Social media and marketing have become synonymous over the years. At the same time, social media is placing the customer back in customer service. Each movement represents important and overdue (r)evolutions within business, but this is just the beginning. With every step toward progress we make in social media, we uncover what’s necessary to make real headway in the progress of progress.
The future of business is social and as such, every aspect of business affected by outside activity will require a social extension. Businesses must shift from reacting to the outside in, bottom up groundswell to also leading a top down, inside out program to earn relevance, community, and authority. In order to do so, the social business will take a human touch…and internal transformation.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Best of 2010: The Future of Business is Social
Who Gives A Tweet: MIT Researchers Build A “Hot Or Not” For Twitter
Because everything eventually becomes an academic field (I’m still waiting for “Internet” to become a major), researchers from MIT, University of Southampton and Georgia Institute of Technology have teamed up to build Who Gives A Tweet, a Twitter app that allows users to anonymously rate their friends’ and strangers’ tweets in order gain more insight into status update perception. Kind of like Hot Or Not, but for tweets.
Monday, December 27, 2010
2011 will be the year Android explodes - Google 24/7 - Fortune Tech
Ever-improving networks and a big hardware announcement that will send handset prices plummeting both point to smartphone growth in 2011 that could totally eclipse anything we've seen before.
Smartphones have been growing at an unbelievable clip over the past year but they still account for only around a third of all phones in the US and an even smaller percentage internationally. In developing countries, the price of smartphones, aside from some 'quasi-smart' Nokias (NOK) are out of reach for all but the elite. India and China each have billion plus populations and growing middle classes, but neither country is even at a 10% market penetration of smartphones.
Globally, market intelligence firm IDC counted 269.6 million smartphones sold this year, compared to the 173.5 million units shipped in 2009.
In 2011, we might see half a billion phones sold worldwide. Smartphones will likely blow by traditional computers next year as the way most of the world gains access to the Internet.
Two major factors will drive this, in tandem: Wireless infrastructure is getting better every day, and hardware is getting cheaper. Cheaper hardware will eliminate the need for subsidies and therefore will improve competition between carriers, and spur them to improve their networks. Google (GOOG) Android head Andy Rubin calls this a 'perfect storm' for smartphone adoption.
Volkside | Introducing Wirify: The web as wireframes
Wirify is a bookmarklet that lets you turn any web page into a wireframe in one click. It’s lightweight and works in many modern browsers. To use Wirify drag the link below to your Bookmarks toolbar (or right-click > Add to Favorites in IE):
Then go to your favourite web page and click “Wirify by Volkside” in your bookmarks toolbar -- it’s as simple as that!
The following wireframes have been created using Wirify today and besides basic cropping and resizing they are completely unedited:
Source: The New York Times
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
Audi's interactive web experience that you cannot play... | SkiddMark
Based on the legendary Audi Ski Jump advert of 1987, repeated again with the Audi A6 in 2005, Audi’s creative agency have now reinterpreted the idea in a contemporary style on the 30th anniversary of the quattro® technology. It’s now an interactive web experience.
In doing so Audi have created the first banner in the world with motion control. Or in other words: “Vorsprung durch Technik” (Advance through Technology) has been applied to an advertising creative.
Cue more whooping and hollering, plus plenty of thigh-slapping of der lederhosen…
'Now take the laptop in your hands. To control the car intuitively just tilt the laptop carefully forwards and backwards. Tilt forwards = accelerate. Tilt backwards = brake. Give it a try.' Hmm, let's hope Audi's forthcoming driver aids receive a little more ergonomic thought before they're released...
So, off I trotted to try this out for myself only to discover a few ‘conditions of use’ that despite qualifying as a “technology aficionado, early adopter, and opinion leader”, I couldn’t, er… use.
You see, to interact with Audi’s new state-of-the-art banner ad you need to have in your possession a MacBook fitted with Apple’s Sudden Motion Sensor and installed with Firefox 3.6, if not then the ad is about as interactive as a dead fish.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
360 degree video with augmented reality on top - Immersive Media
a little convoluted but still very impressive..
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
5 Predictions for Online Data In 2011
Summary
In the midst of all the data-driven innovation we are seeing, this will be also the year of separating the non-trivial from the trivial.
It’s one thing to acquire terabytes of data, and it’s quite another to cleanse, disambiguate and mobilize that data in service of real-time insights into markets young and old.
The intellectual and experiential barrier to entry in social media, I think it’s fair to argue, is relatively low. It’s therefore harder to distinguish oneself, but certainly easy to get started. That’s been the beauty of the experiment all along.
Until now, data science and data marketing have been relegated to the realm of a self-selecting and highly motivated few, but as new tools democratize access, we’ll start to see a different dynamic.
But with great power comes… well, the Mark Twain quote I used last time still applies: “There are three kinds of lies — lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Data can create new insights and open new opportunities, but it can also be twisted to serve an agenda or simply tell us what we want to hear.
It’s all in there, though — there in the data somewhere, if you know what you’re doing and how to do it well. Data knows everything we know, everything we don’t know, and, as it turns out, even a few things we don’t know we don’t know.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Mint Launches Online Finance Game for Middle School Classrooms | Fast Company
Intuit-owned Mint.com, the service that made budgeting a fun task, has partnered with Scholastic to offer a free, online personal-finance program to middle-school students, teachers, and parents. The program aims to help build money management skills at a young age. It will feature colorful classroom lesson plans and materials, as well as an interactive game, that should translate to younger audiences.
The materials are expected to be available for teachers beginning today, and will have a nationwide distribution to 30,000 classroom and 100,000 students by early next year.
Apple Takes Major Step With “iAd Producer,” But Will It Solve Cost And Creative Issues? | Mobile Marketing Watch
Apple made a significant announcement today in relation to iAds with the introduction of “iAd Producer,” a Mac App that gives anyone the opportunity to create rich media mobile advertisements for iOS devices.
Advertising History Is Made — Web Ads Overtook Newspaper Ads in 2010
Online advertising is up 13.9 percent year over year, according to eMarketer’s data, and it’s set to show annual double-digit growth through 2014, when the market is expected to reach a value of $40.5 billion. Projections for the newspaper industry, which are presented through the end of next year, aren’t as favorable. After hitting a total of $49.4 billion in 2005 – $47.4 billion for newspaper print ads and $2 billion for newspaper online ads – the total is forecast to fall from this year’s $25.7 billion to $24.6 billion, with only $21.4 billion coming from print ads in the newspapers.
Monday, December 20, 2010
The Best HTML5 Game Yet: A Threat To Flash? | ConceivablyTech
HTML5 game: Pirates Love Daisies
The game “Pirates Love Daisies” was developed by Grant Skinner for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team. Skinner usually develops Flash applications and is, in fact, among the most prominent Flash developers on the planet. This time, however, Microsoft asked him to work with HTML5 and only HTML5. The result is a tower defense strategy game that is buggy at advanced levels, according to my 9-year old tower defense expert at home, but that is just as captivating as Flash based tower defense games. The controls are similar and the graphics, while always a matter of taste, appeared to be slightly more sophisticated in their effects than your average tower defense game.
Friday, December 17, 2010
You have to watch this: Introducing Word Lens
Reminds me of the "babel fish" from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy..
Fantastic idea.. I'm guessing this would b far more useful for non-latin character languages.
Euro RSCG Prosumer Reports
Propelling businesses and brands to the future first is the focal point of our work at Euro RSCG Worldwide – and the promise we make to our clients. To that end, we have made Prosumers an ongoing focus over the past decade.Who are Prosumers? They are the men and women who are influencing markets all over the globe. Empowered by new technologies and improved access to information, Prosumers are highly knowledgeable and demanding consumers. What they are doing today, mainstream consumers are likely to be doing six to eighteen months from now.
Here is our full compendium of Prosumer Reports, with insights and information on a range of categories and topics, from food through to gender.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Why TIME’s 2010 Person Of The Year Means Nothing In 2010 | Gizmodo Australia
How was this Zuckerberg’s year? It wasn’t. For a roundup of entities that actually made 2010 the strange contortion of good and awful it was, you can look, ironically, at TIME’s “Runners Up” list: The Tea Party. Hamid Karzai. Julian Assange. The Chilean Miners.
Well, maybe not so much the Chilean Miners.
But to think that Assange – a man whose actions in less than one year have shocked governments around the world, sent the US State Department scrambling with its face beet-red, put INTERPOL on a controversial manhunt, and triggered internationally coordinated hacker retribution – was overlooked, is asinine. Assange’s determination to make information available at any cost is unprecedented in the history of information – and 2010 was the year his cause ignited, whether you consider him villainous or virtuous.
But we don’t need TIME to tell us any of that. Hell, you don’t need me to tell you any of that. Like the cables he leaked, Assange’s story was everywhere, spread online through a diversity of mediums, un-suppressible and undeniable despite the attempts of world governments.
You blogged about it. You GChatted about it. You texted about it. You commented about it here. And, we now know, you tweeted the hell out of it.
Statistical troves like Twitter’s 2010 Year In Review show (and validate) more than TIME can ever hope to in 2010. We don’t need a magazine to tell us what we care about. We know what we care about – because we’ve make it important, not an editorial board.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Harnessing Ignorance to Spark Creativity | Fast Company
Chapter 13 of Weird Ideas That Work offers some guidelines for harnessing innovation:
- During the early stages of a project, don't study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.
- If you know a lot about a problem, and how it has been solved in the past, ask people who are ignorant it to study it and help solve it. Young people, including children, can be especially valuable for this task.
- Ask new hires (especially those fresh out of school) to solve problems or do tasks that you "know" the answer to or you can't resolve. Get out of the way for a while to see if they generate some good ideas.
- Find analogous problems in different industries, and study how they are solved.
- Find people working on analogous issues in different companies, fields, regions, fields, and industries, and ask them how they would solve the problem or do the job.
- If people who have the right skills keep failing to solve some problem, try assigning some people with the wrong skills to solve it,
- If you are a novice, seek experts to help you, but don't assume they are right especially if they tell you they are right.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010
Scripting News: WikiLeaks on the run
See the problem isn't that WikiLeaks is lying, the problem is that they're telling the truth. This is not business as usual.
While the politicians and reporters are getting a fumbling on-the-job education of the architecture of the Internet (an NPR reporter said, hesitatingly, that it appears as if the server is now in Switzerland), the next question is where does the running stop? When does the situation reach equilibrium? What's the best outcome for the people of the planet?
It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks wants to publish the next archive, they can get their best practice from eztv.it, and have 20 people scattered around the globe at the ends of various big pipes ready to seed it. Once the distribution is underway the only way to shut it down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.
That must be what they're discussing behind the scenes in government. And don't miss that this is equally threatening to media. They won't be able to engage in spin rooms and situation rooms, appearances and such -- when we can see the real communiques, that kind of mush won't do.
Smartphones and Tablets Will Take Over in 2011, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com
The PC-centric era is over,” the IDC report says. Within 18 months, it forecasts, non-PC devices capable of running software applications will outsell PCs. In tablets, IDC adds, Apple’s iPad will remain the leader, but lower-cost tablets will begin making inroads, especially as demand for tablets really takes off in emerging markets.
Facebook Adds Email Importing To Page Invites
There are two options for importing contacts, and both sound similar at first:
- Import your email contacts: List them all in a file, upload to Facebook, and they’ll receive suggestions of your page.
- Provide Facebook with your username and password for any email software or site that you use, and then everyone in the address book will see your page suggestion.
You can access the contact importer within the page manager tool. Click on the marketing tab, and then check out the part labeled “tell your fans.”
Like you see in the screen shot below, files for uploading need to be in Outlook, Constant Contact or .CSV. Notice how Facebook has a placeholder for the addition of more file formats, conveniently called “etc.” for now. However you choose to upload, you’ll see a progress bar until the job completes.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Yaşasın 30.000!
Facebook’ta en çok beğenilen Türk bankası Akbank sizlerle büyümeye devam ediyor. 30.000’i aşan takipçi sayımızı kutlamak için sizlere 50 TL değerinde idefix hediye çeki armağan ediyoruz!
Alışveriş sepetinizi onayladıktan sonra ödeme ekranına aşağıdaki kodlardan birini girerek hediye çekinizi kullanabilirsiniz. Acele edin, her kod yalnızca bir defa kullanılabiliyor!
Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four
More about this programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wgq0l
Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.
2011 Trends: Content Marketing Is Critical - eMarketer
Creating effective, breakthrough advertising has always been a challenge for marketers, as well as for the agencies charged with the task. But the classic interruption-disruption model of advertising is moribund. Marketers should ask themselves five questions about the magnetic content they are seeking to create to determine whether it will be truly attractive to their audience:
- Is the content unique?
- Is the content useful?
- Is the content well executed?
- Is the content fun?
- Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears (e.g., social, mobile, video)?
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
8 Predictions for IT in 2015 From Gartner
The predictions are as follows:
- By 2015, a G20 nation's critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage.
- By 2015, new revenue generated each year by IT will determine the annual compensation of most new Global 2000 CIOs.
- By 2015, information-smart businesses will increase recognized IT spending per head by 60%.
- By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25% of labor hours associated with IT services.
- By 2015, 20% of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers.
- By 2014, 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.
- By 2013, 80% of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.
- By 2015, 10% of your online "friends" will be nonhuman.
Persuasion Triggers in Web Design - Smashing Magazine
Cognitive biases like these play a significant role in the way we make decisions so it’s not surprising that people are now examining these biases to see how to exploit them in the design of web sites. I’m going to use the term ‘persuasion architects’ to describe designers who knowingly use these techniques to influence the behaviour of users. (Many skilled designers already use some of these psychological techniques intuitively — but they wouldn’t be able to articulate why they have made a particular design choice. The difference between these designers and persuasion architects is that persuasion architects use these techniques intentionally).
There are 7 main weapons of influence in the persuasion architect’s arsenal:
How do persuasion architects apply these principles to influence our behaviour on the web?