Agile Digital Ethnography: Secondary Market Research That’s Quantitative and Qualitative

#agile #digital #ethnography: dynamic new secondary market research: mainAgile Digital Ethnography uses an ethnographic research approach to analyze people’s online interactions. It creates a dynamic new market research capability that’s useful by itself and even more when used with surveys, focus groups, field work, and other primary research.

I have learned that Agile Digital Ethnography provides a unique combination of research results. I have used it on client engagements since 2006. Like primary research, it reveals people’s behavior, thoughts, emotions, and motivations in rich detail; however, because it’s secondary research, it’s faster and less costly than most other methods. It’s very useful when it’s conducted before primary research since its results can inform the design of primary research instruments.

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Article Review: Triune Ethics Theory Reveals Roots of Trust and Relationship

Trust Triune Ethics Theory: Mechanisms of #Trust

Trust and the Triune Ethics Theory reviews Darcia Narvaez’s breakthrough Triune Ethics Theory paper and draws new insights into how trust and relationship building work, based on the human brain’s evolutionary development, structure, and functions. And it sheds light on how experiential social media increases intimacy.

Triune Ethics Theory, Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D.

Trust and the Triune Ethics Theory: Article ReviewTriune Ethics is an enthralling, exceedingly useful approach to understanding human behavior because it explains the context of trust and relationship building at a profound level that is actionable for anyone who wants deeper, richer, more flexible connections and collaboration with people. Triune Ethics Theory will help me to educate my clients and teams at a deep level, and it can give you a rare understanding of your own behavior—and that of people around you.

As with all my reviews, I will attempt to summarize this paper’s salient points before adding some reflections and conclusions about how I’m using its assertions in my work. As I have no formal training in neuroscience, I am drawing on lay study as well as psychology and my […]

True Love for Customers [Love in Business Series]

True Love for CustomersTrue love for customers reveals how nonprofit, commercial and government organizations of all sizes can create much stronger relationships and business by transforming how they relate to customers.

Philosophers, clergy and psychologists have long acknowledged love as the most powerful force between humans. Love connects people like nothing else can, I think because love touches and binds together so many parts of the brain simultaneously: Love stimulates the reptilian brain because it’s related to survival. It is central to the limbic brain, which is grounded in emotion and memory. And love throughly engages the neocortex in art, ideals, and many other forms.

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Customer Experience: An Experiential Business Application

Customer experience and experiential social mediaCustomer experience and experiential social media shows how you can succeed in transforming your customers’ experiences with your firm by adopting a refreshing and effective human approach. Transforming customer experience enables most firms to become more resilient and profitable.

If you’d like to watch this post instead of reading it, click the thumbnail button.

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Customer Success: An Experiential Business Application

Customer success and experiential social mediaCustomer success and experiential social media identifies three pitfalls that too often prevent customer success initiatives from attaining their potential for improving customer experience. In case you’re not familiar with the customer success movement, I outline its origins and scope, so you can appreciate the pitfalls and avoid them.

If you’d like to watch this post instead of reading it, just click its thumbnail.

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Many Businesses Live In Fear—How to Break Free

Many Businesses Live In Fear: How Trust Drives Down Firms' Risk and Fear[Updated] Many businesses live in fear, and how to break free reveals how fear and risk can be sharply reduced by increasing trust among employees, customers and partners.

I have learned many surprising things while practicing experiential social media, but one of the most astounding is the realization that most business practices, especially those that concern people, are grounded in fear and mistrust. This ties businesses in knots, but few people realize it because it’s accepted as normal. This post aims to open your eyes, so you can start noticing how fear and mistrust operate in your firm. Then I’ll offer numerous ideas that can help you to reduce fear and risk by increasing trust.

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Ethnographic Research for Design

Ethnographic Research for Design: IxD Service Design UX Strategy Interaction Customer ExperienceEthnographic research for design explains how to use advances in ethnographic research of social media to design products, services, experiences… anything—while getting better results at lower risk. Ethnographic research of social media is breakthrough for designers in the “design stack” in which I’ve includedArchitecture/Interior Design, Product Design, User Experience Design/Interaction Design, UX Strategy, Service Design and Customer Experience Design.

Designers in all fields lament clients’ resistance to funding robust research. Traditional design research methods are often grounded in asking proposed users explicit questions, and self-reported responses vary significantly from actual behavior despite respondents’ best intentions. Similarly, shadowing, service safaris, “a day in the life,” and other analog research methods are costly and slow. Sample sizes are necessarily small because scaling analog methods greatly multiplies the budget and length of the research phase. Ethnographic research of social media changes the game because it studies proposed users’ actual behavior in digital public when they’re having heated discussions about the outcomes they want when the proposed product, service, or process is useful to them. It […]

Behavioral Economics, Autonomy and Ethical Land Mines

Overview: Behavioral Economics Autonomy and Ethics user experience designBehavioral economics autonomy and ethics is a thought experiment on how to approach “doing good” when applying the emerging practice of behavioral economics. Along with big data analytics and cognitive science, behavioral economics affords businesses, governments and other organizations unprecedented impact on individuals’ behavior, even without their consent or awareness. This arouses serious ethical and social dilemmas.

Every behavioral economics practitioner I’ve met has emphasized the importance of using its practice “for good” in order to help people. Like all other human endeavors, however, “for good” is open to interpretation, so I’ll apply my experience with ethnographic and behavioral analysis of social media to reflect on what “for good” might mean in light of individual and group autonomy.

I also hope this Noodle will be food for thought for executives who hire behavioral economics firms as well as all of us who are invariably its subject. In a similar vein, most designers I know are committed to using design principles to improve user experience, and there’s considerable overlap between design and behavioral economics.

Behavioral economics is […]

Ethnographic Research for Business Innovation Using Social Media

Ethnographic Research for Business Innovation Using Social Media: de-risk innovationEthnographic research for business innovation shows how to apply ethnographic research of social media to managing controlled disruption within organizations. Ethnographic research of social media can transform the entire innovation process because it’s a very efficient way to study the behavior and motivations of the people that the innovation proposes to serve. Unlike traditional innovation and ethnographic research methods, which are relatively slow, costly and qualitative, ethnographic research of social media combines qualitative richness with quantitative analysis. It’s faster and less costly, too.

Ethnographic research for business innovation can dramatically improve the depth and breadth of business and corporate strategy, business design and service design research since it allows teams to consider more users and to assess their behavior and motivations, which can improve the value of more costly research.

This post outlines the business innovation use case of ethnographic research of social media, and it includes examples in banking, professional services, consumer products, and B2B marketing. For more on ethnographic research, see More Resources below.

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Social Media Strategy Lessons Learned

Social media strategy lessons learned summarizes eleven golden rules I’ve learned while leading strategy and its execution for global firms. Some of them might surprise you: I’ve come to learn that I have a different perspective on social media strategy since I advised global firms and startups in their corporate strategies before founding CSRA in 2006.

Social Media Strategy Lessons Learned

Before diving into lessons learned, let’s specify what we mean by social media strategy. “Strategy” itself is an overused work that denotes some mixture of research and planning. The strategy trade-off is simple: the more research and analysis you do upfront, the more risks you can foresee and account for in your plan. When you put your plan into action, you make fewer mistakes and execute more efficiently. Conversely, “minimum viable”/lean strategy does less research upfront, so the team learns while doing. Neither approach is universally “right,” and both work best for certain situations and firms.

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