Lesson Plan 4: Engaging the Methods and Message Strategy of the Purple Cow

Lesson Plan 4: Engaging the Methods

Meditate: Triangulation—discuss triangulation of methods

From dream to flow to picture to lit review to method

Overview: which methods will best help support you in achieving your dream

All products/services need MESSAGES to connect them with their users/audiences/markets

What kind of message should you create, directed at what audience, through what medium

Introduce the idea of communication campaigns

Value of audience analysis

The persuasion continuum from

Actively work against you through neutral (uninformed/unmotivated) to true believers that work for you in getting your product/service out there

The diffusion of innovations and the adoption curve:

Trying to target the mass market in the middle is difficult because they are less likely to try something new whereas the innovators and early adopters are more likely to try something new IF it’s a purple cow, that is, something truly remarkable…so rather than target everyone in the middle, FIND the people that already are excited about your idea and want to try it out…get your message out to them !

To craft the ideal message, you need more information about these people: here’s where methods come in: ethnographic, interview, survey, focus groups, experiments…combining 2 or more gives you the triangulation effect…

              Look for beliefs, attitudes, behavior, affect related to your purple cow dream…

              Discuss n of 1 (story) vs n of many (statistics)

 

Brief intro to the methods:

First discuss some of the ethics of research methods: privacy, consent, information about the study (experimenter expectancy effects), confidentiality (de-identifying data), do no harm (special populations), potential risks, cost/benefits analysis, debriefing (behavioral contagion issue), discontinuing the study, human subjects committees…

Different methods are like shopping for a new pair of pants, sometimes you have to "try on" several pair before you find the right "fit", color, design, etc...i'd like you to "try on" these different research methods to see which one(s) fit best for you.

Ethnography—hanging out in the environment where people are using your product/service and observing (note on the issue of hawthorne effect, more broadly the effect of knowing that one is being observed and how to minimize this impact in the field), taking field notes (variations: true observer, participant observer, going native), issue of privacy and confidentiality for recording audio/video

      think of examples of places you could visit where people are doing something related to your   
       purple cow dream, and how you would observe, take notes...

Interview—structured to semi-structured series of questions (funnel or inverse funnel) that are asked face to face, with potential for follow up questions, recorded or note taking (discuss the issue of knowing that one is being recorded and how that might bias the conversation toward more conservative or socially acceptable responses), only one person at a time, bias issues, leading questions, time commitment, 3 experts are better than one for triangulation

     who is an expert on your topic, where can you find them, what would be a good method for
      interviewing them

 Focus group-invite a small group (usually 4-8 people) with common interest to a specific private place to answer questions about a topic known ahead of time for a reward of some type (gift cards are popular in large scale funded research, but food is an old stand by reward with minimal cost for a 4-6 person focus group), issue of homogeneous or heterogeneous groups, time commitment, pre-planning of questions, record or not, mining the transcripts for themes, multiple groups for reliability, need a facilitator that participants can identify with

    where can you find a group of people interested in your dream that would be willing to meet up
     and talk for an hour or two over pizza and some drinks?

Survey—same type of questions as interview but not face to face, written vs on-line survey (facebook, surveymonkey-limit of 10 questions, google survey doesn't limit to 10 questions), best in groups for efficiency, bias introduced by person collecting the data, issue of confidentiality indebriefing with some types of automatic replies (de-identify the data)...advantage of statistical analysis of data from likert type (statement followed by agree-disagree scale) and semantic differential type (word or phrase followed by bi-polar adjectives) scales...give examples using their topics of: open/closed questions, likert/semantic...for open ended questions show how to do the beginnings of a content analysis of responses using one of their topics as an example (categorize, counts, themes)

     what kind of questions could you ask, who would you ask them to, what medium would you use?

EVERYONE should create 10 questions related to their dream topic for next week (show how these questions could be used in focus group, interview, and as a focus of attention for ethnography)

Experiment—theory, hypothesis, one or more independent variables and one or more dependent 

variables, known population, random sample, and random assignment to at least two experimental groups (or one experimental and one control) in a controlled lab type setting, valid and reliable measures for iv and dv, post test only versus pre-post test designs, time series designs…good if have two or more versions of a product or service that you want to compare, statistical analysis of data for similarities or differences at the .05 probability level (or 95% confidence level)

This is just a SAMPLING of some of the methods that comm. researchers use

Depending on your dream, one or more methods may be applicable.

Based on the information you obtain from the method, design a persuasive message—standard persuasive tactics:

Attention devices, 

credibility induction, 

explicit vs implicit conclusion, 

one vs two sided arguments, 

inoculation and counter arguments, 

central vs peripheral message processing, 

type of evidence: story vs statistical, 

organized vs unorganized messages, 

message order (primacy vs recency effects), 

number of arguments depends on ego-involvement, 

cognitive responses to message, 

message repetition (pt of diminishing returns around 4-5 repetitions), 

readability (flesh index), 

language intensity, vividness, 

use of metaphors, 

use of color, 

print to image ratio, 

text size, 

emotional responses to images, 

and so forth.. 

GOOGLE any of these topics for more info.

              

            If you want to test you message design strategy on the web, I recommend:

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer  Bryan Eisenberg (Author), John Quarto-vonTivadar (Author), Brett Crosby (Foreword), Lisa T. Davis (Contributor)

The central idea is that you can take different versions of your messages, load them up on the web, and have the different versions randomly appear, then compare using some benchmark like number of views, or number of clicks on “more info” or “buy now” or…it’s a very powerful tool for those willing to invest some time with the learning curve.

You’ll need to consider the message medium as well…

Word of mouth, 

small group sharing, 

large group public speeches, 

posters, 

bumper stickers, 

buttons, 

cards, 

pamphlets, 

and the assorted mediated places: 

facebook, 

twitter, 

linked in, 

gmail, website, 

blog, 

podcast, 

youtube video, 

etc…what would work best for your dream?

WHICH medium will you use and why?

There are probably many other ways to use “methods” to support your dream becoming a reality besides designing a message campaign, but these remain unique to each dream and we will need to talk more in class…

Hwk: 

at this point, everyone should have some sense of how to approach creating a message strategy for their dream for a particular audience…

Research at least one “method” that you think might support your dream project—

find out everything you can about the method and develop a plan for how you will use it to create a message for a target audience and/or something else related to your project…

get your thoughts on paper, another flow chart and picture for next week to share in small groups and with the class…

then it will be time to bring it all together for your dream proposal and presentation…

one more journal entry