This chimes with my own experience of conducting focus groups for web services, and seeing creative concepts subject to them.

In other words, if somebody put a mobile phone in the hands of the focus group it could be very useful to ask about their impression about how it makes them feel.

If however you came up with a concept for a creative brief, or an application like Twitter, without a working prototype, you won’t get meaningful feedback from a focus group. In fact Twitter is a fantastic example of how nebulous an interactive human driven service – most new digital services – can be: Many users have to try and use them multiple times before they get it. If Twitter’s future had been dependent on the approval of a focus group of people that had not used it, it would have been dead in the water.

In political polling the pollster will always frame the question, “if you could vote tomorrow”, precisely because of the need to focus the mind on an outcome which is imaginable, says Tyndall. If the polls tell you that the public thinks there is no alternative to austerity, that does not mean politicians should take it face value and not seek other solutions. A major policy shift that could be received very well, might just be out of the groups frame of reference in the present.

But – making decisions without these crutches are hard. It requires insight and vision. And courage.

So whether you are a product developer, pitching a creative concept or an activist politician. Remember – focus groups can never replace an informed vision if you want to do something out of the ordinary.

A new study is proving what we suspected for a long time. Traditional tools like Google Analytics no longer show an accurate picture of what traffic is driven to a site by who. And the one media property that gets done in is Twitter. Most Twitter users don't access it via Twitter.com, but rather do so via a plethora of mobile clients.

Stats from Comscore (PDF) this week just served to underline this fact. Twitter.com is only the 37th biggest website. So how much traffic from Twitter goes unattributed? As much as 75%.
 

American Express loves your social graph

None other than credit card company American Express is jumping into the Social Deals space. They're creating a social deals platform called Link, Like, Love, which will offer their cardholders deals and discounts based on their Facebook social graph. And it's not just that: they will also give businesses a platform to create deals, directly competing with the likes of Foursquare and Groupon.

"This phenomenon of daily deals and location-based offers–it's a great opportunity to reach AmEx customers, but there are [many] merchants who are overwhelmed by all the digital options that have been created over the past few years"

Big question: will people be willing to open up their personal content to their credit card company, in return for deals?

Mobile: marketers don't get it

Despite attempts from the likes of Citroën with their Hide & Seek Game, Rei Inamoto, AKQA's chief creative officer, states in this post that the ad industry doesn't get mobile. He claims that the creativity in the mobile space is coming from start-ups and not from the advertising/communications industry.

"Often, what we are selling to our clients may be closer to software than to stories. But clients are not yet used to buying software ideas."

In other words: why didn't Kodak set aside time and resources to invent something like Instagram. We whole-heartedly agree, but it's a balancing act for brands. Because if Kodak would have invented Instagram, would it have been as popular?
 

Toronto is burning

So you're on a holiday in a new city, you want to know where stuff is happening, but your Lonely Planet is – like- a year old. The city of Toronto has just released a real-time heat map called Toronto Trending based on Tweets and Foursquare check-ins.

We've experimented with a similar idea before, but this is a very neat implementation.

Whose Twitter account is it anyway

This week the BBC lost 60,000 Twitter users in a snap when a well-known correspondent walked out with their account @BBCLauraK and changed it to @ITVLauraK. Our thoughts? That is how it ought to be.

If the BBC had a clause in their contacts that said its employees' accounts – the ones that explicitly mention they are BBC-related – belong to the corporation, employees would be reticent to Tweet on behalf of their employers. And if the only reason a person is followed is because they worked at the BBC, then moving elsewhere should see an account lose followers anyway.
 

Tasty numbers

Every week we see new numbers that make our eyes water. So without further ado, here are this week's beauties.

2.1 billion mobile devices will have HTML5 browsers by 2016, only 109 million had in 2010. Reminder: there are only 7 billion people on this planet. Android phones and Facebook are playing no small part in the phenomenon.

Here in the UK Google’s Smartphone audience grew by 634% since May 2010. Symbian (Nokia) and Windows both showed a small decline though.

And here's one for all the Apple fanboys. Apple Aps are selling 9 times faster than MacDonalds burgers, hitting the 15 Billion mark in a snap. Yum!

Anti-social behaviour

"They smashed a hole through a locked closet door, and found the passport, cash, credit card and grandmother’s jewelry I had hidden inside. They took my camera, my iPod, an old laptop, and my external backup drive filled with photos, journals… my entire life. They found my birth certificate and social security card, which I believe they photocopied – using the printer/copier I kindly left out for my guests’ use."

Finally, the case that the Airbnb nay-sayers said would happen. A month ago a user of the house sharing service posted a gut wrenching blog post about her experience. There were of course a few important signals that she missed. The guest had misspelled his own 'name' and he had no Facebook profile. In this brave new world we need to learn the new signals of what constitutes trust worthiness.

Also read what Airbnb is doing to help fix the mess.
 

Apply with LinkedIn

Neat little feature from LinkedIn this week. In their bid to re-think the way online job applications work, they've released an 'Apply with LinkedIn' button. When companies embed it on their site, applicants simply apply with their LinkedIn profile.

Nice detail: it allows you to tweak your profile before submitting.

Creative Of The Week – Karl Marc

At first we didn't realize this was part of Ballentine's Human API campaign (really?), but nevertheless we thought Karl Marc deserved a mention for his interactive tattoo piece. Marc created a tattoo with a flower that included a QR code, which, when triggered on your iPhone for instance, launched an animated version of that flower.

Oh – and the whole tattoo session was streamed live on Facebook. 

Tech Insight The Week – What is OAuth?

The gateway to most Social Network API's is OAuth. Often cursed, seldom appreciated, OAuth actually provides a very touch piece of functionality in a very simple and effective way. So, what is OAuth, exactly? This week's tech post investigates.

Why? Crowd to me sounds like just more jargon – a bit like oft used tribes. And Source? Well, this a sibling of that other contentious word – outsourcing. Many of the most successful platforms in this area – like Wikipedia – are not commercial in nature at all. “Crowdsourcing” is so much more than just a management strategy to cut costs.

We know “crowdsourcing” is powerful (our logo came via a “crowd”), but how do you fully harness this power? How do you decide what functionality to have to maximise contributions?

We have just been asked to help conceptualise and build a “crowdsourcing” platform. A platform for collective ideas generation. It should produce better creative ‘concepts’ and get the right people to execute them. Importantly – unlike similar solutions out there – it is different in that it would not be open to everybody.

So I’ve been looking at many online examples to see what’s out there in the ‘wild’. That’s important because as an MIT’s Sloan management review study – Decisions 2.0: The Power of Collective Intelligence – acknowledges: practise is still some way ahead of the theory.

Of all these platforms, the ones that have impressed me most for the purpose of what we are building are – in no particular order:

CrowdSpring – Focused on design (graphic, web, product), it already has a big community of designers and people requesting designs. The requester or buyer can interact directly with creatives and picks the winner. Anybody can be a buyer or a creative, and portfolios are public. A whole set of metrics are visibly published so buyers and designers can make decisions based on reputation. This reputation dashboard also serves to regulate behaviour.

Eyeka, a French platform, is a social network for creatives. It also allows brands to run design competitions. Each competition gets its own URL so the creative process and the selection of a winner becomes a marketing exercise in itself. The community picks the winners through a voting system. Anybody can join Eyeka.

InnoCentive is one of the most talked about collective platforms. Here seekers post sophisticated challenges they want solved – like a computational problem. The challenges are public and so are the profiles of the solvers. All challenges have monetary incentives. Anybody can join InnoCentive.

And then there’s the Dell and Starbucks Idea platforms built on top of Saleforce.com platforms. These two have been discussed in many good social media books, from Forrester’s Groundswell to Jeff Jarvis‘ What would Google do, and many more. For a reason. They are very active and work. Anybody can post an idea and others can comment or vote on it.

There are also some much smaller networks. London is the home of Radar Music Videos, a small social network for video directors, which also allows commercial briefs to be posted. You have to pay a small membership fee to access briefs and post videos. The network seems quite active, but alas it does not have that many briefs.

It is worth noting that there are many platforms out there that look like they are on their last legs, virtual tumble weed is blowing across interfaces barren of users.

I don’t need any convincing about the power of digital media to harness sharing of all kinds of things. So what did I learn?

Incentive is the key issue. People’s motivations as to why they take part in these things will determine the platform’s functionality, its mechanisms. As the above mentioned MIT study says:

“An application that taps into collective intelligence for improved decision making may be simple in concept, but it can be extremely difficult to implement. As with many systems, the devil is definitely in the details.”

The devilish details

The so-called devil’s in the detail. So what are some of these details?

How much control do you exert?

Jeff Jarvis says give up control, the users will take control and run with it – more often than not in a good way.

But do you give your ‘crowd’ the ability to choose winners (for example)? What if you don’t agree? If you manage to build a platform where a number of people have contributed to a creative approach, do you split the rewards between them? How? Do you let them decide? Should brands be able to interact with the community directly? These are just some questions we will have to face shortly.

Diversity vs expertise

You have to get the balance right. If your collective is not open, how do you choose participants? If it’s a small group of experts, how good will they be at evaluation (studies show diverse and large groups are better at evaluation – and I will blog about that tomorrow)? If your members don’t like each other, are they likely to stay?

Engagement

What motivates people varies wildly – the MIT report explains:

“Incentives such as cash rewards, prizes and other promotions can be effective in stimulating individuals to participate in activities like prediction markets, for which explicit rewards seem to matter greatly. With other applications — for example, submitting T-shirt designs to the Threadless Web site — cash rewards seem to matter less than recognition. Value-driven incentives can also be important. As the open-source movement, Wikipedia and other similar efforts have shown, participation in a community, the desire to transfer knowledge or share experiences, and a sense of civic duty can be powerful motivators.”

Another problem is keeping people engaged over time. And if your users are primarily incentive-driven and there’s too many competing for a limited pool of cash, then what?

So how do you measure success?

Well it obviously depends on the goal of your platform. But there is one important way to measure success. Is it being used?

“Engagement should not to be taken lightly. Indeed, for a large fraction of Decisions 2.0 projects that have flopped, the primary cause of failure appears to be a lack of engagement. Participants expect to be treated in a certain way and, more often than not, they also want the organizers of the application to be engaged as well.”

With a little uncommon sense, a little theory and many examples of what has worked and what not, you should have as solid a start as you can hope for.