What is icanmakeitbetter?

Well, here is an answer in a short video. All new platform with a ton of new features: surveys, customer panel and idea platform and customer feedback all in one simple, powerful tool. And, it's FREE!

SXSW: A short Sentient Services history

We had the pleasure of being part of Startup America and the Dell Entrepreneur In Residence program during SXSW 2012. You can read the article written by Dell's EIR Ingrid Vandervelt HERE.

And watch the interview below.

I hope you enjoy this short "history" of Sentient Services. We could not have done it without great support from family, friends and clients - thank you!

The Subtle Art of NO

A few years back I found myself in a transitional place professionally. I was in a new state looking for work in a related (albeit only marginally related) field. I found myself in an interview wearing a suit (yes, a suit), sitting in front of someone whose role, and entire department to be honest, I did not fully understand. It’s times like these,  when one takes a resume from one field and submits it to another that you realize you have been talking in hyperbole, or in other words BS laden task lists made to look like a resume. All of a sudden a resume riddled with sexy items like managing the production of vertical specific variations for non-transactional web content becomes worked closely with writers to update various website articles. The latter line item is boring, lame, flat…and as humbling as it may be, more informative to most people on the planet. It was during the vernacular-free discussion that I realized the fulcrum of my career was the fact that I had refined a way to tell my clients and managers “no” on a regular basis and have them love me for it.

Allow me to explain…back to the interview. As it turns out, I got the job. A while later, my boss told me I pulled off the upset and edged out someone with much more relevant experience because of my answer to one single question – “Do you have any experience with difficult clients?” My response – “Respectfully, there’s no such thing as an easy client. But, if you keep them informed and deliver what you say you will, they get a lot easier.” Before you fire me, let me explain. During the interview, I went on to elaborate about how clients come to agencies and research firms to extend their own skill sets and resources. As such, both sides – agency and client – are almost constantly teaching each other new things. This may be learning about new technical product features only a senior engineer could understand (and love) or mastering the phrasing nuances of an insightful discussion guide. For this reason, each project includes an ebb and flow of novel information that makes both sides vulnerable to mistakes which can quickly derail the productivity of any given project.

Now, combine constant learning/exploration with a smartphone in your pocket that makes you available 24x7 and you’ll find that it’s the urge to please, and over-commit that can get you into trouble very quickly. For instance, I may tell my boss I can crank out three reports in as many days. But the end result is going to be a 60+ hour week, and three reports where a substantial piece of each was written past midnight. To quote my high school golf coach – “Nothing good happens after midnight.” I and my client would have a much better product to show for it had I just inserted a little incubation time for each of those reports. Faster is not always better. Once you fail to meet a deadline or underperform, whether irrationally overextended or not, you’ve just set off a chain reaction that will take a whole heck of a lot longer to sort out than the original extra half day you cut out of the schedule, just to be agreeable.

Now, there are two qualifiers here – 1) you must not overuse this gift and 2) this must never be for solely your benefit. Frequently use “no” and you will find yourself fired for being an obstructionist, as you should be. Too much self-serving “no, because that would require me to work past 6” and you’ll be fired for being lazy, as you should be. My point is that we must strive to exceed expectations. Sometimes, that means that you have to lean hard on a history of achievement and ask your colleagues to “Trust me; you’ll be much better off if we do this…” Sometimes you swallow your dissent, roll up your sleeves and make impossible deadlines looks like a walk in the park.

Clients, and our bosses, pay us (not to be tacky, but) a good chunk of money to exceed their expectations – which is not a matter of killing yourself to crank out deliverables. Exceeding expectations is a delicate balance between building up credibility through over-achieving when your client/boss needs you and then calling upon that reservoir of goodwill when things appear headed off course. Master the art of “no” and they’ll love you for it.

Two More New Hires!

Details below on the new hires, but these are some great folks, and fun to work with as well!

Sentient Services is pleased to announce the hire of Meghan Bazaman as Research Analyst at Sentient Services. Ms. Bazaman has a Master of Arts in Advertising from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining Sentient Services, Meghan worked on the agency side at ThinkStreet, and was an Experience Design/Usability intern at Dell. Meghan brings a unique creative  and research driven perspective to global research clients.

Eric Vo is joining Sentient Services to manage clients and projects on the icanmakeitbetter.com social innovation and market research platform. Eric holds a Bachelor of Science in Music Industry/Business Studies from Loyola University, New Orleans, where he studied business strategies and technologies for entertainment companies. Prior to Sentient Services, Eric pursued his entrepreneurial interests by helping build online startups from the ground up, contributing to market research, coding, and online marketing (SEO/SEM). Eric brings a strong technology background as a coder and site builder combined with online marketing, and social community experience.

We are super excited about these new hires. The addition of Meghan and Eric to the Sentient Services and icanmakeitbetter team allows us to continue our rapid global growth, while maintaining impeccable client service and quality. We interviewed for 6 months before finding just the right fit of market research skills, project management and interactive expertise. It just so happened that we found two perfect fits at the same time – we got lucky!

Feel free to stop by and say howdy to them anytime. Thanks for your continued support and helping make Sentient Services and icanmakeitbetter.com a success!

Lessons from SXSW 2012

A great part of being located in Austin, is that it is known as the “Live Music Capital of the World”. Every spring, we have an amazing music festival called SXSW. For those of you not familiar with SXSW it is a weeklong festival of music, movies and cutting edge technology.  As I find myself in the trenches of SXSW this week, I continue to wonder, how did it all get started? I found an article that breaks down the origins of this well-known Austin festival (complete with nifty timeline and demographics):

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2012/03/06/sxsw-over-the-years-from-music-to-tech/

The post begins by describing the amazing growth in popularity of SXSW:

 “What started out as a small avenue for 700 participants to share their common interest in music has since grown to more than twenty times its original size. The growth spreads across more platforms beyond music, including film and web tech. Today, South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival (SXSW) is a much anticipated international gathering of fun-loving and business-minded people.”

I believe that what makes the festival continue to grow in popularity is the central idea that people like to gather around and share their common interests. SXSW fosters a community of people that care about music, film, business, technology and emerging interactive trends. With the springboard in place, people will begin to congregate and share.

Looking at the highlights of this year’s SXSW interactive portion, we see buzz around applications designed specifically for improved sharing. For example, companies like Instagram , a very successful app for sharing photos with friends and family, joined in on the SXSW interactive panels, announcing 27 million users and plans to launch a new Android app very soon. There was also talk of a new app called Highlight. Highlight allows its users to learn more about the people in their nearby location. The app lets you look up names, photos, mutual friends and anything they have chosen to share. Meaning when you meet someone, you can see what you have in common with them.

The bottom line is that people will always find ways to connect around what interests them and what they care about. It is merely the changing technology, allowing us to do so, that makes festivals like SXSW so interesting and exciting.

At Sentient Services, we also believe in connecting people around their interests and ideas, just like SXSW and its event goers.

Our idea platform icanmakeitbetter can be used for market research, but more importantly, it’s a community where users can connect around what they care about and have in common. With icanmakeitbetter, members can post, share, follow ideas, participate in online discussions and take surveys with others. The end result of these conversations – help to improve what you care about.

See our platform at work with Dell and City of Austin.  

We have a CTO!

Yes, we, the market research company, now have a CTO! Read below for all the details, but needless to say this is very exciting and huge for Sentient Services and our social innovation and market research platform - icanmakeitbetter.com.


Sentient Services hires best-selling author and renowned developer – Bruce Tate (March 2012)

[Austin, Texas. March 2012. For immediate release.]

Bruce Tate has joined Sentient Services as CTO and will head up all technology practices, including Sentient Services’ groundbreaking social innovation and research platform (www.icanmakeitbetter.com). Bruce is an internationally in-demand speaker (Ruby World in Japan, The Server Side Symposium and other), and best-selling author, including the Jolt award winning Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and From Java to Ruby.

Prior to joining Sentient Services, Bruce founded and ran RapidRed which worked with high growth start-ups to rapidly build genre-leading web applications such as DigtheDirt. Bruce spent 13 years at IBM, including co-authoring several IBM patents and serving on IBM’s certification board for application development.

Bruce will be managing the icanmakeitbetter.com platform – a patent-pending SaaS solution providing crowdsourced innovation, customer engagement and market research in a seamless, scalable and dead-simple platform. Since its quiet launch by Sentient Services in 2011, it has changed the way organizations engage with customers, innovate and conduct market research.  

Sentient Services CEO and icanmakeitbetter founder Paul Janowitz states: “Bruce’s is nothing short of a huge win for us. Bruce’s proven experience with rapid application development for scalable social platforms with leading technologies such as Ruby on Rails will let us move quickly to build the next generation of market research and innovation software. Having Bruce full-time as our CTO changes the game. Expect big things to come out of Sentient Services and the icanmakeitbetter.com platform.”

About Sentient Services, LP

Sentient Services is a Knowledge Studio® - the amalgamation of market research, user experience and information design practices. We leverage these core competencies for our clients in product development, interactive, usability, sales, marketing and branding.

icanmakeitbetter is a patent-pending, revolutionary social innovation and market research platform developed from the ground up by Sentient Services. icanmakeitbetter enables organizations to create, share, and act upon ideas to drive innovation, engage customers and conduct market research.

For more information on Sentient Services or icanmakeitbetter, please go to:

www.sentientservices.com or www.icanmakeitbetter.com

Contact:

Paul Janowitz

paul@sentientservices.com

512.288.1706

Building a Community around Interests

While surfing the web the other day, I came across a blog post by one of my former professors, George Howard, on his personal blog 9GiantSteps.

The post “Shifting Social Sands” tries to explain the recent phenomenon regarding the rapid boom of Pinterest and other interest-oriented websites/applications and how this boom sheds light on the way emerging companies should position themselves in the “Facebook era”.

Everyone (or at least 800 million people) has a Facebook profile. While Facebook is the market leader by a long shot, social network upstarts like Pinterest, Instagram, Chowhound, etc. are having a major impact (Pinterest share button now on CrateandBarrel.com!) beyond Facebook – how?

According to Howard, it is because social networks like Pinterest focus on object or interest-oriented networking instead of acquaintance-oriented networking (Facebook). The simple way to explain this is that Pinterest connects people through the things/interests they share in common, while Facebook connects people through other people.

This finding gives great insight to how emerging companies should think about building their network and customer base. As Howard says, “There is tremendous opportunity to rethink how we should be conceiving of networks moving forward. As I’ve argued forever, look to objects of interest (in some respects, the more specific the better) that people are passionate about, and give them the tools to better organize. Doing so will lead to far more durable, rewarding, and expansive connections than organizing around existing social connections.”

This is what we at Sentient Services and those at other companies should strive to do on a daily basis. We work to connect people around their personal interests and things they care about.

While our platform icanmakeitbetter is a tool used for market research, in its simplest form it is a network that we hope allows our users to collaborate around ideas/objects that they genuinely “want to make better,” and then see the results of their collaboration. We connect people based on the products they use and the ideas they have. Through this they become engaged with each other and the brand through social collaboration. We allow them to become part of the brand/product through their ideas. Our users are able to post their ideas, receive feedback on their ideas from other users, and then see their ideas implemented by the company. This creates a depth of brand engagement that is hard to find elsewhere, and gives our users a sense of accomplishment once they see their ideas at work. We think the future of innovation, research and social networks lies in these shared “objects of interest” and making them better!

Back to the Basics

I came across an interesting article today called “Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A “Social Media Expert” featured on Business Insider by Peter Shankman. In addition to being quite hilarious; it also covers the serious subject of current social media and how it can get in the way of what organizations NEED to do – deliver customer services and products people really want to buy.

Peter brings up a great point about the use of social media stating that at the end of the day a company’s success is not based alone on Facebook page likes or Twitter posts but is really about a simple basic driver - “It’s about generating revenue through solid marketing and stellar customer service, just like it’s been since the beginning of time.”

While social media outlets can create buzz, they should not be the only thing in your marketing toolkit as they do not make up for the basic marketing principals. As Peter states, “Do you know your audience? Have you reached out to them? I’m not talking about “tweeting at them.” I’m talking about actually reaching out. Asking them what you can do better, or asking those who haven’t been around in a while what you can do to get them back. It’s not about 10 percent off coupons or “contests for the next follower.”

The question is: How do you marry the latest buzz creating social media with direct customer interaction, innovation, and market research?

The answer is: icanmakeitbetter

I know this may seem like a cheesy plug for my own company (which it sort of is), but this article and this type of discussion is one of the main reasons we created icanmakeitbetter. While social media is a great tool, customers want to be heard and feel their feedback is shaping the products and services offered to them. We created icanmakeitbetter as a solution to do just this.

Please check out the platform and see how Dell and City of Austin are using social media to innovate, engage and actually do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. And if you have any questions, comments or ideas, I would love to hear from you!!

Sentient Services UX client City of Austin launches new acclaimed site

We had the pleasure of doing the end-user citizen UX (usability and IA) research for the City of Austin's completely redone website. Steel Advertising and Interactive did the design and knocked it out of the park.
Check out the City of Austin website here.

And the MuniNetGuide article here. Where they state "To say Austin's revamped municipal website is "impressive" is like calling a giraffe a tall animal." Read it and see why usability research pays big dividends!