The Future Place Blog

SKOPOS Video on YouTube

Whilst rummaging around in YouTube I came across the video below which is a promotional video about European market research agency SKOPOS, featuring the ever-present Darren Noyce.

The great thing about the SKOPOS video is that they are trying these things out, and very few other people appear to be trying. The problem with the video is that it is hard to see why somebody on YouTube would choose to watch it. The content is a quick introduction to SKOPOS and makes a very strong image link to London, and a bit of a link to traditional values. But it has no entertainment value or ‘need to know’ hook for the most businessmen when they have their 'YouTube' hat on.

From the SKOPOS website I see that the video was released in January, and they have also released the video via MySpace and is available on their website along with a single. Indeed a visit to the multimedia bit of their website shows that SKOPOS are experimenting with a variety of formats, including podcasts, videos, and images.

I hope that SKOPOS continue to experiment with this medium and perhaps they should look at the second video below, which I think points the way to something that might provide a ‘want to watch’ idea, if developed further (I know I have mentioned this second video before, but I think it has a little bit of something I think could be quite powerful).

SKOPOS Video

Research Odyssey Video.

Your Social Network profile may be more accurate than you think!

This weeks New Scientist has a fascinating, small, article about the impression a person’s Social Network sites create. The research was conducted with the profiles of 133 US students who use Facebook. The profiles included photos, details, and messages from friends.

The study comprised three cells of information. The profiles were shown to strangers who were asked to describe the type of person who had created the site. The people who had created the profiles completed a standard personality test, and finally the people were asked to describe themselves.

The research found that people’s description of themselves did not match their personality profile. But, the impressions that strangers had assumed from viewing the sites matched the results of the personality test.
The implication, if repeated and validated, is that the impression we give about ourselves is more powerful than we might assume, and it might be telling more about us than we would wish. The article highlights that this phenomenon might be crucial in the future, people, including prospective employers, might meet you first through your online profile.

Clicks Losing Saliency

A report in this week’s marketing magazine by Andrew Walmsley reviews how clicks are becoming a redundant currency in terms of assessing the impact of a web site. Walmsley reviews how the currency has changed from hits, to page impressions, to clicks since the mid-90s.

Walmsley makes the point that approaches such as Ajax, RSS, and Widgets mean that people are not actively clicking on pages in order to receive contact and to interact with sites. For example with an Ajax page the application is looking to download stuff in the background to second-guess what you might want next, RSS feeds material to you without visiting the site, whilst widgets sit on your PC and fetch information from elsewhere.

Walmsley did not speculate what the new measure of success will be, but clearly sites and advertisers need something now that the page view has become decoupled from site use, and now that the click has been undermined.

Can big companies buy coolness?

Slashdot has a post by Toby Toadstool highlighting an article on Cnet which asks “Can the Me-Too Tubes buy the zeitgeist?”. The story follows on the news that News Corp and NBC plan to build a rival to YouTube, and pours scorn on the attempts by stodgy ‘old’ brands when they try to ‘get with the youth’.

The new venture will offer free full-length films and TV shows, and will be fully legal. However, it is not clear that being fully legal is perceived as a consumer benefit at the moment. The article notes cases where big brands tried to buy their way into coolness, for example Microsoft’s attempt to attack the iPod niche with Zune. These cases sit well alongside the example, quoted by Nigel Hollis, of Bud TV.

The article closes with the following comment “… there is something incredibly boring and sad about giant companies who constantly chase the fleeing tailcoats of the latest Internet trends. Like the kid who leant over and copied you in art class, News Corp/NBC are the archetypal corporation -- lumbering and so very uncool.”.

Ray Nominated for Best Presentation

I have just seen the news on the MRS website that I have been shortlisted for two MRS Conference awards! I have been short listed for the Special Contribution award and the Best Presentation Award - the winners are announced in the Autumn, at the annual dinner. My Virtual Surveys collegue Pete Comley (or should that be rival now?) has also been nominated for a Special Contribution award.

The presentation I used at the MRS conference Research 2.0, Walking the Talk, was the first outing for the style of presentation I have been working on since reviewing the Lessig method material. The style certainly requires more preparation and feels much more exposed, no charts and numbers to hide behind, but it certainly seemed to be well received on its first outing.

I will be using this approach, and some of the same slides, at the BIG conference in May and at two seminars being hosted by my colleagues at Virtual Surveys. With the sucess of the first attempt I certainly feel energised to go back and see how the presentation can be made better (inight plus engagement being the target).

Political Spin About Iraqi Death Statistics Exposed

The BBC have posted a report that shows that the UK Government knew that the methodology that was used in 2006 study published in the Lancet (the UK doctor’s magazine) was robust and was close to ‘best practice’. The Lancet survey had used a cluster sampling technique and had estimated that the number of deaths caused by and since the invasion in 2003 was 655,000 (with upper and lower estimates of 393,000 and 943,000). The study was conducted by John Hopkins School of Public Health and survey 47 areas across 16 provinces, talking to 1,850 families, comprising 12,800 people.

When the report was published it was attacked, both in terms of whether the estimates were credible, and in terms of its methodology. Tony Blair attacked it because he said it used extrapolation from a non-representative part of Iraq. Lord Triesman (a foreign office minister) said the method “is a matter of deep concern”. But Triesman wa speaking six days AFTER the Ministry of Defence’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Roy Anderson, had issued a memo confirming that the study was robust and the methods used were close to best practice.

The BBC accessed this information under the UK’s Freedom of Information’s Act (something the Government is currently seeking to limit).

There can be honest dispute about the accuracy of the estimates produced by the methodology used in the study published by the Lancet – as with most methods. For example, the Iraqi Body Count group, an NGO looking into deaths in Iraq, have produced an estimate of about 62,000 civilian deaths since the invasion. Their response to the Lancet study talks about where the missing 490,000 deaths would have to be to reconcile the estimates.

However, it cannot be acceptable for the UK and US governments to attack the methodology of a study after they have been advised by the relevant experts that the method is robust and “best practice”.

Signal to Noise Ratio in Presentations

Garr has a great post on Presentation Zen, looking at several issues relating to signal (good) and noise (bad) in the context of presentations. The key message of the post is the need to tell a clear story and not to distract the audience from the story.

The post has quite a long section on the merits of using pie charts, and suggests a number of alternatives. I do not necessarily agree that the bar charts shown are better than all pie charts shown, but the discussion is well worthwhile.

My main concern about the post, and about others by the likes of Seth Godin, is that they seem to be based on highly literate, visual people generalising from their perspective to the population. I would like to see all presenters (me included) spending longer talking to audiences afterwards to find out what worked and what did not work. What do I mean by worked? I try to have a clear objective for a presentation, for example I might want the audience to understand that the brand is doing OK, but it could do better in terms of responsive service, and that the customers have identified that these three changes would be the best way to affect their view of responsive service. If that message has got across then it has worked. IF I have ALSO reassured the audience that I am a great researcher and a great presenter, then it has worked even better!

The post by Garr includes this really fun pie chart, which Garr describes as having been going round the internet for a while, but I think justifies repeating.

ESOMAR Prices Study Launches

On Wednesday we conducted a soft launch of the ESOMAR prices study. A soft launch is always a good idea with any survey, and especially a survey with one’s peers. BTW, a soft launch is where a small percentage of the invitations are sent out a few days before the main launch – allowing any problems that crept past the quality checks to be picked up.

Our early feedback from the study suggests that we need to clarify that we want everybody to include all standard extras such as incentives and location hire. One of the problems with creating comparable projects and comparable costs is that different countries often have different customs and practices, and we need to remove as many as possible of these variations in the comparisons.

MRS Conference – A Curate's Egg!

I’m writing this blog on the train heading back to Nottingham from Brighton. A curate's egg is an old fashioned way of saying something is part good, part bad.

The good things about the MRS conference were:

• The people, it is always nice to see old friends and meet new people
• Brighton, a place that gladdens the heart and provides a great venue for the non-conference aspects of the conference.
• The papers, several useful contributions, and more written papers to read. Macer, Pearson, and Sebastiani’s presentation on the automated coding of verbatims was particularly useful.
• The MRS team and the techies who did there best to make sure that things worked

The bad things, however, were all related to the venue. The conference venue, the Metropole is tired and tatty, the loos were in poor repair, and the rooms were too spread out. The Durham room had no dividing wall separating it from the hub/dining area and all the speakers had to compete with a background hum of voices and the clinking of cups. The main Thursday afternoon session was on Web 2.0, about 60 people had to sit on the floor because there was not enough seating. At the lunch break the hotel kept running out of food, and kept running out of coffee.

As much I love the MRS, I have to say that this was the worst venue I have attended for any conference, for many, many years, and to say that it was for the 50 anniversary conference makes it all the worse.

The Web 2.0 expert session I was running Thursday morning was hidden away in different part of the hotel and was scheduled to start before people would be able to leave the plenary session, which certainly seemed to hit the numbers. However, several people accosted me later to say how good the session was, and the slides should be put on the Virtual Surveys website in the near future. I was quite reassured by the response as I was using my ‘modified Lessig’ system – more slides, fewer words, almost no numbers. I will be using this approach again for my Keynote speech at BIG

How to use New Media Badly – The Bud Way

Nigel Hollis has a great post about the apparent failure of Anheuser-Busch’s Bud.TV. Basically Nigel challenges whether Bud.TV has the right content and whether it understands what people are looking for online. If you are interested, read the article, I can’t paraphrase it without stealing it. But I will lift one wonderful quote where Nigel quotes Jackson West, who says of the Bud.TV content “forcibly viral by committee.”.

The success of some online ventures, such as www.threadless.com challenge whether research is needed. But clearly, when major brands with existing equity want to make a major exploration of a New Media they should be researching it. And if Bud.TV did research it, and if they did pay proper attention to that research, then they should consider moving their business!