Interlude: We Are Not The Customers You Are Looking For
(Website to Wonderful will resume next week) It’s hard when your face doesn’t fit. Especially when you’re the eager customer. I got an email recently from a clothes store that I love, with an invitation for customers to take part in a market research exercise at my nearest branch. I got terribly excited, but then I realised they were looking for people a lot younger than me to take part. That was a little bit sad-making. I loved the brand, but I really wasn’t a core customer to them. I even wrote a little note explaining my passion and begging to be let in, but nothing...
Read MoreOnline lions and offline lambs
I’ve been thinking about personality, and how it differs between our online and offline selves. There is a hope, expressed by all sorts of people, that the internet represents an easy way to understand exactly what people think. According to this argument, if we listen to internet conversations (scrape them, analyse them, Google-alert them) then we know what’s going on. It’s just a case of data reduction. I think that’s incredibly problematic, and here are three difficulties that I see with this way of thinking. 1. Online lions may be offline lambs It feels...
Read MoreRhythm 1: Leaving a space for response
There should have been a post yesterday, because I am trying to posting every weekday at the moment. But there wasn’t. I didn’t have time to create and put up the right piece. I thought about pasting in anything, just to meet my own challenge, but there’s a greater issue. Creating a post is only one part of the cycle. The audience response is the next part. When I’ve worked on creating online research groups, I’ve seen a temptation for researchers to put up questions daily. It can work, but if it’s the wrong rhythm for your group, people who have...
Read MoreUnderstanding context: Life span, life stages and predictable crises of growing up
Excuse the mess around here. I’ve just moved to a self-hosted blog and am playing around with images, headers, widgets and all that stuff. I want to think about context. When you are trying to understand what matters to your audience, there are a whole slew of things that have an influence. Very commonly, we focus on the immediate response to our questions, and we act as though that’s all there is. In particular, the focus on the internet and social media seems to strip us back to pure text without bodies. This online conversation feels real and solid. But in...
Read MoreOn loving 70-page Powerpoints
I feel compelled to weigh in on the whole ‘Death by Powerpoint’ discussion. Steve Gatt of Volkswagen was interviewed in August’s edition of Research Magazine, and gave an interview in which he complained about the standard of market research in general and in particular about receiving 70 pages of Powerpoint when all his team really needed were 15. Or even three. As I read, I found myself nodding like the Churchill Insurance dog, for do I not complain about Powerpoint all the time? Do I not, in fact, possess a copy of Edward Tufte’s seminal critique of...
Read MoreManifesto
Some of us find it quite simple to put our real organisations and authentic selves online.
Others - well, let's just say that some of us can't bear to look at our own websites.
My mission is to help you transform your online presence so that other people understand and appreciate what you really have to offer. So that you can achieve what you want - whether that's better engagement, more readers, or more sales.