The agency turned the tramway into a sightseeing service and launched “Tram Sightseeing”, a mobile app that provides guided tours. Tourists just put their headphones on and listen to the narrative. The sights are geotagged and thanks to the GPS in phones the app knows where a tourist is the entire time.

Yet we keep on using research methods and tools that have been proven biased and inadequate at actually allowing us to understand how people think, feel and make decisions. Most of the tools we use today such as focus groups, online surveys and street interviews are, for the most part, a waste of time because they:
1. Assume that people are self-aware of how they arrive at decisions.

2. Assume that people remember what they did/felt/thought in a certain situation.

3. Assume that people tell us the truth instead of what they perceive to be the socially acceptable or expected answer.

The best way to understand people and gain human insights is to observe them. To observe their behavior. To observe their needs and frustrations. To observe culture.

Social media platforms can be a great research tool. The “Google before you tweet” saying is becoming more and more popular, but that exactly is the beauty of social media as a research tool. The fact that people share how they feel, what they think, what they do at the moment when it occurs is much more powerful than asking them about it months later in a small room with a bunch of strangers.

Social media allows us to conduct ethnographic research in a new way on a much larger scale.

Writing about Pinterest as a free market research tool in HBR, Grant McCracken shares:

“Isabelle O’Connor uses the following categories: Guilty pleasures, Fashun (sic), Awesome women, Dickheads, Spaces, 90s, Choker, Orthopedic shoes. I am sure there are many other categories that organize her world, but if we were to follow up each of these, we would have a useful map of the things that matter to her. A lot of anthropology, ethnography, and market research is a search for the categories in people’s heads, so this is research for free, and the scholarly and commercial applications are extraordinary. Pinterest founders Ben Silbermann, and Evan Sharp are mapping American culture. Mapping not just the categories but the movements of our culture.

For some time now, and certainly since Clay Shirky’s great work, we have been on notice that the new digital technology makes new categories and new cultural order possible. Pinterest helps us build and share these categories and to specify what we mean in a medium more telling than language. And this makes Pinterest an observation platform from which to study a culture that becomes ever more liquid, responsive, crowd-sourced and generally speaking dynamic. And this potentially makes Pinterest a place to detect early changes and to get early warnings, a pretty useful thing as our culture accelerates.”

On the one hand, social media allows us to understand what people want, what they aspire to and how they organize everything in their lives in certain categories. On the other hand, social media allows us to understand how people feel and what they think now. For example, in 2006, Jonathan Harris and a colleague launched We Feel Fine, a project that took the Web’s emotional pulse by culling personal data from blogs. Another example of such undertaking is the work of Scott Golder who analyzed the public tweets of 2.4 million people in 84 countries to understand how moods change through the day around the world. Not to mention attempts to predict the stock market and how successful movies will be in cinemas within the first few weeks of their release dates.

But gaining insights about general human behavior is only a part of what matters when it comes to market research. The other part is more closely related to how people use our products and services and, even more importantly, how they feel about our brands as well as about the competition. Large enterprises already collect, categorize and analyze public social data to use it not just for branding and promotions campaigns, but also for product improvement. Even the United Nations is using social media platforms to analyze topics such as unemployment and crises-related stress.

Although social media as a research tool will never fully replace ethnographic research in the real world, it provides great opportunities to observe a lot of people at the same time and gather human, brand, product and culture insights. Such insights are more unbiased than the data we gain through focus groups and online surveys for two reasons:

1. People don’t know they are being observed (I know this sounds a bit creepy. Maybe more than a bit.)

2. People share how they feel, what they think and what they do as it happens instead of being asked to recollect those moments months later.

The best part is that we have the tools to collect and analyze data from social platforms and find those few insights that will help our brands compete in the market.

My first attempts to explain the strategy process were marked by the use of jargon terms upon whose meaning even strategists can’t agree. Not surprisingly, my parents quickly lost interest. Later attempts included the use of case scenarios that usually started with “It depends on the project. If it is _____ then I do _____.” That didn’t work so I started using the sentence “I connect the dots between brands, people, culture, media and technology.” This made sense when I gave examples, but on its own my parents found it ambiguous.

This leads me to my newest attempt to explain to my parents what strategists do in general. Strategists. Period. Not digital strategists. Not social media strategists. Not brand strategists. But all of us. Without acronyms. With simple words. With as few words as possible.

Understand: Understand the organization, understand the context, understand the problem, understand the people, understand culture. Wonder. Wander. Question assumptions. Reverse assumptions. Research. Experience. Empathise.

Connect the dots: Analyse all aspects of the situation. Analyse the complex relationships between all different aspects. Analyse how they influence each other.

Set a direction: Make a hypothesis of how to solve the problem. Considering everything you know, what would the best solution be and how would you know you’ve solved the problem? (This is what a lot of people think is the sole job of strategists, but there’s a lot to be done before and after this step.)

Collaborate: Explain the direction, summarise the thinking behind it and work with the organization and its partners, creatives, developers, media folks, sales people, customer support staff and even customers to create something smart. To make something tangible of the direction set earlier.

Monitor: Because a strategy is just a hypothesis, monitoring how it works, or how it doesn’t work, is essential to solving the problem. Sometimes a hypothesis will work perfectly. Other times tweaks might be required. Yet other times a complete pivot might be needed.

Adapt: If, based on the ongoing monitoring, changes are required and make sense, make them.

Measure, learn and apply: Measure what has been achieved (not just output but also, and more importantly, outcome). Learn what worked, what didn’t work and why. Apply the learnings when relevant in other projects.

As strategists, we all have our idiosyncrasies. We all have our own strategy processes. We all have our preferred terms and proprietary tools. We all have our preferred methods of doing research. But in an essence we all go through these seven steps, regardless of the type of strategy we are doing.

And this is how I explained to my parents what I do. It just took a few years.

It’s important to note that I am not fascinated by “mobile payments” or “mobile wallets” like Google Wallet, but about “mobile money” and all it relates to. Mobile money is much bigger than transferring a credit card to a cell phone or duplicating payments, receipts, loyalty cards and coupons on a mobile device. Mobile money allows us to rethink and reimagine how we interact with money, how we use money in little and big  everyday activities: effortless online and offline payments, P2P and C2B transfers, online banking with all it entails, self-discovery tools that help us learn how we spend our money, budgeting tools, getting discounts based on proximity, etc.

Of course, there are products that provide some of these services. Chase’s mobile app allows you to transfer money to other Chase customers. You can even snap a picture of a check and cash it through your phone. Even though NFC adoption has been slow among cell phone manufacturers, Visa provides NFC stickers for mobile phones for touch and pay services. And you can pay for your green tea latte with the Starbucks Card Mobile.

But making money mobile is more than just putting it on a phone screen. It provides us with the opportunity to use cell phones’ numerous features: a location-aware fast computing device with camera and quick texting capabilities that is always connected to the internet and to the people in our lives, a device that is always with or near us. Taking advantage of all these features and user behavior is what can make mobile money revolutionary. We have an opportunity to create a seamless and effortless money experience that addresses our fundamental financial needs.

Which institution, or more likely cluster of institutions, will be brave enough to create such a seamless and effortless experience so we don’t have to juggle 38 apps?

I am not advocating that people should spend their entire careers in the industry. That’s just unhealthy, plain simple masochistic to stages never previously diagnosed by psychologists and painful for the people in your life. But I do believe that if you want, you should spend a few, or several years in the industry and here’s why:

1. In no other industry you’ll have a chance to learn something new every single day. In no other industry you’ll spend the day learning about human behavior, computers and pharmaceuticals and the next day learning about cars, sneakers and nonprofits that work with youth at risk. The industry is a heaven for those with short attention spans and for those with childlike curiosity. It will expose you to things you never knew existed and things you never considered before. It will allow you to work and live at the intersection of different fields and different ideas.
2. The advertising industry has changed a lot in the past decade (or at least that’s what I am told hence I keep referring to it as “the industry previously known as advertising”), but regardless whether you work in an advertising, communications, idea, branding, design, production, social, digital, interactive, mobile, storytelling agency/firm/studio/shop/boutique/collaborative/farm/whatever else we decide to call these places, you’ll get a chance to work on an incredible range of diverse projects, or at least be exposed to such diversity of work. Regardless of what the firm you work for calls itself, we are all in the business of understanding people and their dreams and telling stories. One day you are creating a :30-seconds story to be told in TV and the next day you are shaping the core of a brand and its story that will be told for years to come. One day you are creating a story to be told on a cell phone screen and the next day you are working on story that people can experience in the form of an event.

It’s an incredible time to be in the industry previously known as advertising for a few years and what makes it so incredible is the diversity of work we get our hands on. The diversity of people, or to be more accurate the lack of such diversity, is one of the reasons why you should stay away from this industry, among many others. But that’s an entirely different story.

Today we are witnessing one of the most pervasive and successful, based on the campaign’s objective not on my personal views, human rights web campaigns in recent history – Kony 2012. With a purpose to make Joseph Kony famous, Invisible Children’s campaign has taken over Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and any other major social network you can think of.

This campaign is also an example of what’s wrong with non-for-profit organizations’ use of the internet, or anyone who wants to use it for good. This isn’t a post in support of Joseph Kony, or particularly against Invisible Children, but against how the Internet is used for supposedly good, against encouraging slacktivism.

We’ve gotten used to doing so many things online, so many productive things: shopping, creating art in its various forms, collaborating in research, saving lives, proposing marriage, conducting business, etc. Yet non-for-profit organizations keep asking us to spread the word, to share a piece of content, to change our profile pictures and somehow that is enough. That counts as doing good, as social activism. When in reality non-for-profit organizations can make it easy for us to participate in meaningful ways that go beyond awareness and into action. Into actually solving problems. And that’s what they should be using the web for.

What is even worse is that organizations like Invisible Children and other well-intending NGOs make us believe that a single click is enough. They reward a behavior that hinders the efforts of other organizations that focus on real solutions, not just awareness.

The problem isn’t one-sided, of course. It is also our fault for blindly clicking that share button without thinking whether awareness is what it takes. Without thinking whether an organization that used a huge portion of its budget to create a stunning video deserves that click. Without doing a simple Google search to learn more about the organization that is asking for that one click, what exactly it stands for , what its operations and initiatives are. Without thinking what the most effective solution would be and what we can do to make it happen. Without doing research to understand the problem in its various levels of complexity.

Let’s not blame Generation Y for being slacktivists when NGOs reward such behavior.