IE Master in Digital Marketing

Anna Znamenskaya – a student of Master in Digital Marketing program @IE Business School has recently launched a start-up aimed at making the life of women with both families and careers easier.

Anna with her WorkingMama.Ru has already won the Best Start-Up award at MITEF (mitef.ru) and is invited to the Silicon Valley to present the project to the potential investors. Speaking about the role of IE’s Master in Digital Marketing role, Mrs. Znamenskaya says that IE helped her crystallize the idea and launch the site.

Anna is the former top manager of different big Russian Internet companies. She has a daughter of 6 years and she from her own experience the issues that modern women face. Her project will share different success stories, provide tips and real tools to successfully combine demanding jobs with even more demanding careers of happy mothers. For women with traveling needs there are parts of the website dedicated to different destinations. Anna is looking for the contributors who would be able to add valuable information about Russian and foreign cities that they know well.

Place and a time for everything – even Google?

One of the highlights of November was a trip to San Francisco to teach a class of MBA students online research. This included a trip to the Google campus no less and the euphoria of going there went to the heads of the faculty as much as the students. Google is very self consciously trying to be different from other companies. Hence the T Rex sculpture being attacked by inflatable flamingos and the Google bicycles left around for casual users.  We got the creds presentation to Silicon Valley which seemed very grounded in the here and now. At one point we were shown a slide showing the number of deals taking place in Silicon Valley compared with elsewhere in the world. Their conclusion – if you want to build a business of any scale then eventually you will have to come to Silicon Valley to find the engineers, the academics and the venture capitalists. A curious powerplay from a company which has done more than most to destroy a sense of time and place – wanna known anything? Google it from wherever you are. We heard from the product manager for mobile advertising who warned us that 80% of websites were not mobile enabled and this represented a threat to our businesses. Heady stuff from a company which is barely a teenager.  But interesting that newfangled digital talk sounds a lot like old style imperialism. I asked if all this money chasing a few halfway decent ideas wasn’t going to become inflationary. Probably was the laconic reply. But when you’re on top of the world what does it matter paying a few extra millions. Plan your exit we were told. So we did.

Second that emotion

For much of the autumn I have been discussing and reading up that slippery topic emotion. Now believed to be the source of so much behaviour but defining it is problematic because the scientists can’t agree what emotion is. The first challenge is to get people to tell you how they are feeling without thinking about it too much. Because that changes the emotion. The second challenge is to distinguish emotions from mood.  Mood being a vast porridge with all sorts of emotions blended into it.  The point of this project is to explore context – how place and time and other people affect us and the decisions we make; specifically those to do with buying and consuming. I can’t give away much at the moment but expect to see an announcement in the new year about how to measure the effect of context on consumption. And where brands fit. If you’re curious or have a point of view – then call me to chat about it.   This is hard but worthwhile and wide open for marketing.

Idea of the month: making the most of meetings..
I found myself in Brussels last week taking a roomful of young planners through the principles of running workshops. One of the most exciting aspects of this kind of session is when the penny drops that you can apply the thinking to any meeting you run resulting in an immediate improvement.  The fundamental difference between a workshop and other meetings is that you pay primary attention to inputs and the energy levels of the participants and trust the output to them. A lot of meetings ARE output focussed. But the reason why so many are so unsatisfactory is that no one has thought about outputs or inputs and which is more important. So they become working sessions without clear waypoints. So the top tip if you want something new then focus on making the inputs different and the process exciting. But one way or another plan that meeting!!

2011 what a year!

Yes what a year it has been – I’ve been working for Spring Research since May so much of the year has been spent in transition as I have fulfilled prior commitments. Sometimes it has felt as if I am pedalling two different bicycles at the same time. The pressure has been considerable but I look forward to 2012 and a renewed focus on tackling new research challenges and developing innovative research products. Next month I can tell you if Joanna and I won the award for best workshop or will have to be content with a nomination!  Have a great Christmas – I look forward to catching up with you in the new year. Don’t we live in interesting times?

One week after the second Face-to-Face period in Silicon Valley of the Master in Digital Marketing, we are receiving loads of materials the students sharing their stories from “inside perspective”.

See for yourself through the picture gallery and feel free to share more pictures or comments from the experience!

The Master in Digital Marketing  has reached one step further!

The Face-to-face period, held for the first time in San Francisco, California has been an amazing success.

Our 2011 MDMKT intake and a group of students representing the Global MBA ,  had the unique opportunity to attend lectures from prestigious professors of Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley , combined with relevant visits to New Tech big firms such as Google, Electronic Arts or Zynga.

Moreover, the group had networking meetings  with brilliant entrepreneurs from start-ups and incubators  in the Silicon Valley area.

Do you want to know more about their agenda and insights?

Check our Master in Digital Marketing playlist  by clicking the image below and stay tuned to “The Silicon Valley Experience.

More videos and interviews will be added shortly!

Mind The Bridge Venture Camp Milano  is one of the fastes-growing european Entrepreneurship event.  And this year, world-renowned authorities in Entrepreneurship have taken this congress one step further.

Entrepreneurship professors Tom Byers from Stanford University and Paris de L´Etraz, Phd from IE Business School addressed the key topic of “Linking Business and Academia” in one of the main panels.

The main mission and purposes of Mind The Bridge are:

 TO LEARN about the most successful bridges between the Silicon Valley and Italy.

 TO HEAR examples of Italian and European entrepreneurial success.

 TO MEET the Mind the Bridge 2011 Business plan competition finalists and hear their business pitches.

TO BUILD A STRONG NETWORK with other budding entrepreneurs, potential investors and mentors.

* written by Gonzalo de la Mata and Alberto Benbunan

Did you remember the phrase? The only thing cooler than a million dollars is, well, a billion dollars.

One of the things 2011 will be remembered as, is the year of Social Gaming, already a of billion dollar industry today. Have you ever heard about Social Gaming before? Who are the players? Have you ever bought Facebook Credits? Social Gaming is here and, it’s here to stay.  There are many news/indicators in the industry that support this statement, Zynga is working on it for its IPO, Google launched Google+ with an eye on social gaming, and the adoption of Facebook credits as a virtual currency has been well adopted by the audience, that it is means Social gaming is becoming a land of opportunities for marketers and advertisers.

Some figures of US trends to help the argument

Picking up from Jeremy Liew post there are three key factors to explain this rapid ascent over the last years on Social Games. Development-Distribution-Discovery

• Fast Development: Social games can be launched in three to six months with total development time. Furthermore developers can launch a game in beta and if the game finds an audience it will earn further investment for development.
• Easy Distribution: Facebook is the most popular social platform, it’s users engage easily and at no cost (most of the time) with the games. There is virtually no friction in the distribution of social games.
• Mass Discovery: One of the core elements of Social Games is their viral growth, Facebook feed post, notifications and fortunately the discovery is free for publishers.

The Economics of Social Gaming   clearly states the rapid ascent of this new advertising channel. Facebook has reshaped the landscape for advertising, before audiences were predominantly male and teen, and the most popular games consisted of sports and action tittle today marketers have a richer array of choices than ever before, and are the women in their 30’s one of the largest audiences for social gaming. The key question is how brands reach their target audience.

• Targeting-Segmentation. Although the demographics of the Social Gaming audience have become increasingly complex the key for marketers is to look beyond demographics and factors in psychographics (online habits-tastes etc…)
• Innovation. Marketers are attaching brands to games in new and sophisticated ways as experimenting serving videos engage ads in social networks in exchange for virtual currency
• Rewarding. Virtual Currency is a viable incentive to get gamers to watch branded videos with this new way to serve advertisers. This practice is likely to grow as marketers, agencies and gaming companies refine the use of video to enhance the game experience while engaging customers in brand interactions.

What is next? Mobile is the next stop for marketers looking to reach audience through gaming.

Motivation still matters – eh Steve?

The death of Steve Jobs within days of the launch of the Iphone 4S has stirred up a storm about his legacy and where the future lies for Apple. I have particularly enjoyed the Fast Company piece which identifies the chief protagonists for 2012: Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Who are on a collision course with one another. What makes this confrontation so interesting is that all have a phenomenal reputation in their core markets. They all have ready access to investment – and may even be sitting on piles of cash. But the battlefield is about customer data which all have found ways to harvest and repackage. It is curious working in a market research agency every day when such audacious land grabs are under way. Is the writing on the wall for research? Well no it isn’t. You see however much data you have about human behaviour. And however brilliantly you data-crunch networks of human relationships, nothing replaces simple motivation. What human beings think they are doing. Confused, conflicted, in denial or clear headed, customers need to tell us what is going on in their lives. Without which marketers are working blind. Bear in mind that most of the social network content which is claimed to reveal motives is actually advertising – personal advertising. People are selectively presenting certain facets of themselves. Their data trails don’t tell you why they did what they did. Or what they plan to do next. I don’t deny that all four of these companies offer huge opportunities for targeting and tracking. But the challenge for marketers is how much of the budgets to spend on insight generation. Data trawling at whatever scale doesn’t compete with simple motivational research.  Interesting isn’t it how so many of the tributes to Jobs have focussed on what motivated him rather than what he achieved?  

Free passes for my session at the newMR conference on Nov 3^rd

This Thursday I am speaking about co-creativity at the global online research conference NewMR which you can join via your computer be it desktop or laptop. The conference extends 24 hours and loops the globe. I am on the early European leg – 7.30 to 9 am session. My fellow presenters are Ray Pointer founder of NewMR and David Penn. Ray is talking about the future of research and David about the re-humanising of research in the face of neuromarketing.  The whole conference will cost you £100 but I have some free passes to give away for my session so if you fancy an early start and want to attend then mail me fast! First come first served. I am going to be talking how we level the playing field to ensure client marketers are able to participate as equals alongside customer participants

Idea of the month: hire a games designer
One of the treats of teaching MBAs about research is the interesting case studies and links they send you. Here’s a corker. Scientists cracked a 10 year old puzzle on the structure of a retrovirus enzyme using gamers. So here’s the idea: What intractable problems does your business face and how could you using gaming to solve them? The solution – hire a games designer. You don’t have to solve the problem yourself. You don’t even need to frame the problem – that’s what the games designer is for. Gamification has become a regular research topic which usually boils down to how to make boring surveys a little more interesting. This idea is altogether more radical. It taps into communication and connecting with your customers. But at its heart it means stop trying to solve all your problems internally and cloaking them in secrecy. Why not turn them into puzzles and hand them out? It was once considered odd and outrageous to hire a creative advertising agency. Now that’s a habit that is hard to kick.  Back in 1975 SF writer Vernon Vinges wrote Shockwave Rider he envisaged corporations and companies creating stock exchanges opinion polls to solve social and business problems. Crowdsourcing is now a mainstream business tool. The gaming business has never been smarter or more profitable. Isn’t it time you tapped into that skillset?

Upandcoming

On December 2^nd  I will be rerunning the Online Research Universe – a day’s introduction to how to do online research – we are still taking bookings for it. But my main focus continues to be running research projects day to day at Spring. If you have a thorny marketing issue on your mind then feel free to call.  I’ve been rather too busy to blog but will be posting again very soon.  And

Thank you for your attention.

John Griffiths

Simon Wootton, alumni from our last intake of the Master in Digital Marketing 2010 has launched his Interactive CV and wants to share it with all of the IE Community!
Building an Interactive CVs is the latest trend for a higher performance in the job market. This format provides companies a deeper knowledge of the candidates and offers them a wider range of chances for reaching more employers all over the world.

Do you want a brilliant example? Check Simon Wootton´s site and see for yourself…

How you facilitate meetings can make a big difference on the quality of the discussions and the ultimate outcome you are to achieve. This Six P’s will help you lead more successful meetings in the future.

1. Preparation
As in everything in life, you do a better job on anything if you do the preparation; and the same is true if you are going to lead a meeting. There are two key actions to do in this preparation. 1) Get very clear on the outcome you want to drive in the meeting and remember to state it up front at the start of the meeting. 2) Meet some of the key participants prior to the meeting. Especially with a meeting discussing a very emotive topic, you want to meet some of the key people beforehand and really understand their position. Understanding the position of key participants helps you to control the actual meeting much more effectively.

2. Performance
How you act in the meeting can really set the atmosphere for it. If you speak with energy and passion, the people in the room will pick up on that and speak with energy and passion. Very often, the people in the meeting will feed off the energy and attitude of the leader. Therefore, as the leader, always bring in the most energy and drive into each meeting; and leave any negativity or tiredness at the door.

3. Paraphrase
People express their thoughts in different ways, and sometimes in ways that are not as meaningful to others. When this happens, you can help others to understand better by paraphrasing what was said in a different way. Keeping the discussions moving forward is key for meetings, and paraphrasing is one of the best ways to accomplish this. Also, you can paraphrase negative comments of some participants into a much more constructive and productive way. In fact, paraphrasing negative comments can be one of the most important skills to help keep the discussions moving forward and not letting a particular negative comment destroy what was a good discussion.

4. Prompt
Many times you will lead meetings where you know some of the people really have some good ideas to share, but just don’t speak up. As the leader, you can pick them and ask if they have any ideas they would like to share. Also, if you did your preparation and spoke to them prior to the meeting, you can then say to them “John, remember you had this idea when we talked this past week – could you share that with the others”. The problem is never that there are not enough good ideas in the room, but that people don’t always share them. Prompting gets more information out of everyone that could be useful for getting a better outcome from the meeting.

5. Pre-empt
Now, the next P is the opposite of prompting. Here you want to pre-empt some possible negative comments from someone in the meeting. Again, if you have done your preparation, you would have talked to the people who you thought might be negative in the meeting. When they begin to express their negative thoughts, you then “pre-empt” them by saying “yes John, when we met this past week you said that…..”. This gives you a way to share what John wanted to say, but in a much less confrontational way. However, remember that to pre-empt someone in a polite way you must have talked to the meeting where they expressed that thought.

6. Position
Where you stand in the room and how you move around the room can either help or hinder the conversations. If you are in the middle and constantly moving around to help drive the conversation, you are then really controlling it as well. Sometimes you need to back away in a corner if the conversations are being productive and don’t really need your help. Also, there’s a great way to control people who are speaking too much. Why don’t you just stand in front of them for a few minutes and you take them out of the conversation quite naturally. That’s not something you want to do often, but there always comes the times when someone is just being too disruptive.

Remember these six P’s for the next time you need to lead a meeting, and you will drive it to a much more successful outcome.

Preparation → Performance → Paraphrase → Prompt → Pre-empt → Position

October 2011: Are you monitoring your tribe?

One of the great pleasures of speaking at the Australian research conference last month was meeting for the first time people I had got to know online. One of these is Kate Tribe – the lady with the luckiest surname in the business. Kate has a really simple idea: to stop thinking of our organisations as buildings full of employees. And to conceive of them as tribes of producers, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. In the porous conditions created by the digital world the buying, selling and supplying have become faster and interconnected. The work doesn’t need to be done in the building any more. Research is taking place in a much wider range of locations. Kate’s company Tribe Research provides a range of online tools that allow you to monitor what your customers, suppliers and employees think about the performance and reputation of the company. What I admire about her approach is that it changes the way we think about companies – research may be more accessible and relevant than you had ever thought possible.

 Rumsfeld Grid: Insight comes from what you don’t know you don’t know

Last week I met a researcher who was having to reinvent himself after working several months pitching research projects in a social media agency. His problem –none of the clients wanted to pay for research. There is so much free customer data out there that the notion of doing conventional research is becoming endangered. The trouble with having lots of free data is that it makes you less critical about the data you actually need. The kind that creates new business opportunities. I refer you to the Rumsfeld Grid after Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quotation about the things you know, the things you know you don’t know, and the things you don’t know you don’t know. The trouble with a lot of customer data is that it only fills gaps you already know about. What qualitative research and behavioural data can tell you is much more – they can show you things you didn’t know you didn’t know. This is the source of most insight. The new fast growing brands have disrupted their markets because those already running established businesses there didn’t know what they didn’t know – patterns had changed but they couldn’t spot it. Be very careful that your business intelligence isn’t simply reinforcing what you already know. That can kill your business if you let it.

Idea of the month: Rehearsing your next imitation
My colleagues Steve Phillips and Abi Hill triumphed at the September Amsterdam ESOMAR research conference, winning the prize for best paper for their take on Behavioural Economics and how to apply it to research design. Including the herd effect. A couple of months ago I mentioned the curious truth that we find it a lot easier to imitate than to be original.  The above photo is taken from The Disciples a photography project which assembles photos taken of fans from different concerts. It won’t surprise you that the ladies above had each gone to see Dolly Parton – but no prior consultation on dress code was required! When you read the morning paper you are collecting material for the conversations of the day. You don’t need to prepare this kind of activity. Its automatic. A reminder of how much of learning is below the surface and when we think we are doing other things we may be rehearsing our next piece of imitation. What are you doing to help your customers rehearse?

Upandcoming

I’m thinking about holidays recently –not my own alas but at the luxury end – I get to research exotic locations even if I don’t get asked to fly there!  I’ve been asked to speak at the Festival of New Market Research – a 24 hour spectacular conference that runs online on Thursday Nov 3rd. You can attend the entire event without leaving your desk – there are sessions for Europe, USA and Asia. Or all of them! My topic co-creation and the marketers’ role in it. That aside October is filling up nicely.  If you have research projects on your mind then feel free to call to discuss them.