Hotels and Social Media

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HVS - Examples of How Hotels Are Using Social Media - A Guide for Getting Started.pdf (2426 KB)

An interesting guide on what major hotels are doing on the social media space and how other hotel marketers should get started

 

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A hunter shoots a bear!

This is a great example of how to create a great viral ad for a most certainly boring product - The ink correction fluid/tape.

It's an interactive YouTube video campaign for European stationary brand Tipp-Ex. After viewing a YouTube video titled "A Hunter Shoots A Bear" - during which the former can't quite bring himself to pull the trigger - users are invited to re-write the encounter themselves, making virtual use of Tipp-Ex's ink correction products to white out the title of the video and fill in the blank with their own version of events. Check out the video here:

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The beauty of data visualization

An awesome TED talk by David McCandless on the beauty of data visualization. Information design can help us better answer so many questions

 

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Life Hacks

This is an awesome infographic on some really cool life hacks – like how to get a free phone charger when you lose yours.

Via

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Sony Media Monster Wars

This is a pretty awesome Facebook App by Sony. Generate your own Media Monster through the content on your Facebook profile. The more photos, videos, comments, likes, shares and interaction you have, the bigger, better and meaner your monster will be in battle!

Build yours and let's duel!

And it’s not just a frivolous game/app. The idea for the media monsters comes from Sony’s attempt to clean up the piles of media that often clog our computers, through their new Vaio notebook and software. Along with a great concept, the app also allows for all the social interactions and viral elements of Facebook with status updates, direct posts to friends’ walls, wall to wall views and direct friend to friend battles, challenges and scoring. Nicely done.

(Via www.digitalbuzzblog.com)

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VW's Sunday Drive

When it comes to marketing cars online, it’s always a challenge trying to replicate the experience on a digital platform.

VW Canada’s new Sunday Drive microsite has done a pretty good job doing it. Their idea was to bring back the much forgotten Sunday drive where destination were overated and schedules were non-existent. You  just picked a random direction and drove. Chilling out and enjoying the sights and the whole driving experience.

The microsite at http://vwsundaydrive.ca has a little turntable where you can remix your own tunes for that perfect Sunday cruise to nowhere in particular.

Makes me feel like taking a road trip.

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Tissot Augmented Reality Product Experience

Another great Augmented Reality product experience – This time for Tissot watches.

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The Olympus Augmented Reality Experience

Another really cool use of augmented reality. Get a 3D product experience of the new Olympus PEN E-PL1 camera right from your computer.

Try it out for yourself at www.getolympus.com/PEN3d

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Lego Augmented Reality

This is a really cool use of technology to drive sales.

Lego developed an Augmented Reality Kiosk System called “Digital Box” which is now being rolled out to LEGO brand stores worldwide. It allows kids and parents the ability to see what the end product looks like before making a purchase. Absolutely brilliant.

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The Mégane Experiment

Great campaign by Renault – Can a car change a town?

In 2010, Renault discovered a set of fascinating statistics. According to the figures, towns with more Mégane were happier, had higher rates of fertility and longer life expectancies.

To put this theory to the test, they've sent Claude, a 'consultant de joie' to Gisburn (Lancashire). A town with no Méganes and apparently very little joie de vivre, to conduct 'The Mégane Experiment'.

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Aides Graffiti

This has got to be one of the most creative AIDS Campaign ads ever. EVER.

 

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Old Spice Social Media Case Study

Here’s the case study from W + K for what is arguably the best social media campaign for the entire year.

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Social Media Advertising in the 1960s

What Facebook, You Tube and Skype Ads would’ve looked like in the 1960s.

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Account Planning in the Digital Age

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accountplanningdigitalv03-100503145244-phpapp01.pdf (1235 KB)

Great presentation on digital planning by Zigurds Zakis from Instinct (Part of BBDO Group , Russia). It talks about the changes in traditional account planning to one where involves four key elements

1.       Understanding Customer and Society

2.       Understanding the Economy (and not just the business)

3.       Understanding Technology and what it enables

4.       Understanding Creativity

He also talks about the skillsets of the Convergent Planner and how they should have:

1) The Intellect of the brand architect

2) Financial acumenof the management consultant

3) Geekiness of the hacker

4) Curiosity of the social psychologist

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Audi: Augmented Reality Calendar

Presenting the world’s first car calendar…without the cars. Great Augmented reality stuff by the guys at Audi and Razorfish

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The 73,000 Bar Tab

Innovative campaign by Ogilvy Brazil to educate people about the cost of drink driving!

Check out the video:

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Social Media Infographic - Dos and Don'ts of Social Media for Business

This is a simple but great infographic on the Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media for Business.

Courtesy of: http://www.thesteelmethod.com/b2bdodont.html

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Pilot Handwriting

How cool is this! Write by hand on your computer! The guys at Pilot Pens have developed an application that turns your handwriting into a digital font which you can use to send handwritten e-mails to your friends.

www.pilothandwriting.com

Check out the video below.

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What if money grew on trees?

Interesting campaign by Rabobank Australia. RaboDirect sponsored a ground breaking experiment to see how Australians really react when presented with the ultimate financial fantasy - a money tree!

RaboDirect's mission is to wake up people's lazy money because over the last year Australians missed out on $4.7 Billion in interest on their savings by leaving it in accounts that pay little or no interest. This is what led the experiment. If people ignore money in their account they can't see, do they also ignore money they can see and touch?

They secretly filmed people as they passed by a tree covered in $5 notes and asked a psychologist and financial decision-making expert to monitor and analyse responses.

Check out this video of the experiment:

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The Social Media Revolution

Just to put things in perspective. This is the new and update version from the original video.

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AT&T Augmented Reality Soccer Game - Banner Ad

This is a really cool showcase of an Augmented Reality Soccer Game that ran within a banner ad on ESPN.com.

BBDO and Zoic Studios created a game for AT&T that uses our proprietary motion capture technology (ZugMO) to allow people with a webcam to "head in" corner kicks. Take a look at the video below

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The Impossible Brief

This is a pretty cool crowdsourcing campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi. Think you can solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

Submit your idea at www.theimpossiblebrief.com

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Latest Social Media Stats from Asia

This video from Thomas Crampton/Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence pulls together the latest stats on Social Media from across APAC.

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How To Do Digital Planning

This is a great article by Iain Tait on what’s required of a digital planner in terms of qualities and skill sets. He lists down 10 things that every good/decent digital planner needs. Original post available at http://www.crackunit.com/2007/11/28/how-to-do-digital-planning/

Be good at cutting and pasting

If you’ve ever set up a blog or or a MySpace page you’ll probably have seen funny code knocking around the place. You shouldn’t be scared of this stuff. As the web keeps evolving to become more open and customisable the ability to copy and paste odd looking bits of code from one place to another increases in value.

At it’s most basic level knowing how to customise a feed or add a widget to a blog will at least give you some appreciation of the building blocks of the web. Kind of like Lego is to engineering.

In lots of ways this act of copying and pasting funny geek code from one place to another is a useful proxy for what digital planners need to do all the time. I’m not talking about lifting people’s ideas or ripping them off, I’m talking about applying principles and techniques in a variety of seemingly disconnected places.

I’m guessing at this point some people will be bursting to say things like – “this is all too geeky, you don’t need to know how a car works to be able to drive”. And that’s true. But if your job was designing and selling cars to people, you might find it useful to know how the different bit of a car fit together. And everyone ought to know how to change sparkplugs and tyres right?

Be able to deconstruct the craft

You don’t need to be able to do all of it. But it’s really important that you understand it and can talk about it semi-convincingly.

What is this it of which I speak?

It is the craft of making really good and interesting interactive stuff.

It is made from all kinds of things. Graphic design, programming, information architecture, experience design, typography, HCI, good writing, databases, video production, game design, e-commerce, networks, devices…

Be good at knowing why something is good or bad. There’s a lot of very bad stuff that looks very good out there. And a lot of amazing things that look like shit. You need to be able to see through the veneer and be able to judge things on a different level.

If there was one bit of the craft that I think is super-important for planners to understand it’s user experience. It encapsulates a lot of what we should be concerned about in terms of making things that work for an audience.

Be able to expand (and contract) to fill the space available

There isn’t digital planner shaped hole.

On some jobs it’ll be much bigger than others.

Sometimes you might be the lead strategist on a big paradigm shifting pure play turnkey web commerce integration project, where part of your job is helping a client figure out how and why their business exists.

This requires a different way of thinking and being from an ‘online advertising’ project where your role might be to convince the Cheezy-Puffs client that the idea that they’ve been presented about building a Cheezy Radio Station on Puff Island in Second Life and Podcasting the shows into Facebook might not be exactly the right thing to do. This time.

Then of course you’ll have to deal with the fallout of sabotaging the idea (from whoever it was that came up with it in the first place)…

Other times you’ll be part of a multi-agency team working alongside a number of other really good planners. In these cases it can be best to wind your neck in a bit and focus on the skills you’ve got that complement the rest of the team. And just skip over the ritual of intellectual posturing and corner-pissing nonsense that you’re meant to go through. It’s just a bit boring and pointless.

Be able to be big, and be able to be smaller too.

Be a good, and patient, educator

When you’re dealing with lots of new stuff that isn’t particularly well understood you need to be able to explain complex things to people. And do it in a way that’s simple (but not patronising), accessible (but not dumbed-down) and effective (but not overly salesy).

That’s a hard thing to do.

But then you have to do it, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And be as enthusiastic and interested as you were the first time around.

“Right, this Internet thing, it’s basically a bunch of computers…”

Be a cyber-optimist and a hyper-cynic

You’re the person that everyone expects to be really excited by, and interested in, the latest gizmos, widgets and whatnot. And you should be. But at the same time you have to be the one that is able to see beyond the hype and have a critical view on whether it’s just another passing fad or something that we should all care about.

Sometimes you’ll back the wrong horse. We all do. But just as long as you’re backing the horse for the right reasons that’s the best you can be expected to do.

Use the forces of geekdom

Geeks are cool. Well, at least a bit cooler than they used to be.

What is it that planners need to learn from geeks? Maybe it’s passion. Or an obsessive attention to detail. Or is it a drive to understand the how and the why of stuff. I’m not really sure. But there’s an interesting strand of geekism that feels very real, very tangible and very very useful.

There’s something about a need to take stuff to pieces and put it back together again that links the minds of geeks and planners I reckon.

Don’t hate business, it’s your friend

If you’re in ‘the game’ because you want to make film or art then making digital stuff can often drift even further away from your goal than doing traditional advertising.

There’s still a need to create desire and make beautiful things . And there’s lots of amazing digital ‘art’ that gets made in our world. Some of it in the name of art, some in the name of marketing.

But a lot of the projects where we’re really able to add value are things where we get to optimise businesses. Creating revenue opportunities. Selling more stuff. Driving efficiencies. Reducing waste. Things you might find tedious and hateful if you’re in denial about how and why you get paid.

Of course you can have ethics. And lots of the really interesting things that digital enables is rooted in empowering small businesses and creating a level commercial playing field.

But let’s be really clear, digital is not just about creating fascinating communications, it’s about how you can help business end-to-end.

Do things, make stuff

There’s a bunch of plannery mantras in circulation around doing stuff. Whether it’s ‘act don’t say’, ‘always in beta’, ‘embrace failure’ or any variant of this kind of thing. It’s all pointing in the same direction. You should get out there and do things rather than just banging on about them.

And yes, a blog counts as doing something. But no. You don’t have to have a blog to be a planner. Not yet anyway.

Be Non-Stick and Wipe-Kleen

If you’re out there experimenting and doing new stuff, chances are you’ll fail from time to time. No one likes to fail. But some people are much better at failing than others. It’s natural to be gutted if something doesn’t work as well in the real/virutual world as it did in your head.

But if you’re the kind of person that bangs their head against stuff when you don’t win, your temperament might not be exactly right for a game where the things that don’t work are as important as the ones that do.

Say sorry. Explain to yourself and others why it failed. Learn from the failure. Try not to repeat the same failure again. Dust yourself down. Move on.

(This point was inspired by someone at an above the line agency we work with who reportedly referred to our agency as ‘Teflon Poke‘)

Love what you do

Do what you’re doing for the right reasons. In interviews the thing I try to figure out above anything else is whether or not the person I’m seeing actually loves what they’re doing. If they’re in the game because they’re really excited and passionate about it then they’ll learn new things (because they can’t help themselves). If they’re in it because they think it’s a career opportunity or they fancy a change of scene you’re all in for a much rougher ride.

If you’re in ‘digital planning’ for fame, money, groupies and adoration, you’re in the wrong business. Well until next summer anyway.

And isn’t it much nicer when you work with people who love what they do. It’s the kind of thing it’s hard not to fall for.

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How Google Works

Great infographic about how Google works

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Rethinking the Creative Brief

This is an interesting and insightful deck on how to rethink the creative brief – From what it means, to how to make it better. Kudos to Jasmin Cheng (@min_o) for this great work.

The Creative Brief: A Research Project

View more presentations from Jasmin Cheng.

10 Things I Learned In Web School

This is a great article on user experience by Luke Wroblewski (Original Article Published in www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1133)

Last year Matthew Frederick, author of the excellent book 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, asked me to contribute some things I've learned about the Web for a new book in his series.

The book, 101 Things I Learned in Business School, was just released but with only one lesson about the Web within its pages. So here are all the lessons I wrote up for Matthew in raw unedited form!

1. You can influence your audience on the Web, but you can’t control them.

• In management, you can’t control anyone but yourself. But you can influence everyone.
• Companies need to give up the idea of controlling a user’s experience on their Web sites & applications
• The completion is one click away and people are quite comfortable using the back button when needed.
• Instead of controlling a user experience, focus on influencing people’s behaviors toward value creation and activities that meet their needs and your business goals.

2. Web applications are digital products. Design & think of them as such.

• The first wave of the Web consisted of digital representations of physical companies & organizations. So the dominant behavior was locomotion: going from place to place.
• In the second wave of the Web, the shopping cart showed up everywhere and enabled digital manipulation of physical goods online.
• Now the goods themselves are digital. Web applications are products that companies market and sell.
• As such, they should be designed with packaging, first time experience, customer lifecycle, and more in mind.

3. Whoever can frame the problem best, is the most likely to solve it.

• In today’s digital world, getting clarity into the problems organizations face is sometimes more valuable than coming up with solutions.
• There are many more people trying to provide solutions than there are trying to clarify problems.
• Usually when a group of smart people is at an impasse for a long time, it is because the problem is poorly framed, not because their solutions are not good.
• The most important is that a well defined-and exciting problem (and its associated constraints) is the catalyst that makes design go.

4. There are many ways to move pixels around on a screen. Not all of them are designing.

• There’s more than one way to make software user interface decisions.
• Designing: decisions are evaluated by how well they contribute to an integrated “human-centric” experience. This is the model most designers crave because it leverages their ability to empathize with their target audience and think holistically. Designing focuses on understanding the fundamental purpose of an application and bringing it to life in a way people can understand and use. An experience that “makes sense” to your audience is your yardstick in this model. This approach is probably most common when developing new products.
• Optimizing: decisions are made based on explicit testing of isolated variables to drive very specific behaviors. Designers create variations of a control that are evaluated systematically. The elements that perform best likely become part of the user interface. In this model, performance is your yardstick for decisions. Mature products (especially cash cows) frequently employ optimizing models and designers on these teams spend most of their time creating (lots of) iterations for the key elements of the product.
• Managing: decisions are reached through discussion or debate. In this model, designers represent the collective decisions of groups within the product by laying out what everyone agreed to. Consensus and buy-in are the yardsticks by which people judge success.
• It’s important to note that the processes that define each model can also be inputs to other models. For example, explicit testing can help inform a holistic design or healthy debate can result in variations to test in order to optimize a product. The thing that distinguishes each model is what is used to make design decisions most of the time: holistic customer experience, optimization, or consensus.

5. What defines a user interface?

• Information architecture defines the structure of information (which can exist in many forms).
• Interaction design enables people to manipulate and contribute to/create that information.
• Visual design communicates these possibilities to people and creates affinity to them (desirability).
• A user interface is the summation of these considerations.
• Some might argue that the term "information" is a bit limiting in this set of definitions and I kind of agree. So anyone who needs a broader purvey for what they work with could simply substitute "information" with "stuff".

6. Don’t just think about the context of your Web site, think about the context of the Web.

• In today’s social, distributed, search-driven Web, customers are finding their way to Web content through an increasing number of distinct experiences.
• Yet when people arrive at most Web pages, the experience they get isn’t optimized for this context.
• Instead, the vast majority of content pages online remain more concerned with their own context than the context of their users: where did a user arrive from and where are they likely to go next?

7. Visual design is not just about making things look pretty

• While few people literally ask a design team to make things look pretty, there is a long-standing assumption that visual design is the icing on the cake.
• Perhaps this belief stems from the general public’s introduction to design during the industrial age. Back then, products began to be styled in ways that had not been possible before, and industrial designers like Raymond Lowey got immense fanfare for their aesthetic approach to designing previously dull products.
• While visual design clearly has the capacity to refine a product’s aesthetics, its potential to communicate with people goes beyond good looks.
• Through the visual organization of elements, designers can communicate core messages to people that answer key questions: What is this; How do I use it; Why should I care?
• Answering these questions is a crucial component of both utility and usability, especially in interactive products.
• So when designing Web pages, it’s important to keep the initial functional role of visual design in mind. The visual design of Web pages should: Set initial expectations by communicating what kind of information it provides; Provide a way to quickly scan that information in order to locate something of value.

8. Organization, interaction, and presentation are the top-level considerations for any Web site or application design.

• Organization is the way you structure the stuff that makes up an application. Interaction is the way an application behaves to people's actions - its how you make use of the stuff in an app. Presentation is how all that is communicated to people.
• So in this model, it's not hard to see how the presentation layer really needs to become the voice of the interaction design and information architecture of an application. It needs to communicate the possibilities and limitations of software. But visual design also plays another (more visceral) role.
• A deliberate selection of colors, fonts, images, patterns, and more can elicit an emotional reaction that enforces a specific brand message. In other words, it can help give an application an appropriate personality - fun, safe, caring, or whatever fits best.

9. Be a smart node

• In the craft economy of the 1800s, regional markets were filled with individual or family-based craftspeople like blacksmiths or potters. These professions required creativity, were small size (no scale), and did not need a lot of collaboration to get products made.
• In the industrial economy of the 1900s, small craftsmen gave way to large factories and the need for tight command and control grew as scale increased. Lots of coordination was required to develop consistent products within the assembly lines popping up across developed nations. As a result, the need for creativity was limited to fewer people. Most workers had a defined role in the system and needed to be reliable above all else.
• In the economy of the 2000s, creativity is once again a key driver of value as command and control structures can no longer manage the full set of information and decisions required to operate at a global scale. This creates a need for “smart nodes” across the enterprise that can collaboratively lead aspects of the business. These leadership positions are enabled through access to large amounts of data and technology. Creativity is required to make use of this information and set of tools to advance the goals of the organization.
• The importance of creative thinking and “smart nodes” within large organizations plays to the strengths of designers who are adept at recognizing patterns, synthesizing information, and communicating it through visual means.

10. Design provides unique value to strategic decision-making

• These skills define a unique perspective that designers can bring to strategic work
• Pattern Recognition: allows us to identify relationships within information. (the data).
• Story Telling: gives us a way to organize data into something meaningful by focusing on a big idea and supporting messages (the synthesis).
• Visual Hierarchy: gives us a way to tell the story effectively (the means).
• Empathy: allows us to make the story memorable and impactful (the meaning).

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HOW TO: Evaluate Your Social Media Plan

via mashable.com

Great business tips for companies and startups to consider when using Social Media

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Nike Chalkbot

Case study of the Nike Chalkbot campaign. Nike tied up with the Tour de France where users and spectators could submit 40 character messages by SMS, Twitter, Web Banners and the Nike Livestrong website. Each message would be send to the Chalkbot, printed on a section of the course, instantly photographed, tagged with GPS coordinates and then emailed to the person who submitted it.

Overall, a very inspiring campaign and hats off to Nike for coming up with this.

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BP Spills Coffee

A hilarious parody of BP’s ongoing efforts to plug the spill

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Double Dutch

Double Dutch (www.doubledutch.me) is a white label location based iPhone application which provides an easy and affordable way for businesses to create their own location based app – i.e. Their very own white labeled Foursquare or Gowalla.

Companies can leverage on this platform to quickly bring to market custom branded Geolocation applications and leverage on mobile interactions to deepen customer engagement with their products and services.

Here is some of the cool things that businesses can do with the DoubleDutch platform:

- Customize your own world of local venues: restaurants, parks, bars, events, music venues. Decide EXACTLY what you want to include in your city guide.

- Customize the game play associated with how people use your business’s application. Do you want to give stickers and points to people who go to museums on Thursdays? You can do that. How about people that go to the movies three Saturdays in a row? You can do that to. 

- Bring a city guide to market under your brand in under three weeks

Check out this video intro for more information:

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Social Media Playbook

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Eloqua_Social_Media_Playbook_Public.pdf (505 KB)

This is a great social media primer and resource from the guys at Eloqua  (www.eloqua.com)

It contains just about everything you need to know about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Wikipedia, Delicious, Flickr, Google Buzz, Foursquare, Gowalla and blogs (10 platforms in total).

Created as a “how to” guide for Eloqua staff to follow on the social web, it is a nice compact summary fitted snugly into an awesomely designed playbook. And best of all, it’s available for free (no forms to complete, no email address submissions. Totally free.)

Download your copy at http://media.eloqua.com/documents/Eloqua_Social_Media_Playbook_Public.pdf

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Adidas Safety Wear. Because Love is Dangerous

This is a great ad by Adidas for their Adidas Originals Safety Wear Collection. It’s about the guy who runs 'break-up service' in Tokyo and has to deliver break-up messages on behalf of his customers to their love ones because apparently the Japanese are too polite and too busy to do it themselves.

What’s cool about it is that it ties in so nicely with their new product range – As the tagline goes: “Love Is Dangerous. Stay Safe.”

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Do you like parades?

IS Parade is a parade generator which allows you to create a parade of you followers using your Twitter ID (or anyone else’s for that matter).

Alternatively, you can choose a keyword and the parade participants will involve people who tweet using that keyword.

Check it out at http://isparade.jp

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Digital Strategies for Luxury Brands

This is a great presentation from the guys at Publicis. Affluent customers are particularly heavy users of the Internet and it is their number 1 source of information for luxury products.

The presentation illustrates 10 ways luxury brands can engage with their customers online.

Digital Strategies for Luxury Brands

View more presentations from Marci Ikeler.

BMW 3D Projection Mapping

This is an awesome 3D projection mapping installation from BMW in Singapore. It's set across two separate buildings and at an intersection with both projections synced together. The end effect is just breathtaking!

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Selling Men's Fragrance Online

ID/TBWA introduce the newly revamped men's fragrance Kaiak online with a banner you could literally smell.

The agency created custom hardware and attached it to computers at more than 15 LAN houses in Brazil—used by those who don't have their own home computers. The agency created a special banner that appeared on the computers' internet start pages reading, "The best selling men's fragrance in the country just changed. Want to try it? Click this banner. It's scented." Those who click are treated to scented strip that emerges from the special hardware.

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Pacific Coffee Buy-1-Get-1-Free Coupon

Get 1-for-1 at any Pacific Coffee in Hong Kong for the month of June 2010
with the coupon below. Enjoy!

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Why have the background images on my FBML pages shrunk?

[Update: This has been identified as a Facebook bug and has since been fixed. However, there is news that Facebook will be changing it's FBML tab dimensions from 760px to 520px sometime in late July, so you might want to start making these adjustments for any upcoming campaigns that will run past July]

Imagine my horror when I found that the background images I have been using for some of my client’s Facebook pages have shrunk. Some of them have even disappeared completely, leaving a blank canvas page when you click on the tabs.

I originally thought it may have been some problems on the webserver which the images were hosted on, but a quick check on the absolute image paths showed everything was ok.

A quick search on other Facebook pages showed similar problems for some brands. But others looked just fine. A quick search for “FBML” on Twitter provided some explanations - Apparently Facebook has made some changes to FBML and any images that are bigger than 400px would be automatically resized to that size.

A good example is the Fan offer page for Walgreens

The only alternatives that I know of are to either slice up the images on the FBML canvas (so that each individual image is less than 400px) or build a Facebook app. I decided an app was too much trouble and it took about 15 mins (per page) to re-cut the images and layout onto HTML and re-upload the new (sliced up) images onto my webserver and everything was back to normal again

The only problems are the pages I have that uses image maps for multiple links on a page. That will probably take a little more time if you’re not using a whole image to map out your links. If you get line breaks in your image (which usually looks fine on IE but shows on Fire Fox or Chrome), just adding a simple string of code => style="display:block;” ( e.g <img src="images/main.jpg"  border="0" style="display:block;"/>] after all image paths should resolve it.

Someone on Twitter mentioned that this might just be a temporary glitch which would be resolved soon. I personally figured that Facebook implemented this because they felt larger images (>400px) would take a longer time to download which would mean a bad user experience and decided to limit it.

Either ways, this has been a real pain especially since a lot of my FBML static canvas pages are the default page that users land on when they reach my clients’ Facebook page. Not giving any advance notice to us as stakeholders, if this is indeed an official Facebook decision to change it, is just really just really really uncool.

It’s also a classic example of our over-dependence on Facebook as a marketing platform.

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LOST explained using Post Its

If you've never seen the TV series LOST but would like to know what it was about OR if you're like me and have seen it but have no idea what the heck is going on most of the time - This is a great 3 minute video summary using Post Its!

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The Social Media Decision Tree

Social Media is about relationships. As such monitoring the social media space is essential to find out what your customers are talking about and their perceptions of your brand, products and services.

The engagement part of this is to make sure that you address your customers questions, concerns and complains in the right manner. Failure to do so can be disastrous as everything occurs in an open and transparent manner, where bad publicity can spread across multiple social networks like wildfire, destroying brand equity and bring an onslaught of negative product sentiments.

This is especially important if you actively manage a social platform like a Facebook Page, Twitter Account, YouTube Channel, Blog etc. You want to avoid a similar fiasco that happened to Nestle and most recently HTC Singapore on Facebook.

So when you do get feedback, be it positive or negative, when should you respond and how do you do so?

The guys from the Altimeter Group (www.altimetergroup.com) have crafted an awesome decision tree / social media triage which serves as a great reference for any business.  

This is taken from their Social Strategy Webinar “Getting your company ready” - http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/04/14/social-strategy-33-webinar-recording-and-slides-getting-your-company-ready/

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Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Always the inspirational and thought provoking (and sometimes just plain provoking – Ask the guys at Adobe) person, Steve Job’s speech at the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address has been circulating on the web for a long time. I’ve read the transcript multiple times myself.

Just found a video on YouTube of the actual commencement address and it’s even more awesome watching him make the speech.

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Integrating Social Networks with Corporate Websites

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Integrating social-networks with corp sites.ppt (5882 KB)

This is a great presentation by Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group (Follow on Twitter @jowyang) that looks at how corporate websites can be still relevant in a world of social networks.

The presentation talks about the evolution of corporate sites as they seek to integrate elements of social networking within them. There are 8 different levels and great examples are given for each type of integration.

1. No social integration

2. Link away with no strategy

3. Link away but encourage sharing

4. Brand integrated in social channels

5. Aggregate discussion on site

6. Users stay on site with social log-in

7. Social log-in triggers sharing

8. Seamless integration

A great framework for all companies to benchmark themselves against where they are now and where they want to be in terms of having a well integrated online presence.

Social media is here to stay and for many brands and businesses, having a presence and participating in social platforms is a given. The next step is to ensure that their corporate website is well integrated with their Facebook page, Twitter account, Youtube channel and other social platforms. This ensure that their customers get a unified online experience and can easily share information about the company’s products and services along with their own personal opinions and endorsements of these brands to their own social networks.

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Google Pacman

Fancy a game of Pac-Man? Go to www.google.com and click on “Insert Coin” to play!

Definitely the coolest Google Logo yet!

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Kiss You Tube

This is an awesome tip courtesy of @lucianop (twitter.com/lucianop).

To download videos from youtube.com onto your computer, simply add "kiss" an the beginning of url (e.g. instead of ' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjAZ5esOBZw ', make it ' http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=gjAZ5esOBZw ').

The downside is that the only format available is FLV. For an option (FLV and MP4), you can also use www.savevid.com

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Collective Buying - Web 2.0 style

Collective buying is not a new concept – People have been grouping together to make bulk purchases since the dawn of time. Increasing the purchase quantity allows buyers to bargain and negotiate for higher discounts and better prices.

The idea is that as more and more people group together to buy something, the lower it drives the per unit purchase price

The problem was finding enough people within your social circle that wanted to buy the same thing.

With the Internet and the advent of social media, that problem no longer exists. People who don’t know each other can now band together for a common goal: Buying something they want at the lowest possible price, at a discount quantum that they will never ever be able to get individually.

It’s a win-win situation: Customers get great discounts while merchants are guaranteed a minimum purchase quantity

The concept is simple – Showcase an item on a website with an amazing discount (think 50% and upwards) that only comes in force when a minimum number of purchases are made. Put in a countdown timer and the fun begins.

Anyone who comes to the site can make a purchase but they won’t be guaranteed of the offer until the minimum quantum is met before time runs out. If the offer is not activated, the customer’s credit card is simply not charged and another offer is displayed.

Dell started out mid last year with Dell Swarm (www.dellswarm.com) in Singapore where 1 user starts by joining a swarm (for a specific featured product) to enjoy a price lower than Dell.com’s best discounted price. As more and more users join the swarm to buy, the price reduces. The swarm closes after 72 hours or when 15 users have joined (which results in the lowest possible price for the product).

Then came along Groupon (www.groupon.com) where the deals weren’t specific to any brand/product. However, these offers were only specific to users staying in cities in the U.S and Canada.

Then Chinese spawn www.meituan.com follow suit. Suffice to say, the site looks almost exactly the same as Groupon

Now, it seems some enterprising individuals have seen a similar opportunity in Hong Kong and Singapore with similar sites starting up and more coming along:

Voucherwow (www.voucherwow.com) started in Singapore recently

www.deal.com.sg

Voucherous (www.voucherous.com) – A Singapore site coming soon

Gigonzone (www.gigonzone.com) – HK site that seems to be focusing on F&B

www.gobuya.com – HK site coming soon

I’m sure there would be many other new sites coming out soon offering discounts across various verticals. What would be interesting though, would be to see how businesses would leverage on the social aspects of collective consumption and incorporate this within their online campaigns.

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Write The Future

Here’s the new Nike World Cup Ad in full - Write The Future.

Another brilliant campaign by W+K

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Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn't Know

Some pretty cool Facebook Facts that you probably didn’t know about all packed into a nice little infographic. Courtesy of @mashable.

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Standchart SG's new mobile banking app is a breeze to use

Standard Chartered Bank Singapore has just launched a new mobile banking iPhone App called Breeze. A brief tour of the functionalities shows a pretty good user interface and great functionalities.

It even brags about featuring the world’s first iPhone e-Cheque which is basically you issuing a cheque to someone via your phone. At the back-end, someone at Stanchart will take that instruction and issue/mail a physical cheque to that person.

Check out the Breeze microsite and download the iPhone app at:

http://breeze.standardchartered.com

http://breeze.standardchartered.com

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Build your own social graph

Ionz is a cool little site and app that lets you build your own social information graph based on your answers to some basic questions. You can then download it as a desktop wallpaper.

Here’s mine:

Get yours at:

http://www.ionz.com.br/index.html (Click on the UK flag on the top right to toggle the language)

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Social Strategy - Getting your company ready

This is a great presentation done by the guys at the Altimeter Group about what's required for companies to incorporate social media as part of their overall business strategy.

It details a step by step methodology and provides an array of helpful insights and tools. Overall, its a great road-map for client side marketers and stakeholders to refer to when laying the foundation for building their brand and business with social media

Social strategy getting_company_ready_apr14_final

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

HTC Singapore Facebook Page #EPICFAIL

HTC Singapore’s Facebook Fan page has been drawing some major flak lately. Business tend to forget the social media is not just a means of marketing their wares but also a personal and direct channel to engage their customers.

HTC has been neglecting questions from fans about issues and problems with their phone, creating an impression that the brand was ignoring it’s fan base while still posting updates on its latest launches and promotions. Thankfully, they didn’t make the same mistakes that Nestle did during the whole Greenpeace saga with Kit Kat by deleting negative comments and feedback.

The funniest thing happened on Monday when they posted a message saying that they would no longer be supporting the page (i.e. answering questions, customer service etc) but still asking fans to look out for updates and promotions. And then they went to disable the update bar,  disallowing fans to post things on the fan page wall.

As you can see from the image below, this wasn’t exactly a smart move. It might appear that HTC outsourced the management of this page to some social marketing agency to handle and perhaps their contract was up or they just didn’t have the resources to handle the large influx of comments and questions.

In any case, the lesson here is that any company looking to go into social media must be prepared to see it through. Doing it for the sake of just that will lead to more bad than good.

The thing with social media as compared to other digital campaigns is that it requires a huge amount of resource to manage and maintain and your customers expect to be able to communicate directly with your brand and get answers. You can’t just decide that you want to have a fan page so that you can push out marketing messages and promotions just like an eDM. It doesn’t work that way because the analogy is that now, the customer has a way to reply to you on a very public forum. And being able to handle these engagements in the appropriate manner is what helps drive brand advocacy and triggers the positive outcomes that would ultimately help you acheive your actual business objectives.

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SPG's Passport to Free Weekends Contest

Starwood has always been active on social media, with Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) being the first hotel loyalty program to establish a suite of Twitter, Facebook and iPhone applications online

Obviously, SPG sees social media as a key platform for further engaging an influential and rapidly growing segment of its members who are highly active social media participants. Online bookings are an increasingly important channel to the hospitality industry and with the number of players in the market, brand advocacy and customer service becomes an important differentiator. With these social media platforms, SPG hopes to be able to engage their customers and drive customer loyalty and increased bookings. At the same time, also use the channel to deliver the SPG experience to new customers.

 

SPG will be launching a rather interesting social media campaign on May 11.

For a period of 10 days (starting May 11), SPG will share clues (text and pictures) about the location of a specific Starwood hotel or resort on Twitter and  their Facebook page. The first 10 participants to arrive at the hotel and provide the front desk at the correct hotel with the phrase “I’m here for my Free Weekends Passport photo” will win 2 free weekend night that can be redeemed at any Starwood hotel.

They will need to take a photo with the front desk (which will probably be shared on Facebook & Twitter) when claiming the prize.

This is a perfect way to reinforce their current Free Weekends promotion (spg.com/freeweekends) where customers get to earn a free weekend night for every 3 hotel stays they make.

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Social Media ROI: Socialnomics

Here’s a great video that showcases examples of social media campaigns that have delivered on ROI.

I believe that social media can help drive business results and show ROI, whether directly or sometimes, indirectly. The most important point is that you have to be clear from the onset about your objectives and not just plainly rush into it and see what comes along.

What are YOUR campaign objectives? Here are a list of possible campaign objectives:

• Build product and brand awareness
• Strengthen relationships with clients, prospects, and influencers
• Better understand your buyers
• Improve customer service
• Identify new product ideas
• Increase web site traffic
• Improve search engine rankings
• Drive traffic to your events
• Generate leads
• Generate sales

As with any other digital campaigns, there are an array of tools you can use to measure results. Social Media is not just a passing fad. Your customers are talking about you and your brand regardless of whether you like it or not. The question is no longer "Should we be on Facebook or Twitter?" but rather "How should we leverage on social media to drive sustainable business results?"

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Philips vs The Sun

Philips did this social media campaign a while back called Philips Vs Anything which I thought was really cool.

The idea was that people could challenge Philips to beat something else using their products via twitter.

The winner would get one of Philips’famous 21:9 Cinema Screens.

In this video example Philips Vs The Sun, the guys try to fool a Rooster to think that it’s morning using a Wake-Up Light – It’s hilarious.

Campaign website: http://philipsvs.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/philips_vs

This is a great way to leverage on the viral power of social networks and interact with the social community by giving them something really interesting, fun and innovative to be part of and shout about.

You would think something this cool would generate a lot of buzz – It did in the marketing community. However, it only generate a small number of tweets per day and there weren’t many mentions of the brand on Twitter; showing that it wasn’t as well received by mainstream consumers.  A key lesson here in social media - Just because some people like content doesn’t guarantee that it will go viral.

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Updates

Haven't been posting for a while....Maintaining a blog just takes too much time and commitment. I will be posting from time to time. But for real time updates, you can flow me on Twitter @intersphere