The Power Of Doing Nothing

It is time for some Sentient employees to take off! Don't worry they will be back. We have Julie reaching her 3+ year mark and Kristen is in year 4. At Sentient we provide a little extra time off (you must take 2 weeks without email or contacting the office) and $5,000 travel allowance after 3 years and then every 3 years after that. The only catch is that we get to keep their computer and they can't call in to the office or contact us.

As we are fond of saying:
We all want to be proud of our work. But as important as our next project is, we know that it’s not our greatest gift or the greatest good that we can do. We have to work for a living, but it’s the living that defines us, not the work. 

Well, this is part of that "living" thing we strive for. So, Julie will be gone part of this Summer and Kristen in the Fall. I could try to explain the benefits of this, but I think this video from TED says it very well. (Though we have not figured out how to take a year off just yet.)

New ways to "research"

While it may not be “classic market research,” social media is bringing new ways for businesses to connect with customers for communication and feedback.

Interesting case in point – I was eating dinner at Tarka Indian Kitchen last night, and I saw that they had a well placed call to action to facilitate feedback from customers.

As my camera phone lacks the focus of an SLR camera, what you are looking at is a table tent that is found on each table.  On one side is the wine list, and on the side we’re looking at is an invitation to “Share Your Experience” by reviewing them on Yelp.  The final paragraph invites customers to submit their review immediately using Tarka’s free Wi-Fi connection.

With this open-ended approach Tarka is accomplishing several things:

1. Driving user-generated content about their restaurant by encouraging reviews
2. Gathering unstructured feedback from customers
3. Advertising that they have free Wi-Fi
4. Gathering point-of-purchase feedback from those that login at their table using their smartphone or laptop

Pushing customers to post reviews creates a wealth of data for Tarka.  What to do with this? One could use text mining (analyzing and categorizing unstructured data, e.g., reviews and other text), set up social media monitoring dashboards such as Yext or a myriad of other services that are starting to pop up and trying to take all of this user-generated-content (UGC) and structure it to help businesses make more informed decisions.

A tool we use to gain a topical level of understanding when looking at focus group data and other unstructured text is wordle.net.  With it we create word clouds where more frequently used words are displayed in larger font sizes and less frequently used words are displayed in smaller font sizes.  We have used this successfully to showcase brand attributes, political campaigns and many other areas. This can help identify broad perceptions and opinions people may have.  Below is the resulting word cloud when we feed Tarka’s Yelp reviews through it (note this is just a quick rundown – it has not been cleaned or edited of “nonsense” words such as conjunctions).

The Future Of Brand Research?

This is a quick post, since I missed mine last week! However, the subject is not a small one - brand research. As many of you know Sentient Services believes that the closer research can mimic actual brand interaction environments the better that research is. What do I mean here? Well, if most of a customer's brand experience is with a brand online, then it makes sense to conduct the research online (e.g., an online bulletin board focus group instead of an in-person focus group). Why?

1. If a customer is telling others about a brand only online, then you want to hear and measure their within "native brand language" 
2. We love focus groups and love traveling and they are great for a myriad of subjects. However, if normal brand interaction is not part of a group, then it makes sense to measure brand interaction on an individual level and not within a group setting.
3. If others are receiving peer-group brand feedback online and via social media, the research needs to use the same format. By researching within the format that future communications will take place one can get a better grasp of vernacular, content, and motives to use when making brand research recommendations for implementation.

The idea for this post came about after playing with new social brand site - SocialSmack. This new site allows users to "prop" (thumbs up) or "drop" (thumbs down) different brand experiences they have online and in the real world. These reviews then are shared on Facebook and other social networks. Just like watching a live Twitter stream for brand reactions when news breaks, new sites like this combined with language analytics may start to form the baseline for future brand research.

They won't replace focus groups, back-room M&Ms and the nuances that only having a skilled moderator and 8 consumers in a room can bring (think collages, innovation sessions, white boarding website tasks and all sorts of other stuff that keeps us in business!). However, as researchers we have our eye on these new brand engagement platforms that live beyond the typical measured and researched "customer experience" CE scorecards. The customer experience is now everywhere, and discussed everywhere. Research needs to be the same. What are your thoughts?

A New Way of Asking the Same Question

In the day and age where online surveys have become quite common, there is always a need to keep respondents engaged in the survey process. As you can see in this recent Quirk’s article “How Web 2.0 Made a Long Survey More Palatable,” by Amy Hebard from earthsense, the need to balance getting the information you need and keeping respondents from feeling fatigued is a very big challenge. In this article Amy speaks about how they utilized the latest Web 2.0 techniques in order make sure the respondent enjoys their survey taking experience.

In our own search to keep our audience engaged, we have come across several visual survey formats that allow the ability to ask standard types of questions but in an innovative and captivating way. Take for example Vision Critical’s survey tool within their Sparq online community platform. You can see a full range of abilities they offer in their Respondent Experience product demo, but some interesting capabilities it offers include:

• Ranking by just dragging text or images on the screen into buckets
• Visual marking up of images or pictures and then commenting on the highlighted area
• Other visual type questions such as ordering images to rank and sliders for allocating points or money

Another interesting survey I recently came across is by Ionz. When you go to their site (you must click on the British flag in the right corner for English), an extremely engaging survey pops up. Below are a few screenshots of some questions. You can check out their website to see the full survey.

Instead of the normal radio button question for gender, Ionz used figures of a man and woman that move as you mouse over them.

Another interesting concept they used is displaying other respondent’s answers after you have selected your answer to the question.

Have you come across any interesting examples of using Web 2.0 features to make the survey experience even better? I would love to see them!!!!