1. Social is a paradigm shift

Thanks to the emergence of digital media channels, the way people shop is fundamentally and irreversibly different from a few years ago. We’ve moved on from brand-controlled messages to a world of empowered consumers in a channel-agnostic marketplace.

This brings with it new rules and metrics for acquiring, retaining and interacting with customers.

The power of selling has been with the seller because of the broadcast model and advertising culture. Over the last few years, technology has changed. The customer is now exercising this power.

Search is still a critical mechanism for the web, but time spent on search is up just 1%, compared to a 50% increase in time spent on social networks.”

To take advantage of this, brands must ensure there is a consistent customer experience across online, instore and mobile channels, and social must be a part of every aspect of the business.

2. Social data reveals the why behind the buy

Opinions from friends are still the most trusted source for purchasing decisions – 90% of consumers now trust peer recommendations compared to 14% that rely on advertising.

With the growth of social, consumer conversations are now available online giving businesses access to new data and an opportunity to align more closely to the needs of customers.

Listening to people in social media is fantastic because the comment is made at the moment of high engagement. What you learn through this kind of medium cannot be gathered through research.”

Understanding trends in consumer data allows businesses to become more customer-centric, which is proven to drive sales, decrease returns and support costs, inspire product innovation, and power effective marketing.

3. Becoming customer-centric demands cultural and organisational transformation

Social media brings companies closer to their customers; the real people who shop for, buy, and use their products and services.

The shift in power from broadcast to fragmented media, from brand to consumer, from paid media to earned media, collectively requires a new focus for businesses: an obsessive devotion to understanding and delighting customers.

This calls for an organisation-wide cultural shift at every level.

See the full report by Bazaarvoice

Lydia Dishman wrote an article for Forbes that describes the new app, which is summarized below.

In April, Walmart bought Kosmix, a social media start-up focused on e-commerce for $300 million. The new firm joined Silicon Valley-based @WalmartLabs division to work on building the retail giant’s online shopping experience.

One result of the collaboration are apps for the iPhone and iPad. They are designed to simplify weekly shopping trips for grocery staples, and should be launched by Black Friday.

The National Retail Federation estimates over 52 percent of smartphone users will use their devices for holiday shopping. There’s been significant mobile adoption among the estimated 140 million customers who walk through Walmart stores every week.

One feature of the app is smart shopping lists, which allows customers to add items either by scanning a barcode on a product they already have or by speaking or typing the name of the item. They’ll also be able to access product details, customer reviews, and local availability. A budgeting tool calculates the total price of the list as items are added and calls up manufacturer’s coupons where available.

See the original article at: http://onforb.es/ssv90Y

Mashable published the infographic below to present JiWire’s findings.

Below is a mini-interview with Jason Parker of Leo Burnett. As Jason explains, his view is that account planning is no longer about consumers, but about people and experiences.

PB: What does a Planning Director do?

JP: So, account planning is just another term for Strategy. It started in the UK years ago when agencies saw that media had a ton of research that wasn’t being fully applied so they created specialized account managers to use it. It’s the merge between Account Management and Media Planning (hence, Account Planning). It’s evolved over the years and now incorporates a lot of different types of disciplines. For example, my background’s in psychology and have done some traditional brand planning as well as digital strategy.

What I do is work to unify ideas to create holistic programs and experiences. The UX part of my job (though I’d not refer to myself as a UX planner) is essentially in designing communication experiences. Part research and insights, part media, part creative, part content strategy, part UX. Sounds like a lot, but it’s really a lot of orchestration.

PB: What do you like most about your job?

JP: What I love about what I do is the chance to work with diverse people with different types of expertise. It’s about finding a common thread and making it work to simplify and focus experiences. I often refer to what I do as creative problem solving – lots of folks do that, so nothing special – but I’m lucky in that I get to apply it across a lot of different disciplines.

Designing experiences is increasingly important as consumer communication becomes more complex. To me, design is about simplification and focus which is needed now more than ever. This also includes graphic design. Creating elegance out of complexity.

PB: What are the biggest things on the horizon that you’re interested in?

JP: What I’m most excited about right now is that the need to create meaningful experiences for people is actually forcing us to go back to understanding fundamental human behaviors. It’s no longer about consumers, it’s about people. It’s not about brand perceptions and attitudes, it’s about human motivation and behavior. Disruption, persuasion… all these things are no longer as relevant as we try to create communication experiences that actually DO things for people – help them in ways beyond just buying a product. It’s about creating marketing that’s a service in and of itself.

Tagwhat announces the launch of its publishing platform that allows anyone to create and monetize their own location-based multimedia stories. Comprised of video, audio, images, and text, Tagwhat stories can be placed anywhere in the world for mobile users to discover.

Tagwhat’s mobile application delivers location-based stories in real-life context by employing GPS and a digital compass. Stories are displayed in order of proximity to the user and are organized in Channels that are toggled on and off to quickly filter through different streams of content. Tap on a story to launch the full multimedia experience. The mobile application launched in July seeded with content created by its in-house team of journalists and filmmakers as well as select launch partners including the Associated Press (AP) and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Since then, the demand for access to Tagwhat’s publishing platform has been tremendous.

“Today marks the start of a new mobile medium: Multimedia Stories at Places. We go to radio for audio, to TV for video, and now Tagwhat delivers multimedia experiences tied to places on the mobile.” said co-founder and CEO, Dave Elchoness.

How does it work? Visit publish.tagwhat.com and follow the steps. Tap on the map where the story will be found. Input text and upload the video, images, and audio that tell the story. Assign the story to one of Tagwhat’s channels: Heritage, Movies, Books, Sports, Music, Real Estate, Food, Art, or Nature. Add in actions that automatically link users to websites for additional content or commerce, and interaction through email, phone, and SMS. Tagwhat will review submissions to ensure a high quality user experience.

What kind of stories fit in Tagwhat? A restaurant could publish a video interview with its chef talking about her inspiration for the signature dishes she has created. An art gallery could offer images and video of artists creating their works to encourage passersby to learn more. Sports teams can now deliver great media experiences to fans in and around the stadium. Realtors can offer prospective buyers video walkthroughs of properties and a deeper look at the neighborhood and nearby schools.

Publishers can easily monetize their stories in Tagwhat. A band could, for example, publish video and audio from a recent show, place the story at a concert hall, and include a link to purchase tickets or souvenirs.

“Anyone with a location in mind, now has a canvas for offering a story to people at that place.” said Elchoness. “Think about all the videos, images, and other content hidden away on the internet in sites like YouTube and Flickr. Tagwhat extends these beyond the ‘web’ to real places surrounding real people for entertainment, education, information, commerce, or any purpose benefiting from place-based engagement.”

[Excerpted from Tagwhat Press Release]

The following is a mini-interview I conducted with Adriano Braun Galvao, author of Design Relationships: Integrating User Information into Product Development, and VP of Sylver Consulting. 

PB: What is your book about?

ABG: This book introduces an innovative method for creating products that work better for consumers. The methodology, developed through pragmatic case studies, is applicable to industrial projects, helping developers to define attributes of future products, and reducing the chances of making wrong decisions about the relationships between product functions and users’ tasks. Some of the key topics addressed in the book are: affordances, product architecture and user research.

PB: How can UX strategy and design professionals put this information to practical use in their projects?

ABG: As products are being embedded with increased functional and interface capabilities, there is a rising demand for design methods that can incorporate user interaction into the product architecture design process. The affordance-based method and the practical case studies presented in this book make it an excellent reference for practitioners, students and academics in the product development field.

PB: What is on the user experience or digital horizon that most interests you?

ABG: Digital spaces and related applications.

The following is a mini-interview I conducted with Rainer Gibbert, a user insights lead for Xing, which I would describe as a European counterpart to LinkedIn.

PB: What does a User Insights Team Lead do?

RG: First let me shortly say something about XING – as probably not all readers will know it. XING is a professional social network based in Germany… quite similar than LinkedIn but (at least in the German-speaking region) much more active and personal… and of course much more usable!

The user insights team (actually the name of my team is “User Insights and Consulting”) is part of the product department of XING. The job of the team is to find out who the XING users are, how they work, what their needs are, how XING meets those needs. etc. And we carry those insights into the organization and consult our colleagues with regards to usability and UX questions.

So my job basically consist of two main parts. First I do lots of user research, user tests or generally talk to users. Second I help my colleagues in the product department to transform the insights we obtain into valuable and usable products.

PB: What do you like most about your job?

RG: My job is very versatile, interesting and fun. First, I talk a lot with people, learn interesting things about how people think, work and network and meet interesting personalities. Second, I work in a very nice, collaborative and inspiring team and company. And third, social networks are a really challenging, fast-changing and growing, interesting and fun topic to work on.

PB: What are the biggest things on the user experience design horizon that you’re interested in?

RG: As XING is a company using agile development, I used to work a lot on integrating UX into our agile processes in the past. And I would say that were have made good progress with this in the last 1,5 years.

Other topics that I am really interested in are persuasion design and game mechanics. How can we use those techniques to make our users more active, do the things we want them to do etc.

A last topic I would mention here is innovation management. In my team we collect loads of valuable insights that XING can use to create cool products. But transforming those insights and user needs into real problem-solving (innovative) products is not always easy. The insights have to be collected, analyzed and interpreted in the right way. After that, we need to find the right approaches to meet the user needs… I really like the design thinking approach to reach this goal.

PB: What is Userlytics about? 

ARM: Leveraging webcam ubiquity and the targeting power of digital media to revolutionize exploratory qualitative research.

We are transforming study turn-around times from weeks to days, even hours;

We are allowing for studies with highly specific and granular demographics, almost anywhere in the world;

We are placing our clients inside the homes of their targeted personas, so they can watch and listen as they interact with websites and prototypes, react to content and advertisements, and resolve their needs and wants;

Overall it can be viewed as a mix of ethnographic studies, immersive qualitative research and remote user experience testing:

The Video-in-Video platform allows for seeing and listening to the participants, their context and surroundings, and their actions on their desktop screen, whether browser related or not.

The innovative digital media based recruitment methodology allows for extremely specific personas, recruited in a very fast turnaround, at a very affordable price point.

PB: What do you like most about your job?

ARM: I love the international aspect. Userlytics has had the good fortune to have employees from around the world contribute to its success, including colleagues from Peru, Mexico, Chekia, France, Spain, Argentina, US, Ukraine, Poland, New Zealand, Ireland, and Switzerland.

Our orientation from the very beginning has been international, and although that creates many challenges, it is also a very enriching experience, for all of us.

PB: What are the biggest things on the user experience horizon that you’re interested in?

ARM: We believe that mobility will transform the user experience field. We are actively developing a mobile version of our platform, and we believe this will be the main focus of our product development for the foreseeable future.

Below is a mini-interview I conducted with Kimberley Williamson, Social Media Strategist with Goldstein Communications. If you have an interesting job and would like to be interviewed, drop me a line.

PB: What does a Digital Strategist do?

KW: In my role as a Digital Strategist I am responsible for balancing many aspects of a digital initiative on behalf of a client. I like to think of my projects as requiring three media arms to operate effectively and a good digital strategist can take these arms and figure out how best to use them and how they should work together.

These are:

1: Paid Media (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Banner Ads, using services such as Retargeter, Etc)

2: Marketed Media (Curation of content across social spaces including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)

3: Earned Media (Placements and awareness brought about by blogger outreach, content syndication etc.)

PB: What do you like most about your job?

KW: My favorite aspect of my job has to be measurement and reporting. The biggest strength of working with online properties is that everything is trackable and provable. Using things such as impressions, interactions or conversion rates, we can gauge the success of an initiative with an accuracy never before achievable. I love gathering all of these things and presenting them in a format that proves what I’ve done was valuable.

PB: What are the biggest things on the digital strategy horizon that you’re interested in?

KW: Looking forward, I will be paying particular attention to the following things:

I believe that mobile technologies such as apps and mobile sites will become integral parts of any business (especially retailers). I feel that American consumers have some catching up to do in terms of mobile purchasing and that the next coolest thing will involve a monetary transaction solution for consumers and their fancy devices.

I don’t think that the next big thing will be a new platform. I think that smart brands will keep their eyes on new applications of platforms that are already established. Foursquare, in particular, is very encouraging of others building on their API and a lot of fun products have been the result of this.

The days of brands reaping the benefits of being early adopters are long gone. The online community at large is used-to and comfortable with interacting with brands in a digital space and they have high expectations for how established brands should be performing. It’s exciting to see how these brands are pushing the boundary of connectedness and interactivity to take creative ideas to their limits in order to stir up some buzz.

See Kimberley’s LinkedIn profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberleywilliamson

The following is a mini-interview I conducted with Nanqian (Nancy) Xu, a design researcher who studied design strategy in the U.S. and now works for Samsung in China. I asked her to describe her work and interests.

PB: Please describe your current job role.

NX: My current job is the product researcher of Samsung Design China. Which my output will be linked to the design part. Mostly we do ergonomic research and sometimes quantitative and emotional research. We are trying to understand the local market and comparing with global market, to see what are the key driving factors of localized product usage.

PB: How design research similar, and how is it different, in the US and China?

NX: 1. Do be conservative. people in China are more conservative specially in less developed part or in higher income level (premium). Using camera (DSLR) is very disturbing while doing home visits. Not mentioned about the video. Best way to do it is to inform the people ahead, then use your iphone to take photos or videos. Do not point it to the user.
2. Do not bring foreigners. People in China will be more cautious, or curious about your peer than the topic.
3. Do check with the interviewee before your interview. Their availability, time length….Best is talk to them in person(phone), make them understanding you are not selling things or spam…
4. Methods? keep it simple. either direct or indirect, do not use complex tools. They will be frustrated than u do.
5. Gender? it really matters, or not. If you are going to a single lady’s home, might be good to bring only girls. (at least ask them before you go, to see if they are Ok with the group of people)

PB: What are the biggest things on the international design horizon that you’re interested in?

NX: To keep updated with the most best things, in every field of design.
We all know that youtube, facebook, flipboard or those good & fresh media are banned in China. Then I really need to know, and keep the social network and knowledge as a global level. To be localized in the research insights. but not be localized with the vision.
If you guys are having really good resource, like organizations, conferences,…etc, can be both online or in reality. Just let me know and I will try my best to make it spreading in the design field in China.

And last, dont get scared when I say do not bring foreigners. In a different type of research, like double mirrored room, market visit, focus group, you guys who are interested in China are highly welcomed. And with the help of local researcher, you can also peak into the real life of Chinese. People are open-minded in megacities.
Anytime in China, let me know. I will introduce some nice spots to enjoy the original Chinese living.