Integrating the Online and Offline Communities
Community
Dell opens a pop-up gallery in New York
A fortnight ago we were talking in our Friday brainstorm about how Sony’s ambition should be to become an enabler to make.believe projects. They should open up their products and services to the creative community for them to play and create – in line with the collaborative consumption trend they could allow their products to be rented by a creative community within a locale. Dell are streets ahead and have opened up a pop up gallery on the lower east side for New York artists to showcase their ideas and be able to use Dell products to create new work. If they successfully build a community then perhaps this will become a more permanent space.
Join Whole Foods for a Twitter Wine Tasting
Whole Foods are using their Twitter feed to bring people together for a shared wine tasting event. Friends and family can take part at home and follow the tasting TweetChat on the 17th November to share their experiences. This is a great idea for activating an online social community to share in a physical world experience and a great way to drive to purchase.
Zuckerberg Talks about Steve Jobs, IPOs and Google’s “Little Version of Facebook”
An interesting article documenting an interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Highlights include how he considers Facebook in relation to Google, Apple and Amazon. Despite the interviewer pushing the idea of a “flat out war” between the companies, Zuckerberg says that whilst there is some competition, he doesn’t think one company will “win all the stuff” – Facebook is a sharing platform for these companies products.
Google+ Pages and Google+ for Business
Earlier this week Google+ launched their brand pages which appear similar to Facebook. However, there are some significant differences – real face-to-face conversations with “hangouts”, consumers being able to recommend brands in Google searches and ad’s using the +1 button. Whilst it’s only been a few days, some big brands who focus highly on social media, such as Burberry, Pepsi and Cadburys, have already set up quite impressive pages.
New services
A new bank for 18-30 year olds
OCBC bank in Singapore have launched a new brand specifically for the youth audience. Frank by OCBC have tailored their services and products to this young age group with bank cards that can be customised with personal colours and images, bank accounts that have a management system that lets customers separate savings from their expenses and branches that resemble music stores. Engaging the next generation with the importance of savings and building trust in the financial institutions will be a key objective for banks in Europe – I’m not sure branches that resemble music stores is the answer though.
Mobile
Even QR codes are undergoing a creative transformation this week, with creative agency JESS3 transforming the bland black pixels into a work of art. Whilst these do look good on their own, the bigger benefit to brands is being able to fit QR codes into their content and advertising without it being such an eyesore.
B2B marketing trends
Groupon, LinkedIn & The Blurring of B2C and B2B Marketing
Traditionally B2C marketing has always produced higher website traffic than B2B but in recent years this has equalled out. Business buyers are spending more time researching vendors prior to contacting them, mirroring consumer behaviour and B2B companies are utilising their online channels to a better extend to drive traffic to website. Interestingly this writer suggests that more businesses like Groupon, LinkedIn and Facebook cater to the individual as well as businesses. This overlap allows these sites to take a hybrid approach offering free services for consumers, but additional paid-for services for businesses. As the consumer base increases, there are increasing opportunities for up-sell if the overlap between consumers and businesses is high. Will digital communities lead to a blur in B2B and B2C communities?
Research
The brands that survive will be the brands that make life better
Making life better doesn’t mean saving humanity, it means making life better for the individual – does a brand make you fitter, wiser, smarter, closer? That’s what consumers are interested in according to research carried out across 50,000 consumers. The survey found that consumers think only 20% of brands they interact with have a positive impact on their lives, and 70% could disappear without them even noticing.
Garner identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012
It is essential we keep up to date with the latest technologies as these often pave the way for future trends. This study found that that Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012 were:
- Media tablets
- Mobile-centric applications and interfaces
- Contextual and social user experience
- Internet of things
- App stores and marketplaces
- Next-generation analytics
- Big data
- In-memory computing
- Extreme low-energy servers
- Cloud Computing
Juiced 