Privacy

The amount of information that people are sharing on the internet is staggering.  There are warehouses full of server farms to hold all of the data that is just people sharing their lives through comments, photos, and videos.  The majority of the data is items that people deliberately post about themselves to public forums such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.  However, there is a lot of data that is being collected in the background that many users are not deliberately sharing.  Most websites collect information about what pages people browse.  If I go to visit the JCrew website, all of a sudden I start seeing ads for JCrew on every website that I vist.   I think it is possible for marketers to collect data ethically.  I have four ideas for how marketers can do so.

Keys for Marketers to Collect Data Ethically


Be Transparent
If you are collecting data from your users, you should make it clear to the users what data you are collecting and why you need it.  Having this spelled out in your terms of service or privacy policy is a good start but probably not the complete answer.  Most people will never read the terms of service or privacy policy.  It would be better for you to explain what information you are collecting in a place where people  will see it such as your FAQ.  Having simple icons or images that explain the data collection process. Obviously, you will need to consult with a lawyer to make sure that you don't create liability by potentially having outdated or conflicting explanations on your FAQ page.  By being transparent, you can make people feel better about sharing their data and prevent/reduce the creepiness factor of getting tailored results.

Only Collect What You Need
This recommendation has both practical and ethical considerations.  From the practical standpoint, if you have enough users collecting data that you don't need is wasteful, it takes up space on your servers and costs you computation time and money.  Also, the less data you collect, the less likely a user is going to get upset at you for violating their privacy.  It also makes it easier to justify and less subject to legal action.  With congress ramping up investigations into privacy concerns and information sharing right now, a little moderation may prevent you from ending up on the wrong side of the law in the future.  From the ethical standpoint, taking personal information for the sake of having it is somewhat disingenuous.  Which brings us to the next point...

Try to Provide Value in Exchange for the Data You Are Collecting
Foursquare needs your location data in order for it to work.  All Foursquare users know that they are intentionally broadcasting their location to the public in exchange for game playing and the potential to earn discounts/freebies at local merchants.  When I do a search on my phone in Yelp, it's convenient for me that Yelp finds my location by GPS so that it can help me find a restaurant in a city I've never been to before.  Apps that link into my contact list so that it is easier for me to talk with my friends provide value to me  Apps that link into my contact list for no apparent reason are more likely to raise my ire.

This guideline is most problematic for data providers or in other words people who make money selling your data.  Those that anonymize your data, provide you some privacy protection.  However from an ethical standpoint there is a question of whether it is reasonable for them to profit from your data without passing any value directly back to you.  Companies like Rapleaf argue that they are providing value by selling that data to companies that can use it to provide value to you through personalization.  This argument works well when it results in me consuming more interesting content online due to personalization.  It doesn't work as well if companies are using it to refuse me a job based on information I shared online.

Make it Possible to Opt Out
Lastly, there needs to be the option to opt out of the data collection process even if it breaks or cripples the service that you are trying to provide.  If the user truly gets value from your service they should be willing to trade some privacy for a better experience.  If they don't, they probably aren't your target customer and you are wasting your time.






Infographic on Social Posting from http://visual.ly/think-you-post

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Creativity

What are you personal experiences with individual creativity?  Have you had times when you felt especially creative or, even, especially uncreative?

I find my creativity comes in spurts.  I agree with the Jonah Lehrer’s article on creativity in the Wall Street Journal that often times when I am least alert I will come up with a solution to a problem that is bothering me.  I first noticed this in AP Physics in high school.  There would be particular problem that I could not figure out and scribbling on my paper and erasing my work several times over, I would just go to my room and lie down.  I would try to sleep and I would find as I was starting to drift off I would start thinking about the problem again.  Instead of continuing to feel as though there was an obstacle in front of me, I would start seeing connections between concepts that I had not realized before.  These insights would cause me to spring out of bed and back to the paper.  Immediately, I would return to the paper and start sketching out the solution to the problem that had previously vexed me.  This “get groggy” approach as mentioned in Lehrer’s article works well for me.

What are your personal experiences with organizational creativity?  Have you worked at companies that felt or behaved in ways that made them more creative or, even, especially uncreative?

I think organizations can provide structures that either help or hinder creativity.  Having worked for a large corporation, I have seen instances of both.  It may seem counter intuitive but sometimes having a set form to handle certain things actually helps creativity.  For instance, when I worked at Samsung, whenever there was a major incident someone would have to create a multi-paneled document explaining the cause of the problem and describing how it could be fixed. Having a stock form to describe and solve an issue can allow people to focus on solving the problem and not have to worry about what format they will use to report on that problem. 

On the flip side, I’ve seen managers that can hinder creativity by discouraging feedback and input from their employees or soliciting feedback but failing to act on employee suggestions.  In these cases, employees begin to feel that their voice is not heard and so they tend to stop doing any more than what is directly asked of them.

Do you think you, as an individual, are even capable of being creative by yourself?  And, better yet, do you think a group within an organization is capable of being creative?  

I think creativity can occur at the individual and group level.  The only prerequisite for creativity is motivation and often times that motivation comes from an existing pain.  I also think creativity typically requires getting ones hands dirty and testing different ideas until one sticks. Creativity is really about taking existing elements and putting them together in new and unique ways to solve problems.  It is often applying old models to new problems.

Individuals can find creative solutions to their problems on their own.   However, I think for a creative idea to have maximum impact, individuals tend to need to be able to work within a larger organization in order to successfully spread their idea.  One example of this is the inventor of Post-It notes, Art Fry an engineer at 3M invented Post-It notes based on poor adhering glue that another scientist, Spencer Silver had invented.  Prior to seeing Silver’s glue, Fry used to use scrap pieces of paper to mark the pages in his hymnbook in church.  He would inevitably drop some of the scrap pieces of paper outside of his hymnbook and have to quickly pick them back up[1].  Initially Fry’s managers did not see the benefit of the product so he created prototypes and distributed to 3M executive secretaries to use.  A few days later, the secretaries ran out of Post-It notes and asked him more.  He said that he did not have any left but they could talk to their bosses to back his project.  As a result, 3M Post-It notes are one of the most widespread office supplies of all time.

This was an example of a creative idea that one individual came up with but he was inspired by another scientist’s technology.  After finding a novel use for a crummy adhesive, he had to advocate his idea within an organization so that he could actually implement it.

What do you think about this article and the way this author describes different creative types of problems and, thus, different creative processes?  Should we trust ourselves just to know or sense when we need one type of approach versus another?

I think that Lehrer’s article is on point.  There are a number of different ways to stoke creativity and creativity is not just a spark of inspiration but something that actually can be obtaining by testing out different processes.  I think there are probably even more creative processes that people to use to help brainstorm good ideas than listed in the article.  I think the key is to try different processes every day. 

I think one thing that is probably implied but not mentioned explicitly in Lehrer’s article is that people can be creative by benchmarking other industries or areas.  He talks about chemists solving molecular biology problems.  The lesson here is that we should always look at how people solve problems in one area to determine how we can solve problems in another area.  Analogies are an incredibly powerful problem-solving tool


As far as trusting ourselves to know when to use which approach, I think that we need to trust ourselves based on what has worked for us in the past.  However, if we don't have much of a successful track record being creative or our existing systems are failing then we need to engage other people.  We need to involve other people that help us by asking us what-if questions and challenging our assumptions.  

However, I think that choosing a specific approach is less important than trying multiple approaches.  Lehrer provides ten different creativity hacks but he could have probably as easily provided twenty hacks or only three hacks.  Trying multiple approaches or thinking about the problem from the perspective of triangulation can help spur creative thoughts.  I think that there is an element of luck to all creativity and by trying multiple solutions/hacks one can increase their odds.

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[1] Daly, John A., 2011, Advocacy.

Paper Topic - Collaborative Consumption

For my paper topic, I will write about the rise of collaborative consumption. Collaborative consumption is a new trend in which people are sharing, renting, and trading their real and personal property.  The driving logic behind collaborative consumption is that it is expensive and wasteful to buy things that we are not using constantly.  A bicycle sitting idle in a garage provides no value to anyone.  As a result, at a local level communities have developed different sharing or renting services.  However, collaborative consumption is not just an underground movement catering to the granola set.  It is becoming a sizeable market in itself as for-profit companies join the fold.   Businesses such as AirBnB (home rentals), Car2Go (car sharing service) are making profits based on aggregating consumer demand for shared/rental services and charging a transaction or usage fee. I am particularly interested in topic because I am co-founding a mobile peer-to-peer company.  Our company is called reQwip and it is a mobile marketplace for people to buy, sell, rent and donate used sporting goods.  The rental portion of our company is a form of collaborative consumption.

Collaborative consumption has the potential to disrupt existing business models and change how people purchase goods.  Knowing that I can easily rent or share a lawnmower with my neighbor will change my purchase behaviors.  I am very interested to learn the psychology behind why people are willing or not willing to rent or share things with strangers. From a customer insights perspective, there are a number of experiments I can conduct to understand what are the underlying factors that influence a person’s decision to engage in collaborative consumption.  One potential exercise would be to do an in home visit and ask someone for each of their durable goods would they be willing to rent or loan it.   This exercise might reveal in some cases that people have sentimental and psychological attachments to certain seemingly commodity goods.  Or for some people, they might be willing to lend or rent very personal goods.

For my research, I will start by reading the book “What’s MineIs Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption” by Botsman and Rogers.   This book released in 2010 profiles three different models of collaborative consumption.  The first model is called Product Service Systems, and is compromised of individuals that use a sharing service (such as Zipcar) for a product instead of owning that product.   The second model is Communal Economies such as Etsy in which individuals not corporations are creating products to sell to each other.  The third model is Redistribution Markets in which people engage in bartering (eBay) or swap trading  (Zwaggle) in order to reuse or resell used items. 

Additionally, I will look for market research reports that quantify the financial impact of collaborative consumption.  I will also look for studies that have researched the rationale and psychology behind selling, renting, and swapping existing gear. 

Gaining Insights from Social Media

For our Nordstrom project, we created the persona of Cindy Mai, a 31 year old, Chinese-American management consultant living in Chicago.   As a marketer, there are a number of insights that I could get from Cindy’s social media usage.  The first thing that would be important to know is which social media channels does Cindy currently utilize and what is her engagement level based on Groundswell’s Engagement Pyramid.  For instance, is Cindy simply a member of different social sites (Watching), does she share information on Facebook/Twitter (Sharing), respond to other people’s blogs/social posts (Commenting), does she write her own blog (Producing), or does Cindy actually edit and compile content (Curating)?   By observing Cindy’s online persona, I could learn a lot. 

For instance, if I was interesting in understanding her travel habits, I could look to see if she has posted any public YouTube videos and what content did those videos contain?  If she posted photos of her trip to the Bahamas, this may indicate that she is into travelling and would be receptive to messaging around luggage and travel accessories.  Provided that I had access I could see her the location of geo-tagged tweets, foursquare check-ins, and Facebook places. 

By looking at what pictures she has uploaded to flickr or instagr.am, I could determine what sort of images move her.  For instance when she takes pictures of buildings are these pictures of historic or modern buildings, this might tell be whether she has a more classic or more modern sense of style.

I could look at the sentiment of her facebook posts or tweets to determine Cindy’s overall personality.  For instance is the tone of posts playful or sarcastic, optimistic or cynical, praising or complaining?  In Clifford Nass, “The ManWho Lied to His Laptop”, he notes that in order to relate to people it is important to match their emotional valence.  For instance, if Cindy has naturally a bit of a negative persona, Nordstrom may seem irritating and cloying if they message her with overly positive messaging.  Messaging that is more neutral in tone may be more appropriate for her.

            Another way to gauge Cindy’s engagement would be to use 3^rd party software such as Klout or Infochimps to look at Cindy’s relative level of engagement across different platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.  Another site, FlipTop allows brands to search for social information based on users emails.  This would easily allow Nordstrom to track what channels Cindy is using to communicate.

However, another way to gauge Cindy’s engagement and potentially increase her engagement is to allow her to link different social media accounts to her online Nordstrom profile.  For instance, Cindy could link a Facebook and Pinterest account.  Nordstrom could track how often Cindy “likes” or “pins” a certain item.  This information could allow them to tailor Cindy’s experience to create a custom experience based on her preferences.  FB and Pinterest are great at tracking her online persona, but another way to engage Cindy is through Foursquare.  I got my haircut at Birds Barbershop yesterday and they offered $2 off for showing that I had checked into their shop.  Nordstrom could use similar tactics to encourage Cindy to show that she is at Nordstrom.  By incentivizing Cindy to check-in to Nordstrom, Nordstrom benefits in that her location is broadcasted to her other foursquare friends.  This increases Nordstrom’s brand salience.  In the ideal case, Cindy’s friend Lisa might ask her what she is buying and Cindy’s response might inspire Lisa to visit Nordstrom soon.

One caveat about gaining social insights about one’s brand’s customers is that it should be transparent to the customers when you are using their data and your brand should provide opportunities for users to opt out of sharing their information.  Otherwise, it verges on stalking.  When brands over step their bounds, it tends to cause backlash.  For instance, the mobile app, Path recently was found to have been uploading user’s iPhone contacts to their server without their knowledge and this caused a large amount of backslash online.  Nordstrom must be careful to balance its desire to engage Cindy and learn about her without appearing to be invasive or creepy.

Persona

Name: Ruth

Age: 86

Relationship: Grandmother

Location: Cleveland

Think and Feel

Ruth cares the most about her family’s wellbeing.  She wants both her children and grandchildren to be healthy and happy.  She wishes that they have good careers and always good luck.

Ruth is widowed and still thinks of her late husband Sam a lot.  She reminders when they were poor and when they got a little money.  She thinks about when they took dancing lessons (cha-cha) and had to give a performance.  Ruth was nervous but Sam took the lead and made sure they did well.

Her biggest worries are about health of her children and grandchildren.  Her biggest aspirations are that her family stays healthy.   She feels hopeful when her grandchildren call and when she prays.

See

Ruth does not drive so she spends a lot of time in her apartment.  Her apartment is filled with pictures of her family.  She also likes to collect china and figurines.  Her home is usually very neat with the exception of a stack of bills on the kitchen counter.  She likes to watch Turner Movie Classics.  Ruth likes watching the afternoon and evening news (“Anderson Cooper”).  She really likes the View because they always try to solve a problem.  They talk freely.  She finds it freethinking and likes hearing opinions.  She does not like violent or disturbing programs like police procedurals.   She frequently manages to break her remote and has to call her grandson to fix it.  She has almost a savant like ability to mess up technology.  One time she managed to reprogram her TV to Spanish (she doesn’t speak Spanish)

Ruth considers her closest friends to be her two daughters, cousin Sadie (both Sadie and Ruth were only children), and her sister in law.  She says her friends that are not family –are sick or dying off.

Ruth tends to leave the house to either go out to eat, shop, and watch movies. She does not have a particular brand preference.   She likes to buy clothes from Nordstrom.  She thinks that the help is very kind (“sweet as apple pie”).   She likes looking at shoes particularly heels (even though she wears an ankle brace).  Ruth goes to the Dior makeup counter to get her makeup.  She really enjoys going to their restaurant (“wonderful restaurant”).   She does not like to buy clothes at Target (“that red circle place”).  She does not really like the environment.

Say and Do

Ruth likes going out in public.  She has been buying fedoras and she says that she does not want to brag but she gets lots of compliments from men and women on her appearance.  She says it makes her feel young.

Ruth likes to wear black pants and a lacy top.  When she wants a more casual look, she will wear long cotton shirts with a vest.  She likes long earrings that “look hot”.  Her favorite purse is a black leather purse with different colored flowers that her daughters brought back from Italy.

Ruth likes to talk to strangers.  She tries to get people to laugh or smile.  She thinks that makes people feel better.  She says that when you laugh your heart feels overwhelmed.

Hear

Ruth tends to hear a lot about politics and the presidential election right now from her friends.  She says they also talk a lot about their various ailments.  She does not like to talk about her illnesses.  She does listen to health news specifically about Parkinson’s disease because her late husband Sam had Parkinson’s disease.

She finds that the lady in charge of activities, Lisa, in her apartment is influential.  Lisa helps residents that no longer drive find drivers.  Lisa encourages Ruth to take part in activities.  Ruth likes to go to birthday parties, book reviews (she often does not read the book), and other activities.

Pain

Ruth’s biggest fear is not being able to be alive to see her grandchildren walk down the aisle.  Ruth gets frustrated with her daughters.  She says that they watch her every move and tell her what not to do.  Then she admits that her biggest obstacle is walking and staying alert.  She concedes that her daughters might have some justification for their watchfulness.

Gain

Ruth’s primary goal is to stay healthy and to not fall again.  She walks with a walker now.  She wants to be around to help her children with love, money, or advice (“even though they don’t listen”).  

Ruth does not measure success in terms of making the most amount of money.  She thinks that if people are happy to go to work or volunteer then they are successful.