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I thought it worth putting down some learnings we’ve made in the last few years about the attributes of successful innovation programmes at some of the companies we work with – and equally the attributes of some of those that are less successful; and although I hate ‘Top 10 Tips’ or ‘Rules’ of anything (as there are always good reasons to do things differently) it is useful in this context to do some basic do’s and don’ts, so here goes:

Don’t confuse innovation with ideation

Ideation is the creation of ideas. It comes in many forms: brainstorming, ideas drives (a company drive to go out and get new  ideas together). Innovation is what happens when ideas are implemented. You usually need ideas to generate innovation of course, but we’ve seen many organisations that think the job is done once they’ve generated a load of ideas and had a good think about what the future could hold for them.

Don’t get wedded to a small number of ‘big ideas’, instead just be good at having lots of ideas, so when ideas fall on the sword of feasibility or viability, there’s another one waiting to take its place. Ok, so I stole that from Bill Buxton, who actually said: “Don’t be precious with your ideas, just be good at having lots of them” and he was talking about design, not innovation, but anyway, he’s my idol, so I’m going to use his thought!

The exercise of ideation is exactly that, it’s about having ideas, and becoming good at having lots of ideas, and getting good at the creative process that precedes innovation. Innovation itself is actually delivering a change, or a new product or something, that actually makes a positive difference to the business or environment you’re in.

Don’t criticise, nurture

If an idea is bad, then it’s bad. You know it, your boss knows it, I know it… but the last thing I am ever going to do in a creative environment is trash it. Because first off… who am I to judge? There literally is no such thing as a bad idea. At the heart of any idea is a kernel of a thought that is always, in some way, good. What is often bad are the things that surround the idea; the nature of the solution proposed, the execution of it, or perceived barriers of feasibility or viability. If all of these things were to come right, then it suddenly, in perception, becomes a good idea.

The art of innovation is to nurture these ideas, tweaking those things that surround it, to see if it can be made to come right in every aspect. Sometimes the answer to this process is to park the idea. Not to lose it altogether, but to park it. If the barrier was one of feasibility i.e. whether it  can be built, or executed with the resources or technology at our disposal - then parking it for a period of time means that this aspect may have come right when you come to review it a year or so later.

Accept any idea for what it is, and try to understand the logic and rationale, or underlying issue that led the idea generators to come up with it in the first place. It might have been a valid observation about user behaviour, or knowledge of the capability of a particular piece of technology, or simply that they personally have a need that this idea satisifies. Try to dig out which it is and see if it’s useful elsewhere, or whether the underlying need could be satisfied in another way.

Good, implementable ideas are a collaboration of user knowledge, business knowledge, design knowledge and technical knowledge – if there’s a valid observation in any of these areas, they deserve nurture. “With the advances in nano technology, we should build a calculator that is 1mm long” is a terrible idea if you’re proposing to build that calculator, but as a piece of insight, translated by someone else with another observation it’s valuable. So don’t trash it, extract the valuable bit, and build on it; “Does that mean we could we could make the control systems in cars so light they would save fuel?”… or some other better application.

Another classic way to kill an idea is “That’s already been done” – So what? I always think that if the originator of the idea hadn’t heard about the existing solution, then there’s something wrong with it, that we could potentially do better, and so merits further investigation. if Apple had said “MP3 players have already been done” then we’d be in a very different world.

Ideas are killed too easily. We can’t pursue every one, but we must nurture ideas until they blossom into actionable pieces of innovation. Sometimes the most unlikely ideas make it and I hate to be the guy that backed the wrong horse or didn’t see the really successful bit coming!

Don’t be ruled by the business case, give ideas room to breathe

The key challenge here is that on the face of it, only a very, very small number of ideas will be well understood enough at the outset to generate the necessary data needed to make a good business case. In many organisations that might only be one idea a year; and if that idea is an expensive one to implement then it’s a big gamble to take. The pitfall of this approach isn’t that gamble, it’s that there may be dozens and dozens of ideas that float by that may turn out to be way more effective and potentially cheaper to implement.

What we recommend is that a certain amount of budget is allocated to the nurturing of ideas regardless of business case. Whether an idea will realise business benefits depends. It depends on the execution, the market readiness, the marketing, the manufacture, the environment, sometimes even the politiical landscape. What this budget does is help shape and test ideas, and formulate what conditions would be right for it to succeed, and further to quantify the benefits.

That same budget can also be used to develop ideas that on the face of it have good business benefits, but you simply can’t see how you would ever do it. i.e. they’re not currently feasible.

So this budget is used to take several of the many ideas you generated, and find ways to somehow nurture them into ideas that you know will work in implementation. This might mean researching aspects of feasibility (“can we build it cheaply enough?") or testing the concept with potential customers (“will people pay for it?”), or shaping it into a more sensible proposition (There’s something in this idea, but not in the way we're currently envisioining it).

In all these scenarios, what ideas need are a bit of time and space and resource. they just need the people with the right skills to spend a little bit of time to see if the ideas could be made to work.

Sometimes we’ve given a  small team just a day to see if they can make an idea work. Sometimes they come back with examples of similar ideas working, sometimes they spend time fleshing out  a story about how customers will use it, sometimes they come back with video testimonials from people on the street who say they would buy it and sometimes they come back with a technical architecture with a rough idea of cost attached to it.

As well as making sure you’re backing the right horses, this also gives you a good reason to park ideas that sometimes people are wedded to. If someone is personally vested in an idea and won’t let it go, they are much more ready to move on to the next idea if their first is given the praise and acknowledgement they think it deserves, and an opportunity to flourish; even if it has to be parked due to a feasibility barrier (because then it’s not their fault is it?).

“Nurture and see” requires budget or resource, or both. A budget that is already considered “sunk” by the business. This is often a part (but not all) of what Research & Development (R&D) teams do in many organisations, and almost never requires that an individual initiative have a proven business case in the traditional sense. This is not the budget you use for ideation by the way. The idea is to evaluate the ideas already generated as a potential good business case, and then to allocate a finite, limited amount of resource to nurturing it into life. The good news is… R&D is tax deductible!

Do build and use an evaluation framework

So if we can’t back projects on the basis of a business case, we do need a means of prioritising where we place our resources.

“Will the general public see this initiative as being in line with our brand values?” Even this is a question that is biased to an existing status quo. What Scott Jenson calls “innovation blindness” in his book The Simplicity Shift is an assumption inside an organisation that certain things will stay the way they are, and this kills proper innovation. If the answer to the “brand fit” question is no, then that’s no reason to kill an idea. What if this idea were so magnificent that it would be worth reinventing the brand around?

The frameworks that we put in at EMC Consulting are based on customers. They are user-centered, and they are Total in their coverage of the customer or brand experience in that they leave nothing out (see Total Experience Design for more on this).

The evaluation framework must be a picture of total customer experience wherein the core needs and overriding objectives of the business are met, through the satisfaction or delight of customers. If the overriding objective of the company is to be e.g. the most successful retailer in the world, then it’s feasible to consider that they might sell pigs if there was a market for it, even if they’re known for selling high fashion. What that would require to implement would be a variety of measures and tactics to protect the existing brand (or migrate it if the pig market really takes off!) and to look at all the issues and considerations of the practicalities and deal with them one by one. But if they could make it fit with brand, with operations, with logistics and in the retail environment, then why not? Apparently Amazon now sells food…

An evaluation framework must be free of constraining assumptions and focus in on establishing the ‘likely’ success of an inititative in the context of the organisation’s overriding priorities and principles of customer engagement. We often use “Experience Principles” as part of our defining success characteristics. This gives us easy tests to see if something fits. Abstracting up to a principle like “Our experience must invoke delight in customers” leaves you free to interpret that therefore leaves you open to any possibility.

Although Tata is a brand that has no real equity amongst western consumers, they are at the same time one of the world’s leading providers of IT services, and they make tractors. Although I still find it amusing when I see a Tata truck on an Indian street, it takes nothing away from my view of Tata Consulting Services (TCS) and makes me wish even more I could have bought shares in them 20 years ago as they are unbelievably successful and profitable! To do that, new product areas or services have to be related to some bigger set of organisational principles or drivers that are bigger than any individual business unit.

Do create a tight relationship between R&D or Innovation and business as usual

Microsoft R&D is in Cambridge, BT R&D is in Martlesham, BBC R&D has just moved to White City, but is in the building over the road from the rest of the BBC. Innovation teams have to be much closer, both physically and figuratively to the day to day business. An idea may get hot-housed or nurtured in isolation in an innovation team, but it has to flow into the main stream business very quickly. Very often companies move in waves of innovation – an intense ideation and nurturing period, often accompanied by a major change e.g. a new website, or a flagship store fit-out. Then nothing ‘innovative’ for years. If you have tight integration between the two streams, this doesn’t happen, and you get more in the habit of constant innovation.

There are some pre-requisites though – the people responsible for ideating and nurturing cannot also be responsible for the day to day operations. Instead they have to have the time to breathe and work whilst the business is run by someone else, but then they need to feed regularly into that business as usual stuff. If the innovation team are seen as a funnel for getting stuff ready to go into day to day, then that’s the perfect place to be.

In an agile development environment on a website for example, this means that the innovation and production streams link up at Sprint Review time – to discuss the things that have been nurtured in the innovation stream, and to see if they’re yet ready to go into the production stream to actually get built. At the same time, the innovation stream takes issues, ideas and challenges that the production team can’t solve, and takes them off for nurturing to see if they can ready them for inclusion in the next or subsequent development Sprints.

Do be happy to fail

A successful innovation team will generally:

1. Have banked and helped generate tons of ideas
2. Have developed the thinking in many of those ideas to a stage where the business gets it
3. Nurtured some of those ideas and tried some of them out
4. Pushed some of those nurtured ideas into production
5. See even some of those production ideas fail
6. See a small number of production ideas succeed and generate value that outweighs the cost of the process and failures that led to them

The fact that not all ideas from step 3 make it into production implies that many fail. The fact that of the ideas that did make into production, not all succeeded is another failure point. In short, way many more initiatives fail than succeed.

But the alternative to this modus operandi means one of the following statements will apply to your organisation:

• “we do nothing that our peers, staff or customers consider to be innovative”
• “In recent history we have had one massive failure”
• “In recent history we have had just one massive success”

Frankly, the odds of the one idea that you thought worth pursuing turning out to be a massive success are infinitesimally small, and if this applies to you and you don’t have that innovation funnel, then you’re incredibly lucky. So, failure is not an option, it’s absolutely mandatory if you want to guarantee your chances of succeeding in the long run.

Also, failure leads to learnings. I’m sure that when Apple came up with the iPad, someone in their team remembered the Newton, and asked some questions about what could be learned from that (retrospectively) dismal failure. But the real learnings come from a lot of small failures that hardly ever come to public attention – a prototype that was tested with customers, that universally was hated, must go through a value extraction process, to understand what the real value of it was intended to be, and to see if you can’t work out why the customer never got that value from it.

Having no fear of failure also means you are more free to test ideas in a public forum and get genuine customer response to them. This is what led to the whole “Live life in beta” attitude, the poster child for which is generally Google. A series of small experiments that are almost expected to be failures. If the public goes in with the attitude that it’s their job to evaluate them, then there’s no huge expectation set, and therefore no harm done by failure.

Getting up to scratch is not innovation, but it might be necessary

Ok, so that’s not a “Do” or a “Don’t” but don’t you find that premise gets a bit hackneyed after a while? Anyway - You have to know what the objectives of your innovation programme are. If they are generally to improve the operations and products of the company, then you have to consider anything, even if it’s not strictly speaking “innovation”. For example, “let’s put all of our products online” is not ‘innovative’ it’s what most other eccommerce companies do, but of course it may be a bigger idea that takes most of the organisations’ efforts to implement, and so should rise above other more ‘innovative’ things.

However – in many organisations, there are other programmes tasked with fixing up the basics. They take many years and there are many initiatives “on the list” from modernising the supply chain to updating the intranet, to bringing salaries up to or above the market value. In this case, often an ‘innovation team’ is set up to do something very specific. For example; enhance brand value, or build shareholder value, or simply the public perception that a company is ‘innovative’, which usually translates into equity value of course.

If this is the case, then the last thing your innovation team should be doing is helping fix up the basics.

Here’s a few examples of innovators and non-innovators:

• The many inventors who ‘invented’ the concept of the aeroplane – innovators
• The Wright Brothers – who actually made those concepts work in real life – innovators
• De Havilland – whose “Comet” aircraft made commercial passenger jet airlines viable – innovators
• Easyjet – who deconstructed some big industry assumptions to make a new airline business model – innovators
• The company who in 1990 said – hey, instead of sending our people on boats from the UK to the USA, we should send them on commercial airlines – NOT innovators…

Ok, so that last one is a stupid made-up example, but it’s indicative of what many companies are going through right now. The idea of putting people on commercial airliners isn’t innovative, but it’s something that they obviously need to do and everyone else is doing, so if the idea came up in an innovation ideation session, it should be given a chance to succeed obviously!

A company who was not selling or servicing customers online even a few years ago was not innovating when they built their ecommerce platform, they were just getting up to scratch. This was something of course they had to do and was more important to their business than ‘being innovative’. Many who were faced with this task of course also took on the ‘innovation’ mantle, knowing that being late to the market, they should take the opportunity to try to leap-frog the competition as well as just do the basics.

When we launched self-service kiosks for check-in at the airport for Virgin Atlantic back in 2003, they weren’t the first ones out there, but they were the best. They did more things (allowed check in of infants and groups that others didn’t), they were better integrated into the rest of the airport experience, and they had an interface and customer experience unlike (and better) than any others in the market. it was a catch-up move, but one where innovation also factored.

My point is that you have to decide why you want to ‘be innovative’. Is it to improve the day to day and get your company up to, and beyond where your peers are. Or, does it serve a public relations and brand purpose, aiming not only to create commercially successful initiatives, but to differentiate your company from its competitors? If it’s the latter, then it’s important to uncouple the hygiene factor ideas from the innovation process, but equally important that the organisation finds a way to deliver on those whilst your innovation team is lauding it up in the Sunday Times lapping up praise for their latest bit of gadgetry and doing their bit to enhance brand and equity value.

It could be of course, that you’re tasked with all of these objectives. In which case, the trick is not to sink all your resources into the massive change projects in the hygiene factor camp, and keep the sparky innovation bit alive at the same time.

Ok, that’s by no means comprehensive (there’s enough here for a book isn’t there? Actually, I think a few people got there ahead of me; Steve Shapiro, Ken Robinson and others!), but it does deal with a few of the things that companies we have worked with recently have struggled with, and overcome to get innovation away.

If you follow this link you’ll see how much we talk about Total Experience Design here at EMC Consulting (formerly Conchango) and I recently gave a talk at the Forrester Marketing Forum Europe where we also talked about it as an approach to orchestrating experiences, even marketing ones. However, after finding a few references to Total Experience Design around the web this evening, realised I’ve never really expounded the basic premise in simple, easy to digest terms. So here goes:

In summary: Total Experience Design is design without boundaries. A consideration of an overall potential customer experience, regardless of medium, or other boundaries, with the aim of drawing out what elements of experience have to coordinate or orchestrate to create a memorable, delightful, valuable experience that people want to talk about.

Which starts with:

Good experiences stimulate a number of senses. They hit a number of emotional triggers and leave people feeling great about it, and wanting to tell people about it. The best experiences are actually a large number of individual components in a variety of media that beautifully orchestrate to create a good, great or even delightful experience.

Designing experiences like this doesn’t happen accidentally. Often the individual components are surprising in themselves and cross a number of organisational or skills boundaries. Things that are not normally considered a part of an experience, but become so through creative thinking and orchestrating them beautifully with other elements.

Should a web designer be concerned with the packaging a product arrives in, or only the eCommerce site that sells it? Both have to be taken care of and orchestrated as part of the same experience.

Total Experience philosophy would expose that designer and the wider team to insight and research that looks at a big chunk of a customer’s life where it might _potentially_ touch the company we’re working with. We’d look at what motivates them to want to buy something, how they select where to buy from, the decision-making criteria they use, and what happens to that something after it’s been purchased.

What do I mean by experience?

I often talk about Virgin Atlantic as a company that thinks about experience as a multi-sensory, multi-channel thing, where many small things have to come together to make an experience memorable, delightful and something that turns people from being merely loyal to out and out advocates. Most importantly, at the heart of a designed experience is one central question “How does this make the customer feel?”. In other words, the design process is user-centred in classic UCD terms.

At MIX08 I also talked about Virgin America, whose experience is comprised of everything from lighting, to an inflight entertainment system, to their aircraft signage, their promotion and marketing and the way their staff talk to you. You can only do that if you orchestrate all aspects of an experience and design them with a very specific user in mind and have a remit to think beyond the traditional remit of someone inside a specific organisational department or discipline within that organisation.

“When you start to think wider, interesting things start to happen”

Total Experience Design is where you consider an entire customer experience regardless of organisational or disciplinary boundaries. As digital designers, we tend to think about “How can I design this website?” whereas in Total Experience Design, we look at the lives of the customers we are trying to affect, and identify a much wider bunch of opportunities to help achieve the goals we have of the overall experience.

In retail this means, the website, the marketing, the packaging your product arrives in, the service you receive, the follow-up email you get, how the company deals with issues, and on and on ad infinitum. Total Experience Design says that you have to start from a point where you consider this entire experience, before you drill down into the details of any given medium. As a company we may not execute in all these areas, but we have to think them through, and drive them out in order to create the right experience.

You can’t come up with a Virgin America experience unless you have the remit to explore everything from aircraft lighting to websites to the way the cabin crew address their passengers. Only a Total Experience Design philosophy allows for that.

When we talk Total Experience Design we also postulate the theory that as ‘digital designers’ we are perfectly placed to be at the heart of this process. Not only is digital going to be a critical part of any experience, but being a relatively new discipline, we come from a variety of backgrounds from retail to finance, from the arts to ergonomics and between us when combined with client domain expertise and insightful ethnographic research, we have many of the skills in design and engineering we need to design an entire experience.

A brief history of how we got here:

All of this builds on the work of a few key people and some experiences of our own that have influenced me and the company I work for, in the last few years. Roughly in chronological order they are:

Alan Cooper – interaction designer, CEO of Cooper Interaction Design, and author of The Inmates are Running the Asylum  This taught me about user-centred design and how it can apply to a variety of ‘products’ from PC applications to Sat-Nav systems.

Working with Virgin Atlantic for 10 years, and seeing how their ground and air ‘product’ teams work, the backing they have for this approach from the very top of the organisation, and the effect their work has on the people who experience it. Just search Twitter for Virgin + Clubhouse to see what I mean.

A moment when designing a self-service check-in kiosk for the airline BMI, where we suggested that as the designers of the interface, we needed to look at the overall customer flow in the airport and the physical environment in which that interface was to exist, and consider that as part of the design process.

When Matt Bagwell joined what was then Conchango, now EMC Consulting, and introduced the discipline of Experience Planning, building not only on the planning discipline as exercised at many an ad agency, but integrating experience and measurement as part of that to formalise a previously adhoc set of skills we had.

Lou Carbone, author of Clued In and CEO of Experience Engineering. I’ve seen Lou talk in person three times now, and he’s imprinted on me a number of things about experience. Experience clues, rational versus emotional thought, and how ‘experience’ manifests itself in a huge variety of ways are the main ones. Recently, Lou has started talking about how as designers and organisations we think a lot about the medium, but that’s not how people experience companies and brands. This bumped neatly into what we used to call ‘multi-channel’ thinking or the ‘channel of choice’ observation we made about how people actually consume. i.e. behaviours of researching in stores, online and then purchasing in either, dependent on what their motivators were. This was something that for us migrated into Total Experience Design as our thinking matured, so it was good to hear Lou talking about that.

Some Experience Planning pieces of work we ran for clients like Barclays Bank, Virgin Atlantic and others, where we considered the breadth of customer’s lives. What we sought out were the bits of it that could work smoother when it related to our customer’s service and product, regardless of what medium the potential solution ended up in. This influenced in turn their strategies for digital channels and a variety of products that could help things run better for consumers, which in turn bonds customers to them. This clearly showed the benefits of Total Experience Design.

Bill Buxton – Principal Researcher at Microsoft and author of Sketching User Experiences. I’ve seen Bill present in person about 4 times now (sorry Lou), and each time he has shown how product design thinking can apply to almost anything, and again how ‘experience’ can apply, and must apply to almost anything from advertising, to service, to product. His team might be at Microsoft, a software and increasingly, hardware business, but they have the remit to follow almost any train of thought or research based on curiosity rather than to solve a specific perceived ‘problem’. When they explore a wide variety of situations and technologies, they sometimes come up in surprising places, but with products that serve users’ needs and goals well.

A couple of months ago at one of Matt’s The Fantastic Tavern events, he ran it on the topic of Total Experience Design, and we had some real leaders from a variety of digital brands and other digital designers, who spent several hours in a room above a pub in London debating and discussing exactly what this meant, but all of them unanimously offering the point of view that life and the work they produced, would generally be better with Total Experience Design. This absolutely reinforced that this philosophy was the right one and that we should operate it, evangelise it and talk about it as often as we could.

Two years in a row we’ve talked about it at MIX (and other events, but these guys have the videos!) and it’s had a great reception. This year, fingers crossed, we’ll extend the theme further to get into some of the more gritty details of how to bring a Total Experience philosophy to almost any project or organisation.

So this is also the call to action to let us know how you’d like us to expound on some of this stuff for this year’s MIX or other places we’ll talk about it this year. Get in touch on email or comments and let us know.

By the way… we’ve always referred to it as Total Experience Design, in full. We tinkered with shortening it to TED, but have too much respect for TED to do it often. I read a blog on bigthink.com where Lou Susi arrived at a similar conclusion, but dubbed it TxD (Total eXperience Design). What do you think to that abbreviation? Something we should all adopt?? What do you think?

The only downside I can see is that it’s pretty much the universal youth abbreviation for ‘texted’ just search Twitter to see…

A short post just to let you know I’m still alive and what’s been going on recently.

Here, the transition from Conchango to EMC Consulting is complete. Although it means absolutely no difference to the great work we do for clients, it’s starting to make a significant change to how we’re growing. Can’t say much, but the next few months is going to be interesting and exciting, particularly around how we do design and user experience globally. It’s also a time in which we’ll start building up a new brand to measure up to where Conchango got us to in the UK, but this time it will be a global brand that will start to explore how we help clients realise their ambitions in a number of ways.

A big landmark client project launched; My Barclaycard. This truly is an awesome piece of work and sets the standard for how credit card companies offer services to their customers. http://www.barclaycard.co.uk/mybarclaycard/

Elsewhere in client land, the open innovation initiatives kicked off by NESTA (www.nesta.org.uk) with Virgin Atlantic, that we then carried on (with their support) at Tesco (V-Jam and T-Jam respectively… thanks David) are starting to yield some interesting things. Virgin Atlantic launched their first two co-innovated projects, supported by them and NESTA, and developed by customers. Yes customers. They’re a bright lot those Virgin passengers. The details are here on Virgin Atlantic.com. The two are: Taxi2Town and the Flying Club Facebook application – but go to the Virgin Atlantic site to find out more, and read about the people who developed them. All done in well under a year. That’s a way to get innovation moving.

I did some fun and interesting speaking engagements:

Futureproof in Dublin on the topic of online video – where I got to meet Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, and “Groovy dancing girl” Bandy Toaster as well as some other fascinating characters from the very vibrant new media scene in Ireland.

I did the opening slot at EMC’s own Innovation conference. I was at the Irish segment at our centre in Cork, and I think they enjoyed it! Talked about Total Experience Design as an innovation framework. Also in Ireland, I did a slot with several Irish CIO’s as part of CIO Connect. I’m very happy to report (and I’m sure it had nothing to do with me) but they said that EMC was the highlight of their trip (and they’d been to Apple the day before! Ha!).

At Forrester’s Consumer Marketing Forum Europe, I spoke in the Guest Executive Forum slot to about 100 delegates, who had been watching some great stuff from the likes of Lego, and other great brands. I’m glad to report that what I said seemed to make sense as we had some great feedback. Although, more people seemed to ask about the presentation method rather than the actual content! (Thanks Prezi!)

Also, I wrote some bits and pieces for some of our best UK new media magazines, particularly for .NET Magazine, who were also kind enough to run a feature of me, complete with posey pornstar style photos!

Also, I put some comment into articles as diverse as the benefits of an open API for brand marketers, to new rights models; as well as filming some comment on the Google/Microsoft/Newscorp story for Channel4 News – only to get dropped at the last minute for Biz Stone and the founder of LinkedIn… oh well, I guess they do trump me somewhat! :)

Internally, I also put time and effort into a couple of our most ground-breaking projects, and some big pitches. And of course I did the “Surface Roadshow” in Disneyland Paris, Edinburgh and various places around London. This basically involves taking a Surface device somewhere, taking people through its features and some of the apps we’ve developed and then watching as every single person who I ever demo to goes and finds their house in the map in ‘Concierge’.

Edinburgh was particularly fun as it was an event hosted by Gaby Logan, with Scottish sporting heroes including Bernard Gallagher, Andy Robinson and of course Kenny Logan in one of the most beautiful hotels in Scotland.

Finally, I had the rare privilege after the Imagine 09 event of having dinner along with some of my peers, with Bill Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft. Suffice to say I left inspired, and having seen those watches close  up!

Ok, so that was a typical couple of months at EMC Consulting… come join us!

A letter was sent today from a coalition of representatives of employees in the creative industries, that is nicely covered here at the Guardian online.

Essentially, they are saying that the government and broadband providers need to clamp down on illegal file-sharing, as otherwise, jobs will be lost because of the lack of money to fund new music, TV, film and other creative content.

Right question, wrong answer.

Here are some things that the ‘rights’ industry can do to stop illegal file-sharing:

Allow all licensed TV content to be available online in the broadcaster’s on-demand system without limitation on time or format

We see media consumption behaviours where people treat file-sharing as their own personal video recorder (PVR). So rather than trying to remember to programme their Sky+ or V+ boxes to record the content, they just go online when they’ve missed it and watch it then. They might do this every week, or they might choose to ‘catch up’ on an entire series over a few days late on in its season run.

This is the one type of behaviour that consumers find easiest to justify morally. After all, they could have set their own PVR to ‘series record’ which would have enabled all of the above behaviour, so they see no difference between getting it from the hard disk of their SKY+ box, or a bunch of their peers who also want to catch up.  And there are benefits as well to the consumer of getting illegal content of this type in that it can be portable. How many people do you see on the train or at the airport watching content on their mobile device. Not all devices are easily supported by the on demand services and licensors are reluctant to release their content to go mobile. With illegal downloads consumers can move it anywhere they choose, and provided they only use it themselves and don’t sell it on, they see little moral issue with that.

There are rights licences that prohibit a local broadcaster from delivering over IP. So for example, the BBC may show something on TV, that then is not available on iPlayer. Or it is only available in a streaming format and not a download format. This is just encouraging the same behaviour as they again don’t see why it shouldn’t be available. In fact, they’re often upset that it’s not because they relied on it being there. I remember a recent series of Dr Who that we wouldn’t let the kids stay up to watch, so planned on watching it on iPlayer the next day… but it wasn’t there. No consumer understands why this should be the case.

They also don’t understand that when they miss the first two episodes of Ashes to Ashes (I’m not BBC bashing by the way, just they’re the shows I love and come easiest to mind!), and decide they’ll save them up for watching together just before the final episode airs, only to find that they can only watch last week’s episode.

Leverage the long tail, and make everything available for download purchase

Currently, there are artists missing out on royalties not because their work is being stolen, but because their publishers won’t make it available. In the old world, works were ‘deleted’ from the back catalogue, never to be issued on vinyl or CD again. When iTunes came along, we all believed that this would never be the case again, but I challenge anyone to go and find Freaky Realistic (best band that ever came out of Peckham), Half Man Half Biscuit (best indie band ever, Gawd rest John Peel), the Mighty Lemondrops… or of course The Beatles – I’m guessing you’ve heard of them? The only way to get any of these in digital format, is to buy a CD and rip it (in the case of the Beatles, and still also technically illegal in breach of mechanical copyright), or to download it from another charitable fan who wants to spread the love. in the case of the latter, again, the attitude of customers to this situation morally is that it’s fine. They don’t see any other way to get the content; and to be fair, there is no other way.

Well, there are two things going on here. The first is that the labels, either through contracts or other whims are not making available old back catalogue content. The second is that there are still artists and their management who are resisting digital; again for reasons that no consumer can understand.

If everything was available for legal download, through a variety of providers (we need more choice than just iTunes, and we need companies like Tesco Digital to get better support) then all of the reasons for customers to download that are outlined above go away.

Amazon’s whole business has been built on the concept of the ‘long tail’ the thought that they make everything available, and although they might only sell one copy of a particular book every year, there are millions of other books that they also only sell one of, rather than relying solely like the high street retailers do, on big new releases. iTunes is also doing well in this way, but the ‘long tail’ is longer than we all thought it was, and we need to get to the end of it as best we can at any rate.

Don’t make us pay twice, or even five times!

I have bought The Wizard of Oz five times over.

Two VHS copies, one was worn out, the other damaged by a small child. So then we got a DVD. One was lost, the next scratched to hell by small children and the final one is hanging on by a thread as it’s been through the Disc Doctor scratch repairer a couple of times now. Surely, I am buying the rights to watch a title, and not to own a physical object? The video and music industry have relied on new formats for years to revitalise their sales, and the advent of digital is bringing that model to an end. Once content is safely on the hard drives of their customers in HD format, then they have no need to re-purchase their content, except in the case of data loss (you see where working for a storage company finally comes in to this stuff eh?!). But equally, if I have purchased £100’s of titles from iTunes and have a hard disc crash and lose everything, iTunes knows what I’ve bought already. Why on earth should I have to pay again to re-download it? If they want to charge me a nominal fee to cover their bandwidth costs, that’s fine, but I object strongly to buying the same content over and over again.

This is why it’s so refreshing that Tesco Digital offer their ‘backup’ service, where once purchased, content can be downloaded whenever you want. We need more providers like this, and we need the rights holders to make this easier for digital music providers.

This is another reason that the consumers we talked to cited for downloading. They have no idea how to ‘rip’ a DVD so that their kids can watch it on TV, so instead of doing that, they download it. What’s the difference? I’m entitled under the licence for the DVD to back it up, so why can’t I get that backup from someone else? It’s the same content?

MAKE IT CHEAPER, make it easier and make it better

If there is more available in the catalogue, if you are making content incredibly easy to access, if you are offering people the chance to download instead of buying a PVR, then all of these increase the overall volume of people willing to pay for digital content. However, the price point is currently too high.

More volume, easier to access means the price can come down and still mean more money flowing in.

Why does track 8 on an album that the band threw in when they were short a track at the last minute, cost the same on iTunes as the 2 tracks that were number 1 hit singles across the world? If you think the album as a format is dying, it’s because iTunes is killing it! Whereas putting 20 tracks on an album used to be an artist’s way of making an album of more value to the purchaser, today they’re punishing them because it costs more!

Pricing is also anti-competitive. If someone like Tesco wanted to sell tracks at 39p each, or ‘bargain bucket’ albums for £4, they couldn’t because the labels won’t let them. Because iTunes carries so much weight, the labels don’t want to offer content for sale to anyone else cheaper for fear of upsetting iTunes. It is completely bizarre that I can walk into HMV or Sainsbury’s and pick up a CD or DVD for £3, but if I want to download that same content from iTunes it might cost as much as £10.

Finally, if you want to beat pirates, make it easier to get content, and offer more than they can; i.e. make the experience better.

Peer to peer filesharing and downloading is not an activity easily accessible to most computer users. When they do get it up and running, they are faced with a variety of different formats, and potentially having to do codec conversion and all sorts. If consumers can get content easily, they will pay a premium. If you can save a consumer 30 minutes of messing about then that’s immediately worth 25p-50p.

If you would rather they watch your version of Night At The Museum 1, then make it so it has interactive features and stuff that pirates simply wouldn’t be able to replicate. Formats like X-Box and Blu-ray offer that kind of opportunity for an interactive layer, that could easily be replicated onto desktop computers and portable devices, in such a way that it was impossible to pirate.

I would never watch a ‘cam’ recording of a film made by a guy in the cinema with a handheld video camera. Why not? Because it’s illegal? Well, sure, but mostly because it’s terrible quality. I would rather wait and pay for the DVD. The same principle applies, make all ‘official’ content high quality and an end to end experience.

Finally…

If the media industry addressed all of the points above, the market for illegal file-sharing would shrink to miniscule amounts. None of the scenarios outlined above are of consumers as criminals, but currently, technically, everything outlined above is an offence. Would you rather we go after these people? Or should we just make it easier for them to get content legally?

The longer the industry persist with the models they’ve been used to, the more reasons they create for people to actually download illegally, and the more consumers they turn into criminals. And rather like the old adage about soft drugs leading to hard drugs, if people are used to downloading Dr. Who because they missed it on Saturday, they’ll start to question why they shouldn’t download DVDs that they’ve never purchased, and will therefore begin stealing revenue away from the industry, whereas if they’d remained in a legal environment, this would never happen.

To paraphrase Billy Bragg from a Radio 4 discussion a few weeks ago, he said that the music industry’s commercial was fundamentally flawed – and he was talking about downloading and digital distribution. He said if it persisted it would die, and I agree with him.

What’s the alternative?

Well, they could load all of the responsibility for keeping their revenue streams intact on to us, the taxpayers. They could make the government and courts deal with offenders. They could put levies on our broadband service. All things that they are lobbying for.

But what this all ultimately does is make the consumer pay more and more for what is actually a problem the industry itself could solve if only they changed their thinking. I lobby the government to say no to these lobbyists, and encourage the unions to look back to their employers to solve these problems, not the government; after all it’s the employers in that industry that hold the ability and power to make these changes, and to dry up file-sharing forever.

The world I work in goes through phases of interest in a variety of themes (you could call them ‘fads’ but they’re not), services, or trends. In 2007 it was Second Life, in 2008 it was Facebook, in 2009 it is Twitter.

These phases of interest have a lifecycle:

1. low adoption, early interest – we start playing with something and start to speculate on what its potential might be
2. it goes mainstream inside the industry and we and a number of leading brands take it seriously and start generating value from it
3. it becomes ‘Conference-fodder’ and we start celebrating its potential in public
4. the press (either industry-specific or mainstream) get hold of it
5. we broadly understand it, and how to use and not use it, but by no means have we established the ‘rules’ or what is ‘best practice’ or what the specific measurable value is, but intuitively most of us can see it and have a good feel for how to do it and not do it
6. everyone wants to be an expert in the field, and suddenly we are overwhelmed with ‘experts’ in the medium because it’s obviously the trending topic that is about to go mainstream. We get dedicated conferences, even though we’ve already talked about it endlessly already, but of course we need these to help educate those who are just coming to it and want to understand it.
7. it becomes more widely understood – we and our customers understand clearly what its value is, how to do it well, and how to measure that value, and we find something else new to talk about.

At some point in this, the thing either goes mainstream, or it goes back to its former audience. Example: Facebook went mainstream, Second Life went back to its old community.

Where are we with Twitter? Well, we’re at stage 6. Everyone is a social media expert. Everyone still seems to talk about Twitter, even if there’s nothing new to say; but we do need to talk about it because there are still business as usual marketing and brand teams who don’t fully understand it and want help in establishing what ‘best practice’ means for them. So we should be moving from internalising our talk on Twitter within ‘the industry’ to externalising it to the people who need to know, and we should begin to define our specific expertise, are we behavioural experts, measurement experts, brand messaging experts, tools experts, or are we simply Twitter experts, who know all the tools, all the latest developments of the API and the latest on how people are using it?

However, we’ve missed some vital stuff out;

1 - We’re not helping brands establish ‘best practice’ - we’re just still harping on about how great, or frustrating, or inspirational it is. Twitter conferences are attended by the Twitterati, and we aren’t helping brands make sense of it, and people who have never used Twitter before are suddenly social media experts who want to help big brands despite the fact that they are only a couple of pages ahead of those brands (this is a huge area to claim expertise in), and their advice is largely based on intuition or casual observance. This means that the brands we work with are prone to influence by anyone who seems to be an expert regardless of their real credentials, and without an understanding of the value that they are expecting from that expert’s advice.

2 – Measurement – aside from an intangible brand affinity, and building emotional ties to a brand, what is the value of doing Twitter well? We haven’t yet sat down and isolated whether or not a good Twitter engagement will affect someone’s propensity to buy, or recommend or advocate a brand. We need this measurement to back up the advice we give clients, and real experts need this to provide evidence that they have given good advice.

So, what am I going to do about it?

Here’s my social media for the (brand) masses manifesto:

We will make Social Media ‘Business As Usual’ - Well, first, I’m never going to call my self a social media expert – instead I’m going to continue to be an Experience Director at a digital agency (my day job), helping design and create user experiences that flow seamlessly from channel to channel. Why wouldn’t that extend to Twitter? Well it does. A few years ago we decided that it was just as much our responsibility in the Total Experience Design philosophy, to consider customer interactions in store and in the call centre, so these other digital channels should be simply part of business as usual for anyone working in digital media; and it’s their job to understand them. We will still get specialists, in the way that we get usability, SEO and accessibility specialists, but the mainstream of agencies need to know a good deal more than their clients on any of these topics, and social media is included. (Interestingly, I have met some call centre experts, but I’ve never seen them on Twitter. Nor for that matter have they cold-called me on my home phone… )

We will go in pursuit of best practice – We did it for SEO, accessibility, usability, why won’t  we do it for social media? Yes, there’s a bunch of Top 10 ‘how to’ tips out there, but they’re full of subjective advice like “a sure fire way to lose followers is…” How do we know that? What’s the trade-off? Does losing those particular followers matter if we have certain objectives? We’ve got to evolve industry-wide advice, that it is accepted is based on good solid fact. Most of today’s social media experts rely on a single case study. One thing they did well, probably when Twitter was in its earliest days to drive their credibility. Now that the Twitter user base has changed, its usage profile has potentially changed, and our ‘experts’ need to be a mix of ethnographic observers of all social media users, they need to be statisticians and coders, able to use the API to find and predict patterns and behaviours, and they need to be brand and copy experts (NLP experts even), skilled in language, tone of voice and the art of emotional engagement and persuasion. My part in this? I will see what I can distil out of the ether, and our own more scientific studies of Twitter trends and behaviours, and industry behaviours, and contribute that to the mix in an open forum. Which means I’m going to need some of the following…

We will find measurement strategies and evidence – We’ve got to come up with some hard solid facts that back up our advice and the behaviours of the brands we work with. Measuring the value of engaging with users in social spaces is key in reassuring an Executive board that the advice we are giving is sound business sense, and not just because it will be a laugh! My part in this? I hereby commit to producing a solid, statistically sound study that puts a monetary value on Twitter users for a well known business; and I commit to doing that before the end of the year (well, don’t want to overdo it do we? Hopefully it will be sooner!)

We will not Tweet on… – Twitter conferences need to be for our clients. We have to show them best practice, measurement and tools. We have to give them evidence on what works and what doesn’t. If we as an industry talk about Twitter, it should be about driving best practice, measurement or tools. Let’s keep our own Twitter Tweeting between us, and aim and shape it constructively rather than trying to compete for followers against each other. Who knows, perhaps Twitter will never go truly mainstream and we’ll all be pondering why we spent so much time and effort talking about it, but equally it becomes inside our industry, the most powerful networking tool we have….

Ok, must go and read that Tweet Hugh Mcleod sent out yesterday titled “The Death of the Social Media Expert” – you might see this post revisited! :)

I’m not going to say much about this, as it’s not really material to make a lot of in a company blog; but I did want to record these pages, because you thankfully very rarely see it. Before I do, my sympathies, respect and thoughts go to all of the families of passengers and crew as well as those searching for flight AF447 and to the staff of Air France at this difficult time.

We’ve talked before about contingency planning for all businesses on the web. Sadly, Air France had to to activate their worst case contingency plan yesterday. The page shown here appears on surfing to airfrance.com, and provides a main link to a site about the disaster, then much lower priority links to the business as usual sites. Note that there is no branding, it’s very sober and the link to the disaster contingency site is very factual.

Thankfully most of us work in businesses where we are not faced with potential contingency situations that require such a sober response and our contingency planning can be a lot less complex. You can however, learn a lot from companies like Air France, who on the face of it did this very professionally and competently.

I’ve recorded the other sites where the announcement appears, and the contingency site as well – which lives on a completely different server from the main Air France site.

You’ll notice that all of the other Air France sites have a consistent and similarly sober link to the contingency site, and that the announcement itself is incredibly brief, and again, has no branding. See below:

A newer challenge is how to deal with other media outlets, particularly social media outlets. Currently, Air France’s 5 or 6 Twitter accounts are simply frozen where they were. Below is the French regional account, that has a fare promotion to New York. There are numerous Facebook groups and fan pages, below is one fan page. This again, is simply not updated. I guess that social media is new enough that for Air France, it has not made it into an updated contingency plan. Take the opportunity now to rectify this if you’re in the same position.

The advice for PR people planning this kind of contingency, is not to take control of all of the social media outlets, but rather to brief all staff who run Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, etc. with a standardised message to put out on these channel in case of this kind of contingency. For this reason, it’s important also that anyone doing social media outreach ‘registers’ themselves with their PR team. You can action the implementation of that message in a global email to the whole company, making it easy to manage communications and timely action.

To those that run these sites and accounts, if you’re not getting any advice because your PR teams are tied up dealing with media, just put a straightforward factual message like the one on the first screenshot above with a link to airfrance.com and don’t update the site or account until you get some PR advice. Then take a look back at recent posts to see if there’s anything you might want to remove, even temporarily because it’s too lighthearted. Put yourself, as best you can, in the shoes of someone who has lost a family member to assess what is and isn’t appropriate. Do not attempt to provide a real-time update on the situation, leave that to the centralised information source on the main contingency site.

There’s a much harder question, which is should you allow comments and posts from users to continue? I think the answer to this one, is you should allow them to continue, but monitor very, very closely to see what is being said. There is a chance that they could create a misleading impression of what is actually happening, including much speculation about the causes or voices in the conversation that seem on the face of it to be informed, but actually are not speaking from a position of expertise or knowledge. If this is getting to the stage where there is serious misinformation, then taking the thread down would be an appropriate course of action – however, make it clear why you have done this (“to ensure that our customers get accurate and consistent information”) and repeat the simple statement of the facts and links to the official updated information, then close the page to new posts. And don’t forget your auto-responders; nothing worse than starting to follow Air France on Twitter to get a light-hearted auto-response.

Again, my sympathies, respect and thoughts go to all of the families of passengers and crew as well as those searching for flight AF447 and the staff of Air France at this difficult time.

Even when you work with world-class brands (retailers, mobile phone companies, finance companies, all sorts…) they still ask who in the world does digital customer experience the best. So, often they ask “who is the best in our industry online?” and often ask us the same question more generally, looking to find examples to follow from other industries who do a good job online.

Unfortunately when asked “who does it well?” I tend to answer that nobody, in my humble opinion, has really got everything right. There are loads of sites that do a small number of things, or even just one thing really well, but nobody has the whole package. So as part of our Experience Planning offering, we’ll collate companies, sites and brands that have relevance to our customer or their customers.

And because we’re using our philosophy of Total Experience Design, that aims to draw out the magic things you do to make a complete customer experience, regardless of the channel in which it is executed it happens that quite often, we’ll also pick up on the fact that the best thing some companies do on the web isn’t their website. It might be a product, an innovation, a service, or even simply an attitude. When we designed and built www.virginmobile.com in the UK for example, I always look back and say that the best thing that site did, wasn’t done by the site itself. It was the fact that you got your phone the next morning.

Zappos is one of those that does at least one thing exceptionally well; and that’s customer service. The Zappos story is well documented, and we often talk about the number of blogs, Facebook groups and Twitter comments that laud their attitude to their customers and the things they do to make their customers’ experience much, much more delightful than their competition.

The most poignant story is that of a woman whose mother had died. Consequently she needed to return some shoes to Zappos and because she was obviously much more concerned with her mother’s death, was going to be late returning them. How did Zappos respond? They sent a UPS truck to pick up the shoes at their expense (normally you have to take them to a depot), and shortly after, sent her a bouquet of flowers.

The blog post in which she documented this ends:

“IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.

With hearts like theirs, you know they’re good to do business with.”

So, I was asked this same question by the guys from the Windows Live team at Microsoft as we were hanging out on the roof of Tao nightclub in Las Vegas at MIX09 (you meet all the best people there).  “So what’s a really great website?” I think it was John, asked, and I wheeled out my Zappos story for them. They looked at me like I was kinda weird, and got me another beer, so it was interesting when I got an email from Angus the other day titled “Zappos really is the bomb” – apparently this is some quaint Australian or American phrase for “Really jolly good”.

This is the story as it unfolded on Twitter, that I tell here for three reasons: a) how good are we at finding ‘world class’ and predicting the brands to succeed! (Ha!) b) exactly how that service promise translates into everyday life, other than the big stories that get told over and over, and c) to show how a company uses Twitter well also!

@jsenior posted this to Twitter:

@anguslogan, who is known for having rather tasty taste in shoes responded:

@jsenior, knowing how important and influential Angus knows himself to be speculated on whether Zappos might source said shoes for him? Either that, or he really wasn’t looking forward to walking into a store to actually buy them to take back to Redmond for Mr Logan. Or maybe it was the thought of the TSA opening his luggage and finding them there… anyway, he responded:

And it was at this point, that @zappos_service waded in with this:

Which linked to the offending, er I mean, inspirational shoes, on a site pointing at them being for sale at another store, and not at Zappos.

To which, Angus’ response was naturally:

Quickly followed by an email to me, and two others to re-tell the story.

When you get things right in creating a relationship with customers, this is what happens. They respond emotionally in a way that out-does logic and rational thinking any day. When it comes to choosing where to look for (admittedly rather crazy) shoes online? Where is Angus going? Even if the delivery is a bit pricey (which it’s not by the way – they do free delivery too!)

So, if you’re a bit shoddy at keeping the website up to date, or you can’t quite beat the competition at delivery prices, but you can do service like this, customers will forgive you. Why? Because they love you!

How does Zappos do this? Again, it’s well documented, but they ingrain customer service right from the start in everyone that works there and they empower staff to make decisions, and use budget to help customers – which is presumably money they divert from above the line advertising, due to the serious word of mouth marketing they get as a result. To make sure they get the right people working for them, they even offer to ‘buy out’ new trainees. They offer them a bribe to leave on the spot after a week or so of training. Those that survive are the ones they want.. those that take the bribe are equally happy, but not ‘Zappos material’.

So the challenge is, to look at the overall customer experience; end to end, and to plan experiences that delight throughout, not constrain yourself to an interface.

Ok, next question: “What’s the best checkout process in the world?” – and no, it’s not Amazon… yawn.