How Fleeting Fame could be - The Nokia Theory

More recently I saw this Nokia concept phone (Humanform) video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mtyx412eXo&noredirect=1 and was overwhelmed with the beauty of the concept. In fact, I posted on Twitter something which I thought I'd never would ...... 'I want a Nokia phone'.

After years of buying Apple product purchasing a Nokia isn't something I'd seriously contemplated.

Post getting past the giddy schoolboy envy of wanting the next cool object, I reflected on how fleeting fame could be, even for a powerhouse like Apple. Simply, we are all only as good as our ideas and in the era of hyper-innovation irrelevance is never far away. Brand loyalty will only stretch so far.

Building on this theory, in a world where many an industry is seeing their products and services being reduced to a commodity the final battle will be fought around design and customer experience. In essence those businesses which amaze and delight via beautiful contextual customer experience will win the day.

Bringing this logic to the digital world, as a broad brush stroke statement the major brands seem to be slow in realising the requirements of the digital age with the innovation being delivered by the disruptive forces. Financial services is a cracking example, check out Mint, BillGuard, Square, Zopa, Prosper and eToro to see some future challengers chipping away at the big guys via their focus on design and customer experience.

Interestingly, I attended the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo this month on the Gold Coast and for a technology conference the subject wasn't much about the machines but around creating great customer experience. Now if the smart guys at Gartner are pushing the customer experience theory be sure it's coming to a boardroom near you real soon.

So in short, the threat is to be yesterday's fish'n chips wrappers or to live is to build great customer experiences. Simple choice really.

BillGuard is a very cool app

You have to hand it to the people at BillGuard, I'm so impressed with the beauty of their design and how simply it helps you know what you need to know. Check out out how the interface reassures you the consumer, that it has checked out all of your bills and informs you what bills you need to concern yourself with. How much easier is this application than manually scanning through your bills on a screen or paper to sniff out the anomalies. As they quoted on their website "9 out of 10 people don't check their bills, or merely skim them quickly for large purchases". A logical conclusion is that by reducing the effort to review your bills we'll greatly reduce the amount of fraud we are exposed to.

These guys have it sorted, they do the heavy lifting for me and give me the answers to my key questions. Importantly, they tell me of the 100s of bills I have each year which ones are of concern. Simply put they are saving me time, making my life easier and removing anxiety. Moreover, the use of visual aids or great design to get the message across is spot on. Can't ask for much more really.

But yes there is more, BillGuard also use crowd sourcing or the collective experiences of consumers to identify where fraud and the like is occurring. That's a very powerful pool of wisdom to tap into.

In summary, a very cool app, great design and very clever process. Surely, this is the new standard of digital customer experiences which digital leaders will be measured against. Not surprising they won Best of Show at Finovate.

It's all about the pretty pictures

If I've learnt anything this year it's the fact that what best sells your message are pretty pictures or the designs of your website. Not a surprising statement really but a valuable lesson nonetheless. Whilst development of a digital strategy, an accompanying investment model and customer research are absolutely required the people who'll best remember these gathered learnings are you and your direct team. And to labour the point you should produce these artifacts to round out your knowledge and to justify your investments or activities but nothing sells a story like a pretty picture.

Moving forward I'd employ a strong web designer almost in parrell to starting the strategy to help flesh out the vision and to solicit both feedback and sell the strategy. Again an obvious statement but your modern professional has lost patience with PowerPoint presentations and wants to be engaged via other means. Infact I can distinctly remember the audience's response to both the strategy and the visual designs. With the strategy sold by PowerPoint the engagement was fairly passive but with the web designs people would move forward and the questions flowed. Absolute engagement with the web designs.

The one caution I'd add is to not sell a message exclusively on pretty pictures. If you can't explain how it's aligned to the business strategy, how it will turn a dollar and why customers want it your credibility will be quickly lost. So yes pretty pictures are the best way to win the hearts and minds but to ensure it's a sustainable long term marriage all the standard outputs are required.

Social Media - it's just common sense

Is social media the new dot com scam. I find it curious how a communication medium no older than a couple of years has acclaimed experts promising to solve world hunger, build the Internet and deliver a social media strategy in a day which will transform your organization.

From what I've seen getting social media up and going travels a well worn path of :

• developing a strategy
• removing the roadblocks or deadwood who refute change or evolution
• establishing some guidelines and processes to keep to the company safe and compliant
• recruiting in some motivated staff with a passion for customers service (and social media)
• purchasing a bit of affordable cloud technology to manage your communications

Naturally, you'll need a strategy with contributions from across your key business departments to outline how social media can add some value to your business. What's the challenge or opportunity you are responding to? Servicing, sales, brand development etc. It's not complicated, work through what your objectives are and commence from there in a systematic way.

Now the biggest headache will be your legal and compliance teams who generally speaking would prefer you don't speak to customers at all. Sadly this group of professionals haven't kept up with the times so their advice will be dated. So be prepared to challenge the norm and have hard conversations to inform our resident experts that their advice isn't relevant.

To navigate through the 'no police' get yourself a social media guideline and an accompanying set of process maps to explain how you will communicate responsibly. Also make sure you have some serious air cover from your executive sponsor otherwise the 'no police' will grind you to a slow death or meaningless deliverable.

Getting the right person won't be too hard. Head down to your call centre and find your brightest arts or communications graduate who loves to use social media and has some good sense. The actual process itself of running a social media won't be an unreasonable challenge for a talented individual with a thirst to learn. I'm sure if you look around your business you might know one or two of these people. Also, put in a basic structure with the social media team reporting through to a trusted set of hands and you are away.

From what I've seen social media requires a couple of basic attributes in your people to be successful. In no particular order they are:

• Common sense
• Willingness to be compliant and swim between the flags
• A love of social media and gadgets
• A passion for great customer service
• An ability to write using a down to earth and friendly style
• An ability to deal with the 'no police' and politely cut through the stupidity

The technology to manage your social communications is very mature and cheap. Check out Radian6 as an example to get a feel for how far your dollar can go. In short, these types of applications enable you to manage and monitor your social media.

So to the mystery of communicating. There's no mystery, use simple and honest language, plus own up when you make a blue. Like email don't say anything stupid. Common sense right.

So you've now got your social media team, an agreed scope, a set of processes, a few tools to help with managing your communications and the green light to proceed. From here the first step is to listen to what your customers are saying out there and to commence addressing either issues or alternatively reinforcing customer praise. Once you have this understood you can graduate onto communicating via the common social media channels of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Linkedin etc. Simply grow into your strategy, don't turn the tap on full.

So there you go, it isn't that hard, have a crack, put some controls around your processes and start having some great dialogue with your customers. It's a great opportunity to turnaround or reinforce the value of your business.

IBM are right - we need Smart Computers

I never quite got what IBM were on about with their 'Smarter Planet' concept until I began to think through what problems a smarter computer or digital channel could solve. My interpretation of a smarter computer, portal or system is really something which knows me and does the thinking for me. Sadly today there are not many digital experiences where this happens.

So here's the great modern day challenge, to build a digital experience which knows me and pro- actively solves for all of life's little challenges. Personally I often find that as a customer I'm working harder than the computer to find the answers. My expectation is that the computer does the heavy lifting bringing information to me in an easy to consume format. I guess a very basic version of this concept is the Amazon "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" service.

It's pretty odd, that despite the availability of powerful technology, we still request our customers to do a good amount of the work. In our busy and complex lives this seems reasonable.

In terms of the presentation of information in a smarter way, we have to acknowledge the data visualization trend. For so long we've laboured with consuming data in tables with the hope to pick through it all to find the answer. But now we are using smart visuals ie. graphs, charts, icons to better provide the answers. A basic concept I know but a great advancement for the everyday consumer. A great example of this concept can be seen at Mint ( a personal finance management tool) who use lots of visual tools to help consumers understand their spending behaviour. These guys in my opinion really get the 'smarter planet' concept, as the portal does the majority of the heavy lifting and answers are delivered to the customer in an easy to consume mode.

In my day job as a digital profession I concern myself greatly with making the lives of my customers' easier. I imagine their lives are like mine, over committed, time poor and working hard to be a parent, partner and provider. So the best thing I can do for that customer, is to deliver a smarter customer experience which works hard to both know them and deliver the required information in a consumable fashion, so they can live a better, less complex life. In some way I think I'm reproducing the trusted old bank manager, who knew me, gave me the sage advice and kindly reminded me when a payment was due. Those are the days I long for and a smarter computer can go a long way to bringing back the good old days.

Author's note: I've been in that past a beneficiary of IBM hospitality but I'm not employed by that business.

The value of great design

Have been giving a lot of thought to the value of great design in digital applications and its potential to fundamentally reposition your business.

From my dozen or so years in digital I have on the whole seen an under investment in design. And even when the investment has been appropriate the fight to secure the funds has been long and hard.

Interestingly as a society we value great design in other objects like cars, clothes, gadgets and the like, yet when it comes to digital experiences its under valued. Look around at the great many digital assets you consume. How many of them real inspire you?

So why do our sponsors love and appreciate design in objects a great Italian red sports car but when its come to digital there's a resistance to lay down the hard earn.

So here's the rub for digital leaders, we need to champion design and its tremendous ability to transform how our customers feel about our businesses. Somehow we as an industry of professionals need to undertake a mass course in influencing skills to get our sponsors to truly believe in the value of design.

My personal moment when I think I really got the value of design was when we were doing some usability testing with a panel of customers when I worked at GE Money. For one customer our efforts really struck a cord and for him the new portal we'd built fundamentally changed the way he thought about the product and business. Prior to that I never really appreciated how much design could change the emotional connection could have with a business.

Pretty much from that day moving forward I've become somewhat of a real zealot when it comes to design and the necessity to invest strongly in it.