CrapHammer

Twitter is the watercooler of a new era

The days of the water cool may be over yet it remains a powerful metaphor for the shared social experience that was critical to our sense of belonging, place and even identity.

The water cooler was about what was on TV, what was happening of import to those around us and even defined what was socially acceptable to the larger group.

It was a balancing act as the water cooler conversations both defined and restricted who could belong.  As a result, access to the information that defined the shared social experience in the workplace was critical to our status.  To the point that it likely influenced the shows we watched, the media we consumed, and more.

Today, tools like Twitter are playing a similar role.  They are defining a shared social experience.

Kelly Mooney in The Open Brand states "Digital rituals both mundane and exotic help form individuals' and groups' social identities, and along with them people's tastes, preferences, values - what's important to know, what to buy in order to belong (or be unique), what to share with or recommend to friends and family."

Twitter is about defining and restricting a virtual but shared social experience.  By being aware and "in the loop" on what is being discussed, it allows us to feel more confident and comfortable when meeting members of our virtual network at events.  It gives us a stake in a something tangible, human and yet undefinable in an otherwise virtual and distant world.

Photo Source: ShellyS

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Day of Cross-Post-Itis

Two of my articles were launched on two other blogs today.

• Part 1 of Prototyping on the Cheap on the Critical Mass Experience Matters blog
• The Why and How of Engaging Bloggers at Your Event on Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog

Thanks to both David Armano and Ann Handley for giving me the opportunity to write for both publications.

A Call from an Obama Supporter

A very sweet young southern woman just called me.  Or so I am assuming from her voice and accent.

Her voice was shaking as she thanked me for my past support and read through a prepared script regarding the fight for the final 200 delegates and for taking on McCain.

As she spoke, I recalled my younger brother walking door to door in a black neighborhood in Florida.  I replayed in my head the hundreds of posts I have read from young and old alike who spoke of their stepping up to participate in this campaign.  And tears came to my eyes.  Tears of pride.  Pride in a nation that was standing up for something deeper than fear or blind patriotism.  A country in which people were beginning to believe again in something nobler and larger.

I listened to the young woman stumble through her script for a few more moments until I finally had to interrupt her.  "How can I help?" I asked.

I could almost hear the relief in her voice as she told me they could use a donation of $50.

To which I replied I would gladly donate $100.

Money is devoid of meaning.  And while I desired to show my support for this amazing man, Mr. Obama, I realized this was an opportunity for a different act.  A chance to voice my pride in my younger brother and the many others who have stepped forward to reclaim hope and belief in our country.

* I recognize that not everyone who reads my blog shares my political views.  This was a personal moment as an expatriate to share pride in my younger brother and my country.  I ask for your understanding if not your support.

Humane Air Travel

I appear to be having my first humane air travel experience in 10 years.

I am flying Porter airlines for the first time out of Toronto and I have to admit I was more than skeptical about this new alternative that avoids our crazy international airport located 40 minutes outside the city core.  But booking a ticket online at their website was crazy easy.  And there were all kinds of interesting options, like multiple travel passes, tickets that can easily be changed with only an hours notice and more. 

I left my downtown office 1 hour and 15 minutes prior to my flight's scheduled departure.  This is compared to the 3 hours I have to leave for an International flight out of Pearson.  I arrived at the ferry within 10 minutes and was whisked to the terminal where I was checked in and through security in less than 5 minutes.  Not one line.

Then I found myself in a wonderful lounge area with soft chairs, free iMac computer stations, more conveniently placed power outlets than I can shake my fist at, a fully stocked fridge full of an array of beverages free for the taking and an automated cappuccino machine serving up hot lattes to anyone who wants one.

The wireless internet is free.  The people are friendly and the place is clean.

I actually feel valued and special. And at a price that is hard to believe for a flight to New York.

Wow.

I will sign off, sitting in my comfortable chair and sipping my latte while I twitter and work away.  I am quite excited to see what the flight part of this journey is like.  For an organization that has put so much work into this part of the experience, I can only expect to be further amazed.

UPDATE:

Wow.  The flight totally lived up to expectations and THEN some.  Brand new planes and imagine my surprise when I was given a boxed meal AND a glass of wine, all on the house.  I've flown for 5 hours with no food on every other airline.  1.5 hours and a meal. And a glass of wine?  Insane!

Color me impressed.

Oh yeah, and my IDEO cards arrived.  Woot!

The power of dissonance

What's worth listening to?

This is.  A CBC Radio Ideas program regarding Elliot Aronson and his work on cognitive dissonance.  The link to the above program is worth a download to your iPod.  I'm also very interested in his new book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).

What is cognitive dissonance? 

According to Elliot Aronson, "if a person holds two ideas that conflict with each other, he experiences cognitive dissonance which is a negative drive state (like intense hunger, except it takes place in the brain) and he or she is motivated to reduce that dissonance."

The program prompted me to go back and forth on Twitter with cuthbertsteel based on a thought I had.

"Cognitive dissonance is likely the goal of persuasion. To create something to conflict and win out over a pre-held belief."

I'm unsure of cuthbertsteel's real name, so let's call him cuthbert for now.  Cuthbert wondered right back, "Wouldn't the elimination of cognitive dissonance be the objective of persuasion?  'Flow' with complete consensual hallucination."

He is right to question the goal and objective and to do so in less than 140 characters is nothing short of amazing.  And for sure, the objective inherent in any persuasion is to win, or so I assume.  But the method of getting there is far from ordained.  Is persuasion about an easy smooth win?  To gain a person to your side in as fluid a manner as possible? 

Shouldn't changing someones beliefs or views be a tumultuous event?

Bringing the concept of cognitive dissonance into the mix, I would argue that it is about the audience embedding our idea into their psyche with significant energy to place things out of kilter.  Otherwise, we are "winning people over" who already agreed with us in the first place.  Or worse, they appear to have been persuaded only to find out they have reverted to their old ways/beliefs/thoughts.

Yet where are these fireworks when we manage to instill a new idea inside someone?  Do they come later?  Or should we continue pressing with a new idea until our audience drops to the ground in spasms of spit and gurgles?

The beauty inside the theory of cognitive dissonance is that as human animals we work extremely diligently at a less than conscious level to eliminate dissonance in our lives.  We make the process "easy" and most of the mess is hidden from our consciousness.   This occurs AFTER the state of dissonance is reached.  After an idea has achieved significant strength to oppose other ideas or beliefs.

If the idea you are arguing for is not embraced by the audience, does not worm its way down, challenging an existing (and opposed) belief with its strength of conviction, then I would put forward that your idea is not likely to change the audience or their behavior in any significant way.

The challenge as professional persuaders, in my mind, is how we instill a new idea in such a way that it is embraced and placed in direct opposition to a view, position or belief we desire to impact.

Planners doing the design tango

     image source: STAYFLY!

I believe that as planners we can learn a lot from design thinking.

1. We are both problem solvers.

As planners we spend all our time working on things "in secret" and as a result we tend to not share our tools and we certainly don't share our findings.  Imagine my surprise some months back to realize that there is another group focused on how to better identify people's real needs and to innovate based on these findings.

User Experience designers are many steps ahead on some fronts and willing to share both their tools and their findings.  I want to repeat this last part.  They are willing to share both their tools and their findings.  I witnessed this in presentation after presentation in San Francisco.

I would hazard to say that David Armano thinks of himself as a designer.   He recently had a client who was interested in micro-formats.  Imagine this was your client and this is your first meeting with them.  As a planner, how might you position it?  How would you research it?  I hazard to guess you would be hard pressed to put together a more powerful and insightful presentation than this one:  Micro-Interactions presentation. 

The planner in me would KILL to see what David presents at a later stage to this client when it is now specific to their audience, the research done and the objectives at hand.  (So everyone remember to keep knives away from me during the next karaoke session.)

2. Customer "in the center" just makes sense.

A focus group is anything but involving the user.  It's akin to putting rats in cages.  Something quite sick and that society doesn't trust in anything but quantitative settings.  And yet, focus groups are anything but quantitative. They are the worst of many worlds.

At the Adaptive Path MX conference in San Francisco the conversations were generally around how to drive innovation and positive impact for the business. Every model and every solution hinged on one thing:  the customer in the centre. 

A message that people in marketing have been hearing for some time now.  I think people want to put customers in the centre but are struggling with how to do so.  Something design has been focusing on for quite some time.

3. The power of surprise and innovation

Both the greatest and the simplest single thing to come out of MX San Fran (for me) was a tiny little model for defining the types of research used on a project.

• Explicit:  What someone is willing (and able) to tell us.  What they say.
• Tacit:  What they won't say, but we can infer.
• Latent:  What they don't know and can't say.

Certainly not rocket science.  But when I look at the majority of research I've witnessed being done in marketing, it is both self-reported (surveys, focus groups, interviews) and definitely explicit in nature.  We tend to maintain a very tertiary focus on lurking, behavioral monitoring or any other activities pertinent to tacit observation.  Inference is generally left to what we can glean from explicit task data.

My favorite, however, was latent.  Something you can't ask because they truly can't tell you.

So what good is Latent as a category if a person doesn't know it, can't say it and we can't infer it?!  Great question.  This category refers to where a person can only respond after "seeing" something.  It can be a prototype, a story or even a re-enactment.  It is where the light dawns and they can then have a reaction or response to the idea being tested.  The need is suddenly realized.

We use re-enactments all the time with clients.  But using it in research and ideation is where its real power lies.

If the idea behind the iPhone had been focus grouped to see if people needed a single, touchscreen device, I'm sure it would have been lukewarm at best.  But take that same concept and put a prototype of it into people's hands and watch the amazement and wonder appear and the realization that suddenly so much is at their fingertips that wasn't even a concern before.

If we are working to surprise, delight and innovate, one would be well advised to take a lesson from the design sectors and use all three research categories on your projects.

Wrapping it all up...

So why isn't everyone embracing user-centred design principles?  I think part of the problem is that focusing on the user and the experience first forces us to define the problem differently,  often in a way that breaks down silos.  Sort of the point but the challenge lies in how quickly it can take us away from our areas of expertise and right into someone else's sandbox.

The toad, who is all for a shift to user-centred design principles, presents a sage argument for why agencies should tread carefully before embracing all things "user experience."

"So we can suggest changes in store design to our clients. But if they already have a store design agency, they’re not going to care what we think. Or want to pay us for it."
   - Alan, the tangerine toad

I am learning an unbelievable amount from design thinking.  It has changed the way I approach research and how I am struggling to combine participatory elements into almost everything I do.  And agency, or no agency behind me, I'm proceeding forward.  Watch for more.