partners remains a matter of speculation, and it would be stretching credulity to suggest that they go 50:50. So far, no one is complaining and the balance in the new partnerships looks right.

Small companies such as Sederma – the boutique French skincare technology company behind the peptides used in Olay Regenerist – bring ideas and specialist know-how to the table. P&G chips in with investment, advertising, and, not incidentally, the backing of what may well rank as the world’s most powerful sales force.

According to P&G’s chief technology officer, Bruce Brown, the policy is one of “value creation, against just measuring the number of connections”. What his company plans to do now, he says, is to ask: “What are the biggest opportunities we want to address, and are we looking outside to make the right connections?”

And the signs are that Procter & Gamble is in this for the long haul. According to Bob MacDonald, its CEO, the corporation’s net will be cast as wide as possible. “We are interested in all types of high-quality, on-strategy business partners,” MacDonald told a dinner held in honour of the group’s top innovation partners this month, “from individual inventors or entrepreneurs to smaller companies and those listed in the Fortune 500 — even competitors.”


And with products such as Glad’s “ForceFlex” rubbish bags now appearing in shops, MacDonald is practising what he preaches: ForceFlex has been developed in partnership with Clorex, long one of P&G’s bitterest competitors.

There’s little doubt that – even looked at with a sceptical eye – P&G’s strategy makes all sorts of sense. The corporation operates in low-margin sectors where – as strategic planning maven Inder Sidhu points out – it runs “very competitive, entrenched position-kind of businesses, so even small, incremental changes can mean a lot”. Adds Sidhu: “There has to be that focus on sustaining innovation, but then they also tried every once in a while to come up with disruptive innovation, the Swiffer or those kinds of products.”

As proof that C + D is working, look no further than one of the latest products from the labs. Procter & Gamble turned its back on candle making in1920 but several years ago, alerted to the growing popularity of scented candles for air freshening, it married its Febreze fabric-scenting technology to the know-how of a traditional candle-maker to re-enter the candle market. Now Febreze Candles can be found in the same sorts of mom-and-pop stores that P&G used to supply nearly two centuries ago.

William Procter and James Gamble, it seems safe to say, would certainly approve.

From Stylus

Case study: Social Media Listening Strategy for Orange – identifying insights, super contributors, and sentiment


Orange is a leading telecommunications company in Europe that has partnered with Synthesio, an international web monitoring and research company, to actively listen to and engage consumers online.

The problem

Orange telecommunications initially started out on the web by implementing a FAQ on their site, allowing customers to find answers to any number of problems or questions they might have had. Online for a dozen years or so, the objective was to respond to the larger number of questions posed by their clients. All in all, the FAQ was a rich resource for Internet users when it was first put into place. It had about 2,000 different cases and several topics like cell phones, Internet, TV, VoIP, etc.

The FAQ was a traditional web service that seemed to work well. Divided into several sections, it sent site visitors to the right answers via a questionnaire – and averaged 6 million visits per month !

However, the problems faced by Orange were multiple, according to Thomas Le Gac, Project Manager 2.0 for Orange :

a FAQ doesn’t allow visitors to ask their own questions there were “so many different client requests” that it was impossible to answer every question clients and corporations don’t use the same language – so customers spent time searching for their answer or left unsatisfied you had to actually go to the official Orange site to use the FAQ ! Not very user-friendly for customers searching for a response – any response – where they could find it

Solution #1 :  the Orange forum

Orange decided to put into place a much more interactive system that would allow visitors to pose their own questions and find the responses they were looking for much more easily.

They started working with Synthesio one year ago, at the same time when they put into place their own official Orange forum. The official forum allowed visitors to ask questions in their own phraseology and get answers from others just like them. Instead of being sent to the “right” answers, visitors to the Orange FAQ were sent to the forum thread that corresponded to their question.

The forum was self-regulated, meaning that only non-corporate web users were allowed to leave questions and answers. Orange, however, took it upon themselves to “certify” certain answers by placing a Stamp of Certification on those they felt were the best answers to user questions.

The results

The forum receives about 15,000 visits per day – meaning about 15,000 service calls per day that Orange doesn’t have to answer themselves. They started to save money in their Hotline department almost immediately. As opposed to having only 2,000 answers available via their FAQ, they had now Certified over 1,000 forum responses and estimate that over 100,000 people have viewed them.

That’s 100,000 fewer Hotline calls.

What’s more, the Stamp of Certification recognized certain forum members as experts and leaders in that community, energizing them to contribute more and more often.

Solution #2 :  a team of Web Consultants

However, Orange realized that they could – and should – go a step further. Instead of making clients come to them, Orange decided to go “fishing where the fish are” according to Thomas Le Gac. Also one year ago, Orange began listening to forums online with Synthesio, watching and learning how people interacted on forums and what they were talking about.

“One of our main challenges was to collect millions of opinions on a brand that has the same name as a fruit,” says Synthesio CEO & Co-Founder Loic Moisand. Le Gac and his team worked with Synthesio to identify the 5 top forums for Orange discussions. ”They were able to listen to forum conversations for a year before joining in on the conversations,” says Moisand.

Orange and Synthesio worked to analyze and engage in conversations with customers in real or near-real time. Synthesio’s analysts filtered through comments to identify them for positive or negative sentiment and assign them to pre-chosen categories, while Le Gac put into place a team of “web consultants” to respond to comments. After listening to conversations on the web, they were able to develop a chart of guidelines for intervening (or not) in forum discussions.

For example even before intervening, the Orange team asks permission from forum administrators so as not to intrude. They also identified certain moderator-like particiapnts that Le Gac refers to as “super contributors.” They are community participants that regularly post good answers to visitors’ questions. ”There are certain members of every forum that respond more often than others that should be identified,” says Loic Moisand.

Le Gac adds that “the rule of thumb is to let the ’super contributors’ answer questions first. We don’t want to seem like competition to them, so our web consultants only answer when these ’super contributors’ don’t have an answer.”



The response :

Since the implementation of Synthesio’s monitoring, Orange has been able to identify and solve  numerous “collective problems”. Recently, for example, 40,000 clients signed up for a specific package complained of not receiving the amount of memory they had signed up for.

The customer service hotline answered questions from clients that called in, but the web team was able to detect the problem as a “collective problem” as the number of thread posts grew quickly. “Identifying weak signals is key to avoiding a major communications crisis,” says Loic Moisand. Orange rapidly corrected the problem and alerted clients to the correction. This information allowed them to realize an immediate savings on clients that did not call the support center and possible PR expenses.

Orange has estimated “a few million euros” in savings just through this installation of listening, and are expecting several more millions in ROI. According to Le Gac, the ROI they have seen has been “extremely quick”.

Added benefits – - monitoring competitors’ conversations :

In addition to the ROI realized by listening to third-party forums and positive image constructed through the encouragement of influential forum members, Orange has also been able to work with Synthesio to listen to conversations about competitors.

In one case, they were able to spot a problem in a direct competitor’s offer that was complained about by a number of forum visitors, and avoided making the same mistake, themselves.

They have also been able to spot offers from their competitors that their customers wanted in their own plans. Family calling, for example, is now part of the Orange Open calling plan. It gives customers unlimited calling capability for a certain number of their contacts.

Next Steps :

Orange is always seeking to go further in their response to customer needs and is planning on growing their team of web consultants, says Thomas Le Gac. He aims to turn the team of 7 web consultants into a powerhouse of 30 by the end of the year.

Orange is also planning on expanding their web listening and interaction via their involvement in more social networks and more countries. While a seemingly “must” for northern American companies, Twitter has been slowly growing their presence in France in terms of the number of users. Orange therefore plans to take advantage of this tool by opening their own B2C account, as well as using Facebook forums.

They realize the potential of these spaces to attract younger customers and to find them where they are.

There is also a number of international branches that are interested in Orange’s innovative steps in France, and they are currently working to use Synthesio’s monitoring services to expand their social media efforts to Switzerland, Spain, Romania, Poland, and the UK, to name a few.

Finally, Synthesio’s analysts identify sentiment surrounding the Orange brand and various offerings. Each comment in a thread is flagged as positive, negative, or neutral, and assigned to one of the topics Orange is monitoring in online forums.

“There are certain characteristics that we would like to see around our brand,” says Thomas Le Gac. “Transparency and honesty aren’t easy to measure, but they are clearly an objective for us. We are comparing Synthesio’s sentiment analysis from month to month to see where there are changes and why. This is a question we are going to keep looking at.”

This case study is a submission for the 2010 Forrester Groundswell Awards.

10 facts that make you think twice about online gaming

Thanks to All Facebook

Tuesday 9 November 2010

Social shopping comes to Levi's



Levi’s introduced a “Friends Store” on its website which showcases the jeans that your friends have liked and also allows you to share the jeans you “like.” This introduces a peer-to-peer influence model where we influence and are influenced by those we trust. Levi’s is betting the denim that the more we interact within its Friends Store, the more people we will be introduced to it simply through our interaction. Doing so creates a bridge between the web and social web, content and relationships, thus socializing the objects that move us.

The natural step for Levi’s is to also recreate that experience within Facebook. With Facebook Tabs, the opportunity to create a Friends Store within Facebook exists now as does the means to introduce a sophisticated, engaging, and fully-functional storefront. There is debate as to why brands would willfully sacrifice traffic to its dotcom. In my experience, this comes down to the unique touchpoints that connect brands to traditional consumers and social consumers respectively. With the social consumer, attention comes at a premium and there are great advantages in capturing attention where and when it’s focused.

HT to Brian Solis

Inside word from Laurence Ellis about the Topman Denim Fashion Videos



Creatively Topman were very open to what we wanted to do. They had a core brief, to show some jeans and appeal to a very savvy and media saturated consumer but how this was interpreted was left down to us. One of great realisations from the Topman side is hits don’t necessarily equal the success of a campaign. They could have orchestrated a silly viral campaign achieving millions of hits but in a way it seems obvious and insecure, and often doesn’t leave you with a great impression of who that brand are – apart from the fact that they’ve hired a clever ad agency. We understood that these films were slightly different from what had been done before. They have integrity and a subtle beauty to them. With such a huge brand behind them there is something quite beautiful about this combination. They are not at all what you would expect from Topman –  the unexpected is always much more interesting.

From It's nice that

How luxury brands can tap the blogosphere’s growing influence


Luxury brands need to be more proactive in cultivating a presence in blogs that have assumed a more central role in the cultural discourse, according to several media experts. Consumers trust blogs more compared to traditional media than they did five years ago. Brands should actively look for ways to generate positive press by developing relationships with prominent industry bloggers.

“My specific advice would be to identify bloggers and content creators who are genuinely passionate about what your brand is trying to do,” said Imran Amed, founder and editor of The Business of Fashion, London. “Build real relationships with them, so they can offer something unique to their readership.

“It gets people excited and engaged from social media,” he said. “There are a lot of creative things people can do.”

Mr. Amed spoke at L2 Think Tank’s Innovation 2010 Forum along with Lauren Sherman, editor of Fashionista, New York; and Christine Barberich, editorial director of Refinery 29, New York.

Blogosphere ascendant

There is reason to believe that blogs are assuming a more central role in the social discourse, according to Technorati’s 2010 State of the Blogosphere report. Here are some interesting facts:

  • Forty-six percent of consumers said they trust traditional media less than they did five years ago. Meanwhile, 34 percent said blogs are being taken more seriously and 19 percent said blogs are a better source of information than traditional media oftentimes. 
  • Thirty-nine percent of consumers said that more people will be getting their news and entertainment from blogs in the next five years than from traditional media. 
  • Just under 50 percent of consumers say they trust blogs for brand, product or service information, compared to around 60 percent of consumers trust traditional media such as newspapers, television or radio news, news Web sites and magazines. 
  • Meanwhile, 71 percent of bloggers only write about brands and products whose reputations they approve of, according to Technorati Media’s 2010 State of the Blogosphere report.
  • Additionally, one in three bloggers will boycott products and 20 percent will share their reasoning with their audience, and advocate that their readers join in the boycott.
  • Ninety percent say that it is important that advertising on their site align with their values.
  • Half of professional bloggers and a quarter of hobbyists say that they have been approached by a company to write about its brand or products.
  • However, 64 percent say that they were treated less professionally by brand representatives than are traditional media sources, and just 20 percent say their interactions were positive.

Value relationships

Relationships are the currency of the blogosphere, according to Mr. Amed. As such, brands should develop a strategy for cultivating relationships with bloggers to generate brand-enhancing press.

The blogger mentioned the example of British handbag designer Bill Amberg, who contacted approached the blogger with an opportunity to design a bag suited to his lifestyle. The two spent several months developing the bag. “That’s a great example of engagement,” Mr. Amed said. “Of course, you’re only going to do that project with a few people but what a great story for me to tell our readers,” he said.

Mr. Imran said that brands interested in engaging with bloggers should set up individual meetings to throw around ideas, rather than blanket a large number of publications with generic emails. The personal relationship makes it much more likely that the writing that results will create value for the brand. The most important thing is to find blogs that feel like organic fits rather than forcing relationships that make less sense.

By the same token, brands should not treat these relationships like a commodity. Offering quid pro quo can strain relationships. “Don’t say ‘We’ll give you something if you write about us,’” said Fashionista’s Ms. Sherman. “People who are really interested – of course getting a gift is nice – but that’s the last thing I want to hear,” she said. “If you want to advertise on the site, that’s fine. “But I’m going to write about you if I think you’re an interesting company.”

Golden opportunity

Whatever the case may be, luxury brands should be more aggressive in developing a presence on the Internet in general and blogs specifically, according to another blogger.

“One of the things that’s disheartening is that there are all these amazing brands and they have these amazing legacy stories, amazing heritage and so little of that is reflected in their online environments,” said Refinery 29’s Ms. Barberich. “It’s such a critical and exciting opportunity to create an environment and all those features.

“It doesn’t have to be a volume of information, but things that reflect the value and aesthetics,” she said. “They have their core customer, but there’s an opportunity to seduce a new audience – people that want to latch on to a luxury brand that speaks to them even if they don’t have the budget now.”

From Luxury Daily