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Customer Development: a few tools and resources (or how to become an excellent stalker)
Following on from Justin’s post last week on the empty hamburger dilemma, I’ve been doing some research into what tools and resources are out there on customer development, and who’s using them. Unsurprisingly, it’s the usual suspects who have been putting this methodology into practice: start ups and the people advising them. As Justin pointed out, it doesn’t look like this approach has been adopted by agency land yet, primarily because their source of dollar is the client not the customer, which tends to derail their priorities.
But how can we take some of the lessons that have been learned and implemented by the start up community and apply them to the agency worldview? Here’s a few thoughts pulled together from what other people are already doing.
1. How to find your users
The first step in the process of customer development is finding them. Cindy Alvarez, Product Manager at KISS Metrics, has some useful thoughts on this over on her blog. Adopt a diverse approach and and don’t be snooty about the methods you use (Facebook ads anyone?). It certainly makes sense to set up a Google Alert and trawl through Twitter for mentions of keywords relating to your problem/solution. If you are working for a pre-established brand, as we often are at Made By Many, she suggests putting out a call on Craigslist and equivalents to find customers of the brand and their competitors. As you do more research you’ll start to map where it is that your users hang out and what channels they are comfortable communicating through – Twitter, forums, comments on blogs, Facebook, plain old email. Basically you are a glorified stalker. You’re also a bit like a bee gathering snippets of user nectar from each point you touch down on, which then feeds back into your hypotheses about your problem/solution. Read full post
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Vote for our SXSWi panel suggestions
Made by Many has an opportunity — actually, three — to host panel discussions at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2011, but we need your votes to make it happen.
We attended SXSWi 2010 en masse and absolutely loved it — the people, the networking, the keynotes, the panels and the tequila. By bringing together a huge number of creative, freakishly intelligent people SXSWi acts as a sort of ideas incubator for our industry.
The sessions delegates attend set the tone of the year to come: they raise the issues we talk about and tease out the problems we try to solve. The best sessions kick off conversations that lead to technical innovations, new ways of working, unexpected collaborations and all kinds of general awesomeness. Hosting a panel discussion is an opportunity to start some of those conversations.
Here are the things we want to talk about
Good News: Apps, Paywalls, Publishers and Content
News organizations and publishers are walking backwards into the future carrying the cultural and business baggage of 200 years of mass media. Most will die; new models will arise. In the next half decade we expect a wholesale change in the way news is produced and consumed and by the end of this period we’ll know the answer to the question: “If we had never had mass media, what would journalism look like today?” A panel of individuals involved in news innovation looks at the issue from all sides and plots a path from old to new models of sharing what we need to know.
Daddy, You Should Tweet That: Parenting Goes Digital
The parenting web is on fire, with more parents tweeting and more family sites and services launching every month. Social media is fast becoming a huge part of modern parenting, but to what end? Is it here to wreck or revolutionize family time? Is there money to be made in this market, or are savvy parents marketing-proof? A panel of agencies and service designers will explore a series of projects to identify mistakes made, lessons learned, and future directions for the parenting web.
The Last of the Launch-and-Leave ‘Ems
Negotiating the new handover. Agencies are building fewer static campaign-oriented sites and more platforms, communities and services. Cutting the apron strings between agency and digital product immediately after launch doesn’t make practical sense, but maintaining the relationship indefinitely is costly for the client and creatively stifling for the agency. This panel will explore solutions that are most likely to be beneficial to both parties as well as the members of the service they are trying to build: a new plan for launch, propagation and perpetuation.
Your vote will get us to the next round
All of these panels are in the panel picker right now, just waiting for you to register or sign in (free! easy!) and vote for them. If you think these things are worth talking about, please spread the word and rally the troops to make it so. Please also use the comment space on this post or on the panelpicker to share any ideas or links that you think would make these sessions more valuable.
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Agile training day – another take on visual notetaking
I’ve swithered about posting these notes, given their visual inferiority to Tim’s. But what they lack in beauty, I hope they make up for in utility. I certainly had fun making them. And as someone more adept with a viola in hand than a sketching pen, I’m not too ashamed of my efforts.*
Enjoy.
* Please don’t take that as a cue to harangue me with rubbish viola jokes.
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Sketchnotes: Agile training day at Made by Many
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve put everyone at Made by Many through a day of Agile Training with Simon Baker and Gus Power from Energized Work.
These guys really are the Penn and Teller of agile software development, and I thought the session was excellent. Most of us here have been trying to work in agile ways for five years or more but this was an opportunity to get better at it by broadening our knowledge and understanding. Another post follows containing some more considered takeaways, but I wanted to share these sketch-notes I made during the day. They petered out towards the end of the day as proceedings became more discursive.
There are 10 pages in total, including a ‘page of evil’ where I tried to capture all of the things that we decided one way or another were EVIL.
See the whole set —-> Read full post
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What’s Next for Location-Based Services?
I wrote about Foursquare recently, and thought it would be interesting to follow up, given the fact that the location-based service recently hit the 2 million users mark. So what’s happened since then in the location-based services world? Some key happenings:
- Gowalla is lagging way behind Foursquare as far as users are concerned, and even advertising on billboards doesn’t really help.
- Nevertheless, Gowalla plods on (as they must), and focuses on beauty with the launch of the iPhone 4. Utility will always trump beauty in my opinion, though obviously both together is ideal.
- Whole Foods agrees to stick Foursquare decals in the windows of their stores.
- The Boston Globe is encouraging people to discover more about the city with a location-based check-in service that is neither Foursquare nor Gowalla: SCVNGRSo things are definitely hotting up. What’s next? Apart from the most obvious – more businesses signing up to services like Foursquare to get to know their customers better and encourage repeat business, here’s what I think:
1. Local governments and city councils will use location-based services to encourage citizens to report instances of crime.
The other day I had a phone call from a research agency on behalf of Westminster Council, where I live, to assess the impact of crime in my area. If I could pin-point any instances that I knew of on a map, I’m sure it would help the police in their efforts. Sort of like the Metropolitan Police Crime Map, but user-generated, so that less resources can be spent on surveys. Of course, I’m assuming some level of digital literacy among the public.
2. Tourism Departments and Transport Departments of different cities will offer incentives for visitors and residents to discover their cities, similar to what the Boston Globe is doing.
I’m thinking of some sort of a combination of the Boston Globe Trek and Chromaroma, basically.
However, it is important to remember the basic tenet behind any kind of social networking, whether location-based or otherwise: humans are social animals, and we like to share.
As Yan-David Ehrlich says in this post,
“Location — the “where” of a social experience — is not the most important characteristic of social media. In order to create lasting value, location-aware social networks need to look at what motivates their users to share with one another and make it central to the app’s design and user experience.“
He also says,
“Features and services should come first, and checking-in should be viewed as an accessory. We have to move from creating services that are location-based to those that are “location-enhanced.”That leads me to my next thought, which is:
3. It’s all going to get more social.
So far, Foursquare’s fun but there’s something missing. In the leaderboard, there are always some people who are Check-In Jedis and some who languish at the bottom. The automatic popping-up of tips (if there are any) when you check in at a venue is useful, but it doesn’t happen all the time, and it’s mostly from a stranger. Checking in is losing its novelty – so making it more shareworthy would change the nature of the game.
Would it be possible, for example, to create a chain of events? I check-in somewhere, leave a tip and pass that on to a friend I think would like the place. If they check in there within, say, a month, I get points. Or perhaps I could create a chain of good – I check-in somewhere and leave a code for a friend to use. If the code is used (i.e if my friend checks in there), I donate a certain amount to charity and my friend gets a code that she can leave for a friend of hers to use in turn. Or, using the Dell Swarm/Groupon/Living Social idea, a certain bunch of people agree to donate something if they all check-in at that place within a certain period of time (obviously the place has to be unusual, not the office local!).
We haven’t heard the last of location-based services. Hopefully in their quest for success, they’ll continue to tap into the human quest for opportunities to engage in social stuff.
Image credit: Erica Marshall of muddyboots.org via Flickr courtesy a Creative Commons license
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Made by Many Talk: John-Henry Barac on the Guardian iPhone App
We’ve held some interesting talks here at Made by Many over the last couple of years, and I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve got an exciting one coming up next week.
We’ve invited John-Henry Barac, the designer of the tremendously successful Guardian iPhone app, to come and share his experiences in designing a newspaper app for the iPhone. Our friends at BBH London have kindly agreed to provide a room for the talk, for which we’re very grateful.
The Guardian iPhone app has been a huge hit, and recently won the innovation award at the AOP awards, where the judges said that it “broke the mould of how content to mobile can be monetised”.
The Guardian have long had a reputation for small innovative projects that help to point the way towards a future for quality online journalism, and the iPhone app is an excellent example of that approach. While other newspapers circle the wagons, the Guardian is committed to quality journalism that plays a full part in what Steve Jobs calls ‘the open web’, but have still scored a hit with a paid-for application.
What specific issues were there in developing the Guardian app? Can print publications simply transition to tablets and phones by preserving the page metaphor, or do they need to re-imagine what they do at a more fundamental level? Should they follow Apple’s lead and adopt skeuomorphic interfaces, or should they turn their back on the paper-based past entirely? How can newspapers and magazines develop new services on this new class of mobile device?
These are just a few of the issues that John-Henry will offer an opinion on, and he’s ideally placed to do so. He spent a decade at the Guardian on the print side as an art director, and is therefore both an insider and an outsider; a print man helping to forge a digital future. His is a fascinating perspective on this most hotly debated areas of digital culture.
The talk will start at 1pm on July 15th at BBH London’s offices at 60, Kingly Street, London, W1B 5DS and will last for between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on the number of questions.
We’d love you to come to hear what John-Henry has to say, and to put your own questions to him in person. If you’d like to attend the talk, please email me at james@madebymany.co.uk. There are – obviously – limited spaces available, so it’s best to book your place early.
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Made by Many’s London Digital Event Calendar
London’s a great city to be working in digital/social/whateveryouliketocallit. There are lots of interesting events happening all the time, like the Clay Shirky talk we went to at the RSA a couple of days ago. The problem is that they aren’t easy to keep track of. There’s always Twitter but with the real-time nature of the thing, you’re likely to miss announcements if you aren’t on the service at that particular time. I’ve also heard a few people asking around on Twitter for a calendar that lists events related to our industry, and haven’t found a suitable one yet. So I put together a list of one, which you can access here. If you know of events that should be on the calendar and aren’t, comment on this post, or notify @madebymany on Twitter and I’ll add it. Hope it’s useful!
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Ready for Ten Skillscape – a utility for parents of 6-9 year olds
Last week saw the second release of our engagement platform for Robinson’s Fruit Shoot: Ready for Ten. The build up to the release was short — only five weeks — but in that time we achieved an awful lot. A complete evolutionary turn on the visual design, plus introduction of new features for our members including a VIP Club, enhanced profile pages and most importantly, the Skillscape campaign.
Ready for Ten homepage
What is a Skillscape? Well, it’s something we’ve devised to help parents find the best spaces near them for kids to play, practise and learn new skills. From talking to parents, Read full post
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Around Made by Many
I noticed a cool map on the AnalogFolk website recently, and thought it would be interesting to plot some of Made by Many’s favourite hangouts near our office too, in a quick-and-dirty way, with Google Maps. If you fancy popping in to say hello, these are some of the places we may take you to for a drink or lunch. Don’t forget to see our notes on them here, and if you have something to say about the map, feel free to comment on this post or on the map itself.
Here it is:
View Around Made by Many in a larger map -
Racking up the points…and the coins
I’m probably not the best company nowadays to non-Foursquare users, because checking in has become almost an obsession. When I’m too immersed in the events or conversation of an evening to check in, I mentally kick myself when I realise the fact later at home. I like that I’m still discovering new things about the service on a regular basis. Of course, it isn’t perfect – there continue to be a few bugs with the service which frustrate me no end when I encounter them, but in general the boys at Foursquare seem to have a good thing going. At 1.3 million users, Foursquare is almost 7 times as popular as the next most popular location-based service, Gowalla, despite the latter winning in the Mobile category at SXSWi 2010. (The latest edition of Wired UK has a nice article about the founders and evolution of both).
What motivated me to write this post was the observation that the Foursquare reward mechanism has recently inspired a couple of other reward ‘programmes’, as it were, in completely different industries.
First, the Huffington Post has started giving badges to members in return for their participation on the site, specifically sharing HuffPo news links via Facebook and Twitter, collecting friends and fans, and flagging inappropriate comments.
And in the automotive industry, Subaru has started a Free Vehicle Badge programme, where they give badges to Subaru owners based on their hobbies (gardening, music/arts, the environment, biking, animals and so on).
You know how they talk about the difference between leaders and followers? Perhaps this is an indication of the fact that Foursquare’s star has hit big time – I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of the badge phenomenon yet.
Friends and family often ask me what I get in return for my check-ins on Foursquare, and my response is social kudos. But with businesses cottoning on to the Foursquare phenomenon (Starbucks being the most well-known recent entrant to the game) and offering Mayors and first-time check-ins discounts, I think there’s going to be more to it. Below are a range of the options that Foursquare offers businesses (taken from their website):
- Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue. (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days)
- Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times.
- Frequency-based Specials: unlocked every X check-ins.
- Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but staff have to verify some extra conditions before awarding the Special.
So far most specials that I’ve heard of or noticed are Mayor specials – I’m waiting for businesses to tap into the others in a bigger way, or even create custom specials in co-ordination with Foursquare. I think this is only the beginning, though. Who was it who said that first a technology needs to become mainstream, then it becomes ubiquitous or accepted behaviour, and finally you master it and the innovations start?
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