Crowd DNA embraces the January transfer window (we'll stop the football metaphors right there, though, before we start banging on about tricky wingers or midfield generals...), welcoming new research manager Chris Kebbell to our team. With five years client-side experience in the research department at international broadcaster CNBC under his belt, Chris brings extra firepower to our media skillset, with a particular focus on the quant side of things.

Like almost everyone else at Crowd DNA, Chris also owns a bicycle. But he's peddled his all the way to Russia and back (he's an expert on Soviet/Cold War history to boot) and therefore not just up and down Kingsland Road...

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2012 greetings from all at Crowd DNA (symbolic new year sunrise pic shot from the window of our Shoreditch office; honest), and hope this proves an exciting, rewarding and an all-round action-packed 12 months.

We're kicking off the year grappling with topics such as the following: mobile phones and the parent/child purchase decision; music consumption habits in France; the role of UGC in media offerings across Europe; what content/opportunities get 'superfans' excited; multiple flavours of media meshing; various influencer communities; assessing multi-market sport and celeb gossip preferences; and tracking changes in the fashion accessory market.

Plenty to be getting on with, then, but we're always on the look out for a new challenge, so don't hesitate to get in touch (similarly, we're always happy to head out to meet prospective clients to share ideas and insights). We've got plans for various new products, tools and events in 2012 as well, so do stay tuned...

Crowd DNA

Season's greetings from all at Crowd DNA and big thanks to clients, contributors and co-conspirators as we wrap up what's been another amazing year. We grown considerably in numbers (staff and billings); we've cracked new categories; developing some excellent new tools and approaches (Impact DNA, Youth DNA, Crowd Communities); and we've squared up to an incredibly diverse range of research challenges – from iPad launches and media meshing trends, to understanding X-Factor superfans, conducting FMCG product development, building award winning online research initiatives and innovative campaign effectiveness work.

Along the way, we've hung out with farmers and music fanatics, got Brazilian guys to make us videos of them shaving, filled our heads with more info on French attitudes to sport and celebrity than we ever thought we would, tracked conversations around a car launch in every corner of of the world, sat on the sofa with dedicated gamers, got people to wear stop motion cameras around their necks, and experienced every taste and colour combo imaginable as part of new beverage range launches.

We'll be here right through to December 23 but, if we don't catch up with you before, have a lovely break and here's to more good fun and compelling challenges in 2012.

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Pleased to say that we have a new research manager, Stuart Malcolm, joining our team. Previously of ICM and, before that, Sparkler, he has great experience with clients as diverse as NME, BBC 1Xtra, Orange, Tesco and Aviva; and bags of knowledge in areas such as running longterm research communities and managing segmentation studies.

He also owns a bicycle, which means he should fit in well round here.

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It's amazing where holiday reading takes you… Somehow we got to reading something on how author/lecturer Silvia Hartmann had modelled the creative processes of Metallica, to gain a better understanding of their 100 million unit shifting success. She discovered that they jam together for hours, meticulously recording everything and subsequently looking for events within the jams with an extraordinary quality to them. They then isolate these events, before looking to build upon them. When Hartmann came to break the approach down into tangible stages, the parallels with developing powerful research projects becomes apparent (if you replace the quest for noisy, grunty creativity with that of achieving commercial advantage, that is)…

• Generate as much material as possible

• Review the material and localise the extraordinary events

• Isolate and lock down these events

• Use the events discovered as a new second level jump off point for generating further material

• Review, localise, isolate and lock down further extraordinary events

• Group the events according to their energetic flavour and matching relationships

• Use the group of events to understand the finished product, and fill in the blanks accordingly

This sounds very much like the approach we aim to deploy on many research projects, chiseling away at the incoming material until we get to findings that genuinely have the power to drive change, then exploring the additional depths achievable through focusing on the most head-turning of findings; with the grouping of events key in terms of presenting organised, structured findings at the project conclusion. It's a sometimes demanding and exacting process but it's one that gets to the evidence-based recommendations that all good research needs to be making. For those about to rock/research, we salute you...

Crowd DNAMusicMethodology

The network audit is a research method we've designed, re-designed, re-designed some more and, along the way, used to good effect on a number of projects for clients in media, FMCGs, fashion and alcohol. It is, in fact, less of a method and more of a tactic – not a set-in-stone technique, per se, but something that can be remodelled and adjusted for use online or offline, to connect with smaller or larger sample sizes, and over varying lengths of time.

In a nutshell, we use the network audit to help better understand how ideas, messages, advice and recommendations flow (or indeed don't flow and instead grind to a shuddering halt…) through social systems. It's an acknowledgement that people do not operate, think or make purchase decisions in isolation; an acknowledgement also that effectiveness can only really be assessed through observing/measuring impact between human connections.

The network audit technique, whether carried out face-to-face, via telephone interviews, online or social media tracking, whether quantitative, qualitative or a combination thereof in approach, basically focuses on recruiting networks of friends, friends-of-friends and work colleagues. This, of course, ought to be a blindingly obvious way through which to establish influence and advocacy but one that is rarely conducted in research. Yes, it takes more work and greater attention to detail in terms of project design, but reaps powerful results when deployed with specific objectives in mind.

We've conducted network audits involving over 200 participants and involving more than 600 interviews, others with just ten participants responding via Twitter. What's consistent and advantageous to the research objectives across all has been that the surface level emphasis of the work has been more on understanding friendships and relationships, something people are generally happy and willing to discuss, and less obviously about influence, who has influence and whether the participants themselves are influential (points which people are often far less willing to discuss candidly). In the network audit, the dynamics of influence and advocacy are peeled away at (if 'peeling away' at a dynamic is indeed possible!) rather than tackled head-on and far greater insights are derived as a consequence.

Similarly, the network audit gets away from the shortcomings of exploring influence solely in terms of that which is self-reported (plenty of people tend to overstate their own influence; some even downplay it). A network audit tactic allows for different perspectives to be cross-referenced and compared.

There's plenty that we've discovered about word of mouth that we don't believe we would have (or at least not as crisply and saliently) had it not been for the network audit tactic. These include -

• Status bargain – we've discovered that people who are willing to modify their opinion based on receiving new information and differing views score very highly with others as influencer

• Bridging capital – we've learnt the significance of those people who possess the ability to contextualise and make ideas relevant to others; similarly how and why some people who have expert knowledge of a product, idea, service etc may not be best suited to transferring their knowledge to others

• Filter skills – influencers have good filtering skills, be these social media/digital tools or just a heightened ability to cope with information overload and consequently to pinpoint new discoveries

• Impact of spontaneity – it's not quite consistent in impact across all categories but spontaneity of comms/event has a significant effect across many in terms of propensity to share branded messages positively and persuasively

To find out some more about work in word of mouth, do drop us a line andy@crowdDNA.com

Crowd DNAword of mouth

Here's a quick round up of Crowd DNA projects right now -

• Just wrapped up a fascinating study into the benefits of local community for the Newspaper Society www.lovinglocal.co.uk
• We're researching product development in the drinks/weight management category
• Research into trends among young people in South Korea and the US for a shoe brand
• Ongoing effectiveness research for Global Radio
• Midway through a really exciting 'roadtrip' research project for a media brand
• Phase two of our research community work for an upmarket beer brand
• Soon to embark on a new phase of fan/superfan research for a media brand
• Qual/quant brand healthcheck work for Oakley
• Just completed a major iPad development study for a publishers
• Social media work for a finance/technology brand
• Recently completed a gaming study and gaming ad effectiveness work for Ubisoft and Bethesda respectively
• Continued social media work for River Island

Lots and lots of interesting stuff, then. We're also looking for a research manager and a director level reseacher to join our team in sunny Shoreditch. Email andy@crowdDNA.com to find out more

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The fourth wave of Phoenix, Bauer Media's proprietary music research project, is about to be launched to the trade, including lots of findings on how music moves through networks, purchase journeys, how people's tastes in music change and, natch, the role of music media.

Research methods included an expert roundtable, a major quant study, depth interviews across a number of friendship networks and plenty of film material.

We'll get a case study together on this shortly but, for now, here's a link to Bauer Media's press release

And here's one of several videos we've produced for the project...

Crowd DNAMusic