1980 telegram from activist group "Anti war citizens"
Social media and mobile phones are the communication and organising tool of this moment. As you well know these tools have been important factors in recent events like the Arab Spring and the London Riots. So I thought it an apt time to reflect on old school comms. I found this telegram from 1980 on a cleaning bee at my parent’s house.
My parent’s took me to huge peace rallies in the 1980s. We marched under the banner of a Greek community club called the Atlas League. Now I can see how this group coordinated their efforts with other peace lobbyists. No group SMS, no twitter broadcasts, no Facebook events, but a telegram, phone calls and word of mouth that mobilised thousands to march in Sydney streets.
Permanent link to this post (134 words, 1 image, estimated 32 secs reading time)
An interesting thing happens when the speakers at Social Media Club don’t hit their mark. The speakers were talking about engagement but they weren’t getting any. The error they made was misjudging their audience as amateurs who needed to be shown how it’s done. They should have known that this is an audience of social media marketers and consultants with years of experience under their belts.
Somehow the disappointment was energising. The speakers showcased relatively intimate projects. The conversations amongst the crowd, many of whom work for advertising and digital agencies were pointing out the difference of executing a social media campaign for a small boutique client versus a big brand. People were talking about dollars, and where budgets for this work should come from when companies don’t devote staff to voice and participate in campaigns. What the crowd had questions about, and what they wanted to hear were the lessons learned. Before a palette of wine was sold off the back of one tweet-up how many mistakes were made and what were they? Endless success stories and figures about the application of social media just didn’t ring true without the war stories.
I recently finished a project where I conducted user testing to validate the effectiveness of a navigation menu. The project was a collaboration with the client’s project team who were responsible for the prototype and the recruitment. Everyone was confident going in to the user testing on the IA scheme but were open to changes. This may seem a mute point—why do testing if you are not going to change anything? Strangely I have seen people be highly selective of what they wanted to have proven in testing. Luckily this project featured no such hubris and everyone was respectful of the problems encountered by the users.
Elsewhere in the organisation other stakeholders held competing and contrasting views of what needed to be designed in the schema and what labels needed to be used. User testing the IA was seen as a means to streamline and manage the internal decision making process by bringing everyone together on the same page and letting users themselves determine the outcome.
This blog post is about diary studies and how to go about conducting them.
What are diary studies?
Diary studies, otherwise known as User Research Diaries or “Cultural probes” were pioneered for use in design research by William “Bill” Gaver, Professor at Goldsmiths London. Interestingly he doesn’t analyse diary content, nor does he create scenarios or personas from them instead using them as a base from which to validate other data. He does not create personas, preferring instead to revisit the raw data.
Diary studies are used in longitudinal research — looking at people over a longer period of time than a typical Contextual Inquiry or interview can allow; and researching people when you could not otherwise be there with them.
What are diary studies good for?
- Great for understanding the activities undertaken by participants, what they actually do.
The panel: Mark Pesce, Keir Winesmith, Matt Moore and Julian Peterson
It was a quality panel at the 10th Digital Citizens event moderated by the talented James Fridley @fridley:
- Mark Pesce (@mpesce) inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster
- Keir Winesmith (@drkeir) Development manager and technical lead for SBS
- Matt Moore (@engin_eer) intellectual capital consultant to corporates, government and NGOs
- Julian Peterson (@JulianFPeterson) former TimeOut marketing boss
There’s a quandary right now which we are all well aware of. Everyone loves content—film, music, books, software but people are becoming less prepared to pay for it. Content may be king but businesses have to not only contend with people wanting it for free but other businesses pilfering and benefitting from it with no permission.
“It’s not piracy, it’s audience driven distribution” – @mpesce
Tshirt: "Copyright infringement is your best entertainment"
Banner image on Snoop Dogg's Facebook Shop
At a FED event in April, I asked Dean McEvoy co founder of group buying site Spreets a question about the deals function. What was the point of quotas for deals considering that Spreets is so popular, it is inevitable that all deals go ahead? He replied and said “watch this space”. Well, nothing has happened so far in terms of innovations on Spreets or any other group buying site. But something has happened on Facebook. With Snoop Dogg.
Dealing and sharing on Spreets
Last week blogger OMG with Emily on FBi radio’s Up for it program, was talking about Snoop’s latest entrepreneurial venture. If you shop on Snoop, the more likes a product gets the bigger the discount. So you can get a $7.99 fragrance with 300 likes for $5.99. Bargain!
Volume discount via liking on Snoop's Facebook shop
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