Skittles made a bit of a splash in the media world recently with a relaunch of their homepage that essentially created an overlay for their various web properties, starting with a Twitter page displaying all tweets mentioning the Skittles brand name. You could also check out their Flickr photo gallery or their Facebook fan page.
Nice enough idea, but I suspect it will enjoy its five minutes of online fame before falling by the wayside. However, imagine such an approach is used internally on the corporate Intranet. The single great feature of the so called web 2.0 applications is that it puts you in touch with customers as never before. The problem generally is that those customer voices are generally only heard by the web savvy people within a company. The overwhelming consensus still seems to regard Twitter as an oddity that will have nothing of use for them.
Blammo, this would shoot that down instantly. The modern marketing credo puts the customer at the very heart of everything the company does, it’s not just enough for marketing folks to care about the customer, it’s something that each and every employee should care about. But unless you’re customer facing it’s often difficult to know what your customers are doing, what problems they’re having and generally how they’re finding your products. Now that can change.
The Skittles website will probably fade into obscurity within weeks, if it hasn’t already done so, but by jove it doesn’t half offer up a great opportunity for how to put social media into the faces of each and every person in your company.
So often we do things for the money we gain or the prestige, but how often do you do something purely for its own sake?
Study for instance is often undertaken with the aim of earning a qualification or meeting new people. But how often do people learn purely for the sake of learning?
I think motivation is greater and longer lasting when we do something purely for its own sake. Is it however something we do often enough?
I was thinking today about how word of mouth spreads and people share positive experiences about companies. I don’t mean simply recalling a job done properly but a tale of exceptional customer service, a proper fan boy moment. And it struck me that when you’re in that position you don’t need or demand any kind of bounty for sharing this news, you’re happy to do so because of the benefit it will bring your friend.
Twitter for instance has spread via word of mouth because of the value inherent in its service. It didn’t need to pay people to talk about them, they were happy to do so because of the value it gave them and the value it could give their friends. I could say exactly the same about Facebook or YouTube or Google. Even Amazon now pay significantly less than other retailers in affiliate bounty yet still demand loyalty because of the service they provide.
So are affiliate schemes merely the attempts by the mediocre to buy into some of this word of mouth marketing? Would their money not be better spent on creating a service that truly excited people to the extent that they will actively promote them without recourse to financial incentives?
Today has seen a jester register the http://twitter.com/sirfredgoodwinaccount to poke fun at Sir Fred Godwin, former Royal Bank of Scotland ceo, who suffered in the press recently for plans to receive a hefty pension from his former role at a time when the government are bailing them out.
It raises the interesting issue of how long it will take for Twitter to tighten up the procedure for registering accounts. There are a few examples of Twitter squatting on famous brand names, such as http://twitter.com/coke
It seems only a matter of time before a big brand, or famous name, complains about such activity. At the moment no email verification is required to setup an account so it is very easy to setup up numerous accounts. With the website becoming more mainstream some form of domain name style system seems an inevitable step, maybe even a way for Twitter to make some money.
Just saw a wonderful advert from T-Mobile on Channel 4 which used a flash mob at Liverpool Street Station. You can see the video below:
I’m really rather fond of flashmobbing so love this sort of thing. I wonder however how many of the dancers in the mob are organised and how many were natural participants?
The PDCA cycle, otherwise known as the Deming Cycle, was created by American statistician W. Edwards Deming. Deming was instrumental in the revitalisation of Japanese business after the second world war and also helped to popularise Total Quality Management (TQM).
The PDCA cycle consists of four stages:
Plan
Do
Check
Act
1. Planning
What is the current situation? What objective do you want to achieve? How can this be done and what processes will be required?
2. Do
Implementation of the new processes.
3. Check
Measure the new processes and check against the previous results.
4. Act
Analyse these results and determine what action to take as a result.
Benefits of using the PDCA Cycle
Daily routine management-for the individual and/or the team,
Gaining consentual support for your project can make or break it, yet it is a topic that is often overlooked. In Japanese business they use Nemawashi to build support for a project.
Nemawashi literally translates as “going around the roots” so that a bonsai tree can be transported without dying. No Nemawashi = a failed project.
If you think about how proposals are typically handled in British companies. Often the person with the idea will gather people in a room and deliver a presentation about his idea, with the aim of persuading the bosses present there and then.
By contrast the Japanese approach involves Nemawashi to consult with people prior to making a proposal. This consentual approach means that when the proposal is formally put to management it is often a simple matter of rubber stamping it because everyone is already so familiar with the idea at hand.
So can I use Nemawashi?
Fortunately utilising Nemawashi is very straightforward.
1. Take an A3 piece of paper and include the following pieces of information on it:
The current situation
Proposal
Costs
Plan
Implementation
Controls
Time line
This is your project document and it broadly follows the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) approach.
2. Discuss this document with people. Doing this in person is best but online collaboration tools are common now so online is feasible too. Don’t limit input from people solely within your department. Diversity of opinion is crucial.
3. Rewrite the project document. By now your document is less a proposal and more a summary of the collective thoughts of your company. It’s worth keeping hold of the orignal to note the changes that have been made. This is a great tool for persuading others to use Nemawashi until doing so becomes second nature.
4. Meet formally to support the project. With the prior consultation out of the way you should have achieved excellent support for your project, so this meeting should not take very long.
That’s pretty much it. The following are some benefits of using Nemawashi.
Benefits of using Nemawashi
1. You will have a better understanding of the current condition as people challenge the initial assumptions and results of root cause analysis
2. It creates ownership for the project because others have had a chance to influence and shape it. People support what they create.
3. Time waste in meetings is eliminated or replaced with time doing nemawashi.
I’m sure we’ve all been to meetings where little seemed to be achieved and the whole process appeared to be a general waste of everyones time. Try following these 6 simple steps and your meetings will be transformed into productive decision making exercises.
Establish clear objectives prior to the meeting. Most meetings have agendas but you need to make sure that your agenda is very focused on clear tasks and deliverables.
Ensure the right people are present. If you need certain personnel in your meeting then make sure they are there. It is easy now to use tools like Outlook to schedule meetings and alert participants in advance.
Make sure that each participant is prepared. Each participant in the meeting is there for a reason, ie to put forward views based on their expertise. Get them to prepare properly for the meeting so that their input is precise and relevant to the objectives.
Use visual aids effectively. Limiting all communications to an A3 piece of paper forces participants to only use what is strictly neccessary and encourages the use of visual aids.
Seperate information sharing from decision making. Share information with participants before the meeting as much as possible. This then frees up the meeting itself for problem solving and decision making.
Make sure that the meeting starts and ends on time.
For regular readers of my blog (sure there must be hundreds of you!) you’ll know that in recent weeks I’ve been reading a lot about consciousness. So an article in this weeks Economist peeked my attention.
The article discusses research conducted by Adam Brasel and James Glips, academics at Boston College. Glips is an expert in human computer interaction and they conducted research into the way we use DVR technology that lets us fast forward tv shows that we have recorded. You can view the entire research document here in pdf form, but I shall do my best to summarise the findings below.
The study discovered that even when viewers fast forwarded the adverts in between segments of a tv show they could still recollect the brand being advertised, with the recollection greater if certain conditions were met, this despite the viewer only catching the advert for a fraction of a second.
The study used eye tracking software to monitor where viewers looked whilst speeding through the adverts and found that they focused on the centre of the screen. They also found that despite looking to avoid seeing the advert they monitored the screen very closely so as to see when the show started up again after the ad break.
With that knowledge at their disposal the researchers then placed some brands inside the adverts. The brands were unknown to the viewers (British chocolate brands not sold in America) and mixed up the placement of the brand names. Some were placed in the centre of the screen, others towards the periphery.
The results were quite amazing, with the centrally placed brand names being chosen by viewers twice as often in tests afterwards than the brand placed on the edge of the screen.
I’ve said a few times recently how powerful the sub-concscious is and how we absorb an awful lot more information than we are aware of, and this research seems to strongly support just this. I guess now the question is whether marketers will start to utilise this knowledge in their advertising.
The credit crunch has been caused in large part by a series of poor decisions both within the financial sector and the regulatory sector. I was reading a study today that revealed yet another unintended consequence of a regulatory decision.
The rule in question forces credit card companies to take a minimum sum each month from all accounts with an outstanding balance. The idea behind the rule is that it stops borrowers from getting too heavily in debt. However a study by Neil Stewart from Warwick University suggests that it has actually had the opposite effect. It all revolves around a concept called anchoring whereby people rely too heavily on one particular piece of information to make their decision. In this instance people were anchoring the minimum amount they had to repay, thus not paying off as much as they otherwise may have done, costing them significantly in the long run.
The anchoring process was famously illustrated in a 1974 study by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The study asked participants to estimate the number of UN countries were African, but only after having rolled a roulette wheel. Those that landed a higher score on the wheel estimated there were more African nations than those that scored lower on the roulette wheel.
Steward does provide salvation however by suggesting that more information would remedy the situation. He’s set-up a simple calculator on his website that allows people to caculate how much their actions could save (or cost) them.
adi on Mar 8, 2009 in Default 
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