Sunday, January 31, 2010

Non IRB Approved Qual Research - BBH Labs

Today's Non IRB approved qualitative research comes from Mel Exon, Managing Partner of BBH Labs who, along with Ben Malbon (who kindly passed my questions along) and Patricia McDonald, talk about new models of engaging brands and audiences. Read on!


Guru in Training:
Before making a blog post it helps to have something to write about. So,
how do you find your news? What are your sources of information both online and off?

Mel Exon: A real mix between work and thinking that bubbles up across the year at Labs and BBH around the world, plus an ever-growing, broad range of favourite blogs and sites whose latest posts are sucked onto my desktop via Snackr. I have other sources like Delicious, Google Reader and RSS etc, but Snackr is a tailor-made, live ticker tape of new content running along my desk top, impossible to ignore. Then Twitter of course for latest snippets of what's interesting out there, a real-time stream of opinion and news from a much broader group of interesting people we follow.

GiT: There's only so much content you can squeeze into an entry. How do you decide which piece of news or personal experience makes the cut as being "blog-worthy?"

ME: Tough one, but we tend to only blog about "news" if we're very early to it or we have a point of view that's not been heard yet. It's got to have some relevance to brands and commercial creativity. We'll usually have some key points or provocations we are interested in hearing people's opinion on. We are pretty disciplined in the topics we write about - see below.

GiT: Some people use blogs as personal journals, some as news sources, others as hubs for discussion. What role do you see your blog as having or what goals do you have for it? What sort of audience do you have in mind as you write?

ME: BBH Labs blog is where we share stuff we've found provocative or inspiring. It's also where we share emerging thinking, opinion and new work for discussion and debate. Its focus is wholly around innovation: new and emerging agency models, creative outputs, platforms, tech, processes - from inside and outside the marketing industry.

In terms of goals, the ensuing debate around our posts always improves the quality of our own output and, we hope, contributes to industry debate and the solving of broader questions facing us all. The blog also builds a reputation for Labs as a source of all the above for our core audience: a broad range of other like-minded agencies, collaborators and partners, ad schools, clients and our friends inside BBH around the world.

It's also strictly business. I have a personal blog melex.posterous.com which is where I stick the stuff I've come across, like and don't want to lose, or personal material I want to share. There's some cross over with work, possibly we take a longer term view for Labs, my personal blog is a lot lighter.

Git: Considering the name and goal of this blog, Guru In Training: How did you get your start in Marketing and Technology and what advice would you give to someone trying to enter the field?

ME: Keep your eyes and your mind open. Vary your stimuli and more interesting things happen. Right now, when it's often hard to know where to start however experienced you may be (in fact this may be *more* true the more experienced you are), I think it's useful advice to "try to learn something about everything and everything about something" (Thomas H Huxley).

Git: And finally, how did you decide on the name for your blog?

ME: It's named after the business, so that was easy. We did debate whether to call Labs something else, our code name before launch was Black Labs - Black for black/secret ops (tongue-firmly-in-cheek); Labs for experimental, forward reconaissance unit. BBH also has a thing for the word 'black' - it means uncompromising, "great, not good" in our culture. There are a one or two bits of trivia from that pre-launch stage, the black dog that is our twitter avatar is a limited edition black labrador toy from Germany that I gave Ben when we launched, for example. We went with BBH Labs as a name in the end, it seemed to make sense to us to leverage the agency's name and we wanted to be as nimble as possible, so were keen to avoid any trademark-related red tape.

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Thank you to Mel, Ben, and Patricia for your time and insights! It's been quite interesting to see how bloggers think about their blogs, entries, and audience. Not mention that twice now I have been encouraged to always be reading and always learn something new. I plan to take this to heart and energize my own blog by making a daily record of new and interesting things I've seen, read, or been part that relates to media, technology, or life. Keeps me writing, thinking, and hopefully interesting.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The Next 5 Months

The next 5 months promise to be busy. I have a research project to manage, comprehensive exams to study for, my final semester to finish, a wedding to plan and a job hunt to boot. And of course a blog to update. Out of that list I can currently finish at least one of those now and so here I am. Today I'll talk a little bit about the research I am hoping to finish in the next few months.

My primary interest is in how people are using technology. I've been a techie all my life since my father first let me log onto his old Prodigy account. I am fortunate to have grown up with the Internet and see the way it has changed the way people interact and I've been drawn back time and again to thinking about just HOW are we talking differently now? What's new? What no longer works? What HASN'T changed?

Of course lacking funding or grant money I can only take a narrow look but hopefully one that is significant all the same. I'm hoping to get some data on how people are using electronic documents versus paper hard-copy. The idea is to see whether messages are interpreted differently when we read them on the computer screen. Are we more likely to remember e-text? More likely to be persuaded? Current research has shown people prefer hard-copy for things like taking tests or reading a book but few (that I've seen at least) look beyond what people think of these media and examine how they are impacted.

So, blogosphere, give me your Qual data. What do you like in your electronic documents? What do you like about physical copies? Those of you with Kindles and Nooks, how do you like them?

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The Year We Made Contact

Happy 2010 blogosphere. I'd like to take this chance to look back at some of my favorite GiT posts from 2009...oh right there's only three. I hope everyone's holidays were most excellent. My own were spent eating entirely too much, drinking entirely too little, and spending just the right amount of time with my two families.

To my continuing shame I do not yet have a smart phone. I don't care for AT&T's service but even if I did both an iPhone and a Droid are beyond my current means to afford. The real irony of going to grad school to study how people use technology is that I can't afford to use any of my own. Google recently announced a phone of their own and maybe by the time its available through Verizon I'll be able to afford it.

One (of many) interesting things Faris mentioned when he so kindly answered my questions is that he uses his blog for personal thoughts and Twitter to share links. That got me thinking about what I use my own social outlets for. There's a Communication theory called Uses and Gratifications which claims we choose what media to use based on how it best fulfills out needs which seems to apply here. My typical divide seems to be Facebook for personal information, Twitter to share interesting links, and this blog to faff about with whatever is on my mind. I notice that a number of my friends will simply cross post their statuses to both Facebook and Twitter. So I wonder, How do you, gentle readers (all three of you), use your various social nets?