Last night was the finale of the Near Field Norwich event run by Hot Source, a local meet-up group. The month-long event allowed teams to use a Near Field Communications (NFC) campaign management platform developed by Proxama. It was the first event of its kind in the UK, so this was the first look by a UK creative community at the potential of this emerging technology.

Last July we launched the ‘UX500’ – a list of user experience opinion leaders from around the world, ranked by their social influence on the subject.

It seems to be a useful resource: the list has already received more than 20,000 visits, making it one of the most viewed Peer Index groups across all industries and disciplines.

It’s been fun to curate the group on behalf of the wider UX community. And we welcome all the comments and input we’ve had from around the world over the past six months.

If you want to predict positive business outcomes like loyalty, word-of-mouth advocacy and satisfaction then customer experience measures may be more effective than monitoring the outcome of service events or using a net promoter score.

That’s the view of Stan Maklan and Phil Klaus in their article ‘Customer Experience: are we measuring the right things?’ in the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR) this month.

They don’t offer a generalised model of how to measure customer experience (i.e. a framework we can all take away and apply immediately into our customer experience strategy work) but they do share a detailed case study measuring the customer experience of a UK mortgage company. This gives some strong clues about how experience measurement will evolve.

In the long-term Facebook can’t be where brands ‘live’ online. Making Facebook the centre of gravity for FMCG brands opens up a number of risks for brand owners. We need to put our thinking caps on and consider a new future for brand websites in the marketing mix.

Brands which are too reliant on social media for digital marketing are giving away data and relationships in a way they may later regret.  But social platforms do offer a new set of tools which allow consumer brands to revisit the old problem of how to create value out of digital. FMCG brands need to consider that the real value of digital is as an ‘ask’ rather than ‘tell’ medium. Success rests on the two disciplines of research and marketing learning from each other, and evolving their practices.

Read the full post published on the econsultancy website: What should FMCG brands do with their websites?

We’re delighted to see that UX Hong Kong is lining up its second conference in February 2012.

Consumer champions Which? have published their research on online bank security which amplifies some of the issues highlighted in Roger Smithers’ blog of last week on Two Factor Authentication.

It’s been a fascinating week for us looking at the response to our Peer Index list: UX500. The list has so far attracted over 9,000 visits – and plenty of lively comment out in the Twittersphere.

Today we launch the ‘User Experience (UX) 500 group’, a list of user experience opinion leaders from around the world, ranked by their social influence (sign into Peer Index using your Twitter handle to view and follow people from the list).

We hope it will be a useful resource. It should give you a view about who’s who in the field. It might also give you ideas about people to follow, befriend and spark up a conversation with.

I’ve just spent a couple of happy days in Atlanta with user experience folk from around the world. UPA conferences always create a variety of emotions.

Don’t know whether to laugh or cry…

Courtesy of The Brads.