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Wow. I happened across a white paper produced by IBM & Cambridge University, with the title ‘Succeeding Though Service Innovation‘. It’s a first stab at trying to draw some shape onto what is essentially a fragmented, cross-disciplinary domain, and I have to say, it’s pretty bloody good. Continue reading ‘Service Systems’

Hot on the heels of my post about My Starbucks Idea, I thought I’d share a couple of pieces of Brand 2.0 love that I’ve come across recently:

• The church of co-creation and community, Communities Dominate Brands: go here for some deep insight into how some companies are recognising the (well-documented) need to get closer to their customers, and embed them into their processes.
• Understanding what co-creation actually means: by Corante.

I’m starting to think of brands as being porous - for the reason that the word ‘porous’ implies a flow into something, but in a gradual, slow-but-sure way. It’s not like most large businesses move (to use Tom Peters’ phrase) at the speed of light, and yet they’re waking up to the fact that they have to constantly shift and adapt to the changing needs of their customers. So…porous.

This is fabulous example of a global company reaching out to its customer base and giving them the opportunity to share their ideas on how to reinvigorate its customer experience. Of course, the idea is only as good as Starbucks’ willing to adopt any of the suggestions that are made - and from what I’ve seen, they’re taking steps to do just that.

I’d like to see more companies taking this kind of approach - and it ties into some thinking I’ve been doing recently around brands and how they become more porous… 

The team here at LBi have been working with Multimap to make improvements to the site, and start the job of integrating with Microsoft’s Live Search product. It went live yesterday, and among the improvements are:

• 45-degree angle high resolution photography - aka ‘Bird’s Eye’
• we’ve tweaked the route planner so that it displays within the main panel of the interface rather than being cramped into a ‘palette’ on the left-hand side of the screen; additionally we’ve introduced more realistic signage to help users scan long lists of instructions
• you can now find a business through Multimap - putting them in the local search market; 

Continue reading ‘Some updates to the Multimap web site’

My colleague Warren Hutchinson posts about an honourable mention at the Webbys for the work that LBi did in helping Multimap redesign their site. I’ll leave it to him to big the team up, but just wanted to add my ‘well done all’ to the mix!

I spent Easter at an amazingly quiet, relaxed seaside town in Cornwall - called Polperro. Fantastic atmosphere, friendly people - and of course some great scenic walks along the coastal path.

More photos from the trip here.

“the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives at the heart of certain works of art”

Nick Cave, summing up what he looks for in music. A cool Guardian piece on this ‘feeling’. Wow. Inexplicable sadness seems to be a theme that’s cropping up a lot these days…and this picture gives me the same feeling, for some reason…

I had the sudden realisation, the other day, that my current daily routine takes in a number of different statistical feeds - and this set me to thinking that *this* is part of the reason that creating your own content is fun. It’s the sense of audience that gives you more of a perspective on the stuff that you put out there.

So, I check out my Flickr stats on a regular basis, then I check my blog stats, and finally, less frequently, I check out LastFM stats for Inaura, one of the bands I used to play with.

It’s this stuff that is ’sticky’ for me - and I’m not normally obsessed by stuff like this…

“It sort of sounds cool,” Watts says, tucking into his salad. “But it’s wonderfully persuasive only for as long as you don’t think about it.” 

Duncan Watt’s provides a counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point theory, in which ideas are spread by super-influencers. Watt has spent years looking at social dynamics, and is convinced that Gladwell’s ideas are too simplistic, and should be placed in a more complex, and likely more unmanageable context.

Continue reading ‘Complexifying the Tipping Point’