Robert Fransgaard

Getting the full story: Multi-channel storytelling using social media

Fransgaard — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:36:08 +0000

I’ve just finished an amazing book called “Hi! My Name Is Loco and I am a Racist” a very honest book about all aspects of racism and about facing and knowing yourself. It is a very good book!

However, this article is not a review of the book but rather a guide to get the full story out of the book using social media.

I first encountered the books author Baye McNeil AKA Loco on Instagram as I actively seek out people taking photos of Japan, my favourite tourist destination. I followed and commented on his photos and he reciprocated.

As he also had a Twitter account I connected with him there as well but it was dormant relationship in the beginning as our common ground was the sporadic relationships Instagram nurture. The fact he had a blog actually escaped me for quite a while.

One day Loco posted the cover of his upcoming book on Instagram. I had no idea what it was about at the time and even if I knew I would never had bought it as it wasn’t fiction or work-related.

But this was an “IGer” so when it was released I bought it straight away for my Kindle app.

I responded to his post, Loco replied. I tweeted about his book, Loco thanked me in an honest way that few bigger companies can do… so far I probably haven’t told you anything you haven’t heard before; A small company/self-employed using social media to promote their services.. yada yada yada.

@fransgaard Still laughing! Gonna laugh myself to sleep

— Loco  Gaijin Hero (@Locohama) January 23, 2012

But the book was not the full story

As I started reading the book I learned the content was fueled by Loco’s blog, which I had previously been oblivious to the existence of. The book seems to be a coherent narrative of his individual blog posts.

Many of the aspects of the book were foreign to me. I knew next to nothing about youth gangs in 80s New York or racism on an industrial scale in Japan.

But some of the book’s themes were uncomfortably familiar to me and brought back unpleasant memories. With the new world of social media I was able to share these memories with the author himself via Twitter DMs. Suddenly I felt part of the story in a very real way.

The online sequel

Blog, Tweets, Instagram all lead up to the book, but the story continued afterwards, not only with me spamming Loco with Twitter DMs, but in a much more profound way.

One day I saw this tweet from Loco which sent a chill down my spine:

For those of you who have read #himynameisloco the most AMAZING thing has just happened! I just got an email from #WhiteBoyChris !!! #JOY

— Loco  Gaijin Hero (@Locohama) January 24, 2012

I won’t spoil the book, but White Boy Chris has played an important part in Loco’s young days to the point where the book has a whole chapter dedicated to him. Unfortunately Loco and Chris lost touch a long long time ago.

How often have you seen something on the telly, in a newspaper or even in a book where you end up with this “I wonder how this turned out…” feeling stuck in your mind?

The Internet can continue the story. In fact, why stop there? My Kindle version of the book is digital. Shouldn’t it be possible to update it with a little footnote just like you would in a blog post where new information has surface?

Please share your thoughts on digital storytelling… and yes, I can recommend “Hi! My Name Is Loco and I am a Racist”.

Multi-channel User Experience Visualisation – How to Structure A Story

Fransgaard — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:20:03 +0000

Rapid Design Visualisation (RDV) is a Capgemini methodology for creating simulations that brings a concept to life. RDV prototypes differ from regular prototypes in that they are much less details as they focus on the overall concept.

Traditional prototypes also tend to focus on a single user interface (or even just a single aspect of a single user interface). But as RDV prototypes aim to represent complete customer experiences, they are increasingly stretching over multiple interfaces and multiple devices.

And it struck me: RDV prototypes are telling a story from start to finish. This got me thinking: What do RDV prototypes have in common with traditional story telling?

So I Googled Structure of a story which led me to a website called “Daily Writing Tips” and an article called: “How to Structure a Story“. The article revolves around the author Nigel Watts’ “Eight-Point Story Arc” concept, which is the article describes as “a fool-proof, fail-safe and time-honoured way to structure a story.”

The Eight-Point Story Arc consists of the following eight steps:

Stasis
Trigger
The quest
Surprise
Critical choice
Climax
Reversal
Resolution

I won’t go into details with each one of them since the article does this brilliantly. Instead I made up a quick and simplified prototype to see how well the Eight-Point Story Arc fits a customer journey as told by an RDV prototype. This is the result:

Storify: Burberry Social Enterprise

Fransgaard — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:33:15 +0000

User Experience Design in a Social Enterprise Environment: Connecting the Dots

Fransgaard — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:55:10 +0000

The original version of this article can be seen at the award-winning Capgemini – Capping IT Off blog.

Social Enterprise is an exciting concept and in a series of blog posts I will share some tips on how to make a desirable and productive user experience for The Social Enterprise.

What is The Social Enterprise?

The Social Enterprise is not a technology or software, it is a concept that refers to an organisation that is fully connected and where all things are digitally integrated with each other using what I call The Social Glue.

It is an organisation that thinks differently and makes use of all the opportunities a digitally connected environment presents. It affects everything within the organisation from how systems integrate to how employees behave. It also has a profound impact in how the organisation interacts with its customers, how fast it can react to any correspondence and how well it can collaborate with them.

The switch to a Social Enterprise mindset can flip the company upside down by breaking down hierarchies and business silos and it creates a radically different and modern work environment suitable for the 21st century. Here at Capgemini Yammer has played a big part as covered by my colleagues Tom Barton and Rick Mans, but there are many other success stories on the web.

Connecting the dots

Chances are your organisation already have several of the cornerstones of a Social Enterprise, email being one of them. You may also have a file repository, perhaps digital working groups and maybe even instant messaging tools.

But are they linked together? Do they all identify themselves as official tools of your company? Have they ever been officially introduced as such?

Historically such initiatives were often not started at the top of the organisations. They were started by enthusiastic employees either by publicly being active on behalf of the company (whether in an official capacity or not) or who somehow got access to some server space and set up a wiki or similar to make life easier for themselves and their closest colleagues.

While such guerrilla tactics may have been borderline improper conduct they more often than not proved beneficial to the organisation and as such were adopted more widely with the management’s approval and backing.

Where does content live?

But the above isn’t actually a Social Enterprise strategy because these different initiatives, no matter how effective, are not working together as a single entity.

The first step is to look holistically at the systems and map out what each system brings to the collective experience because while they work independently of each other there is a danger of content being duplicated or misplaced leading to a disjointed experience forcing people back to old habits as they struggle to make sense of all these new systems spawning left and right.

Creating an overview of the systems will help determine where what type of content live which is crucial for an optimised workspace. It will also identify what functions might be missing for The Social Enterprise to function effectively as a single coherent system.

How do I find it?

For a traditional single site interface, such as a website, the rules for best practice in user experience design are:

Consistent Navigation Structure
Strong Search
All-Inclusive Sitemap.

But in reality very few Social Enterprises have a single global user interface as they make use of the default interface designs of the various systems. So for The Social Enterprise the two most important aspects are Search and Sitemap.

The search facility need to be able to search globally across systems and it needs the ability to return relevant results and provide user-controlled functions like filters. If the search cannot search all systems it need to state so very clearly and give the users alternative methods.

The sitemap is almost always forgotten for Social Enterprises because of how they appear out of individual systems fusing together. But nothing is more helpful for users than a single place to see all the different locations with clear indications of what should be used for what purposes. It is not enough to only inform people when they join the company; they need a destination to constantly remind themselves of the logic rather than wasting time finding information on… how to find information.

How do I keep informed?

Real-time information is at the heart of The Social Enterprise as it strives to bring content to users when they need it. This inevitably creates a huge communication stream between people and people as well as between objects and people. However, receiving a flood of automatically generated email alerts is counter-productive as it is time-consuming to manage and hard to filter.

A new mechanism is needed that can aggregate all communication into a single stream of chronological entries. Imagine a single location where alerts from practical systems, from working groups and from colleagues are found in one place, effectively being the digital footprint of the company but delivered in a modified version tailored to each individual employees job role requirements and interests.

Such an organisational Lifestream need to be at the core of any Social Enterprise to be truly effective and software providers are aware of this offering systems that can act as this social backbone of The Social Enterprise, but it is important to remember whatever system is chosen, it need to integrate with all the other systems to be effective, otherwise it is just another digital location soon to be forgotten by the employees.

But what do you think?

Please let me know your thoughts and feel free to share any suggestions for the next article on how to make a desirable and productive user experience across The Social Enterprise.

A Social Enterprise view on Klout

Fransgaard — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:17:33 +0000

This article is the first in a series of blog posts I will be writing on The Social Enterprise here as well as on the Capgemini technology blog Capping IT Off.

The blog battles of Klout is raging on and probably will continue into 2012. But as I have written before I think a lot of people are making the situation much worse, or better, than it is and I think it is because many digital professionals, being social media users themselves, think of social media as a user would rather than a business.

First impressions last

We are all judged from the moment we meet somebody else. What we say, what we look like and how we behave.

We are also measured by companies wanting our customs but using different parameters: The spending power we have, how loyal we are, how well we fit with a specific brand vision and our ability to influence others. The information helps determine who are more valuable and even who should be given special VIP treatments.

As we, the customers, moved online business adjusted these parameters to fit new data such as online behaviour, site loyalty and digital contact opportunities. All this data helps companies understand our needs. No point selling a electrified cow fence to a would-be Britpop star living in the heart of Camden Town, London.

The importance of social customer relationships

With the dawn of social media knowing customers is even more important to be able to provide that elusive personalised service. Social networks also brought a whole new world of influence created instantly from previously unknown sources. Social media allows a girl named Juicystar07 to suddenly can gain millions views simply by voicing her opinion on fashion on YouTube.

How can businesses spot those customers who are influential in the digital social sphere? While not perfect, services like Klout provide measurable and comparable data that can hint to customers’ influential powers online.

Social CRM: The multi-faceted customer profile

But CRM professionals are not stupid. They understand the limitations of Klout and they know better than anyone to interpret a multi-faceted customer profile.

Let’s look at the customers Eva and Paul:

Eva’s profile was created in June 2008.

Since then she has spend an average of £263 a month.

Her husband and oldest son are both registered customers as well.

Her Klout is 14.

Paul’s profile was created March 2011 when he made his first (and so far only) purchase of £14.99.

No other customer profile is attached to Paul’s profile.

His Klout is 43.

Apply common sense and Eva stands out as the better customer. Paul’s significantly higher Klout is only a single facet of the complete customer profile which overall is in Eva’s favour.

But if we amend the profiles, things look different:

Eva’s profile was created in June 2008.

Since then she has spend an average of £263 a month.

Her husband and oldest son are both registered customers as well.

Her Klout is 14.

Paul’s profile was created March 2011.

Since then he has spend an average of £98 a month.

No other customer profile is attached to Paul’s profile.

His Klout is 68.

Suddenly the profiles are much closer in value greatly helped by the Paul’s Klout score.

What do you think?

The above is not theory. In 2011 digital monitoring tool Radian6 teamed up with Klout to incorporate the ability to measure using Klout scores and Radian6 is owned by SalesForce who is a market leader in cloud-based CRM tools.

What are your thoughts on Klout and Social CRM? Can companies really afford not to consider measurement tools such as Klout when creating customer profiles?