Last night, there was a very enjoyable and insightful gathering for the first London Co-Creation Hub drinks evening (see each member here: Face Group, Farm, Opticom and of course thrudigital). After several short presentations, which will be on slideshare soon, a conversation emerged between several brands and agencies.

The key points of debate were:

• Isn’t openness opposed to the commercial aims of companies?
• How does this affect a research/IP-driven company, who is by necessity private?
• Where is the line between public and private, and does it move?
• Does defining the purpose of engagement bring greater meaning to open conversation with customers?

Below the next section of rambling (please skip if time is short, but hey… its a Friday), I want to answer these questions with an easy-to-use but research-driven framework. (And for even more time-constrained people, just look at these summaries: left & right).

As a company, our general opinion is that

1. Openness wins. And companies will continue to open up. Social-media enabled co-creation is a key facilitator of this.
2. A campaign-based approach to marketing must move to an ongoing conversation-based approach, to facilitate the new expectations of consumers and capitalise on the deepness of interaction that this engenders.

Having said that, I do understand that some organisations have elements of their business that WILL NOT open up, or become subject to pubic opinion. And that is completely acceptable. As Ian Green from No. 10 Downing Street pointed out last night, he tweets and blogs all day long about the activities of the Prime Minister, but there is a clear expectation. Although he will post as the human face of No. 10, with details of Ministerial engagements and duties, he will not be broadcasting details of conversations, especially sensitive ones.

Brands are coming (by necessity) to this same realisation. Openness wins, BUT it doesn’t mean that you have to open everything to the public.

As emerged from further discussion, Apple is a great example of a company that is HIGHLY secretive about one aspect of its research and development (the hardware), yet very open about another (anyone can build an application for their hardware). So, as a brand, it is vital to identify the most suitable and effective areas for openness and social media engagement.

Neilsen’s research into social media opportunities for enterprise (2009) identified 5 areas of an organisation that will benefit most from social media-enabled implementation in 2010.  There is no ‘one fix’ for every company. No one way of engaging that works for everyone. But I have NEVER yet found a company that cannot benefit in measurable ways from a social media engagement/co-creation strategy that operates in at least one (usually at least three) of the following business areas.

The good stuff

Customer Support

Probably the most obvious win for many brands and customer support is a huge cost line for product-driven business and even the most traditional manager pricks up his ears at the cost savings and service delivery improvements that can be achieved.

Social media is now an established channel for customer support. If you aren’t responding there, you can bet your brand reputation that others are. People love the immediacy and ease of sending off a tweet, writing a query on a forum, or googling for an answer to their product issue. The beauty about customer support systems that use social media platforms is that there is a powerful opportunity for crowd-sourcing, customer service issues. Allowing fans to solve other customer’s problems, give advice, and make recommendations for best courses of action might sound scary from a brand perspective. but in addition to reducing support costs and improving customer service, it can also build a much more approachable  brand, with deeper and more meaningful customer relationships.

Insight & Research

One of the key points that I presented yesterday, was that the new media environment rewards (and perhaps will even require) companies to become more customer-centric. Understanding what your fans, general customer base, and the market as a whole want and need is vital for creating products and services that lead the market. By observing general trends beyond the specific remit of your role or position in the market, holistic and forward-looking strategies can be formed.

This goes far beyond the “focus group” approach that has been adopted in the past, although it doesn’t necessarily replace that. Distilling what the market is saying about your company and your competitors, over time, can give you superb (and statistically significant) insight into your competitive positioning and evolving brand perception.  And because what the market is saying is now trackable and public, you can be sure that even if you are not listening and gaining insight from it, your competitors are!

Product Development

At the London Co-creation Hub, one of the key uses for co-creation (doing things with people, not at people) is for product or service development. Now, since this is the area that sparked debate last night, with several brands defending a disengaged process due to security and competition concerns, let’s unpack the issues.

Yes, many elements of product research and development must be kept private, so that the company can build and maintain a competitive advantage. This is especially important in a world where unlicensed product copies can appear within days, from the very sophisticated factory operations in China and elsewhere. Firstly, no one is arguing that all R&D should be done in a goldfish-bowl with everyone looking on. However, as a point of interest, there are companies that have done this successfully, betting that the buy-in and loyalty that is built from an open product-development process will surpass the danger of other companies replicating (cue future blog post with a case study…).

Secondly, even when a brand’s core product research is private, there are always less sensitive areas that can be communicated and co-created. Perhaps the service element of the business needs work and could use customer engagement and conversation. Or incremental improvements to an existing product. Or a new approach to environmental packaging. Or new ways of using the product can be found. Et cetera.

Reputation Management

There are now an abundance of social media monitoring tools in the marketplace,  and although creating lots of data might be all the rage now, creating insight is where the real value lies. There are robust technological approaches to monitoring conversations across the web, identifying those that are most influential, classifying them according to topics, geographies and other attributes, and analysing them for insight.

Conversations are happening all around the web, with or without you. Whether viewed from a crisis-management perspective, or from a more general public relations remit, it is vital that every brand is at least listening. In fact, research by Trendmonitor shows that the mere fact of demonstrating you are listening increases brand perception considerably, even if you never do anything with that insight!

Marketing

It is often the marketing department that experiments first with social media; seeing the buzz and the potential opportunity for reach, engagement, and even (that horrifically overused word) ‘viral’ promotion. The media and advertising industries are in upheaval, with brands realising that they can now speak to customers directly, as well as through media channels and advertising campaigns. This proximity of audience means that brands can build direct and deep customer relationships, if they are willing to spend the time to engage. So let’s touch on 3 ways to approach co-created marketing.

1. Firstly, we have the opportunity for brands to engage fans in the actual creative process. What better way to ensure a message resonates with its audience, than by allowing the opinion leaders in that audience to float ideas and discuss the creative delivery? There are many brands already doing this, from crowd-sourcing ideas through virtual communities, through to actually commissioning and utilising videos produced by fans of the brand as advertisements on other channels.
2. Beyond the idea generation and creative process, there are massive opportunities for cost-effective distribution, if fans are engaged with the campaign that is being delivered. Whether described as ‘friend recommendations’, ‘word-of-mouth’, or ‘social referrals’, enabling and empowering your customers to actually deliver the brand message brings true authenticity and weight to the conversation.
3. And finally, an area which hasn’t been fully explored, but is just around the corner, is targeting and segmentation based on the customer’s social media footprint. Yes, customers can help create the campaigns, deliver the campaigns, but also decide to allow brand’s access to their profile data so that better and more relevant conversations can arise. Think it of eCRM 2.0. An easy way to start is by monitoring social media for an “intent to purchase”. Then engaging. Simples.

The obligatory call to action

If you are interested in finding out about any of the above, please do get in touch (or @andjdavies on Twitter). Between the partners of the London Co-Creation Hub. We have experience in addressing each of the above business areas.

Starting salary up to £30k based on experience and skills, plus brand new iMac or PC

thrudigital builds websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps. We take ideas and turn them into reality. Become one of the stars in our central London office.

You will join our friendly, fun and hard-working team of social media development junkies on a range of projects. We develop websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps for exciting and high-profile clients from entrepreneurs to large organisations such as Sky, ITV and 10 Downing Street.

As a developer, you will be involved in a range of work on a daily basis:

• Helping to plan out projects and come up with technical solutions collaboratively
• Ideas and feature development
• Coding (…obviously)
• Optimisation
• Analysis and evaluation of technical solutions
• Research and blogging
• Bug fixing and maintenance (wohoo!)
• Development of your own projects

What you give us:

• You must be on the cutting edge of web technologies and trends and know the ins and outs of Web 2.0
• Always learning under pressure, whilst improving your own standards as well as ours…all the time
• Able to work with demanding clients to figure out solutions to complex problems
• Able to meet deadlines, manage own time efficiently, and work very quickly
• OO PHP/MySQL, xHTML/CSS, JavaScript (RoR desirable)
• Computer Science degree or 2-3 years commercial experience

Just some of the things we love at the moment (if you have experience in these, it’s a bonus):

• jQuery
• AJAX
• Git
• Capistrano
• Cake
• Amazon EC2

We are a friendly team who are proud of each other and our achievements. We don’t work for objectionable clients or on projects that are set to fail. We take it in turns to be the daily DJ and there is usually something interesting going on in the background, but we like to get our heads down when we need to. We often take the afternoon off to down tools and discuss anything as a group that we think is interesting. We work in a fast-paced environment, and you will find that no two days are the same.

Some of our recent exciting work has been for:

• Church of England
• ASOS.com
• Oracle
• NHS
• Universal
• Sky
• ITV.com
• 10 Downing Street

To apply for the position, please send us your CV and tell us why you are interested in joining us: jobs@thrudigital.com. Links or attachments of previous or current work will help to support your application.

If we shortlist you for a second interview, we will also ask you to complete a couple of tasks. The first task is concerned with dynamic page styling in PHP, while the second requires you to design a database. If you want a sneak peek, you can find the tasks here: http://www.thruserver.com/proveyoucanworkforus

You must be a current UK resident to apply.

NO AGENCIES

Starting salary up to £30k based on experience and skills, plus brand new iMac

thrudigital builds websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps. We take ideas and turn them into reality. Become one of the stars in our central London office.

You will join our friendly, fun and young-faced team of social media development junkies on a range of projects. We develop websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps for exciting and high-profile clients from entrepreneurs to large organisations including Sky, ITV and 10 Downing Street.

As a web designer, you will be involved in a range of work on a daily basis:

• Helping to plan out projects and come up with usability and design solutions collaboratively
• Ideas and feature design
• Designing (…obviously)
• Front-end coding when necessary
• Analysis and evaluation of usability solutions
• Research and blogging
• Development of your own projects if you wish

What you give us:

• You must be on the cutting edge of web design and design trends, and know the ins and outs of Web 2.0
• Always learning under pressure, whilst improving your own standards as well as ours…all the time
• Able to work with demanding clients to figure out solutions to complex usability problems
• Able to meet deadlines, manage own time efficiently, and work very quickly
• xHTML/CSS, JavaScript (PHP/MySQL/RoR desirable)

Just some of the things we love at the moment (not essential to have experience in these, but if you do it’s a bonus):

• jQuery
• AJAX
• Git
• Capistrano
• Cake
• Amazon EC2

We are a friendly team who are proud of each other and our achievements. We don’t work for objectionable clients or on projects that are set to fail. We take it in turns to be the daily DJ and there is usually something interesting going on in the background, but we like to get our heads down when we need to. We often take the afternoon off to down tools and discuss anything as a group that we think is interesting. We work in a fast-paced environment, and you will find that no two days are the same.

Some of our recent exciting work has been for:

To apply for the position, please send us your CV plus links to recent work to: jobs@thrudigital.com.

You must be a current UK resident to apply.

NO AGENCIES

And the obligatory image…

Starting salary up to £30k based on experience and skills, plus brand new iMac or PC

thrudigital builds websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps. We take ideas and turn them into reality. Become one of the stars in our central London office.

You will join our friendly, fun and hard-working team of social media development junkies on a range of projects. We develop websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps for exciting and high-profile clients from entrepreneurs to large organisations such as Sky, ITV, O2 and even 10 Downing Street.

The role will report to and be guided by the Operations Director. You will be responsible for a technical team of 5 to 7 staff at any one time, covering up to 4 projects.

As a technical project manager, you will be involved in a range of work on a daily basis:

• Forming technical and usability solutions to problems collaboratively with the team and client
• Establishing client requirements, documenting these and communicating these clearly to the team
• Drafting and finalising wireframes, based on requirements, for the designers to follow
• Planning development workflow, deliverables and agreeing milestones with the team and client
• Achieving agreement and sign-off from clients on the completion of a development plan
• Maintaining the development schedule and monitoring progress
• Testing, bug tracking and support
• Ensuring projects are delivered on time, on spec and on budget
• Maintaining a hands-on approach during development and coding occasionally
• Research and blogging

What you give us:

• You must be on the cutting edge of web technologies and trends and know the ins and outs of the social web
• Always learning under pressure, whilst improving your own standards as well as ours…all the time
• You must have a background in programming (LAMP)
• You should have experience working in large demanding projects with multiple stakeholders and coders
• You should have some experience managing technical teams
• You should be ready to step into something challenging that requires a lot of learning and will progress your career substantially
• You should be mature, straight-talking, process-focussed and calm in the face of chaos
• You must be prepared to be thorough and spend most of your time planning and testing

Just some of the things we love at the moment (if you have experience in these, it’s a bonus):

• jQuery
• AJAX
• Git
• Capistrano
• Cake
• Amazon EC2

We are a friendly team who are proud of each other and our achievements. We don’t work for objectionable clients or on projects that are set to fail. We take it in turns to be the daily DJ and there is usually something interesting going on in the background, but we like to get our heads down when we need to. We often take the afternoon off to down tools and discuss anything as a group that we think is interesting. We work in a fast-paced environment, and you will find that no two days are the same.

Some of our recent exciting work has been for:

• Church of England
• ASOS.com
• Oracle
• NHS
• Universal
• Sky
• ITV.com
• 10 Downing Street
• O2

To apply for the position, please send us your CV and tell us why you are interested in joining us: jobs@thrudigital.com. Links or attachments of previous or current work will help to support your application.

If we shortlist you for a second interview, we may also ask you to complete a couple of tasks that will test your technical abilities. The first task is concerned with dynamic page styling in PHP, while the second requires you to design a database. If you want a sneak peek, you can find the tasks here: http://www.thruserver.com/proveyoucanworkforus

You must be a current UK resident to apply.

NO AGENCIES

When prospective clients ask what we can do, sometimes its difficult to explain, because “social media” brings different value to different parts of the organisation. For the PR team, it might be reducing the cost of traditional PR by engaging leading bloggers. For the customer service team it might be about finding out the problems customers are having with your products. For the product team, it might be about bringing 1000 customers together in a private community to co-create a new product design. For the executive team, it might be about delivering high-level reports giving insight on the competitive positioning of the organisation in the minds of the masses. And I could go on…

Social media is not a tool, and it is not even a new playground. Often its not “social”, and sometimes it hardly involves “media”. It is not a hat that one person in the organisation can wear, and take off when they go home. Its a term that is pathetically indefinable, and certainly overused. But as many organisations are starting to find out, this new landscape, where messages are not broadcast but conversational by default, where the market is comprised of millions of publishers not just consumers, where networks and groups are almost instantly creating, and dissolved, around topics both mainstream and niche.

What it requires from organisations is not a new campaign, but change. Every social media project we have been involved in has required a change of process, structure, or behaviour by the organisation in order to be most effective. Yes, its difficult. But companies all over the world are managing it.

Exciting times.

So whilst doing our duty and monitoring our government’s discussions through the wonderfully open Hansard (a record of all Parliament and House of Lords discussions), we came across this beauty, and felt compelled to share it (our favourites are underlined).

House of Lords – Wednesday, 3 March 2010

Asked By Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

To ask the Chairman of Committees what measures are being considered to improve pest control in the Lords’ part of the Palace of Westminster.

The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara): My Lords, the administration is fully aware of the problem with mice in the Palace of Westminster and is taking all appropriate measures to minimise their numbers. We retain the services of an independent pest control consultant and a full-time pest controller. The current focus is on poisoning and trapping, blocking of mouse access points, and more frequent cleaning of bars and restaurants to remove food debris. This programme was intensified over the February Recess and fewer sightings of mice have been reported since.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: I thank the noble Lord for his reply. How many calls have there been to the mouse helpline? Has the accuracy of that information been checked, given that the staff report seeing mice on a daily basis at the moment in the eating areas? Has consideration been given to having hypoallergenic cats on the estate, given the history? Miss Wilson, when she was a resident superintendent in this Palace, had a cat that apparently caught up to 60 mice a night. The corpses were then swept up in the morning. Finally, does the noble Lord recognise the fire hazard that mice pose, because they eat through insulating cables? It would be a tragedy for this beautiful Palace to burn down for lack of a cat.

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, there are a number of questions there. I cannot give an answer to the number of calls made to the mouse helpline-if that is its title. I suspect that it would not be a good use of resources to count them up. But I am well aware of the problem of mice, as I said in my Answer. It is something that we take seriously.

As for getting a cat, I answered a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Elton, last week on this matter. I was not aware that such a thing as a hypoallergenic cat existed-I do not know whether our cat at home is one of those. There are a number of reasons why it is not a good idea to have cats. First, they would ingest mouse poison when eating poisoned mice, which would not be very nice for them, and there would be nothing to keep them where they are needed or stop them walking around the House on desks in offices or on tables in restaurants and bars-and maybe even in the Chamber itself. Therefore, we have ruled out at this stage the possibility of acquiring a cat, or cats.

Lord Bradshaw: I have spoken continually to the staff in the eating places in the House and I acknowledge that there has been some diminution in the number of mice around. But could I press the noble Lord, because further action needs to be taken? I know that this is an old building, but mice are still here and we are talking about places where food is served. I have no magic solution, but perhaps the consultant who is being employed might have some answers.

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I am well aware that there are still mice around. I saw one in the Bishops’ Bar only yesterday evening. I do not know whether it was the same one that I saw the day before or a different one; it is always difficult to tell the difference between the various mice that one sees.

We believe that the problem is getting better. Cleaning is one of the measures we are taking, as I outlined in my original Answer. As I speak here this afternoon, the Bishops’ Bar and the Guest Room are being hoovered, so we can get rid of the food scraps from lunch. If you were a mouse, you would rather eat the crumbs of a smoked salmon sandwich than the bait. Therefore, we want to remove the crumbs as quickly as possible.

Lord Pilkington of Oxenford: Why should I and noble Lords trust the Executive to deal with mice when they cannot deal with the economy?

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I do not actually deal with the economy. I am glad to say that that would be above my pay grade, whereas trying to deal with the mice is probably just about right for me.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I was in total ignorance that there was anything of the nature of a mouse helpline until this Question Time. Can the Chairman of Committees tell us what helplines there are for Members of the House on other issues that we do not know about?

The Chairman of Committees: I rather hope that we do not have too many other ones. I was not going to advertise the existence of the mouse helpline, although it was advertised some time ago. Indeed, I invited Members of the House to telephone when they saw mice. The trouble is that when the person at the other end of the helpline goes to check this out, very often the mouse has gone elsewhere.

OMG. Suddenly a hung parliament seems the least of our worries…

With all of the announcements that have come out of the f8 conference, the one impression I am left with is that although Facebook might now be an internet juggernaut, it has not grown out of the ability to iterate quickly with new products. The volume of Facebook’s product changes are huge and incredibly important, and they step on some not inconsiderable toes.

Foursquare / Gowalla

Facebook has long been the gorilla in the location-based-networking room. Although it hasn’t previously done much, its near ubiquity means that it can leapfrog any other competitor with ease. Now Facebook has announced its first major plans in this space. And they are dramatic. Rather than simply the cellphone app (bottom-up) approach of Gowalla and Foursquare, Facebook is using RFID tags and readers (top-down) to allow check-ins.

Meebo

Meebo is a distributed Instant Messenger service which sees over 100 million uniques per month. Its Meebo Bar can be installed by any site, to allow users to chat in realtime. Its an awesome service. But now Facebook has announced a persistent Facebook toolbar that sites can install to allow users to use Facebook Chat.  Is that game over for Meebo?

Digg / TweetMeme etc

The social bookmarking space has a lot of strong players, with multiple buttons displayed by most news stories. Although each service has a loyal fanbase, their seems no reason why Facebook’s new “Like” buttons will not quickly command this area of the market. It has the largest userbase and the strongest social graph, so why wouldn’t you choose to “”Like” articles and pages using Facebook?

Glue (recommendation services)

Beyond a whole host of social bookmarking sites, there are a range of semantically-aware recommendation services, which use toolbars and buttons to allow users to rate products and content. The services, like Glue, then provide recommendations. Facebook’s new “Like” buttons really start to build up rich preference and taste data, which can be mined for user recommendations and for advertising targeting.

Social Gold (virtual currencies)

One of Facbeook’s most awaited announcements was regarding a full virtual currency, called Facebook Credits. This surely seriously undermines existing players such as Social Gold, and also opens up the pathway for Facebook to start eating at Paypal’s sandwich.

Authentication

There is no clear leader in this arena yet, with many services offering authentication, including Twitter. Facebook will basically allow third-party sites to authenticate users by their Facebook cookie, therefore removing the delicate process of notifying the user. This is a very controversial area, and Facebook will certainly have to deal with some backlash. However, they are obviously continuing to bet that the utility and ease will prove greater than the concern.

Any others I have missed?

Starting salary up to £32k based on experience and skills, plus brand new iMac or PC

thrudigital builds websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps. We take ideas and turn them into reality. Become one of the nerds in our central London office.

You will join our friendly, fun and hard-working team of social media development junkies on a range of projects. We develop websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps for exciting and high-profile clients from entrepreneurs to large organisations such as Sky, ITV and 10 Downing Street.

As a developer, you will be involved in a range of work on a daily basis:

• Helping to plan out projects and come up with technical solutions collaboratively
• Ideas and feature development
• Coding (…obviously)
• Optimisation
• Analysis and evaluation of technical solutions
• Research and blogging
• Bug fixing and maintenance (wohoo!)
• Development of your own projects

What you give us:

• You must be on the cutting edge of web technologies and trends and know the ins and outs of Web 2.0
• Always learning under pressure, whilst improving your own standards as well as ours…all the time
• Able to work with demanding clients to figure out solutions to complex problems
• Able to meet deadlines, manage own time efficiently, and work very quickly
• OO PHP/MySQL, xHTML/CSS, JavaScript (RoR desirable)
• Computer Science degree or 2-3 years commercial experience

Just some of the things we love at the moment (if you have experience in these, it’s a bonus):

• jQuery
• AJAX
• Git
• Capistrano
• Cake
• Amazon EC2

We are a friendly team who are proud of each other and our achievements. We don’t work for objectionable clients or on projects that are set to fail. We take it in turns to be the daily DJ and there is usually something interesting going on in the background, but we like to get our heads down when we need to. We often take the afternoon off to down tools and discuss anything as a group that we think is interesting. We work in a fast-paced environment, and you will find that no two days are the same.

Some of our recent exciting work has been for:

• Church of England
• ASOS.com
• Oracle
• NHS
• Universal
• Sky
• ITV.com
• 10 Downing Street

To apply for the position, please send us your CV and tell us why you are interested in joining us: jobs@thrudigital.com. Links or attachments of previous or current work will help to support your application.

If we shortlist you for a second interview, we will also ask you to complete a couple of tasks. The first task is concerned with dynamic page styling in PHP, while the second requires you to design a database. If you want a sneak peek, you can find the tasks here: http://www.thruserver.com/proveyoucanworkforus

You must be a current UK resident to apply.

NO AGENCIES

Starting salary up to £30k based on experience and skills, plus brand new iMac

thrudigital builds websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps. We take ideas and turn them into reality. Become one of the nerds in our central London office.

You will join our friendly, fun and young-faced team of social media development junkies on a range of projects. We develop websites, social networks, widgets and social media apps for exciting and high-profile clients from entrepreneurs to large organisations including Sky, ITV and 10 Downing Street.

Your mission is to transform thrudigital’s design standards and capabilities, designing sites and apps to knock the socks off any leading web agency in the UK. As our design capabilities are still growing, your input as the lead web designer will have a transformational impact on the success of thrudigital for years to come.

As the lead designer, you will be involved in a range of work on a daily basis:

• Helping to plan out projects and come up with usability and design solutions collaboratively
• Ideas and feature design
• Designing (…obviously)
• Front-end coding when necessary
• Analysis and evaluation of usability solutions
• Research and blogging
• Development of your own projects if you wish

What you give us:

• You must be on the cutting edge of web design and design trends, and know the ins and outs of Web 2.0
• Always learning under pressure, whilst improving your own standards as well as ours…all the time
• Able to work with demanding clients to figure out solutions to complex usability problems
• Able to meet deadlines, manage own time efficiently, and work very quickly
• xHTML/CSS, JavaScript (PHP/MySQL/RoR desirable)

Just some of the things we love at the moment (not essential to have experience in these, but if you do it’s a bonus):

• jQuery
• AJAX
• Git
• Capistrano
• Cake
• Amazon EC2

We are a friendly team who are proud of each other and our achievements. We don’t work for objectionable clients or on projects that are set to fail. We take it in turns to be the daily DJ and there is usually something interesting going on in the background, but we like to get our heads down when we need to. We often take the afternoon off to down tools and discuss anything as a group that we think is interesting. We work in a fast-paced environment, and you will find that no two days are the same.

Some of our recent exciting work has been for:

To apply for the position, please send us your CV plus links to recent work to: jobs@thrudigital.com.

You must be a current UK resident to apply.

NO AGENCIES

Press Release

London (February 24, 2010) - Today sees the launch of The Co-Creation Hub, www.co-creationhub.com. A collective of organisations, academics and individuals who passionately believe in doing things ‘with’ people rather than ‘at’ people. Their first project is Co-Create London, an independent initiative giving the general public’s most pressing issues, and their solutions, a platform to be heard.

The founding members of The Co-Creation Hub – London are Face, the co-creation planning agency, which has successfully co-created projects for international companies such as Coca-Cola, Nokia, Unilever, and Reckitt Benckiser; Farm, the advertising agency, which has co-created communications for Nestle’s Skinny Cow; Opticomm, the media planning agency; Touch of Mojo, the brand design agency; and thrudigital, the social media development agency. And, they are actively looking for organisations and individuals from different fields that share their way of thinking, to get involved and help develop the co-creation movement.

The Co-Creation Hub – London is the first of a planned number of Hubs across the world, as the principle of co-creativity grows and develops in territories such as Latin America, Asia and the USA.

Andrew Needham, founding partner of Face, as well as group managing partner of Tangible Group London, a core division of Cello Group Plc, is one of the key instigators of The Co-Creation Hub – London. Andrew explains: “In the next decade brands must adapt or die. The Co-Creation Hub – London recognises that social media isn’t simply another channel; it has fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with brands. We need a more collaborative, adaptive and continuous model of marketing – one that is based on the core co-creation principle of doing things with people not at them. We call it Adaptive Brand Planning. It is a model that will ultimately be better placed in helping our clients deal with the advent of social brands”.

The Co-Creation Hub – London is the first place to bring the principles of co-creation to all stages of the marketing process, and is founded on three key tenets:

1. Constant consumer involvement throughout the entire marketing planning and brand communications process – maintaining a continuous dialogue with consumers; harnessing their ideas and opinions to develop better products and communications and adapting to their changing needs and tastes in real-time.
2. A continuous process, with no end points as the communication is constantly building and evolving. A fluid way of working with a tightly knit team of agency specialists, seamlessly pulsing in and out of the process, as and when required.
3. Creating communities and fan-bases, and constantly communicating with them, online and offline.

Needham continues, “By putting the consumer at the heart of the communications process we have removed the old linear process of passing the baton from one agency to another. We work in a continuous loop of insight, co-creation, validation, engagement and real-time measurement. And, with Co-Create London as our first independent social project, we are creating a platform allowing people to be heard by those who can make a difference, using the co-creation principles.”

Co-Create London, the first co-creation project by The Co-Creation Hub – London, is a social initiative giving Londoners the chance to change their city.

The project is designed to crowdsource the problems and ideas of the general public by asking the simple question ‘What Would You Do To Make London a Better Place?’.

The most insightful and tangible ideas from the crowdsourcing phase will be taken forward into a co-creation workshop. The workshop will see Londoners who contributed to the www.cocreatelondon.com website come together with open innovation experts and key London stakeholders to refine the best concepts and convert them into robust solutions.

The top three ideas collected from the co-creation workshop will be put up for voting online and the idea with the most votes will then be presented to London Mayor Boris Johnson.

As an example of how this creative philosophy is applied to design and branding, The Co-Creation Hub logo was developed using the process of co-creation. An identity brief was written and ideas were crowd-sourced from members of the public. The crowd-sourced designs were taken into a co-creation workshop attended by members of the founding agencies together with members of the public, following which, two logos were selected and refined, using the learning from the workshop, by Gary Robinson, Farm’s Creative Director and Ray Armes, Creative CEO of Touch of Mojo.

The final logo is a combination of a crowd-sourced identity, an output from the co-creation workshop, and the skills of an experienced design team.

Owen Lee, Founder and Creative Chairman of Farm and Hub member, comments: “Consumer research has long been considered a wet blanket on creativity, but the answer certainly isn’t to remove them from the process, it’s quite the opposite. The brand building process is now continuous and the consumer is a constant and integral part of it. We no longer launch our view of a brand at a passive audience; it is about building fan bases, allowing them to play with brands, re-shape them and even imbue them with new meaning.”

Ray Armes, Creative CEO of A Touch of Mojo and a Hub member, points out, “Consumers have always been a rich source of insight and creative inspiration; bringing them into the heart of the creative process yields big brand ideas that both agencies and clients can believe in. For once, consumers can become part of a brand’s vision and even help determine the most effective channels of communication.”

Charles Dalton-Moore, Managing Director of thrudigital and Hub member, says, “Today there is a constant consumer dialogue going on around products and services. The challenge for brands is how to join and add value to this conversation using a range of co-creative tools.”

Paul Cox, Managing Director of Opticomm Media and Hub member, adds: “It is increasingly apparent that consumers are hard to define by prescribed statements on a generic survey, and as media owners can make or break brands. By combining traditional tools with sharper adaptive media planning bespoke to our audience, as well as looking at the efficiency of our media usage in real time, we can make immediate changes within a campaign.”

Whether manufacturers, artists, writers, designers or government organisations, The Co-Creation Hub – London is looking to collaborate with people from around the world involved in co-creation, whatever their discipline, to stimulate the co-creation approach.

As part of the launch, an inaugural members’ open evening will be held on Thursday 18^th of March at The Design Council 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL at 6.30pm.

To reserve a place at the evening on a first come first served basis, please register your interest here: ldn.co-creationhub.com.