blending the mix

Not just because Microsoft are a client, not because Steve, Mark, Marc are really nice guys, but because, in 2006, Microsoft already had planned what Apple have just launched.

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This is one of the most exciting events I have seen. I received this invitation to attend the Pepsi Brandhack. Main problem is I’m in the UK, the brandhack is in the US…shame.

The UK would benefit from something like this – and I don’t just mean because it will give a voice to some of the smaller agencies over here (who are bloody good at what the do but who perhaps don’t get considered alongside the big-boys), but because I think we have some of the most switched-on, creative people in the world here – and it would be a great opportunity to give these places a voice.

Something similar exists in Headbox a community where brands can solicit feedback (and ideas) from a variety fo members who meet that brand’s audience demographic (the 440ml can of Tango for example).

Made by Many, a fab digital/social media consultancy carried out a similar exercise for Amnesty International, getting the help of social media fan boys and girls to help shape their ideas.

As social technologies mature, we are clearly moving to a more collaborative way of working with customers.

Far removed from internal design and build, brands are clearly now looking to not only engage with their audiences but include them as part of the design process – thereby ensuring that what they deliver (and therefore the brand experience) remains consistent with the brand message and experience but also totally in line with what the customer expects of them.

Dell Ideastorm and My Starbucks Ideas are early-stage customer collaboration tools that still require the brand to deliver something at the end but this form of collaboration is still one way, not entirely two-way innovation – you send us an idea, we will do it.

The opportunities to embrace an entirely collaborative consumer experience are utterly immense. The potential for loyalty where the brand entwines itself with its customers for product development, marketing (should it ever be called that in this next phase!) and even HR (as BestBuy recently did last week!) put the customer truly at the heart of the business.

More to come on this one I think…

brandhack, the next web, social media, pepsi

In-video hot-spots are nothing new. They have been around for a couple of years thanks to companies like Asterpix and Coull whose technology support the video below.

What they have always lacked though is a good creative layer to make the hotspots look like they are part of the campaign branding rather than technology-driven functions.

Not any more…

Imagine the possibilities…have your affiliates heard/seen anything like this before? Something tells me they’d like it…and so would your customers!

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how good BMW’s new ads were with their inclusion of augmented reality to promote the new Z4. All well and good you might say. Great for brand awareness, great to get people discussing the brand, but did it really serve a purpose beyond awareness? You may argue that this alone is enough, but this latest gem from AKQA for the US Postal Service’s Priority Mail service creates genuine utility.

As soon as I saw this, courtesy of Nathan, it made me think of the old Pirellis ad “Power is nothing without control”

Likewise, what use is technological innovation if it doesn’t ever deliver anything of value? I don’t think anyone can say that this little gem is anything BUT useful.

So…rather than thinking about how wacky you can be…think about how it can solve a problem.

The big meme doing the rounds these last couple of days is for digital/creative agency Boone Oakley, an outfit whose website is a series of You Tube videos.

So the guys are creative – turning their website into a series of You Tube videos, but more than anything they have shown they have an intimate understanding of You Tube which makes me pay even MORE attention to them.

Few people, let alone agencies have really got to grasp with “ads” in You Tube, whether they be running alongside the bottom of the page or “hot spots” in the videos (which can also include links too). It is little details like this and an intimate awareness of a networks such as that of Toby’s business and Facebook that sets these businesses apart and proof that the smaller, agile business can be the expert simply by demonstrating an awareness  beyond any other that they walk the walk.

The homepage (notice the text at the bottom acting as index points for navigation)

Now, click on the “hot spot” and let it take you to another video…

Seriously, if you want to be taken seriously, take Seth and Hugh’s advice – be remarkable. Boone Oakley are and showing that you don’t need to be big to be great.

I had been watching a lot of the tweets coming out of the Somesso conference earlier this month and was amazed at the speaker line up.

There’s something authoritative and factual about Susan Kish that I could drone on forever, but instead, just look at the video below.

SOMESSO London 09 – Trailer from somesso on Vimeo.

I think it was @wadds who said that the future of social media wasn’t B2C, it was in the commercial sector – changing work practices and mentalities. (wadds, I apologise for the dramatic para-phrasing, but I recall that this was the gist of it!).

Social media and their tools are a very personal thing and as such, are difficult to get everybody to use from a commercial point of view too (project management, idea sharing, innovation etc.).

There’s a couple of (perhaps surprisingly!) PR firms up here who do it especially well, where all members of staff contribute to the company blog, twitter account, company tv channel, company delicious account amongst others – willingly (or so it seems!).

So how do you encourage it in a way that doesn’t cause rebellion?

And then along comes Google Wave

Goole’s open-source, browser-based, collaboration platform enables people to share content and stories in a way that is entirely new and common sense way – replacing conventional email with real-time chat and sharing.

Could this be the change that truly collaborative working needs?

Stunning. Innovative. Very BMW. Augmented Reality (to the uninitiated!)

Oh, the website is pretty good too:

Social Media Checklist:

• Z4 Facebook Fan Page: Yup!
• You Tube Channel: Yup!
• Facebook Z4 pictures on Facebook: Yup!
• TV Channel: Yup!
• Bookmarking: Yup!

BMW are fast becoming the Social Media Poster Boys for the motor industry. Can/Dare anyone else compete with them?

So as most people who read this blog will know, Skittles launched a home page takeover today and seemed to cause quite a stir amongst the only people who were really talking about it, the social media crowd.

The little widget in the top sits on other pages too:

…you get the picture…

I can’t criticise Skittles for the innovation of what they have done, but I do seriosuly question the reason for doing something it. What possible value can doing something like this create?

I’d love to be proven wrong, and there is some underlying genius to this but all I can see is that this is notrhing more than social media spam – an attempt to get publicity for the sake of it. Dirty data capture at its worst, or an SEO link-building campaign to kill all others…after all 582,000 members of the facebook group can’t be sooooo bad can it?? 

However, if you look at the conversations about the campaign, the majority of conversations are talking about the innovation and delivery of the campaign – NOT the product itself and why I might buy Skittles over M&M’s for example.

Accepted, good social media doesn’t sell to people, people buy from companies using social media because they have a closer relationship with that company, but

when the vehicle of delivery is talked about more than the product itself, what value is there in doing what they have?

A friend argued that the whole activity has got people talking and that in achieving this, he is more likely to buy skittles…and whilst I agree with his point, does this not take us back to the mass, impersonal audience tools of the mid-90’s…the online version of junk mail so-to-speak? Get in front of someone and they will buy.

The cool cats at Dutch agency Modernista do an identical thing (Skittles…sure this is all your idea??) but the delivery of this kind of feature is core to what they do – innovation is an important differentiator for them. But Skittles? Come on.

So, unless someone involved with this comes out and explains the motives behind it, I’ll hold back judgement on this (not perhaps that you care nayway) as a cheap attempt to get publicity and assign Skittles to the files of “social media innovation” in every good social media presentations….

Looks like Twitter users are at the very least one-steo agead of Twitter (again) with the launch of Twe2 a free service which does what Twitter no longer does (but may do again soon!)

Ok, so I am a little nervous about giving an app I don’t know yet my mobile phone details and there are some settings to configure which need a bit of thinking about (like how many Dm’s or replies you want to receive per hour – I don;t know!) but it does for those of us in the UK what Twitter does for the rest of the world – and that has to be worth a shout out.

Thanks to @jonpauldavies for the heads up!

I caught wind of this the tonight and think it is an interesting addition to the ongoing debates of both real time news as well as Twitter.

As Friendfeed is managing to do, Facebook is attempting to do and numerous other sites fail to do, the real-time web (largely driven by Twitter) is moving closer and closer, but the very nature of it – news created by amateurs experiencing the news themselves is somewhat sketchy at best, blatantly false at worst.

At the other end of the scale we have the aggregators who collate news based on the number of links a particulr piece of news has. The more popular it is, the higher it will appear in the aggregator (Yahoo/Google News for example).

But, does the most popular news have the same value to users as breaking news? I would argue not. The problem is, breaking news takes a while to attract links and build up a head of steam to become massively mainstream breaking news, yet Twitter lacks the depth of detail to add detail to the story.

Along comes Vik’s Tweet News – a Yahoo BOSS/Twitter mash-up which compares the emerging news stories on Twitter and compares the to the stories in Yahoo News. If there is something in both Yahoo News and Twitter, chances are its breaking news but with some meat to it – rather than a collection of brief, 140 character messages.

The end result is a tool that tracks breaking news stories ranked by the hyper-time-sensitive results on Twitter, arguably offering faster updates, better relevance and more in-depth coverage than either source by itself.

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