My courses at MediaLab TaiK

WebTV: a channel for online institutional and marketing communication

2008-03-09T21:26:00.027+02:00

(Concept)

This was my first attempt at finding a theme for my MA thesis. I changed the focus of the thesis later. But since it is already written, maybe I can develop it later ;)

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What is WebTV (in brief)

The term “WebTV” is used to generally describe the distribution of video contents over an IP network, which can be a closed network (like a corporate LAN) or the internet (on a website).

Along with WebTV also IPTV and Internet TV have been used. There is not a very clear distinction between them. However, IPTV is used more often when referring to subscription based broadband services like digital TV, supplied by large telecom providers. Internet TV or WebTV are mostly used to refer to free services such as YouTube.

The WebTV distribution model is open to any rights holder. The distributed contents can be provided by traditional media content producers, by an institution or by any of its individual users. In fact, user generated contents are the most common.

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What is institutional communication (in brief)

Institutional communication is focused on building or reinforcing a strong and positive image of an organization among public opinion. It emphasises the vision, mission, values and philosophy of the organization to capture consumers’ confidence. It increases the organization’s credibility and socio-political influence.

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What is marketing communication (in brief)

Marketing communication is directed to an external audience or market, focused on product positioning or branding, in order to generate demand.

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My motivation

Throughout my professional experience as a communication designer I’ve noticed that corporations, private companies and also public institutions have been moving on from producing only text based communication towards producing their own audiovisual contents and distributing them over closed IP networks or the World Wide Web.

Corporations such as Millenium BCP (1) and Hewlett-Packard (2) have developed own internal TV channels. Universities in USA have also launched publicly available online TV channels, for example the ones from University of Indiana or from University of California. Even traditional print newspapers and magazines have already started producing their own video contents - see Expresso Multimedia (3) or Elle Magazine (4) - hosting them in popular video sites like YouTube and Veoh.

(1) The major private bank in Portugal.
(2) I’m referring to the portuguese branch of HP.
(3) Expresso is the major weekly newspaper in Portugal.
(4) Elle is a major fashion magazine.

So, communication is taking a quick leap into a new media: Web TV and online video.

I believe that in the following years the publication and communication departments of different kinds of organizations will increase their usage of video contents as a means of internal or external communication and self promotion.

Just below I’m posting a link to a creative personal annual report by Cristina Braga, a student of Digital Culture at the Fine Art School of the University of Porto - Portugal (5). The way I see it, this could be a real annual report video made for a company. Maybe... Toys 'R Us?

(5) Information via infosthetics

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Questions I'm posing

“Why should organizations create their own WebTV channels?”

“How can organizations use their WebTV channels for their institutional and marketing communication?”

“Can WebTV channels be an effective media for organizations’ communication needs?”

“How can the audience interact with information supplied by this media?”

“What kind of contents can be created by an interacting audience?”

Leadership Styles

2007-05-06T19:16:00.000+03:00

(Human resource management tool)

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What is, how it works

Leadership and management are two areas closely connected. Project managers are often the project leaders as well. As managers they are responsible for consistently deliver the expected results to the project’s stakeholders. As leaders, they should give their teams a sense of purpose beyond the scheduled goals, inspiring them with a compelling vision towards a collective mission.

Relationship skills, knowing how to establish smooth relationships between team members, is a powerful tool to achieve effective coordination and information sharing, two key points for successful project and team managing. Developing competencies in emotional intelligence is a big step towards skilful relationship management.

Emotions are the glue that holds people together in a team. All leaders should strive to build resonance between team members. Resonance keeps people’s feelings attuned in the same emotional wavelength; leaders should move people in a positive emotional direction.

Daniel Goleman tells in his book “The New Leaders” about six distinct approaches to leadership that can influence the emotional climate of an organization and thus affect the results they produce: he calls it “leadership styles”.

Four of these styles are sure to produce positive impact in the emotional climate of the team, creating resonance among team members which translates into better performance: they are the visionary, coaching, affiliative and democratic styles.

The other two styles can also have a positive impact on the organization, but must be used with extreme caution otherwise they will create dissonance among the team, loosing effectiveness. They are the pacesetting and commanding styles.

Goleman also says that different situations call for different leadership styles. The best leaders master skilfully at least four of them, and intuitively choose the appropriate style to use in each situation.

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Possible general uses

The six leadership styles differ in the way they build resonance, and work better when applied in different situations:

Visionary. Visionary leaders help people to see how their work fits into the big picture, reminding them of the larger purpose of their work. They inspire employees with a true belief in their vision.

It builds resonance by moving people towards shared dreams.
Appropriate when changes require a new vision, or a clear direction is needed.
Not appropriate if the leader is working with a team of experts or peers who are more experienced than he.

Coaching. Coach-style leaders help people identify their individual strengths and weaknesses in order to plan their personal and career aspirations and establish long-term development goals.

It builds resonance by connecting what a person wants with the organization’s goals.
Appropriate to help an employee improve performance by building long-term capabilities.
Not appropriate if the employee needs excessive personal direction or the leader lacks sensitivity to give motivating feedback.

Affiliative. Affiliative leaders nurture strong personal ties with employees and focus on their emotional needs even over work goals. Using empathy they build strong loyalty and trust bonds.

It builds resonance through harmony, by connecting people to each other.
Appropriate to heal rifts in a team, motivate during stressful times or to strengthen connections.
Not appropriate to be used alone – it usually goes together with the visionary approach.

Democratic. Democratic leaders meet employees regularly to listen to feedback. They are open to critiques as well as fresh ideas and advice. They seek agreement rather than make top-down decisions.

It builds resonance by valuing people’s input and gets commitment through participation.
Appropriate to build consensus or to get valuable input from employees.
Not appropriate when crisis events demand quick decisions or if advise-giving employees are incompetent or uninformed.

Pacesetting. Pacesetting leaders aim for high performance, pushing themselves and their teams into doing things better and faster. If a team member fails to meet their standards they take over and get the job done themselves.

It builds resonance if used to meet challenging and exciting goals, together with an inspiring vision.
Appropriate to get high-quality results from a motivated and highly competent team with little need for guidelines.
Not appropriate if the leader has lack of empathy or doesn’t trust the capabilities of team members.

Commanding. Commanding leaders demand immediate compliance with orders and often resort to intimidation. They seek tight control of situations, centralizing authority.

It can build resonance by soothing fears and giving clear direction in an emergency.
Appropriate in exceptional situations such as crisis, to kick-start a turnaround or with problem employees.
Not appropriate to be used recurrently as a main style or if the leader lacks empathy or emotional self-control frequently showing anger and disgust towards subordinates.

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Example of concrete usage

I will refer here to one example of the commanding style given in Daniel Goleman’s book that I mentioned earlier:

“One executive in our research used the commanding style artfully when he was brought in as a division president to change the direction of a money-losing company. He began by acting forcefully in his first weeks to signal the changes he meant to engineer.

For example, the top management team met regularly in a very formal, rather intimidating conference room and sat in gigantic chairs around a marble-covered table that ‘looked like the deck of the Starship Enterprise’ (…). The distances between people stifled spontaneous talk, and the meetings themselves were stilted – no one daring to even rock the boat. In short, the conference room symbolized the lack of dialogue and true collaboration among the senior management team.

To signal a shift toward openness, the new president had the room demolished – a clear command-style move – with positive effects. From that moment on, the management team met in an ordinary conference room, ‘where people can actually talk to each other’, as the new president put it.

He used the same approach regarding a set of very detailed decision-making manuals that specified who had to concur before a management decision was made. The new caveat: no more manuals and endless paper passing. ‘I want people to talk to each other’, the president explained to us. ‘Anyone who needs to can come to the executive committee meeting to tell us, ‘here’s what I’m working on – I need your help and ideas’. I want us to be more of a resource to people than merely a rubber stamp’.

In sending these messages, the new president was forceful and strong. But his strong tactics worked because he attacked the old culture – not the people. In fact, he made it clear that he valued their talents and abilities; it was their way of doing things that he felt needed to change dramatically.”

quoted from The New Leaders

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References

Books

Goleman, Daniel. The New Leaders, London, Time Warner Paperbacks, 2003.

Management tools: Paper Prototyping

2007-04-30T22:51:00.000+03:00

(Risk, Quality management tool)

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What is, how it works

Paper prototypes are a tool that allows to test the efficiency of interfaces meant for human interaction (more commonly software or website related interfaces) at a very early stage of their design phase. In this way they are quite useful in Risk and Quality Management for they help assure that the final product will have high usability standards.

Right after finding the initial ideas for the design layout of an interface it is possible and advisable to run user tests to find out how efficient that design would be with human interaction and to correct structural details, before committing deeper into the design development. For this first visualization it is best to use just rough sketches of the design (laid out on paper) that allow to test its mechanics, rather than a more elaborate prototype (software based) since visual styles and general appearance details are not yet to be discussed. The point of paper prototyping is not to sell the “look and feel” of a design, but rather to test its mechanics and usability – in a fast, reliable and quite cheap way.

If we take as an example a website, the paper prototype is built by sketching the contents of each webpage and corresponding links into a plain sheet of paper in a way that the paper pages reproduce the basic layout of the contents and controls that the user would see on the computer screen. This is done very roughly: hand sketching with coloured pens, cutting and gluing different pieces of paper are the most common techniques used. Possible pop-up or drop down menus are also made by cutting smaller pieces of paper.

Prototyping in paper is a good way to involve the whole project team in the early stage of the design process, since everyone can master the cut-and-glue technique (as opposite to html or flash prototyping) and all can do it together at the same time, exchanging views and ideas. Building of a complete website paper prototype can be done in just a few hours. Evaluating the usability of that design begins right after.

The testing team will consist of about 4 people, who will take different roles as the test proceeds:

The facilitator: this person will be the only one talking to the user and conducting the user test.
The “computer”: this person will operate the paper model simulating that it behaves as a real computer.
The observer: this person will take notes on the user behaviour. There may be several observers.
The camera: this person will film the test so that the development team can later analyse it and draw some conclusions.

They should select a few test users, the best is that users are real representatives of the community they is aiming for or at least gather some of their characteristics.

To begin the test they should ask the users to perform some tasks on the paper model of the website, as if they were using a real computer. When the user is done with all the tasks (successfully or not) the test team should interview the user, gathering further impressions and comments on the tested interface.

The results of each testing session can be used to improve the model for the next one, since paper prototypes are quite easy to modify. Corrections can even be made as the test is proceeding if it’s needed. By the end of the test sessions the test team will have gathered a lot of useful information to improve the design further. Paper testing can be done again in later stages of the design.

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Possible general uses

Design an interface from scratch
Redesign an interface or part of an interface that exists already.

Digital interfaces can be found, for example at:

Applications for personal computers
Webpages
Mobile phones
Digital cameras
Ticket selling machines
GPS devices
ATMs

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Example of concrete usage

I have used a paper prototype as an academic exercise. I was part of a team designing a website which had wiki-style characteristics, such as collaborative writing and editing of texts documents, comment posting, link posting, search and print functionalities, as well as registration and login requirements. These were the main features of the website design that we would like to test.

So, our starting point was creating a flow chart defining the number of pages needed and what information, contents and functionalities should be in each one of them. Following that we built a paper prototype from that structure, using the traditional coloured pens, sticky paper, scissors and glue.

We made one first usability test ourselves and we corrected some features of the prototype immediately after, like:

Adding a warning sign for a non-existing page;
Adding some content for title boxes so they would be closer to real contents.

After that first round we started testing with real users. We had a team of 4 testers, which included one person for filming, one to act as the computer, one to take notes and another one to lead the interview.

The following are some of the changes to our design that emerged as necessary from this user testing:

Need to reposition or resize the “Create a New Document” button, reducing its visual impact – it is drawing too much attention right now.
Highlight or even rename the “News-Media” box – maybe to a more obvious title like “Links to External Information”
Change the name of the button “Page History” to “Document History”
Add an error message in case people try to post a comment without actually typing anything in the comment box
Add a “Links to External Information” box also on the documents page

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References

Articles

Klee, M. 2000. Five paper prototyping tips.
Available from User Interface Engineering.

Rettig, M. 1994. Prototyping for tiny fingers.
Communications of the ACM (April). 37(4):21-27.

Snyder, C. 1996. Using paper prototypes to manage risk.
Available from User Interface Engineering.

Websites

Paper Prototypes
http://www.paperprototyping.com/

User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com/

Management tools: RSS feeds, podcasts, vidcasts

2007-04-30T11:26:00.001+03:00

(Time and communication management tools)

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What is, how it works

“RSS” stands for Really Simple Syndication. “RSS feeds” are contents automatically made available over the internet.

When subscribing to a RSS feed from a website, a portion of the content of that website is automatically made available to the subscriber, being downloaded to a portable digital device or to a personal computer that uses software capable of reading feed formats (*.atom or *.xml). These contents are usually text, video or audio. Audio contents are referred to as podcasts, and video contents as vidcasts.

But the term “podcast” is also used many times as a synonym of all types of RSS feeds. In this way “podcast” means just an automatic way to download contents from a website; it’s a link that enables a specific software application to search automatically for new files and download them from that website periodically, without the user even needing to open the browser.

An image featuring an orange square with waves has been adopted as a standard icon to identify RSS feeds on webpages.

Many websites are also adopting standard buttons which add information in front of the icon about what type of content is available and the correspondent file format.

Everyone, individuals or companies, can distribute contents by podcasting or vidcasting.

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Possible general uses

Podcasts were initially thought to give individuals a means to distribute their own radio shows. But soon they started to be used for distribution of many different contents:

School lessons, audio or video
News from online press (text, audio or video)
News, TV shows from online TV websites
Radio shows or parts of a radio show
Audio tour guides for museums, city tour companies
Audio music files from record companies and independent labels
Alerts for updates on blogs or any kind of website

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Example of concrete usage

I want to focus here on the usage of RSS feeds as a means to save time and improve communication between entities. As an example I leave the testimonies of 2 professors in the USA who are using podcasting as a way to improve their methods in teaching.

Richard McKenzie is a professor of economics at the University of California-Irvine.

When McKenzie noticed some questions were frequently asked by different students, he decided to make short videos to exemplify the answers. Then he posted the videos to Youtube, where he had created his own channel.

He also has longer videos, available as iPod downloads from his own website. He has now over 60 videos available not only to his students, but for everyone.

By providing these videos McKenzie was able to spend less time in class repeating the same topics over and over. He can now cover more topics in the same time. Students use his video material to get the basic concepts of a topic before going to the class, and also to understand better more complex arguments that may need some repetition before they are completely grasped.

David Miller is a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut.

He has a collection of podcasts that he sees as a way to extend his lectures away from the classroom. Some are meant to be listened to before the classes and some are provided after the class, for the same reasons as McKenzie. He also provides podcasts of student-led discussions.

From his analysis of the podcasted videos Miller takes his own notes on how to correct parts of his lectures, so to improve communication between him and his students, ensuring he provides a smooth and efficient teaching.

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References

Articles

Timmer, John, 2007. Extending the reach of the classroom.
Available from Ars Technica, (23rd April)

Wikipedia, April 2007. Podcasts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasts

Websites

BBC podcast service
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/4977678.stm

RTP podcast service
http://multimedia.rtp.pt/index.php?aud=1

Management tools: Corporate blogs

2007-04-30T00:00:00.001+03:00

(Communications, Risk management tool)

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What is, how it works

Blogs are a product of web 2.0, social networking tools. Blogs are websites in which the content (images, text, video) is user-generated. Entries are primarily ordered in a chronological order, but can be arranged also according to topics (tags or categories). One of its most emblematic features is the possibility for visitors to leave comments to each entry, making it a user-interactive media. The usual purpose for a setting up a blog is to share information.

Corporate blogs are managed by company employees and feature company information about its products, policies or any other kind of relevant information for their intended audience, which can be internal or external to the company.

External oriented corporate blogging aims mainly at strengthening the relationship with targeted costumers and position the company or specific company employees as industry experts.

Internal oriented corporate blogging can promote discussion and collaboration between employees at all levels of an organization, allowing them to share information, ask questions, comment and make suggestions in rather an informal way.

Bain & Company, a global consultancy firm, studied several corporate blogs and found that in order to be successful, corporate blogs should:

Establish the blog's focus and mission;
Develop a simple-to-use site and update it frequently;
Create links with key audiences;
Ensure consistency with corporate image and product branding;
Employ RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology: RSS encourages readership by displaying recent posts without the need for readers to log onto the blog website;
Consider the option of wikis (named for the Hawaiian word for "quick")—a variation on corporate blogs that promote collaborative brainstorming, in which visitors can easily add, remove or alter the content itself by using links at the bottom of a page;
Establish clear blogging guidelines for the corporation and educate employees about potential legal repercussions (postings become part of a permanent public record).

quoted from Bain & Company

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Possible general uses

Blogging is a powerful communication tool, and the corporate world is using it as a helping hand to reach their goals: increase sales, respond to crisis, reach to new markets, encourage teamwork.

External corporate blogs can be used as:

Marketing tools: improve brand visibility, brand awareness
Loyalty tool: promote customer loyalty by providing specialized information to narrow segments of the market;
Market research aid: get direct feedback from costumers;
Presenting CEO’s as bloggers establishes them as experts and reinforces the company’s image by providing costumers direct access to top management.
Extra tools in managing company crisis – they’re a quick and effective way to communicate first hand with the public.

Internal corporate blogs can:

Encourage employees to share information;
Incentivate employees to contribute with suggestions for brainstorming and decision making, even if they haven’t been involved in the process;
Be a virtual meeting room and build a feeling of community for employees of global companies who work in different offices.

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Example of concrete usage

A good example of external corporate blogging are the blogs of several offices of the advertising agency TBWA. It is of relevance that TBWA is one of the top world advertising and communication experts, and that they are pionners in using blogs to promote themselves.

The blog of the portuguese office is kept quite much up-to-date with the work that the agency develops.

Although the intention is clearly to expose the agency creative work, it also has entries about current issues and work of other TBWA agencies in the world. The intention is to give the feeling of a larger community under the TBWA brand name.

On the portuguese version of the blog (called Tblogwa) there are several comments and critiques left by people from outside of TBWA, some of them claiming to also work in the advertising field. In this way the blog is being used to build a network of contacts and critical mass (although many publish their comments under a nickname), and to show that the brand TBWA is a leader in the field (it attracts visits from competitors).

The blog also has a special area to promote books about marketing, pitching, creativity and other areas related to advertising. Some of the books have been written by employees or ex-employees of TBWA. There is also a place to post articles and insights from traditional media about actual trends in the markets and consumers. With these areas the company not only shows its capacity to keep up-to-date with the latest theories in advertising but also that it employs top-qualified professionals.

In another section of this blog there are photos of everyday life at the agency, and social gatherings. This is a more personal approach, which I believe aims to create a familiarity bond with the readers and helps strengthening the team spirit among the employees – it feels as a “family” album.

In yet another section there are posts of articles or references about TBWA offices, work or interviews with TBWA managers that came out in the press worldwide. This is also aimed at reinforcing the company reputation since it gives the reader a sense of solid background and continued reliability.

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References

Articles

Rigby, Darrell, 2007. Management tools 2007: An Executive’s Guide.
Available from Bain & Company

Carr, Nicholas, 2006. Lessons in Corporate Blogging.
Available from Business Week (18th July)

Websites

TBWA blog (portuguese office)
http://www.tbwa.pt/tblogwa/

The podcast roundtable – about blogs
http://podcastroundtable.com/?cat=16