furtherandfaster

Best workshop

Sorry bit of a hiatus at the moment - lots of things going on at the moment some of which I can talk about a lot of which I can't. All clear soon. In the mean time a big thank you to Han Zantingh of Brainjuicer China, Kate Tribe of Tribe Research in Australia, Jaroslav Cir of Perfect Crowd in Prague and Hanne Kristiansen of Creative Creatures in New York who were our crowdsourcing mentors when Joanna Chrzanowska and I ran the workshop at the research conference. In 60 minutes we had our experts each on a different continent doing one on ones with the workshop participants as they shaped their crowd sourcing research concepts.

The judges must have liked it because we have been shortlisted for Best Workshop - a great honour since there was lots of redoutable competition. We get to put this sticker up - till December when we find out who has actually won.  It was the first time Electric Learning the training company I run with Joanna Chrzanowska had been out on show. We renamed it this year from Mike Imms & Partners. Our goal is to run more immersive learning - more unmissable event than training course.

Where were we? online research and horseless carriages

Nearly 2 weeks since my last blog -  I've had my head down with a lot of work to do. I've become very immersed in the issues around online research. I was working with Joanna Chrzanowska running a training course on the topic last Friday which has consumed large amounts of energy and generated a lot of enthusiasm among those who attended.  Working with a research agency on Tuesday discussing how the ability to moderate for more than a few hours requires us to become super social facilitators.  And I had a mass of suggestions I had culled from other projects I have run for keeping motivation alive and kicking when running longstanding research projects.

Tomorrow I am due to speak about research again at Buckingham University about the future of internet research and after all this immersion I feel as if I am at last finding my stride. I shall be talking about cars. Not looking backwards at the old horse and carriage of conventional offline research, nor the horseless carriages of the transition research formats where early online research spent most of its time trying to look like what went before and being terrible as a result. Nope I want to talk about cars - vehicles fit for purpose which are designed to perform differently from a horse and carriage. There are so many exciting ways to do research out there I don't have to talk about the transitional mutants.  

So tomorrow I'll be talking about Digividuals, Ethos mobile based ethnography, emotion into action and  Tribe Research's stakeholder model of brand measurement. Not the only new research ideas out there but all in their own way game changers. And I'll be referring briefly to how I propose to change the research game too.

Ooh just heard that my proposal for doing crowd sourcing at the MRS conference has been accepted for the conference next March. I want to crowdsource live from all over the world. Conferences are just too  well local. So time to change that. And by this time next month I will know if I've won a prize from the last MRS conference or if I'm an also run. Good times..

 

Crowd sourcing the London tube strike

Interesting and practical example of crowd sourcing (because I need to be in London tomorrow). The point is that the BBC however professional a news organisation doesn't have the resources to cover the entire tube network. In addition Transport for London and the unions have a vested interest in playing down and exaggerating the effect of the strike - so their briefings amount to disinformation. Which leaves the crowd. This has been tried once before. Let's see what happens this time. Here's the link so you can see the map of the stations which are closed - and how you can get involved if you are in central London tomorrow.

Crowds full marks, media professionals 1 and brands 0. Media professionals  please note - the first the limitations - the information sources you use can't be trusted. Brands note that you are activing in self interest and so the information you produce is not reliable and .. duh we noticed.  And there are still questions on marketing blogs Why do customers use word of mouth to make decisions?

Crowd sourcing - and research

My website www.planningaboveandbeyond.com is slowly coming back into life and it is there where I shall be putting grabbags of references to particular topics. But not quite yet. This is something I have been pondering today and got some very useful links from students I have been teaching on the Digital Marketing Masters at IEBusiness school. Our discussion has been about usability testing and the web and it is clear that crowdsourcing is being used to betatest webbased services. This seems to me a really interesting possible extension for research because of the way we can ask people about their experiences but also get loits of behavioural data at the same time.

Here are some of the links

What crowdsourcing means for innovation Business Week article

Global network of professional testers Utest

How crowdsourcing helps research activities - Jeremiah Owyang

Crowdsourcing research - small business Trends Steve King

Classic research is suspicious of crowds because it wants to know who each person is and wants them to behave independently. I am becoming much more interested in trying to find away past this objection to collective behaviour which can safely fall within the research canon.

My interest in this is related to the Cloud of Knowing project for which I am starting to gather collaborators.  There are several components. What intrigues me is the idea of setting up a wiki or friendfeed room into which a whole lot of feeds have been placed and then crownsource people through the room to rate what has been put there. It isn't the only toy I am playing with but it is an important one. To go back to an earlier post in March where I talked about cultivators and huntergatherers. The kind of research participant we need to crowdsource in these rooms is a cultivator - someone who is good at evaluating things that are given to them. The research participant hunters are a different kettle of fish - that will be left to another posting. 

Thx to Rahul Nambiar and Suzanne Flug for the links