Friendship and Personalized Engagement (or: I wish that Nike Swoosh would stop smiling at me)

Hello Friends

Since my articles are published quite intermittently and not so highly publicized, there's a good chance that you my dear reader are also my friend.  As your friend, I hope that I have been a good listener, that you find value in our friendship and that you feel I have delivered as much to you as I have expected in return.

Psychology Today has a nice article on friendship.  They describe 4 characteristics:

1. Common Interests
2. History
3. Common Values
4. Equality

What a nice goal for your brand and your customers, right?

Way too many Dead shows

I was at a conference a while back where the speaker started with an exercise for the audience.  He had everyone (quite a big group, a few hundred attendees) initially stand.  "If you have never been to a Grateful Dead concert, please have a seat".  Half-ish of the audience sits.  "If you have been to one and only one Grateful Dead concert, please have a seat".  Significant sitting.  This continued, the sitting audience now getting it and anxiously looking around as the standees thin....

"If you've been to more than fifty Grateful dead concerts, please remain standing and all others may sit".  The audience scans the room and gazes back and forth at the two remaining men--standing, smiling and waving at their unexpected recognition that morning.

(Those guys, by the way, weren't wearing tie-dyes, weren't from San Fran and didn't reek of pot.)

OK, this is a bit of an oversimplified example, since asking about an incrementing count of one audience attribute does not make for the best conversation starter.  But even this simplified example works in terms of audiences:  having been to zero Dead shows informs my conversation to some level (maybe it's too early to bring up music at all).  And having been to over 50 certainly gives me some ideas  (I could start the debate that the June 9, 1973 at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C. was the greatest Dead show of all time and undoubtedly get a reaction).

In reality a human conversation balances the pace of question (how many shows) and answer (sitting or not) over a much longer period of time than the speaker's allotted five minutes to facilitate.  It involves a unique balance of recency and history that allows us to enjoy a weaving conversational journey with friends.

As brands we can't ask one question about one attribute and then immediately treat all respondents the same based on their one answer.  We should listen to the answer, decide whether that answer alone should spark a conversational response (or is the friend still trying to tell us more), add it to our ever-increasing historical appreciation of our customer and continue to provide value to that customer wherever the next conversation takes place.

I know Personalization when I don't see it

You watch for signals, you listen to tone.  The fact I wear a Boston Red Sox tee-shirt is a signal, the fact I'm considering a vacation has more behavioral aspects to it, more nuance, more tone.  My friend knows I'm considering a vacation (and knows that scheduling and budget might make things tough with everything else going on).  Lots of strangers on a busy New York street could identify me as the guy that wore the Boston Red Sox tee-shirt.  My friend sits next to me at the game and starts to understand more about my vacation plans and because of that conversation starts to understand the other things going on in my life--how my kids are doing in school, how busy work might be, my past vacations and the particular activities that made that vacation so special.  He listens and responds to tone.

Since this little story happens in New York, that guy behind me in the stands yells, "hey, Red Sox suck!".  He screams based on signal.  So New York.

A Smiling Swoosh Nightmare

I love Amazon as I know you do.  The convenience, research options, price comparing, unbelievable operational efficiency...all simply amazing.  But I have to admit I have an unhealthy fear of the stalking Nike running shoe.

While I prefer to buy my running shoes at a local Portsmouth, NH running store, I do always check Amazon to make sure the price difference doesn't finally push me over the edge and break my loyalty.   I'm a reluctant runner at best, so the mile count that drives a new purchase for me can take years.  So it's a pretty small window of conversational opportunity:  I do a bit of research, buy, then run sparingly.

In essence the next best conversation between Nike and me is very rarely a new pair of running shoes.  And this is especially true when I'm looking at my local New Hampshire news site.  I'm so over the novelty of being impressed that the same running shoe I was looking at is showing up at my news site at all.  Now as I read about the local goings on, it just feels that the swoosh is smiling at me in a really weird way, like it knows too much about me.  I've been awakened by slightly terrifying dreams where an oversized Nike running shoe is sitting in wait in the corner of my room, the bright white swoosh blinding in the darkness.  (Ok, this dream never happened but you get the belabored point).

The next best conversation for me takes into account a lot more than my most immediate last purchase.  It takes into account my stage in the journey for all the topics of conversation that brand could be talking to me about.  Nike has so many conversations that I'm interested in (now that the kids are older I'm thinking of taking up golf again) and so many places where I'd rather have a conversation with them.

If you had a friend that kept asking you the same question every day even though you answered "no" each time, how many days would it take before you decided that this friendship was the wrong decision or how long before you tried to get him some help?

When the Nike running shoe shows up on my news site, that's not in my interest...it's clearly in the brand's only.  They want my money (now, now, now) and I really just want to see what this weekend is going to be like outside.  Maybe I can go for a run in my new shoes.

Thunderhead's ONE Engagement Hub and Friendship

OK, here's the obvious pitch.  Thunderhead's ONE Engagement Hub is purpose-built for you to listen to your customers, your members, your fans.  It is built to grow that friendship based on the trust and equality and mutually beneficial value creation that true listening empowers.  ONE promotes your ability to appreciate the pace and nuance of human conversation, a pace of listening and responding that allows us to learn more about our friends over time, to broaden our common interests and to equally enjoy and appreciate our journey together. 

Thanks for listening my friend!

Mike

A common customer vocabulary with Thunderhead's ONE Engagement Hub

As this exciting ride with Thunderhead continues, I'm experiencing something with a thrilling new frequency:  I am in more and more meetings where someone looks across the table and says something like, "we've been trying to have this conversation forever, we just never had a focus for it."

We could label this conversation they've been trying to have in many ways--omni-channel engagement, customer centricity, customer experience, 360 degree view of the customer.  But if I were to really boil it down I'd describe it like this: "defining a common vocabulary of customer intent".

The reason I like this definition is that it rolls all those other (buzzword stained) terms into a concise reason for having the conversation in the first place.  If we're doing things right, we're:

1. Thinking about what the customer wants to accomplish, in their terms.
2. Realizing that the customer is going to accomplish those things where and when he wants to.
3. Appreciating that the customer isn't going to care about my internal systems or the challenges I have integrating things.

The ONE Engagement Hub provides the perfect canvas to facilitate this conversation.  Rather than coming from a particular perspective (campaign management, content strategy, mobile app development, CRM operations), ONE is built to appreciate the strengths and gaps in those existing systems and strategies.  Rather than insisting on a wholesale replacement of things we're working with today, it starts to raise them up, fill those gaps, uncover insights and opportunities locked therein.

Our conversation to evolve the common vocabulary is fundamental to this.  When we don't weight ourselves down with the specific capabilities and challenges of one system, we start to talk more clearly in the customer's voice, around her intent.  We discuss customer activities (not where or how they happen).  We talk about our banking customer who wants to open an account, and not the need to just optimize the form where she (might) want to open it.  We talk about the conversational opportunity around the opening of the account (wherever she decides to talk about it).

Yeah, it's freeing.

Probably my favorite thing about ONE in these conversations is that we can put it to work right away, visualizing REAL WORLD customer activity--happening today--against this shiny new common vocabulary we're starting to agree on.  And like any great project, this new vocabulary is flexible to changes in that real world, to the exciting follow up conversations that result from quickly gained initial insights and to the evolution of our customer conversations wherever the technology world takes us.

Looking forward to working with your team to create this new vocabulary.

Thunderhead ONE Answers Questions

The problem:

If you've been involved in marketing or selling software in the digital marketing / customer engagement / customer journey / {insert your buzzword here} market, you know one thing:  IT'S CROWDED.  If you've been tasked with evaluating these tools and platforms, you know another thing:  IT'S CONFUSING.  Why does everyone say the same thing?  Where does one platform begin and the next one end?  How many of these different things do I need and how in the world are they going to stitch together?

After all, you've been tasked with gaining insight, improving your customers' experience and engagement with your brand.  You didn't know you signed up for this.

The solution:

I wish I could write one article to clear it up for you.  I won't fully, but I'll start.  My goal here is to describe very simply why Thunderhead ONE is something different, something that is going to change your career, something that will allow you to skip writing that 17th RFP questionnaire, something that will start to answer your questions.

The "3" things:

So that we can leverage the power of 3, here's a way of thinking about what Thunderhead ONE helps you accomplish:

1. Listen across all your systems (really! non-invasively) so that you can start to understand your customer journey, appreciating all the places you and your customers interact.
2. As you're listening, watch as your customers assemble into Audiences based on a combination of things you might know about them (CRM, attributes you already store), and journey-context behavioral flows.
3. Have the Next Best Conversation with that customer wherever and whenever it happens, with the authority that you've listened to and reacted to your customer's needs.  You've earned the right to cater the next message or offer.

OK, so why is that different?

I wanted this article to tee things up...now, in follow-up articles we can tackle very specific questions about your customer journey and see how Thunderhead ONE can answer them.  To start to consider why ONE is different, and as you evaluate the barrage of messaging coming at you, I'll leave you with some bullet points to consider:

• Your overall digital strategy will not be covered by one platform.  Don't lock yourself in to something that promises it's best of breed at everything.  The landscape is too rich, the channels too broad, the future too uncertain.
• Find platforms and groups that represent them who talk about future flexibility, about the ability to be nimble, to react.  We all know we don't know what's next.
• Relax about the mess of systems you have in place!  Embrace it!  There's a reason for it...you have lots of different groups in house with different needs and skill sets.  There's inertia.  Beware the vendor who tells you it's all going to be different with this one last (massive) change.
• Find platforms and groups that represent them who talk about the fact that insights are all around.  You need something flexible and non-invasive to collect lots of small insights that lead to greater understanding.

My first-hand experience with a broken customer journey

Disclaimer

All individual and brand names will be changed or omitted to protect the guilty....

'Twas the night before Christmas (or so):

It was just before Christmas and I was in a cheerful, buying mood.  I was remembering back to how happy I made my wife when I bought her a car for her birthday a couple years back...red bow on the hood, surprised her with it in the parking lot of a restaurant we just had dinner at...the whole thing.  Since then, I've had a particular fondness for that brand of car (guilty name omitted) and my wife has said again and again that this is the only kind of car she is ever going to own.  This December, the novelty of my awesome-husband-gesture was starting fade amongst the bright lights of the season.  I had the hopeful, almost-New-Year positivism that could drive me to buy a car I really shouldn't have.  Let's just say I was an incredibly hot prospect.

The mailer (the ultimate offline channel):

So everything was lining up quite nicely for this car brand as I walked out to the mailbox that day.  Bunch of Christmas cards.  A few letters telling me about everything that happened in the last year from folks I worked with ten years ago.  Way too many way too thick catalogs for last minute deals and free shipping.  Then, there it was.  A concisely written offer on a conveniently sized postcard.  I was already due a $10 gift card to an electronics superstore from aforementioned famous car company I'm already fond of.  Just go online and register.  I can type a URL with the best of 'em (that QR code is nice and all, but I never really bought into them), so let's go online and do this.  It's all upside from here, and I can just picture my wife's smile at the thought of this particular customer engagement.

Registering online (um, the Web channel):

OK, URL typed into browser...nice landing page...welcomed me by name (OK, the URL had my name in it, but still...nice).  Easy registration form (yeah, it could have been better since I pay on their site.  They should know my car model and year.  But, I like this brand...cut 'em some slack).  Easy form to fill out...bam!...check this out...if I have a chance to swing by the dealership this next Saturday from 1PM to 5PM, I immediately increase my reward to aforementioned electronics superstore to $20.  (That's a 100% increase if you're keeping track).

A swing by the dealership (the on-premise channel)

I was pretty sure I was going to rest on my laurels and just cash in my $10.  I had paid off the birthday present car already and really didn't want to incur a new debt for such a irrational investment.  I didn't want to deal with the typical pressure of a car lot.  So I was as surprised as anyone when I veered right last minute to enter the car lot that Saturday.  I was in the area doing last minute shopping anyway, and it would be nice to picture my wife's face as the new 2016 model appeared under the tree (I wasn't going to buy anything anyway, so the fantasy could include this impossible present placement).

The 10 things that happened at the dealership:

1. I walk into a showroom that is absolutely buzzing with activity (wow they must be busy, no one even approached me as I looked at the new models out on the lot).
2. First guy I see looks at the promotional print out in my hand, tries to muster a smile, forces a "welcome someone will be right with you", and hurries off to more important matters.
3. I see the woman (let's call her Susan) who sold me the aforementioned birthday present a couple years ago....we exchange polite smiles and she hurries to more important matters.
4. I am guided to a closet-sized back room where a friendly-enough intern-aged young woman sits staring at a tablet.  She welcomes me exactly according to script, hands me my first $10 gift card (I already earned that one), and invites me to sit.
5. Without ever really looking up from said tablet (it's a generational thing), she asks me a number of questions:  am I happy with my current car, what would it take me to upgrade, what do I look for in a car.
6. Survey done, she slides the second $10 gift card my way, thanks me and tells me to go back to the waiting room where a salesperson will see me.
7. I ask about the woman who sold me the original birthday present car (a.k.a Susan) and if I could see her specifically.  I repeat.  I asked to see a specific salesperson who I enjoyed doing business with THE LAST TIME I BOUGHT A CAR FROM THIS DEALERSHIP.  Sorry, needed to relay the emphasis.
8. I sit in the waiting room....5 minutes....10 minutes....ask again specifically for Susan....15 minutes.
9. I leave.  Hey, I already have my $20.
10. Somewhere back at home my wife's smile turns in the other direction.  And she has no idea why.

Here's the crazy thing:

I never heard from the car company on this matter again.  No follow up.  None.  No call from Susan, no email checking in to see if I was able to find something at the electronics superstore....nothing.  Not only did they already have my information from my account, they now had the additional data around my intent, my timeframe, my hopes to make my wife so happy again with an upgrade.  If I was presented with the right offer that day, I would have driven out of there in that new model, anxious to wrap it up with a bow.  But, of course, time kills all deals....and without any follow up, I'm deciding to do the right financial thing this season and opt for the Wok and knife set.

Some summary thoughts about my experience:

The sad thing is, I bet no one at this really great car company knows how easily they lost someone who was so very ready to buy a new car that day.  Worse, I bet there is a PowerPoint presentation slide showing the success of the electronics superstore campaign.

• The marketing team that developed the mailer and QR code campaign must have been really proud of the response.  More people visited the landing page then they predicted.
• I guarantee the Web team and their agency celebrated on New Year's Eve as they congratulated each other on the landing page visits that converted into registration form completions.
• As the folks in the showroom cleaned up confetti and broke down balloons, they hugged and glowed in their job well done.  They had THOUSANDS of people through those doors.  And they gave away LOTS of gift cards.

An Enormous Opportunity.

It's great when experience meets opportunity.  As I started my new year (in my older car), I joined Thunderhead, a company with a product called ONE Engagement Hub that is built with my exact experience in mind.

ONE appreciates that I really don't care that my car company has an email campaign team, an online/Web team, various agencies and digital strategists, multiple CRM and call center applications, survey applications and on-premise systems...it knows and that I just  want a seamless experience with my brand.

ONE knows that I trust this brand--that I'm willing to pay online, download their app, answer their annoying survey questions in the showroom that day.  I want to interact with this brand wherever and whenever I want to, and I don't want to have to re-explain my relationship with them.

ONE could give my car company insights into all my interactions with them, across all of the places I choose to talk to them.  With these insights, I guarantee Susan would have been ready for my visit.  At the very least, she could have saved the sale with a very informed call soon after my leaving the showroom.

The Customer Journey in Thunderhead ONE Engagement Hub

After all, it's the simple things.  I just wanted Susan to be reminded of the time we worked out that great birthday present for my wife and have her put together an informed offer for us to upgrade to an even better Christmas present.

C'mon aforementioned great car company that I'm really fond of.  Valentine's Day is right around the corner....

Thunderhead ONE and your Content Management project: Better Together

Background

With full disclosure that I've spent most of the last decade in web content management discussions, what follows is my belief that your content management / digital marketing platform strategy will benefit from a much needed breath of fresh air with the Thunderhead ONE Engagement Hub.

Web Content Management Systems are central and fundamental to successful digital marketing.  They provide the backbone of an effective online communications strategy and are critical to the create-->validate-->review-->publish workflow needs of today’s dynamic site projects.  Many systems also offer add-on or additional capabilities that cover the range of digital marketing expectations--personalization, analytics, multivariate testing, outbound communication and campaigns.

While Content Management Systems accomplish their core duties admirably, they often struggle when trying to apply their disciplined, structured, procedural approach to the ever-changing and dynamic conversations that you want to have with your customers across the various channels you want to communicate on.

Where does ONE fit?

Conversations are free-flowing, not structured.  They need to pick up effortlessly where they left off (often in a different place than they started in).  Conversations need to be valuable to both sides...or they end abruptly.

You or your customer likely have multiple CMS systems--off-the-shelf varieties combined with internal custom applications--multiple CRM systems, on premise and ecommerce systems and more.  While some days it might seem like a good idea to “start from scratch” with one new system, you know that is not realistic, cost-effective or timely…and you know it is foolish to believe that all of the stakeholders in your customer engagement efforts (after all, this should be everyone), will agree on a single tool for their part of such a significant undertaking.

This is where Thunderhead's ONE Engagement Hub comes in.  ONE was created with this omni-channel reality in mind from day one.  It appreciates that you will continue to leverage multiple systems to gain insights.  ONE becomes a thin and lightweight layer over those systems, listening for insight, showing you opportunities, helping you make the right decisions.

Architecturally and strategically, ONE never tries to be something it's not--in this case ONE fully appreciates the great content management systems out there (including those that you currently leverage or are looking at), and fully appreciates their role as the content system of record.  The job of content management systems in an overall digital strategy is generally clear, well-understood and at the very least underway (and more likely firmly entrenched after years of development).  You (or your customers) don't want to hear that the next step of optimization is going to take a restart, a rip-out, a re-learn.

Let's get specific:

Three quick areas to consider as you start to understand where your CMS project and ONE complement each other:

1)  Personalization, started or improved TODAY across any number of systems

Leveraging SAAS and using an easy to apply javascript tag and browser plugin, ONE allows you to start immediately previewing and activating personalization across any of your digital properties.  Doesn't matter what system or technology lies beneath...if you're serving pages, you can start personalizing with ONE immediately.  Of course speed is nice...but more important are the insights that drive a great personalization strategy.  Those insights are rich in ONE as it listens across all of your customer conversations and touchpoints.  Don't let speed and the effortless start up fool you--this is heavyweight decisioning and automation that you'll never grow out of.

2)  Deliver your managed content across all customer conversations

As I mentioned, ONE is not trying to be or to replace your CMS.  Our brilliant technologists, developers and architects shudder at the thought of your duplicating content or data to achieve better engagement with your customers.  Instead, ONE introduces an "Action" concept which allows you to consider the message to the customer first, then act on sending that message to the appropriate endpoint to continue your conversation with your customer--whether that be a web page, a mobile app screen, a CRM call agent screen, a point-of-sale system....wherever.  The content and assets used in these actions can be pulled directly from your CMS so that there's no duplication or questioning of where the approved assets belong.

3)  Truly understand your customer's journey

ONE is able to take action based on data gathered across all channels, all customer touchpoints.  It is able to make efficient decisions without duplicating (or even storing) these data.  It honors all systems of record and their ability to effectively manage data for their purposes, and is able to surface that data, in the moment, to help you make the decisions that drive the next best conversation with your customer.

ONE is a Hub.  It's in the name.  Rather than assuming the only insights you want and need will be driven by or tied to your CMS, ONE recognizes that those insights will be available in all kinds of places in the enterprise--CMS, CRM, on-premise / point-of-sale, mobile apps, social, email and campaign management.  ONE provides a beautifully designed visualization of your customer's journey, showing you any obstacles in their path to complete excitement with your brand, ensuring you're providing them with the seamless, contextual conversation they expect, wherever and whenever they expect it.


I look forward to our next conversation and truly diving into your successful project that marries the power of your CMS and the agility and insights of ONE.

A new year, and an exciting new adventure with Thunderhead ONE Engagement Hub

After just a couple months with the Thunderhead ONE team, I am incredibly excited about the ONE Engagement Hub and its capabilities to provide customer journey insights to marketing and business process teams.  I have talked to countless customers and partners about the ever-elusive omni-channel insight and actionability problem.  At this early stage in my new adventure, I already truly believe in ONE's ability to help solve this problem.

Why?  Let's be honest.  There is no single system for customer insight within the enterprise, and there shouldn't be.  There will always be tools for different organizations that cater to the specific user interface, reporting and functional needs of that organization.  Trying to suggest that any single system will completely satisfy all will only lead to frustration, workarounds, skunkworks projects, duplication.  With strategic leadership, a business unit should make choices that balance the specific needs of that business unit with the loftier goals of consolidated insights.

The end customer doesn't care about your systems. about your definition of "channels", about your organizational structure.  The customer is going to interact with a brand at any available entry point that any business unit within that brand makes available to them.  It is then a brand's responsibility to somehow aggregate (then reduce) the data derived at those touch points so that efficient marketing strategies and business outcomes fall out.

In most realities, each business unit is doing OK.  Each channel is doing OK.  But the higher level insights have lagged, leading to disjointed, ineffective, inconsistent customer experiences as that customer takes advantage of the growing set of access points that have been made available to them (and that they now expect).

That's where ONE Engagement Hub comes in.  ONE was built from the very beginning with this realization firmly in place--that insights will be derived across systems, across customer touch points, across online and on premise.  Its core tenets hold firmly in place towards this goal--non-invasive, intuitive and usable interfaces (really), awareness of different channels without being beholden to them, rapidly available insights that become a lightweight layer over an incredible depth in power, scale and decisioning intelligence.

I am so excited to be in this zone.  I have joined a team that represents a perfect balance of professionals that I have succeeded with before and folks I'm just getting the pleasure to meet that have unbelievable skill sets, backgrounds and experiences.

We are looking for an additional handful of partners to join us in this journey--digital agencies and system integrators who appreciate the vision of omni-channel insights and have struggled to date with systems that have fallen short of that promise.  We are ready to be true partners in this, to be there every step of the way as we train and enable your organization around ONE's ability to fulfill the omni-channel customer journey promise that is fundamental to your strategy.

Sitecore Analytics Day 3: A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

The following is an article from my time as VP of Sales Engineering, working with Sitecore's Experience Platform....

Main point for today

OK, I admit it.  On my recent posts I faked my picture of Abraham Lincoln in my Experience Profile.  I didn't even use PhotoShop; it was just a cheap SnagIt copy-and-paste.  But now, here's the real deal:

A true Abraham Lincoln Sitecore Experience Profile Contact

Why is this such a big deal Mike?  Two reasons:

1. Looking into how to add a contact's picture to the Sitecore Experience Profile reminded me of how incredible the Sitecore community is.  There are great blogs going back months (from people much more talented than I am) that discuss this subject in great detail.
2. The main purpose of this blog series was to investigate the power of xDB.  I've been around reporting requirements long enough to know that power comes from modeling whatever it is you want to model, viewing it in whatever way you want to view it.  While my adding a picture here is a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of moment, it will hopefully get the creative juices flowing (it did for me).

About that community

First and foremost, two top examples of how great the Sitecore community is, and representative of much more thorough discussions of this subject than I will have here today:

1. Anything by Adam Conn is great.  This is a series he did back in September (which shows how far ahead of the curve he is) that does a great job explaining developing against xDB.
2. Sitecore's great partner, Horizontal Integration, does a fantastic job of showing code samples.

My summarized steps to get Mr. Lincoln's picture in my Experience Profile:

There are much better posts around all things Mongo, development in Sitecore and xDB, etc.  This is my quick list of things that I went through as I investigated this task, using just the information from the above two blogs.

Step 1.  Learn enough Mongo to become dangerous.

As you get into xDB within Mongo, you'll gravitate to the Contacts and Interactions collections.  As you're using RoboMongo or MongoVue or your tool of choice, you'll find yourselves wanting to query the collections for your documents.  Again Adam Conn comes to the rescue with an explanation of how to use ID based queries.  Here are a few find() statements that also helped me:

db.Identifiers.find({"_id" : /extranet\\abr?/i})

In this example, my Identifiers collection has a link between my Contact ID and Abraham Lincoln's Sitecore user record.  The above uses a Regular Expression since in this case the _id field seems to be a string (as opposed to Adam's description of how to deal with identifier types in the Contacts collection).  The RegEX looks for user in the extranet Sitecore security domain, staring with "abr" and case insensitive ("/i").

db.Contacts.find({"Personal.FirstName" : "Abraham"})

Switching to a find in the Contacts collection, above is a way to find a value in an embedded document.  Contacts have a "Personal" document, with an embedded document that can include FirstName and LastName.  The Personal.FirstName syntax allows me to find a value of "Abraham" within.  This could be another use of a RegEX as used in the first example.

db.Contacts.find({_id:new BinData(3, 'zgZHZ6RszESnllHXYIuUrA==')})

Adam's blog will really explain why we need to set up a find query in this way for the Contacts collection.  The example above is just an easy copy and paste (changing out the resultant ID for your system).

Step 2.  Look at an example of a Contacts document.

{

    "_id" : LUUID("4332583d-d8df-3a5c-6382-4cb8037a15f3"),

    "System" : {

        "IntegrationLabel" : ""

    },

    "Identifiers" : {

        "IdentificationLevel" : 2,

        "Identifier" : "extranet\\mike@test.com"

    },

    "ConversionInfo" : {

        "WasConverted" : true

    },

    "Lease" : null,

    "Personal" : {

        "FirstName" : "Mike",

        "Surname" : "Casey"

    },

    "Emails" : {

        "Preferred" : "work",

        "Entries" : {

            "work" : {

                "SmtpAddress" : "mike@test.com"

            }

        }

    }

}

The above document has some entries based on some typical activity on our Launch Sitecore site.  For instance, by registering we've gathered some "Personal" values and "Emails" values.  Notice there is no Pictures section of this document.  As expected with this NoSQL strategy, the document continues to build as information is collected.

Step 3.  Understand a bit about facets

As Adam explains, the Experience Profile makes use of Contact "facets".  As of Sitecore 8, the Sitecore.Analytics.Model.Config file contains the default facets, as shown below:

Default Facets in the Sitecore 8 Sitecore.Analytics.Model.Config

Since "Picture" is already an available facet, nothing to do here.  Adam explains the process of adding new facets and leveraging those new facets in a new SPEAK-based tab on the Experience Profile.

Step 4.  Get some code to write to the Picture facet

Still getting my terminology straight here, but basically we want to add a Picture section to that original Contact document shown in step 2 for Abraham Lincoln.  Thankfully, our friends at Horizontal Integration have already done the heavy lifting here:

Horizontal Integration Code to write to the Contact's Picture

As an aside, you'll be likely looking for some assembly references to use the above, so just in case:

Now, by having a Media Library item with Abraham's picture and replacing the GetItem statement above with its GUID, we're good to go.

Since this isn't a real-world example and just an investigation, I went ahead and created a control that just runs the above code when I visit my page on my local Launch Sitecore instance.  I'm really interested in the real-world sources for this picture--social, CRM, etc.  And now I'm more interested in taking the next steps in understanding the power this type of access to xDB unleashes in Sitecore 8 projects.  I'll leave you with the new section of the Abraham Lincoln Contact document:

Abraham Lincoln Contact Document with Picture

And now we can see good 'ol Abe's smiling face when we access all the great detail of his Experience Profile (and no copy-and-paste this time around!):

Searching for Abe and seeing our new picture facet