I just finished a fantastic session with a group of Edelman employees in Delhi and David Brain, Edelman’s new APAC CEO.
Fantastic…because of the way it was structured and handled, operationally. Being the pioneers in all-things-digital (ahem…!), we did it digitally, online.
What David used was a chat tool, conceptualized by himself and built by Edelman London (Spook Media). And I think this tool makes a HUGE difference.
The tool is rather simple in UI. It allows for a moderator to log in and send an invite to participants, who are also seated in the same room. In our case, we had about 12 people, including David.
David starts the session with a formal introduction and types a question in the chat room, in a new thread.
All of us can respond to that question. But, individual responses will be anonymous and public at the same time! Imagine it like a Twitter session between 12 people where each person is not identified by name and all of us can see all responses! For some of the questions, David takes a look at the responses and creates broad categories after which we (all users) can drag and drop the comments into the appropriate category. At the end of it, each category lists the number of comments under it, helping us prioritize the concerns/comments.
The tool and what is achieves is brilliant for the simple reason that it is a very clever take on our obsession with social networks, while allowing for honest opinions, thanks to the anonymity. The point, of course, is that David gets brutally honest feedback about how things are, with each group he conducts this exercise. That allows for remedial actions, where necessary, without people worrying about repercussions for having aired severely negative opinions.
And the best part is that since Edelman owns this tool, we can use it for any purpose, even for clients and training sessions. I must look for an appropriate forum to put it to good use.
Here is a screenshot of the last question David posed to the group, with some responses…just to show you how it looks/works.
