Posts Categorized: Experience Design

Published on January 26, 2011 by Scott Gould

Want a great experience? Create an alternate reality

It was many years ago when I first heard the statement “People don’t remember what was said, they remember how they felt”, and since then I’ve continually found how true this statement is.

Whether it’s the tiny experience of meeting someone for the first time, or the heights of being immersed in three hours of theatre, we have come to know that these experiences don’t just happen and require design and preparation in order to increase their effectiveness.

But just how do you create a great experience?

Whilst we could talk through framework after framework, I have found the simplest way to begin creating great experiences is to create alternate realities.

This is what Pine and Gilmore say in their seminal book, The Experience Economy, when describing what an experience as an economic offering is. And I think an alternate reality is a pretty good description, because when it comes to an experience:

we want something out of the ordinary
we want something exceptional
we want to experience what we normally don’t

The easiest way to get an overall perspective to this is delivering an alternative reality. For instance, if you want to deliver really great customer service experience, then ask yourself how do you create an alternate reality when it comes to service and support? Well, if most service and support is reactive, than one way to create an alternative reality is to have proactive support. Apple, when creating their Genius Bars, or the Geek Squad and their PC repair stations, have both created alternate realities to the usual “send your PC off to be fixed and see it again in 6 weeks” of customer service, and instead made 24 hour turnarounds in your local store.

Breaking down how we create an alternate reality is another thing, but the general mindset is very useful for beginning to build experiences that are remarkable and in turn, are talked about.

The Application Lab

What help do you need to apply this to your situation? Ask and let the Friends here answer it for you.

Photo thanks to Andy Castro

Published on January 21, 2011 by Scott Gould

If you’re not talking, you’re not learning

In preparing for our Like Minds itinerary this year, I’ve been thinking again about how people learn and how events should help them learn. In particular, I’ve been thinking about a diagram I blogged about almost a year ago now:

This is the cone of learning by Edgar Dale, which says that we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, but 70% of what we say and 90% of what we say and do.

This is great news for event producers, right? Because now all we need to do is get our attendees talking and they will start learning more.

Well, it should be great news, but it isn’t. Unfortunately, most events focus on people listening and they are unlikely to change this because we have adopted the view that the best events are those who have the most and best speakers. We don’t have the view that the best events are those which help you learn.

In Let Attendees be Participants, I discussed the major root of this being an obsession with new content. On Twitter we love the newest thing, and it is new content that really drives the Twitter ecosystem. No wonder then that when these same people get together in a room, it’s to hear more of the new stuff.

The reality is, however, that whilst events run in this way might have buzz and get more people along, they don’t help people learn. And ultimately, the only reason people go to the event is about association rather than learning. Essentially, these events become networking events rather than learning or thought leadership events.

I can’t emphasis this enough. Scientifically: if an event is just you listening to speakers, you aren’t learning, and they are ripping you off.

How To Talk

But enough doom and gloom and onto your thoughts and some creative room for us to brainstorm.

My question is this: how should we be talking at events?

At Like Minds Conference last October we did a 20 minute insight, and then we would ask the crowd to turn to the people next to them and discuss what they just heard. In addition, we have facilitators going around who sparked conversation and helped people reflect on the content.

Whilst this was certainly better than the panels that we’ve had last time, I think there is too much start-and-stop for people to really get into things.

What I want to try at our event is having a 2 hour session, during which we will have a number of 20 minute insights, a few interviews, and then time at the end to digest it and reflect the key learnings. But enough of me:

Your Leading Thoughts

When have you learnt the most at an event? Why did you learn the most then?
How do you think, as being someone in the crowd, you’d like to interact with content and talk?

Published on November 1, 2010 by Scott Gould

Like Minds: Ego Is Dead. Long Live Learning.

Excuse the silence this last week – I’ve been busy delivering Like Minds Conference this week in Exeter, where we had 200 people from across England, Europe and even a handful from further afield, convergence over 2 days on the topic of “Creativity+Curation.” Man, even this line sounds like another one of those PR line’s I’ve written dozens of in the last weeks!

Most of you know that I run Like Minds along with Andrew Ellis. It’s actually the place where the majority of the discussion on this blog finds it’s actualisation – putting the ideas and insights shared here into practice at our Conference and also our community building.

This last one was exceptional. It superseded our event in February in every way (which was the best event I’d ever run and went down very well), but the biggest success was that this event was a HUGE risk on a few fronts. I actually, on the first day when I opened the conference, listed these.

The Risks

1. There were no superstars. Considering my post on “Why Social Events Aren’t Social“, I had to swallow my own medicine and not allow ego to slip in. This was risky because a large number of people go to events for names.

2. It was about learning, not buzz. Our previous events were very buzzy, so to then opt for a format which I knew would create less buzz, but deliver more lasting learning through immersive learning experiences was also risky because it meant fewer people talking about us and therefore buying tickets or participating online.

3. Two days means three days out of the office. Given that we expanded it to two days, this meant a day of travelling on the Wednesday too and that meant fewer people might come because, lets face it, so many still are bound to their 9-5, bill by the hour mentality, rather than billing for value.

But what happened over those three days was just phenomenal. Come the end of Friday afternoon, I could stand up and list these:

The Results

1. There were superstars – THE PEOPLE. Turns out that people really think highly of Like Minds, which is incredibly humbling, and our past events have done a good job for forming a strong culture that meant each person added such life to the event. For instance, Stephen Bateman, who I’m pictured with, travelled over 3,000 from America to join us. That is humbling. And what you can’t see is that behind the camera is 200 people clapping at his contribution.

2. People want to learn and meet new people more than get buzzed up or hang on the words of gurus. People SERIOUSLY got into the learning spirit of things, and all day you could see that our new format of Immersive workshops, Lunch Time Talks, and then keynotes in the afternoon meant people got far, far, far more value that they would’ve previously.

3. Our advocates made the time. Only a third of the people who came booked one day. Two thirds came for the whole two days, plus the two evening events, and they saw it as a major investment. Unfortunately, we had far fewer local people this time, which personally insults me because they were the ones who wanted it to be more practical this time (which we did). Makes me think of Jesus who said “no prophet is without honour, except in his home country” – in other words, you’ll get support from everyone but those who benefit the most from you locally. I need to find a way to crack this.

The Roundup

Events must shift their focus and let attendees be participants. I learnt a lot of things this week, which we’ll discuss in the weeks to come, but the top learning for me is that people really are now tired of the weary conference scene. There must be more than just innovation – there needs to be a revolution, a reformation, a re-evaluation of events – without which, I fear many will die. People want learning, they don’t want ego anymore.

As Robin Dickinson wrote almost a year ago that “Room-filling [is the] last thing a post-Internet leader does“. We must take note.

But the biggest thing? It was the like minds in the room that made it. I fully confess that even on Wednesday night, I still wasn’t sure how it was going to go with our new format. It just goes to show, like I say, that Like Minds is the Like Minds, not Andrew and myself.

Your Leading Thoughts

If you participated in Like Minds, either physically or virtually, what was your top takeaway? Did you appreciate the risk and did you benefit from the results?
As we’re all ones on the inside of these changes from attendance to participation and watching to learning, what do these comments mean for you? What are you thinking about participation right now?

Fantastic photo by the incredible Harry Duns

Published on October 15, 2010 by Scott Gould

Learning About Event Design From Church

We’re running the He Saved The Day Men’s Conference tonight. I wanted to share some of the thoughts behind how we’ve changed the format to make it more about learning and connecting:

A lot of this comes from what I’ve learned from Jeff Hurt and Dave Lutz at Velvet Chainsaw. It seems like common sense that an event should be about talking and learning rather than just listening, but it’s not that common because of the ego issue.

The reality is that most times speakers (in church and without) like to hear their own voices and get the promotion that comes with speaking more than they want people to learn. Or, they want people to learn but incorrectly think the key to is people listening to their wisdom, more than discuss with them. We discussed this in Let Attendees Be Participants, in which I also reference Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning.

Your Leading Thoughts

How are you running events and using different formats to encourage participation? What works and what doesn’t?
Do you find it difficult to confront the norms when it comes to event format? I find it can be hard work as people have quite cemented expectations.

Church, Event Design, Experience Design, Participation
engagement, Events, expectations, people
2 comments
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Published on October 6, 2010 by Scott Gould

The Key To Delighting Customers: #WhatIsWom

There’s a lot of talk about ‘customer delight’ but I find few deliver on it. Perhaps you’ve read or heard the phrase used at a conference or on a blog recently – it’s the idea that we shouldn’t just satisfy customers, we should delight them – particularly pertinent because customer satisfaction isn’t hard to come by these days what with everything we want within a few clicks or a stroll through our local city centre.

Unfortunately, this idea of delighting people is a mystery to most, painted as a very soft and intangible concept that is hard to gauge and even harder to create. I’ve certainly heard the phrase ‘customer delight’ used a lot over the past 18 months, but I’m yet to hear anyone tell us how we do.

Well, except for the guys at 1000heads.

How 1000heads do it

When James Whatley posted this beautiful info graphic on “#WhatIsWom” over the summer, I chomped at the bit to get my hands on one for myself. Sure enough, as promised, it came:

There’s two lessons here that I’ve learnt from James and Molly Flatt and the other guys at 1000heads. The first is the fact that they delivered on the promise in the first place. I’m writing this post right now because James made good on a promise to send me my very own #WhatIsWom poster. You can’t underestimate the power of doing what you say you’ll do.

The second thing that they taught me is to disrupt expectations. I didn’t just get the poster as I was expecting, I got a beautiful hand written note to me, which now sits proudly next to my poster over looking my desk as a fond reminder to go the extra mile.

Now Do It Yourself

I wrote a while back on expectation management, in which I presented a framework that helps you go from what we call ‘customer sacrifice‘ (where the customer doesn’t get what they expect), then ‘customer satisfaction‘ (where the customer gets what they expect), through to ‘customer surprise‘ (where the customer gets more than they expect), and even through to ‘customer suspense‘ (where the customer can’t wait to see what they get next.)

To get a beautiful diagram and framework to help you do this, check out The Basics of Expectation Management. But don’t forget the core two points above: do what you say you’ll do, and then go the extra mile.

And I’d say that to do those two, you have to ultimately and passionately care about people. That’s what 1000heads do.

Your Leading Thoughts

What is going the extra mile for you and what you’re doing right now? If you run a business, how can you exceed expectations (and profitably). If you run a church, how you can deliver more value to the congregation than they expect? If you’re blogging away, how can your blog go the extra mile?
I boil this down to passionately caring for people. When you passionately care, you do your best to value and bless people. Do you see the same correlation in passion care = go the extra mile?

Published on August 23, 2010 by Scott Gould

Using Social Media to Extend and Enhance Offline Events and Experiences

Wow, that’s a mouthful. And that’s exactly what I’ll be discussing at the unGeeked Elite Retreat in Chicago on May 12 – 14, 2011.

How does Social Media extend offline experiences? Sure, you can get a long list of resources that will make your event what is called a ‘hybrid’ (a virtual and physical event), but how do you know which ones are the priority for you, and what is the strategy behind those tactics anyway?

In 2004 I was running a youth organisation that I started called Feedback. We’d already discovered that by putting bands in the show they’d bring their fans along, and that would increase our numbers, but it was when we latched onto MySpace that we discovered the ability to increase participation virtually, aside from the physical limitations of our monthly events. (You can see some old footage on our old MySpace profile still today!)

This really is the benefit of Social Media as an extension of an offline offering. An offline event or experience is typically a single point in space, time and matter, but through Social Media, it can be extended in all three of these areas.

We then need to know how to extend those three in a way that is meaningful and relevant to ‘the why‘ of the offline event in the first place. Perhaps the most helpful element in this is Joe Pine’s model on The Multiverse (For a fuller discussion of this, you read our discussion on ‘virtually present‘)

There are 8 possible configurations of merging time, space, matter with non-time, non-space, non-matter. Joe presents a video on it here, which I would recommend you watch should you have a spare 50 minutes to get acquainted with the future.

Space: virtual / physical. This is the mix between being physically there, and being virtually there. Being virtually there means that you don’t have to be restricted by:
Time: linear / non-linear. This means that I be at the event before the event, during the event, after the event. You get the idea. This also means that I lift the restriction of:
Matter: real / bits. This is about what things are made from. You can be in the same physical space but then still still experience bits – digital data – with which you can then contact those who are virtually present.

It can get very complex, which is what my talk certainly won’t be. I’ll be keeping things simple by getting back to the three core Social strategies that we’ve talked about recently, namely Socialising Channels, Socialising Content, and Socialising Culture. (I think things are easier to remember in threes, don’t you?)

I don’t want to share much more, but there’s a good taster for you here, and I’ll be sharing more of the content over the months, as we’ve got quite a bit of time until May!

Your Leading Thoughts

What’s the best example that you know of, of Social Media extending an event?
What would be you dream usage of Social Media as an enhancing of an offline experience?

Legendary photo courtesy of Benjamin Ellis

Published on August 18, 2010 by Scott Gould

The Key To Creating A Compelling Experience

Branding used to be all about market differentiation. When I saw your logo, read your brand promise, and used your products, the idea was that I felt different about your offering than I about your competitors offering.

That’s the way it used to be.

Today, we switch on the TV, and it’s often a hard job remembering what goes with what. That car advert that was great, but was it Ford or Citroen? Look online and place two recruitment companies next to each other, and what’s the difference between them, other than the logo? Both promise me work, both claim to be specialists, and both offer me the same service.

Essentially, they are offering the same products and the same services with different wrappers.

As my friend Joe Pine says, the next economic offering is now experiences – a customised service that is so compelling, so unique, so distinct, that the customer cannot help be caught up in the experience of it. This is what consumers want (see the video about it here), because gone are the days of appealing to need, and here are the days of appealing to emotion.

This of course is all well and good but a tad unpractical, because ‘create an experience’ is not the most useful of instructions, not is is obvious what an experience is, not what the word even means for varying industries. It’s easy to know what an experience is in the realm of theme parks, but what about online shopping or publishing?

Creating An Alternate Reality

The key to creating experience is in creating an alternate reality.

The virtue of most experiences is that they are different to our normal life. Most memorable experiences were memorable because they were not regular events. It stands to reason then that if by engaging with you I experience something that is not the norm (in a good way, preferably), then I remember it – and the more compelling, innovative and relevant to me it is, the more of an experience I have.

The way that I do this is figure out what the norm is, or what “the world” is that most people are living in with the particular industry I’m focussing on. Then, I create a world where all the negatives of that don’t exist, or where the positives are accentuated. So, if I wanted to be controversial: “ScottGould.me is a world where blogs have deep discussion, in a world where most blogs have no discussion.”

More examples

Geek Squad: th:e alternate reality that they create is a world where any computer problem is no problem, in world where most computer problems are big problems.
iPod: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where music is anywhere you are, within three clicks, in a world where music is on a CD, in album, on a shelf.
Disney World: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where happiness is everywhere, in a world where happiness is not everywhere.
The River Dream Centre: the alternate reality that we create is a church that you feel at home at, in a world where most church services are alien to people.
Amazon Prime: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where you get any book in the world tomorrow, in a world where you have to wait.

Some of these are experiences that are reliant on you being at that juncture in space, time and matter, and others are not, which is why I added Amazon Prime in. We’ll get into this more in the coming weeks, but remember what we’ve already discussed about the best experiences often being the ones that you don’t experience directly, like the anticipation for a movie or Apple product release.

Next time you reasses your products and services, consider if you shouldn’t start standing out by customising them into an experience that creates an alternate reality.

Your Leading Thoughts

You might well already create alternate experience realities. I’d like to know what they are…
How do you think this translates into social media and mobile technology?

Published on August 1, 2010 by Scott Gould

Video: What Do Consumers Really Want?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RD0OZCyJCk

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

Today I’m sharing a video that changed my life. I watched this in February 2009 when on a weekend break in Cornwall, and as I saw Joe Pine’s TED Talk on The Experience Economy, it resonated deeply within me because it explained what I had spent all my working life doing: staging powerful, compelling experiences.

Shortly after, I purchased the book and read it when I took a group of interns to Romania for a week in April 2009 (whenever I read it now, I think of Romania in an instant.) A few months later when researching Joe a little more, I saw he was on LinkedIn and I sent him a thank you message for how it had changed my life and my business. Joe responded, and from there we kept in touch. I was fortunate enough to meet Joe in December 2009, and Joe was very helpful with hooking me up with Teemu Arina, who spoke at Like Minds in Helsinki. Such is the power of Social Media! (BTW Joe is now on Twitter.)

My Takeways

I could and have spent a lot of time talking about what I learned from this video, but my main takeaways are:

Good and Services are commoditised. They are everywhere. If you want to be unique and remarkable, you need to offer an Experience.
An Experience is a customised Service. This provides the starting point to start staging Experiences.
Staging Experiences doesn’t make them inauthentic. In fact I say that the more you prepare for people is the more that you actually value them and care about the experience that they’ll have. Case in point: Like Minds is highly prepared to deliver a compelling experience to every participant – because I care about people learning and connecting.
Authenticity is two things: being true to yourself, and then being true to what you say you are. I wonder how many businesses fail on BOTH!
Whatever the level of Authenticity of your offerings, whether Fake-Fake or Real-Real, you can embrace it and make it work.

Joe has co-authored two books with James Gilmore that combine the thinking in this video. I would highly recommend that you purchase both Experience Economy and Authenticity (affiliate links), because they have given me an incredible way to understand economic value and the levels of economic offering. If you like anything about what I do, most of it has some root in these two books – either because I learned it there, or have found that I was already doing it but it was described there.

Your Leading Thoughts

Do you offer Experiences? Or rather, what Services do you offer that you could customise into Experiences?
Where does your business lie on the Authentic Matrix?

Published on July 6, 2010 by Scott Gould

You Lost Me At Hello?

Ever had such bad service right at the start that they had lost you from that moment on? Or perhaps it wasn’t bad service, perhaps it was bad planning?

Experience planning isn’t a simple task, because if it was, everyone would be getting it right. I think it actually takes a lot of thought to not loose someone at hello.

Lets take my church, for instance. When a visitor arrives they are subconsciously asking themselves the question ‘who here is like me’, all the time wanting to feel safe and secure, and not having to be noticed or attract attention to themselves.

As you can imagine, it doesn’t take much to knock one of those.

The trick to keeping someone at hello, I think, is to get into someone else’s shoes and really into their mind and understand what it is like to approach you for the first time.

Your Leading Thoughts

How have you learnt to keep someone at hello? What are your tactics?

Published on July 2, 2010 by Scott Gould

Lessons in Experience from 1000heads

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgxVsxbhYhs

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

My friend James Whatley pointed me to this exceptional peice of work that he and the team at 1000heads did for Nokia. In the video above, you see the execution of a master plan of word of mouth creation and experience planning, in which they surprise a group of Nokia fans around the world by arriving on their doorstep or flying them to London and then giving them gorgeous sports cars to drive to fulfil a challenge that involved using various Nokia products like OviMaps and their phone.

Two things to say here. First of all, I hear people slam Nokia a lot (mostly Nokia fans) for not having Apple’s marketing machine. But I don’t see Apple hiring WOM planners like 1000heads and doing incredible things like this, or this, or partnering with Like Minds, for their fans on a regular basis.

Second thing: this takes us right back to our discussions on experience and expectation management. Remember this diagram below from Managing Expectations:

If we break this video down, the trailer (the front loading of the experience) is when people get the cars in the first place. It surprises people, it delights people, it’s completely unexpected. But what it now creates is suspense.

Suspense is the experience of anticipating an experience, and when you create one great experience, people will begin expecting another.

The real beauty of this video and work by 1000heads is not the cars at the beginning, it’s the fact that they exceed the expectations and deliver a better experience after that.

To put this into a metaphor, as per the diagram above, the film was better than the trailer.

Expectation Management for Event Planners

Here’s a quick note to the hash of people creating events around the world: you need to understand suspense and how to front/back load your experience to make sure that your marketing doesn’t exceed your delivery. I’d have you start by reading about the Expectation Pyramid, and then the Basics of Expectation Management.

If I was in a fighting mood I could list event after event where it sounded and looked far better than it actually was. The days of these hacks getting away with this won’t last much longer in my opinion.

Your Leading Thoughts

If we were talking about a purely digital experience, when have you had your expectations exceeded?
What can we draw from that experience to learn more about digital suspense?

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