Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

In the hierarchy of customer research listening to your customers is probably the bottom rung of the ladder, the next step is watching what your customers do, and the third is seeing what they create. This is a model pioneered by well known customer research company Sonic Rim.

Out side of the context of research though, companies are increasingly giving their customers the tools to create right now, and therefore seeing what your customers create becomes just a part of doing business.

Here’s an article from Harvard Business Review on this exact topic, from 2002:
A Toolkit for Customer Innovation

I’ve pointed out in the past companies that do a great job of harnessing the creativity of their customers, netflix, ebay, amazon, flickr, google etc. As this continues to gain credence as a business strategy more and more companies are going to need to create environments that enable and support customer’s creativity and cultures and business processes that can actually take advantage of customer’s creativity.

I think one company that is suffering because it failed to take advantage of customer creativity is Tivo. It’s an example of a great product, supremely well designed, superior to almost every other product out there, but it failed to harness the passion and creativity of its user base to serve as a barrier to entry. I would propose that any network aware product that doesn’t take advantage of it’s network of customers, is putting itself at risk from competitors.

From the standpoint of customer experience the viral campagn used to promote “the ring 2 DVD” in Austrailia is a mind boggling scary mixed media, viral campagn that will scare the shit out of your friends.

I was so facinated, I went to 7daysleft.com to send one to myself, but unfortunatly you could not do this to anyone in the US. Shame.

Via mediabuyerplanner.com

I’m very happy to report that CPH127 Design+Innovation has asked me to be a pilot (author) on their blog. If you haven’t heard of them you should check them out, here’s how they describe themselves:

Now I’m really feeling the pressure to write something smart and insightful. At least they’re based in Copenhagen, which I would love an excuse to go and visit again, it’s a great city with a fantastic vibe, and a very good brewery You’d think as a pilot I’d get some kind of discount.

My apartment and tropical storm katrina

Originally uploaded by mrkook.

Interupting our regular broadcast with a news flash. This is my first hurricane in florida, and ironically enough it has the same name as my mother, Katrina, and as you can see from the google map, it’s going right over my apartment. I happen to live about 20 yards from the beach, and the sea is frothing up. The wind is realy howling now, and anything not nailed down has blown away. I still have power but it’s been going up and down so I don’t think I’ll have it for long.

If 96% of new projects or innovation initiatives FAIL to meet or beat expectations then we must learn to “fail faster”. I didn’t coin that phrase but I use it a lot when talking to traditional companies that want to do something innovative on the web. It seems that many companies are not keen on failure, it brings bad connotations, and is not seen as a good career move. The problem is that innovating is a messy process filled with ambiguity and unintended consequences and outcomes. Any company that wants to innovate in any area needs to be quick to start projects and quick to kill them as well, the quicker you can fail, the more you can invest in projects that are successful. Fail Faster should be the mantra of any company that wants to innovate, and it should look carefully at its culture to help put in place messages and symbols that will counter-act any past messages that frowned on failure or produced fear of failure.

Take a look at this slideshow from business week on innovation, it is a great little primer:
Slide Show: How to Learn Creativity and Innovation

Anyone who reads my blog knows what a huge proponent I am of businesses co-creating value with their customers. I believe co-creation is one of the biggest drivers of business value and competitive advantage in todays economy.

In Chris Lawer’s writing and business I find a kindred spirit talking about the value of co-creation, here’s a presentation he did at the Cranfield School of Management:

Creating Positive Context: How can firms co-create knowledge with their customers?

Courtesy of a fabulously long wikified list of more useful things you can do with RSS:
http://timyang.com/wiki/doku.php?id=lists:thingsyoucandowithrss

There’s been alot of discussion as to the benefits and the risks to customer experience inherent in the bottom up process of Folksonomies, or ‘tags’ or ‘tag clouds’ (basically the process of allowing users to create their own taxonomies that feed a central ‘community taxonomy’ hence the Folksonomy).

Well flickr has taken the concept of Folksonomy to the next level with ‘clusters’ or ‘tag clusters’. It looks like the company itsef is now adding structure to the Folksonomy by grouping similar terms together. So what we have now is a meeting of the minds top-down meets bottom up, in a quite harmonious manner. I guess the interesting thing is here is that the bottom up process of tagging provided the essential, but unstructured meta data that the company could then massage, so instead of “never the twain shall meet”, one is feeding the other.

I’m sure a new term will be coined for this, in fact if you have any ideas feel free to post a comment.

I recently came across a paper published by the UK Department of Trade and Industry, that focused on how US companies were innovating through UX techniques, or what they refer to as PCD (people centered design). I think this is an important document for understanding how a focus on Customer Experience Design techniques contribute to wider business innovaiton.

This is a substantial document at around 70 pages, and involves companies like IDEO, Sonic Rim, and Adaptive Path , as well as larger companies like Microsoft, Intel, Ebay, BMW, Volvo and IBM.

1. The chapters are broken up as follows:
2. Role of PCD in mitigating risk in developing new technologies
3. Developing innovation processes
4. Effects of organizational culture
5. Translating research insights
6. Evolving traditional UCD (User Centered Design) techniques
7. PCD and ‘brand experience’
8. Adaptation, personalization, and ‘self centered design’
9. Dialogues with academic research

Here’s a link to the article:
Innovation through people centered design - lessons from the USA

Blogged by : Putting People First: Innovation through people-centred design - lessons from the USA

In this interview of Eric Costello from Flickr by Jesse James Garret we see that rather than a master strategic plan leading to the success of Flickr, it was primarily a large user centered design exercise. Success came from listening and observing customers, as they added features and functionality.

An Interview with Flickr’s Eric Costello

One thing this reinforces for me is that no matter how good the design discipline, the organization must be structured or “designed” to take advantage of the insight from the customer experience.