Bolin Digital

Last night I had the fortunate opportunity to attend the local UPA MN lecture where Susan Dray and David Siegel talked about some of the myths of user research.  Without getting into the details of the presentation, their main message was basically don’t always trust research outcomes, no matter how massive or sophisticated they appear.

We work hard to never stop questioning our approaches to defining customer or user experience problems, in addition to our methods in answering them. But as experience design strategists and designers in agency or consultancy settings like Bolin Digital, we often don’t have the luxury of large budgets to help us inform our design decisions for many projects.

In the methods of our work, we rely heavily upon activity-, user-, and system-centered approaches as models to guide us through the forest of decisions. We hope that one of them or a combination of them gets us to the answer quickly.  Paul and I have also chatted about the common sense approach to design: should we  sometimes  rely on our own experience or instinct to guide decision making (also referred to as Dan Saffer’s “genius” centered design approach)? It seems like even this cost-efficient “gut” check, however, can get us into deep water.

As we continue to grow up in a world of increasingly sophisticated interactions and product experiences, it’s important to understand how we arrive at conclusions about which design paths to take.

All this recent thinking provoked me to ask these questions about design research methods and tools: Wwhat’s the best mix of data and methods?  How much of it is driven by common sense? How do we know when we arrive at the best possible solution?

Many of you may have already seen this augmented reality project by GE. It’s actually using a Adobe Flash based version of ARToolKit called the FLAR Toolkit. We see a lot of potential for this technology to help our clients that have product visualizers. This may help their clients bridge the mental gap of what the product may look like in their house. This would allow anyone with a printer and webcam the ability to view a product rendered in 3d, in the exact location they choose. It’s still pretty new technology, and we’ve spent some time getting it to run smoothly, but we definitely see the potential in both the mobile and home settings, as there is a kit for the iPhone as well.

We will be posting some demos in the following days and weeks.

Social Email Campaigns Expected to Increase Nearly 400 Percent in 2009

A record number of email marketers plan to bridge the gap between online social networks and their email marketing campaigns in 2009, according to new research from Ball State University, the Email Marketer’s Club and ExactTarget.

The study surveyed 351 email marketers in March and found that while only 13 percent leveraged the power of online networks last year to grow their email subscriber list, more than 46 percent plan to use social media and email in tandem in 2009.

“While the global reach, rapid adoption and high engagement found in social media have email marketers salivating at the potential these environments offer to engage with customers and prospects, the real challenge is how best to facilitate meaningful interactions,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy.

Although the demand for the integration between social sites and email is surging, the success with the integration remains largely uncharted, according to the study featured in ExactTarget’s newest whitepaper entitled, “Expanding the Reach of Email Through Social Networks”.

“Consumers are reluctant to invite marketers into social environments, and this is because they don’t want to see the channel overrun with irrelevant commercial messages,” Stewart said. “However, marketers who are able to align their messaging with the distinct mindset of consumers engaging in social networks are posting positive results and building a quality following in these environments.”

The whitepaper features research that highlights how brands such as Carmex, TripAdvisor and Papa John’s have scored success by broadening their communications to include social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg and others to their traditional email-based efforts.

“We want visitors to share the experience with their friends, but we don’t want to force them to use a channel they are uncomfortable with,” said Paul Woelbing, president of Carma Labs, the maker of Carmex (a Bolin Digital client). “By offering visitors choices, we are learning a lot about the dynamics of integrating email, social media and text messaging – namely that they complement each other very well.”

The release of the whitepaper follows Tuesday’s launch of ExactTarget’s Social Forward, its new flexible metrics-driven social sharing solution for email. Debuted at ad:tech San Francisco, the new functionality gives marketers the industry’s first social media integration for email that allows multiple ways to leverage sharing and provides the industry’s most complete solution to enable and track sharing through its Direct to Social capability and through a partnership with social media syndication powerhouse ShareThis.

ExactTarget’s Social Forward will be available to users through its online Innovations Lab starting May 1 and will become an integrated solution for all ExactTarget users worldwide as part of the company’s Summer release.

The whitepaper and an overview of ExactTarget’s Social Forward technology are featured in ExactTarget’s Social Media Kit for Email Marketers. Marketers may download the kit free of charge at www.exacttarget.com/socialmediakit.

At Bolin, we get a lot of requests for “what is social media” or an overview of “social media how to”. There are a number of people and organizations who have answered this question well but we thought we’d take a bit different stance by focusing less on the individual social media tools or platforms and more on how social media came to be and why it is relevant. Getting this perspective should help provide a foundation for understanding the platform choices we all have including the new ones that appear every day.  The following presentation was prepared by Dane Hartzell and Paul Saarinen from Bolin Digital and given to the Tour Minnesota Association’s Annual Conference on Connections.

Since all the slide notes are not published, feel free to post your comments or questions here on our blog.

Following is a Twitter overview presentation Bolin’s Paul Saarinen did almost two years ago.  Still a very good reference for understanding Twitter.  The presenatation covers:

1. “Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.” ~Paul Rand
2. What is Twitter? Blog Instant Messenger Mobile Text Messaging
3. Breaking down a Tweet Icon Outbound Short URL Username (linked) Relative Posting Time Reply to User Posting Service Outbound URL Set to Favorites List
4. How can I send or receive Tweets? Web (twitter.com) Instant Messanger (GTalk) Mobile Phone (SMS) RIA / Widget
5. I’m ready to Stalk! What’s Next?
6. How people are using Twitter today current status questions events local news updates cross posting media special offers
7. How will people use Twitter tomorrow? API driven RIA Multidimensional Analysis Brand Integration Alternate Reality Storytelling Micropublishing

Judson Laipply Dance

I had to post a few pics of Bolin’s exciting video shoot with the star of Evolution of Dance, Judson Laipply.  This went down last Sunday.  For readers who are not familiar, Evolution of Dance has reeled in just under 117 million YouTube.com views.  I wont give too much detail until we’re closer to release, but as you may be able to gather from the image, it was quite the experience.  You can subscribe to Judson’s YouTube channel if you would like notification of the release.  I can personally attest to the fact that Judson is one heck of a nice guy and that he has some amazing energy.

Yours truly was offered a wonderful costume for the shoot.  After 4 hours wearing this thing and dancing, I was severly dehydrated.  I have new found appreciation for mascots everywhere.  Can you guess which of the costumes below was mine?

Wolfram Alpha is a knowledge engine based on Mathematica. Here’s an interesting article giving hints on what it is, and how it could impact how we look for answers online. What will be your first question for Wolfram Alpha?

It’s about 4 or 5 PM last Thursday, and I’m sitting on my couch at home suffering from a low grade fever of 101 degrees, and a thought occurs to me. Well, it’s the thought illustrated in my little diagram above. I always tend to think of data, and how it can be used through a marketing filter. This is my first of many problems. In order to try and understand the diagram above, I had to forget those thoughts…at least for a few hours.

We now can bring three seemingly unconnected, but readily available data points together, and look for connections in a whole new layer. Are there implications, or will anything be on the other side? I’m trying to get my small brain to wrap around something much larger than I can swallow. I guess what I’m trying to peer into, is a collective consciousness, and how it relates to real world events.

Step 1. Gather Twitter api search feed.
Step 2. Utilize GPS coordinates for tweets that have them, or sub in location profile data for those that don’t have GPS data.
Step 3. Parse each 140 character tweet for emotional trigger word and give a value (this will be tricky, and pretty loose)
Step 4. Use open source heat map API synced with Google Maps API to visualize impact
Step 5. Start looking for patterns with real world events (I have a few ideas on this)
Step 6. Determine if the patterns prove out over multiple occurences

Well, that’s as far as I have gone. What are your thoughts?

Today online marketers can tell a lot more about you from your Twitter feed, than from the information on a traditional website “contact us” form. Could this be the future of website forms, or at least the next step?

There’s been a lot of talk about online video product placement in the last year.  There’s been little information on the benefits of online video product placement, or the outcomes of using online video product placement.  I’ve always had a gut feeling that online video product placement works, but up until this year, I didn’t know how it impacted success metrics.

I’ve been loosely involved in the Video Blogging community since 2005, so it was pretty easy for me to identify an online video content creator partner for this campaign.  Finding a online video content creator can be tricky, and confusing.  I haven’t met many online media buyers that have a good understanding on selection criteria.  They usually try to map values to the same metrics as banner buys (i.e. site traffic, time on site, frequency opportunities, etc…), but that discussion is for another post.  What I want to convey in this post is how online video product placement was effective for our client, and our success metrics.

The goal of our campaign was to drive online video submissions to Youtube.com for a contest that had 3 tiers of prizes.  The top prize was $5k dollars cash, and about another $700 in prizes.  Beyond the prize incentive, we used two paid media tactics to drive targeted traffic to a site that had a call to action, directions, and rules to enter the contest.  One tactic was a partnership with EpicFu.com to make a mention of the contest to their community, the other was more of a traditonal online media buy on another popular video website.

Below is the analytics chart showing traffic for the two tactics.

While the traditional online buy drove around 10 times the traffic, traffic wasn’t the success metric, video submissions were the goal. We had approximately 75% of sign-ups on our form that followed through with a submitted video for the contest. The most interesting statistic, approximately 50% of the submission came from the time period of the Epicfu.com product placement video. While we were on a shoe-string budget, the traditional online media buy cost 6 times the amount as the online video product placement. While awareness and traffic are nice, our goal was submitted videos. Dollar for dollar, the online video product placement drove more submissions.

Realizing Consumer Generated Content is on the rise, and is forecasted to get even more popular, targeting users that create online video is very difficult. Comparing our contest to other popular brands that had done similar contest, we saw better than anticipated numbers and quality of submission. Over half of the submission were shot in High Definition, and the quality of ideas were very impressive.