I have been alerting myself (!) and our clients about the impending age of feedback for some time. In my professional opinion it is still coming and not quite here; rumbling and ruminating in the foothills, but boy is it coming. I wonder who’s ready for it? And how?
What I want to play with here is not just standard stuff like ratings and reviews (which in its mature form I still believe will be incredibly disruptive and powerful), but also the changing expectations around feedback in the organisation and in interpersonal relationships.
So the kinda intro which you are no doubt familiar with is that in the digital age we have an exploding universe of information, a decentralised empowering infrastructure (easy to use web tools, basically) enabling the creation and sharing of that information, a changing society where trust and influence are re-balancing away from the centre (big organisations, authorities, ‘professionals’) to the edges (that is, to individuals or smaller groups, where context, relevance and ‘people like me’ win out over size, scale and tradition), a more sophisticated relationship between the media and the people, and some other shizzle.
What we also have is data contrails – the traces we leave in our wake as we click and scroll our way across the web. So everything is generating data all of the time:
- Wattson plugs into your home electricity supply.
- Nike Plus plugs into your shoe.
- Polar watches plug into your heart beat.
- Last.fm plugs into your listening habits.
- And Tescos clubcard plugs into your purchasing patterns.
Accruing, aggregating and interpreting this kind of passive data has become massively easier thanks to technology.
Together, all of these factors combine.
The result is increasingly feedback everywhere.
I regularly ask groups how many people use Amazon in the last 2 months. 75% of hands usually go up (this is in groups of marketing professionals at major brand organisations). I ask of those how many read the ratings and reviews on Amazon? – nearly all the hands stay up. I then quickly ask how many people use TripAdvisor. Interestingly often some of the non-hands-up then start extolling the virtues: ‘I’d never go away without…’ la la la. This normally prompts an immediate discussion about TripAdvisor but what I steer it towards is what they look for: I ask what they look for and how it influences their buying decisions.
And when you ask that you get sophistication, nuance, experience and subtlety from a bunch of smart normal people that have usually not even previously heard the terminology ‘ratings and reviews’.
They say, ‘it’s not the average view that matters to me, I look for the things I care about and what the polarised views are’. They interpret and analyse – they don’t wholesale swallow it all down as nutritious must-be-trues.
So what next?
Well I reckon it’s:
- Ratemydoctor (and these exist)
- Ratemyteacher (as above)
- Ratemysocialmediaagency (coming soon, no doubt)
- Ratemyselfopinionatedsocialmediaselfproclaimedexperttwat
- Ratemycourse (these exist)
- Ratemybreakfast (yada yada)
- UserVoice, GetSatisfaction, Beerintheevening, TopTable, MTBR
This is coming to a place near all of us. To our schools, to our workplaces, to our CVs, to our volunteer organisations, to bus drivers (god, I hope so) and sausage shops (why not?). MO’ FEEDBACK.
There’s more to this. Still more.
There’s the increasing trend for twitter questions to panels at events, the twitterfalls and back-channels at gigs and conferences, the social networking features coming to a TV near you, the stimulation addiction and always-on-ness and ‘let me have my say’ all cooked into the same spicy feedbacky jambalaya. The network is powering and unlocking and opening up the appetite for feedback, information and transparency. What’s that word Umair uses? Unbundling! Everything you wanted to know about the word, all that previously latent locked-down feedback is being unbundled.
Also, let’s be brave and put aside these stationary repositories of feedback like ratings sites and other ‘feedback buckets’ to one side and address the real elephant in the feedback closet: the statusphere – that is, the gigantic ever-tick-tocking lists of micro-updates in people’s Facebook statuses and Twitter updates. Feedback-a-go-go. Feedback at large and all up in your face. FEEEEEEDBAAAAAACCCCK.
I want to add more thing before moving onto the implications. Mobile. In a mobile world this feedback becomes more immediate, more instant, more on-the-spot and therefore more terrifying as a problem and more awesome as an opportunity.
ENUFFF. So that’s the rumbling in the feedback foothills. So what does it all mean?
Many clever people way before me have asked what happens in a world where feedback (or market information, described more purely) is instantaneous, discoverable and underpinned by trust mechanisms? And they have largely described a world where quality wins. Which has led to helpful and catchy phrases like ‘Product is the new Marketing’ or ‘Customer service is the new Marketing’.
Well how ready are you or we for that?
Leaving the mechanics to one side – the websites or apps that permit this, the widgets, e-munchkins and various digital shizzingtons that grab and distribute this feedback – what else needs to change?
How about *you*?
How ready is the average human for constant, merciless, public feedback?
Not very ready (or ‘not many Benny’ as my dad would say).
At NixonMcInnes we have been trying to create a feedback culture since our inception 6 or 7 years ago. I deliberately use the word ‘trying’ because it’s really fricking hard. I believe we’re making progress, because newcomers describe things like ‘it’s like the honesty setting on everyone is turned right up and permanently’, or ‘it’s very adult…’.
But it’s very very difficult. We are British – not Dutch or American or other great cultures where people tend to just tell it how it is. Here we have hurt feelings and thickening skins. We have very uncomfortable conversations. We have workshops to practice and learn new skills: listening; giving feedback. We try and learn about our personalities and preferences and share those as a team to understand how and where we fit and clash. We find it hard. Still, many times we hide, swerve, obfuscate or skitter away from the TRUTH.
And yet still it looms. Still those dark swirling clouds laced with truth and realness loom. The feedback is out there.
What I believe is that just as we now expect to see what MP’s expenses were, we also crave – in a kind of unstoppable way – to know everything else about everything else.
So how do you not only prepare your marketing formula and embrace ratings and reviews and twitter feedback, but how do you change your organisational DNA to embrace feedback on the fly and build it in rapidly? How do you reengineer your business or NFP to go through the OODA loop quicker than anyone else? How do you win in the age of feedback and iterate like a karate kid robot machine virus? (Hmmmm).
Where does this leave you?
And where does it leave Art? Where does it leave family relationships, wet holidays and stale bread and the nuance and romance of averageness?
Where does it leave the ‘meh’ in everyday life – the friends that bore you, the designs that leave you feeling flat, the non-delight, the non-highlights?
How do we contain this stuff as individuals, not just as organisations (recognising that we can’t of course)? Or do we just run with it – abandon self-moderation and instead just splurge it out there like uncontrolled emotionally incontinent therapees, just letting it all hang out?
‘Had lunch with Mum – was bored to death and thought her hair looked manky’
‘Annual appraisal with boss. Yucky man’
‘Just presented my portfolio to new client – I lied and I cheated and did that fake laugh I do’
I think I lost my thread. Any feedback? Anyone? Nah, thought not. I’m off…
Will McInnes wrote this on 30.07.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
An out-of-the-box WordPress installation provides traditional “previous – next” navigation for paging through lists of posts, as do the vast majority of the freely available WordPress themes. These little ‘previous’/’older’ and ‘next’/’newer’ links, that typically reside at the foot of a list of a WordPress posts page, are often the user’s only means of browsing archived content, and navigating your way through a very large set of such listings can quickly become cumbersome with this navigation method.
Pagination offers a more usable mechanism for navigating through a very large set of data, by providing direct access to content beyond the current page.
Smashing Magazine has provided some simple guidelines for creating usable pagination:
- Provide large clickable areas
- Don’t use underlines
- Identify the current page
- Space out page links
- Provide Previous and Next links
- Use First and Last links (where applicable)
- Put First and Last links on the outside
Although I’m admittedly far from a being an expert in this area, I humbly suggest an eighth guideline:
- Provide a subset of the full paged set centering around the current page
This eighth guideline is exemplified by the pagination pattern employed by Flickr on its photostream pages.
To illustrate, a pagination control that encompasses the above guidelines, providing links to the first, previous, next, and last pages and centering on the current page being viewed might resemble the following mockup:
There are a myriad of variations of pagination patterns along this theme available, and you could do worse than start looking in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library for some inspiration.
Anyway, I digress…
Any intrepid WordPress theme developers out there may be interested to learn that we’ve developed a little plugin for WordPress, tentatively named ‘Proper Pagination’, that intends to ease the creation of pagination controls for WordPress listings pages.
Inspired by the WordPress Loop and WP_Query, this plugin attempts to stay out of the theme developer’s way, allowing her to create the markup needed by providing ‘template tags’ such as pp_has_pagination, pp_the_pagination, pp_the_first_page_permalink, pp_the_last_page_permalink and so on (pp_ is a prefix we use to effectively ‘namespace’ the global functions defined by this plugin).
A full list of the template tags, along with their respective descriptions, follows…
- pp_has_pagination — determines whether the current ‘view’ has any pagination to display, i.e. whether the content being browsed spans more than 1 page
- pp_the_pagination — initiates the pagination context, should be called at the beginning of each loop iteration
- pp_rewind_pagination — resets the pagination context, so that the pagination loop can be iterated over multiple times
- pp_is_current_page — for use in the pagination loop, returns a boolean indicating whether the current loop iteration is for the current page
- pp_has_previous_page — for use in the pagination loop, returns a boolean indicating whether there is a previous page, e.g. when at page 1, there is no previous page
- pp_has_next_page — for use in the pagination loop, returns a boolean indicating whether there is a next page, e.g. when at page N of N, there is no next page
- pp_the_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the current page
- pp_the_previous_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the previous page
- pp_the_next_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the next page
- pp_the_first_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the first page
- pp_the_last_page_permalink — for use in the pagination loop, echos the permalink for the last page
- pp_the_page_num — for use in the pagination loop, echos the page number of the current page being iterated over
Additionally, here’s an example of how you might arrange those splendid template tags to achieve the desired pagination effect:
<?php if (pp_has_pagination()) : ?>
<div class="pagination">
<!-- the previous page -->
<?php pp_the_pagination(); if (pp_has_previous_page()) : ?>
<a href="<?php pp_the_previous_page_permalink(); ?>" class="prev">newer stories</a>
<?php else : ?>
<span class="current prev">newer stories</span>
<?php endif; pp_rewind_pagination(); ?>
<!-- the page links -->
<?php while(pp_has_pagination()) : pp_the_pagination(); ?>
<?php if (pp_is_current_page()) : ?>
<span class="current"><?php pp_the_page_num(); ?></span>
<?php else : ?>
<a href="<?php pp_the_page_permalink(); ?>"><?php pp_the_page_num(); ?></a>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endwhile; pp_rewind_pagination(); ?>
<!-- the next page -->
<?php pp_the_pagination(); if (pp_has_next_page()) : ?>
<a href="<?php pp_the_next_page_permalink(); ?>" class="next">older stories</a>
<?php else : ?>
<span class="current next">older stories</span>
<?php endif; pp_rewind_pagination(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
The template tags on offer by this plugin provide the theme developer with an unlimited array of possibilities for marking up the pagination control in a semantic manner.
If you fancy taking the plugin for a little spin, feel free to grab it from our GitHub repositorythe official WordPress plugin repository, and do the usual with it (yep, upload to wp-content/plugins, unzip, and enable!).
As always, we welcome any feedback or comments in the section below…
Steve wrote this on 27.07.09 – 9 comments
It's filed in the Design, Development, User experience box
This weekend I was reppin’ NixonMcInnes at the first MusicHackDay held at the guardian offices (which were super plush!), it was an excellent, fun and tiring event. Held over Saturday and Sunday, about 150 music and computer geeks were given 24 hours to hack some cool stuff together using API’s and data from music related sites around the web. Sponsors included Last.fm, Gigulate, SoundCloud, 7Digital, BBC Music, Echo Nest, Songkick, Peoples Music Store and The Guardian. There was some amazing stuff built over the weekend ranging from cool little hardware hacks aided by the folks at tinker.it, an app that lets you share your iTunes library over the net (with syncing play so you can listen along with the owner) and tons more. All in all great fun.
The weekend started off with an introduction from the organizers and then brief introductions to each of the sponsors and their API’s. The group then broke up and some of the sponsors gave some more in depth talks about their companies and API’s, after that it was hacks-ahoy!
I spent my weekend working on a Flex/Actionscript 3 wrapper for the SouncCloud API, something that I had started about 6 months ago but never had the time to finish. Not being an Actionscript guru had hindered my progress somewhat and it was great to be able to quiz the any attendee’s who were better versed in AS3 than myself (a big thanks to John Martin of Gigulate for that). My code can be found up on Github, its a little rough around the edges but perfectly usable. I’m planning on tidying it up for use in a future app.
After a looong (caffeine fueled) night of hacking (surprising how many people were up until the wee-hours working on the particular hacks) we had breakfast, wrapped up our work then at 2pm the presentations began. There was a huge amount of projects, far more than I was expecting and we all waited eagerly to show off our own work. I cant remember all of the hack but two of my favorites were:
http://citysounds.fm/ – An app from some of the SoundCloud guys, it grabs the latest tracks off SoundCloud from cities around the world. simple but quite cool, its interesting to see how different cities vary in the styles of music that are being produced there.
MusicBore – Pulls in songs and metadata from last.fm, gets info about them from the BBC (like shows they’ve been played on) and then mashes them into a ‘radio’ program spewing the data into an IRC channel where it can then be read using a screen reader as a kind of DJ.
The coolest thing I discovered there was the Echo Nest service, you can upload a tune to it for analysis and it will give you back tons of data on it like tempo, key, volume points and changes in the track like chorus or fade outs etc. You can also process tunes, pitching them up or down or mixing them together etc. An amazing API put to some excellent use in some of the hacks, check it out over at http://developer.echonest.com/pages/overview
Something Rob Watson, one of the other attendees there had built a little while ago using Echo Nest is this piece of awesomeness: http://www.donkdj.com/ – remix your favorite track in to a scouse/bouncy house donk master peice! Give it a whirl.
You can check out all the projects over at http://musichackday.org/info/Hacks and prepare to be impressed!
A massive thanks goes out to Dave Haynes, the other organisers and sponsors for putting the weekend on, I cant wait for the next one!
Cheers to Alexander Ljung for the photo
Edward wrote this on 15.07.09 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Development, Events & conferences, Internet, Web technology box
The Brighton and Hove business awards 2009 are with us and we’re super proud to sponsor the awards website for the sixth year running. We’re working with our lovely friends at Midnight PR, who are taking on the mammoth responsibilities of organising just about everything else (EEEEK)
I love being part of the unique business community in Brighton, the awards give us a chance to celebrate the special stuff that goes on all around us, that we just don’t see every day
Last year we sponsored “The most awesome use of digital media award”. The award went to the guys at Locomatrix for their cool GPS based gaming platform
Their slogan is “Jumpers-for-goalposts for the Wii generation, bringing gaming back outside”
They came up with an innovative gaming system that turns your whole body (using your GPS location) into the gaming device instead of your thumbs or how wildly you wave your limbs like on the Wii – although is not limited just to this! It can incorporate any of these traditional gaming interactions to create a unique gaming experience that takes you out into the real world. In the words of Brüno – Fantastiche!
It’s all going on here in Brighton. I wonder what will be on the table this year – something equally cool I hope!
If you think you’ve got what it takes why not enter your company? Its very easy on our lovely Wordpress site at www.bahbas.org.uk remember the awards entries close on the 30th July though so don’t hang around too long
If you don’t want to enter your company, get your posh pointy shoes out and book a table – we’ll see you there
Patrick Mays wrote this on 14.07.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Blogging, Brighton, Business, NixonMcInnes box
I have just found out I have won a place to stand on the forth plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley’s ‘living monument’ project One & Other. I will be on the plinth from 7-8pm on Sunday 2nd August.
For more detail of what this project is about this is an exerpt from the One & Other website:
This summer, sculptor Antony Gormley invites you to help create an astonishing living monument. He is asking the people of the UK to occupy the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London, a space normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals. They will become an image of themselves, and a representation of the whole of humanity.
Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, a different person will make the Plinth their own. If you’re selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like. One & Other is open to anyone and everyone from any corner of the UK. As long as you’re 16 or over and are living or staying in the UK, you can apply to be part of this unforgettable artistic experiment.
And to see what Antony Gormley has to say about it check out his video here.
I feel very honoured and excited to be involved and want to make the most of the opportunity. Antony talks about the democrotisation of society and representing people in the UK today, and I would love whatever I do up there to reflect this.
So, I have had a couple of ideas about what I can do with the help of a few of my colleagues, and I would really like to do something which involves crowdsourcing and letting others input to what I do.
One idea is to ask people to twitter to me (create a hashtag for this project within the project) with tweets they would like me to hold up written on card while I’m on the plinth.
Another (which is my favourite so far, from the genius ideas machine that is Jenni Lloyd) is to get people to tweet me stuff they would like me to draw while I’m on the plinth. I could take a flip chart, some pens, and have a lot of fun in that hour. I could even mix it up with requests from the crowd (the real life one, in Trafalgar Square) and take in live tweet requests. I could fold up each finished giant drawing and send it out into the crowd in giant paper planes (so long as people don’t throw them back to me and knock me off!)
What do you think? Any other ideas? Really open to ideas and would like my time up there to be a collaborative peice made by all of us.
Anna wrote this on 02.07.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, NixonMcInnes, Off topic, Social media box
Brand guidelines should do just that – guide. They should encourage those working with them to think seriously but creatively about the brand. All too often they are implemented rigidly and uniformly, like Health and Safety Guideline. They are not questioned and so do not change. A static brand as laid down in unchanging guidelines is one that fails to keep the pace of change with its dynamic consumers.
MTV gets it right. Their creative executions are always definitely MTV and that each iteration is unique and compelling—they are connected to their fast-changing consumers. Also getting it right is Amnesty. They have really done a lot of work to sharpen up their brand voice. Love or hate Nike, they do produce outstanding campaigns that never look the same but yet are instantly recognisable by their sense of fun.
Set your brand free by engaging honestly and creatively with the guidelines—don’t be afraid to make changes. Be guided not constrained.
Joshua wrote this on – what do you think?
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
