CarlaBorsoi.com

Wow! I find that all the time I’m spending over on Tumblr, working on the LARC account, means less time here on CarlaBorsoi.com. I’ve got several blog posts about marketing, analytics and research swirling in my head, so I have high hopes for at least a monthly post here.

This year is already in full swing – I’ve got lots of cool research projects on some products in development and further work on ones in preview.

Next week I’ll be chairing the 2nd Consumer Insights in New Delivery Conference in Miami. It is perfect timing as the following weekend finds me in Winter Park for a Rollins College President’s Leadership Council Meeting. While there, it’d be great if there’s a chance to sneak in some time at the radio station.

March brings SXSW and a panel on online identity and resumes. That is being done with the awesome team of Jennifer Jongsma, Kristy Duncan and Kevin Lawver. We’ve been meeting and exchanging a lot of comments already. I’m looking forward to that conversation.  Our panel is Monday morning, so hope you can check it out.

Finally, another side project of mine (along with my lovely husband and our friend Kevin) is the San Francisco Silent Reading Party. We’re having our next event on Feb 9th. Come join us.

I’ve been invited to speak at the Annual MRA Conference on testing iPad applications. This takes place in June in Washington, D.C., so let me know if you’ll be there — I’m speaking Tuesday morning at 11am.

The talk will focus on the iPad testing we’ve been doing at AOL for a particular app that we’re launching this year – and how it influenced the product development process — and didn’t.

Where is 2011 going? It feels like only yesterday the year was beginning and now April is almost complete.

I had the opportunity to speak at a Marcus Evans conference at the end of March, on the intersection of research and innovation. My talk was mainly about the research technique of in-home ethnography (or applied ethnography) and how we use this type of research to drive insights to help the product innovation process.

Over the many years I’ve been doing research, it has become more and more critical to me to actually intersect with consumers in the spheres where they are actually using products. When I first learned about conjoint (which was *the* sexy research technique for a while), the whole sales pitch was around how this recreated a “realistic” marketplace, because consumers are forced to make choices based on variables like brand, price and features. While conjoint isn’t as sexy anymore, the in-home study has risen in prominence as a way to feel very close to consumers.

This is because there is no substitute for seeing someone use your product in the way they do every day. While surveys are useful and provide quick hits for feedback, getting into the consumer’s mind and having a picture of a consumer can change the mindset of a product, marketing or design person. You have someone real to hang your hat onto  — and an ability to see the distractions from your product.

My talk at this conference in March focused on specific exercises for in home interviews that linked to things that we desperately needed to understand – either for search while I was at Ask or on products in the AOL Applications and Commerce Group.

Other talks focused on how to manage an innovation pipeline. It was interesting to hear how product managers take insights and then merge those with industry trends and competitive threats to develop new products. The team at Sunny Delight is doing some interesting work, and I got to hear from Coleman Products and Allstate Insurance too. This enjoyable aspect of this conference was that they deliberately keep attendance low. With significantly fewer people there is a greater opportunity to network and deeply discuss with folks how they area apply their research findings.

It’s always great food for thought to be able to talk to other people who do what you do, but in disparate industries. I’m still mulling over ways that CPG and insurance companies deal with their pipeline and how to apply other innovation tools to our processes.

I’ll be speaking at SMX West on Using Research to Improve Results - talking about how Ask.com uses insights to improve the overall experience. I’ll primarily be speaking about the intersection of qualitative data and clickstream behavior.

Come see me next Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 1:30 in Santa CLara!

The panel picker for SXSW2010 is now up!

Please vote for my panel and let me know if you have any additional thoughts, feedback, or suggestions in the comments there or on this blog post. I’ve already been following up with folks already who have commented on the panel page itself.

The Community is Dead, Long Live the Community.

My previous post describes more about this panel.

Good grief! It’s still over 8 months away and yet the time is drawing near for the Panel Picker to launch for SXSW 2010.  Since I first went three years ago, I wanted to create panels that would be interesting for people and to talk about things for which I personally feel passion. The second year, I was on the How to Rawk After SXSW panel, and the third I was on a panel with a lovely group of people talking about Developing Super Senses: Tools to Know Your Users. For 2010, I picked another subject I’m interested in: online communities.

While I work for a search engine, in my years at Ask.com I’ve also worked closely with the MindSpark group – looking at how you cultivate community for places like Zwinky. We’ve interviewed groups of friends, talked to people for one on one interviews and done quantitative fieldwork to understand the nature of social networks and how people view their interactions in these spaces. I’ve also spent a lot of time in various online communities and watched them grow in importance in my life, linking me to many people who are my dear and close friends.

However, the downside to this is that some of these communities I’ve joined and nurtured have fallen by the wayside for various reasons. So when the time came to develop a panel proposal for SXSW 2010, this was topic that sprang to mind.  Below is the excerpt from what I’ve submitted to the panel picker for consideration.

Title of panel or presentation
The Community is Dead Long Live the Community

50 word description of this panel / presentation
Online communities typically thrive or decay, but sometimes the entire platform for social interaction is shut down abruptly. Look at Pownce, Dodgeball, or Yahoo!360. How do you keep the community alive when this happens? Should you do so? How do you manage this change? Case studies from the crypt.

10 questions that will be answered in this panel / presentation

1. What types of communities have shut down?
2. Why do communities shut down?
3. What are the types of shutdown?
4. What do you owe the user? Legally? Ethically?
5. What do you do with the content the user generated?
6. What are some ways to migrate user content to other sites?
7. How do you communicate the impending transition with the user?
8. Is it something to even care about?
9. Case studies where the transition has been poorly handled/well handled
10. Creating a community that is self-perpetuating

Panelists

I’ve got a short list of people I’m working to be a part of this panel — some folks I’d like to appear are proposing their own panels, but I’ve approached folks who run ARGs (limited communities – destined to expire), sites who have shut down, while getting help sourcing a lawyer to speak on IP issues, among others. Would love to hear from you too – if you think there’s someone really great out there that should be a part of this discussion. My true aim here is to serve as the moderator and ask interesting questions about how we form, maintain, transition and evolve communities.

Extra Special Thanks

I’m also eternally grateful to the following folks for their input on this panel as the idea evolved: Ernie Hsiung, Dr. Keely Kolmes, Jason Schultz, Kevin Smokler, Natalie Villalobos, and Ariel Waldman. I would know none of you if it weren’t for the Internet and the community around it.

Waiting to Vote?

Voting won’t be live for a few more weeks, will post a reminder then.

I’ll be speaking at Search Engine Strategies on August 11th, on the topic of Search: Where to Next? with a panel of esteemed colleagues.  It’s always a pleasure in these situations to finally get a chance to meet other industry folks whose blogs you read, or whose analysis filters into your inbox on a regular basis. There’s been a lot of chatter about this, and I had the privilege of listening to an interview Charlene Li conducted with Scott Garell, President of Ask Networks in preparation for this event- and it sounds like a lot of us industry folks are on the same wavelength. Stay tuned for the actual event!

I’m getting super excited about South by Southwest, which starts next week. There’s a ton of great panels, interesting speakers, and excellent opportunities to socialize and be entertained.

The panel I’m on, Developing Super Senses:  Tools to Know Your Users, will be on Monday, March 16th, at 5pm in Hilton Room C. It’s been delightful to work with Julie Melton, Mark Trammell, Nate Bolt & Andy Budd.  It’s been boiled down to a structured conversation so that those who attend can listen to us argue, debate and discuss the merits of different types of user testing. We’ll also talk about how you use those results and get people excited about it. Andy rightfully pointed out that too many times you attend a panel and the groups says “We had this awesome conversation over breakfast” and proceeds to bore you by agreeing on everything. We’ve decided to let it all hang out for you and play civilly but to let our disagreements manifest themselves in passionate discussion.

There’s so much great stuff to see and participate in — and I’ll be in Austin for all of the festival – interactive, music and film. If you’re attending check out the schedule I’m putting together over at Sched.org. They’ve also created a sweet widget to allow you to listen to the music I’m interested in seeing.

Check it out and let me if you’ll be there too.

I’ll be heading to visit my alma mater, Rollins College, at the end of January for the annual President’s Council Meeting. While there, the Crummer Graduate School of Business, part of the school, has asked me to come speak to both the school’s marketing team, as well as to students.

This all began when the Donald Hale, Director of Alumni Relations & Development, called to talk to me about working in technology. See, when you have a small school in Florida, it’s inevitable that you’re going to end up producing MBA students to feed into the local economy, which in Florida is predominantly focused on tourism, real estate and finance.  One of the first questions Donald asked me was one the students keep asking him: Should I be on social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook when I’m looking for a job?

My emphatic reply was “Absolutely. In fact, if you’re not findable online, in this world, who wants to hire you?” Which is true. In the webby world, not having an online presence can be a real detriment to your career. If you don’t use the tools you’re marketing, developing, or analyzing, or those that complement or complete yours, why are you in this industry? One of the reasons that I moved to San Francisco 13 years ago was to be around people creating a future world view and the tools with which to live that life. Being passionate about the industry in which you work makes you not only a better employee, but also makes you a happier person.

This visit, and planning remarks to share with students and faculty, comes in a week in which a much-beloved, but little used web & mobile service called Dodgeball announced its shutdown. (Well, to be clear, its corporate overlords did.) This topic has been well covered by those closer to the product. However, that clear feeling of caring about a product and mourning its loss shows that a group of folks created a product borne of being engaged in what people want. One of the things I want to share with the Rollins folks is the idea that knowing what’s happening in an industry involves more than just reading the latest WSJ or Fortune magazine, but living and breathing alongside what’s transpiring. It just so happens that the products being created in the realm of technology are things that touch our daily lives.  

I look forward to sharing some of the online tools that I use on a regular basis with these students and how it can enhance their online presence, while being cognizant of the fact that many do want to go into more traditional fields, which may frown upon excessive displays of personal information.  However, given that more and more people do just this, it may be that our social mores must adjust. Something to discuss in a few weeks!

I got a lovely email from Paul Terry Walhus today, asking about the SXSW Charter project, and reminding me of the lovely video he made after our How to Rawk SXSW Panel earlier this year.

CC Chapman, Kevin Smokler, David Dylan Thomas and I talked about how to keep the inspiration going after the always fabulous week. We got some guests to join and were able to extend the conversation beyond the panel presentation.

Check it out.

And yes, I know, I talk too fast.