We could have invented new acronyms and neologisms to “shine” during trendy networking parties.

We could have followed the example of our friends (and competitors) with another post about the latest trends with efficient “paraphrasing” to make us sound like we’re original.

We could have forced ourselves to recycle 12 (to match perfectly with the year ahead of us) of the trends that seem to be reappearing every year for the past 5 years.

We could have, as digital experts, started observing Twitter birds fly or analyzing the deep meaning of lolcats…We preferred concentrating on what we think is getting big and actually sums up all the trends of the year: the increasing omnipresence of the digital world in communications.

Digital point of sale display is everywhere, from QR codes to tablets (in the U.S 6% of the iPads that are sold are used for point of sale animation), without forgetting social functionalities.

Urban displays are gradually getting digital and communicating.

Televisions have become “Smart” thanks to widgets and online access to videos…Web collective consumption is finally becoming a reality.

Mobile internet is (finally) in the top 3 media consumption modes in France.

Stores are getting social with Foursquare or Facebook and some are even putting iPads on their shopping trolleys.

More and more consumers are watching television with a laptop, tablet or smartphone nearby…”Second-screen marketing” has become a must. Even traditional postcards and magazines can now have LCD screens or RFID microchips…and our annual newsletters would not be enough to list all the similar examples of that evolution.

In short, let’s stop with the online/offline compartmentalization, be done with these occasional web campaigns and think long-term/real time, get your digital departments out of their dusty “geek cave” and blend them in your “traditional” marcom teams…Digital is settling everywhere it can, all the time. It’s not a trend…it’s a fact that you can no longer ignore!

Translated from the French post written by Jeremy Coxet published on vanksen.fr: http://www.vanksen.fr/blog/la-tendance-actuelle/

This campaign is part of a global social strategy. PlayStation has put a lot of energy in social media in France for the past two years with the objective of offering what any fan expects from a brand on Facebook : live news, special offers and important interaction. Once again, PlayStation stands out with an exceptional contest.

The PS Vita is Sony’s latest mobile game console. A true high tech object with its OLED touch screen, its two joysticks, two cameras and incredible power for excellent graphic design. It was introduced in France publicly for the first time during the Paris Games Week in the middle of October. The numerous queues at the stand proved that the people were eager to try it out, the gamers in particular.

Giving it as a gift to a fan on Facebook before its release is an unusual approach that will be highly noticed!

Give it a go, you never know!

PlayStation contest :

Translated from the French post written by Julien Bourey

Inspired by the night and the city life, Remy Martin has realized an immersive experience that makes the internet user feel as if he was in a real night club. Dance floor, VIP lounge, bartender and of course, the bouncer waiting for you at the door…

There is only one way to get in the club: you have to know the password! Without the latter, there’s no way the bouncer will let you in…and you might be refused entry if he’s not in the mood to let you in.

The operation is relayed on the website urbanlights.remy.com and on the fanpage, and reveals all the secrets of the Urban Lights limited edition. To back the launch of the new Urban Lights bottle, Rémy Martin offers internet users the possibility to win a trip to Paris for 2!

The campaign was launched on October 1st, 2011 and has already been rewarded by a “French Design Index Award”!

But the most awkward moment is when the girl has the guts to go and is stopped by her boyfriend (a bit embarrassing for the poor guy, or perhaps was he trying to protect her?)
And for the few who manage to get there, it’s lights camera action with a bottle of Carlsberg and all the bikers laughing and clapping!
“That calls for a Carlsberg”: the message is simple and brought up successfully with a nice little joke. This reminds me of another funny beer brand experience that turned out to be a great success:Heineken’s sneaky trick on the night of the UEFA Champions League game Real Madrid vs AC Milan , a must-see for football fanatics.

]]> http://www.vanksen.com/blog/going-to-the-pictures-carlsberg-fills-the-room-with-freaky-bikers/feed/ 0 http://www.vanksen.com/blog/going-to-the-pictures-carlsberg-fills-the-room-with-freaky-bikers/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MarketingViral-BuzzMarketing-EN/~3/F3JHReTnsCQ/ http://www.vanksen.com/blog/foursquare-pages-to-bring-mobility-to-brands/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:11:45 +0000 cbrygier http://www.vanksen.com/?p=7664 ]]> Foursquare has just announced the possibility to create a Foursquare page for brands. This geolocation service already has 10 million members.
The objective is to compete with Facebook and Twitter allowing users to track the check-in of their favorite brands.
So far, Foursquare offered little flexibility for mass communication and was confined to promotions through “Specials” or offers to the “Mayors” of their outlets.
These brand pages were manually generated by Foursquare teams before being managed by advertisers. However this feature was only used by a few major American brands.

The Foursquare page: a Twitter/ Facebook hybrid:
Just like social networking and micro-blogging platform, Foursquare users can now “follow” a brand that they like and be alerted of its movement and its “tips” (comments left by a visitor to recommend an activity or a dish to taste at the venue). Like Facebook, the brand activity fits into the Foursquare feed of the user who can leave comments after their friend’s check in.

Creation of brand value:
Enough with all the offers and coupons that generate little value for the brand! Geolocation has long been used as a tool to attract opportunistic customers. Theses brand offers do not generate loyalty (“Great! A free soft drink for the Mayor of a Japanese restaurant …”) and do not create excitement for the users. Now, the brand can create a cultural universe and built credibility. MTV may check into trendy concerts, the Michelin guide in the best restaurants, a travel agency on the most beautiful beaches in the world…

Case studies: Zagat and MTV
MTV (260 000 followers) indicates the location of the next concert or the shooting of cult shows like Jersey Shore. Thus, MTV can connect the online experience to offline life by allowing fans to dance in the same nightclubs than Snookie, or visit the campus where “The Situation” got his education…

The Zagat dining guide (187 000 followers) uses its aura of world-class food critique to indicate the best restaurants around you. Here, the typical offline experience to taste the swordfish in a small isolated restaurant of the Massachussets is validated directly online the moment a consumer checks in at the venue. Foursquare will then indicate to the user and his friends “You’ve done Zagat’s tip”.

Geolocation is rapidly developing with the rise of smartphones, the brands are well advised to claim their venues quickly on Foursquare. Companies should also consider geolocation guidelines to harmonize the digital experience in the point of sale and ensure consistency with the actions of social media. If you want to know the favorite places of Vanksen and join us at conferences, follow us on http://foursquare.com/vanksen !

This is a sample of Potterfiction. Like thousands of fans all around the world, I’m inventing alternative story to the so famous books. I’m creating my own story. And since last Thursday, there is a website for those stories.

Have no idea what I’m talking about? Let’s go back a few weeks ago.

On the 31^st of May, a new Youtube channel was created, named not so mysteriously JKRowlingAnnounces. On it, a timer. A few days before the release of the last chapter of Harry Potter’s movies, the author was about to make an announcement. The question was: about what? A new book? A new saga? Finally, the answer is: a new website, Pottermore.

But Pottermore isn’t just another website. It’s totally dedicated to a community. Indeed, it’s a clever mix “Facebook meets Wikipedia”. Facebook, because you’ll be able to create your own profile and have a social network of pottermaniacs. Wikipedia, because you’ll be able to read all Potter’s book with the new eBooks, and add your own Potterfiction. For instance, you could imagine what happened at the end of the book number 7. Or you could focus on a secondary character and develop his or her story. But it’s not the only interest. JK Rowling will oftenly add some totally new chapters to the books. Now just imagine being able to read the books, you discover a totally new chapter, and you can read dozens of book written by others. It’s a brand new way of reading. It’s a new experience.

However, some are hinting that this is purely not to kill the golden goose. After selling 400 millions of books, using eBooks will bring new readers, the digital natives.

So this might be more than just marketing.

Firstly, JK Rowling wants to target a new public, a new generation. Starting in 1997, Harry Potter will soon appear for the last time in theater. They have to find a way to attract those new readers.

But the most important is that they understand that Harry Potter isn’t just an average saga, Harry Potter will survive the books and the movies. Like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, fans are numerous. Giving them the opportunity to subscribe to a one and only site is the perfect way to follow them.

Now just wait until the 1^st October for the launching of Pottermore. For the moment, you can still give your mail address and hope to be part of the few lucky guys who will be able to discover the site at the end of July.

To prevent scammers from gaining any visibility thanks to consumer complaints, Google decided to penalize websites receiving too much negative content. Of course integrating automatic sentimenting to the algorithm had its downfall; all controversial or political content was bound to be penalized. To counter this effect, Google decided to blacklist a limited number of e-commerce websites that receive an unusual amount of flak from consumers.

Last month the Mountain View firm announced another feature and technological advancement: “reading level analysis”. Thanks to asynchronous training done with University level literature professors, Google’s algorithms can now detect a website’s “reading level” and divide it up in three categories: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced.

What should strike the industry specialists is the use of automated text analysis (complexity and sentimenting) by the Internet giant that silently guides many strategic decisions in terms of e-reputation (monitoring, SEO, social media presence…). This technological power could be used for other means than feeding quality results to a search engine, for example, it could be used to enter the web and social media monitoring market with its own solution, or it could supply a robust API to monitoring platforms. We can speculate both ways.

Why Google could decide to partner up with one, or many social media monitoring platforms while staying out themselves from the e-reputation market:

• Their core business is still search and information organization. It always comes back to selling more and better AdWords (95% of revenue). For this reason the company might not want to enter a market that won’t generate revenue for its profitable AdWords division.
• Google has historically opened up APIs and good quality code to its user base, such as the Google Prediction API that could be used to analyze the sentiment or language of conversations. The most notable example in the sector is the Ad Planner API that can now be used by monitoring solutions to deliver traffic estimates alongside the traditional results they display (mention, sentiment, influence…)
• This “openness” seems to indicate a commercial disinterest in internalizing and creating a product for conversation analysis.
• The technology used to sentiment the pages the Google bot crawls is out-sourced to a partner company.

Here’s a quick (and ugly) mock-up of what Google could add right away to its Google Alerts

Why Google could decide to launch its own social media monitoring platform:

• Historically, Mountain View’s firm launches products on its own. The company rarely participates in joint-ventures.
• Google is guided by technological innovations and looking for new ways to generate revenue (the Google Prediction API is now paying) A social media monitoring tool dedicated to e-reputation would complete quite nicely the Google Analytics, Alerts and AdPlanner tools.
• The e-reputation market is growing fast and will be valued around $3.1 billion in 2013… to keep the market capitalization growing maybe they might try and seize the opportunity.

Google should define its positioning more clearly in 2011. Until then, we will be watching closely.

Sources :

• Kelseygroup
• Google’s blog
• New York Times

Quora is the newest kid on the social media block. In this article we discuss its question based social interface as well as its benefits to both brands and professionals.

• Talk of the town

Bloggers, Twitteratis and influencers alike have been set ablaze of late by Silicon Valley’s latest darling: Quora. The brainchild of former Facebook employees Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, this new social service has been hyped and touted as the next big thing ever since its January 2010 launch. Recently, it has gained a lot of clout – traffic doubled the first week of January according to Techcrunch – and enjoyed raving reviews from the likes of Mg Siegler or Robert Scoble. But what exactly is Quora ?

• The 90% theory

Quora is based on an insight that may shock those of you who already feel saturated by too much online information: roughly 90% of what people know is locked up inside their heads. Practical experience, technical know-how, words of advice, crucial wisdom and all sorts of wasted knowledge that never make it online.

Why? Because of a lack of pretext. Today’s most innovative blurbing interfaces such as Facebook or Twitter, or even Google request an intent and ask that you come prepared to their desks with queries, memes and purposes (a written article, a research string,…)

So what does it take to unleash the power of such untapped content? Quora’s answer is fairly simple: get people to reply to questions!

That’s what Quora’s founders coin as inverse or reverse-blogging. On Quora, you can easily find a context for expressing yourself: an unanswered question. What’s more you can easily find the audience to coax you into writing your best: people who have opted in on following that specific question.

So, in a nutshell, Quora is a very effective platform to search, post or reply to people’s questions and it’s also a very well presented database of answers. Nihil novi sub sole, some might say, that’s already what competitors such as Yahoo Answers, Aardvark or countless forums do on a daily basis. Fair enough, but what skeptics overlook is the singular mambo of Quora, which has spiked up its offering with “a little bit of” everything digitally successful from Google to Twitter.

• The mambo of Quora

An uncanny mix of everything socially and digitally successful in the past decades, Quora’s millennial dexterity at mish-mashing may be one of the chief reasons behind its surprisingly fast adoption and viral success.

A little bit of Google is what I see

Quora’s core is a real time search engine that acts just like Google’s search box. Fast and semantically efficient, it displays previews of search results and is the unique gateway to both asking questions and browsing through memes. Think of it as your portal to whatever is your interest or as a quick-jump to directly inputting your questions. It’s fast sleek and effective just like Google’s (or not at all like Facebook’s).

A little bit of Facebook is all you need

Quora’s key timeline functionality is a nice take on Facebook’s feeds. On quora, you can easily browse through the ritual social functions (friends and notifications) while perusing a real time feed of questions. You also get this special feature that allows you to witness the forming of draft questions in real time before they are posted by their users.

And a little bit of Twitter by your side

The follow function is what makes the salt of Quora’s social interations. Molded against Twitter’s notorious key feature, Quora’s shiny little button will not only get you updates about followed users but allow you to follow just about anything from a meme to a question, user or specific answer. (see also Object Based Social Graph under our a little bit of Slideshare). Another key feature, Twitterati will be familiar with is the asking habit. While Twitter accounts are littered with help requests such as “Looking for Service X, Y, Z”, Quora offers you not only to still benefit from the same hand-picked audience – i.e. you imported twitter friends- but at the same time to open your questioning to a much broader community giving much deepness to the rescue-tweet game.

According to its founders “people say they feel smarter after they use Quora.” Today the service is based on the same kind of user-powered moderation engine that made the success of Wikipedia but without any of the bitter fights over registering entries. It seems that the format, building the best common answer to a question, elicits virtuous participations and takes out the hassled of chest-drumming and ego-blogging.

A little bit of Slideshare in your life

As we detailed above about the follow function , Quora is based on Object Social Graphs, e.g. the capacity to socially share content, pretty much like  on services such as Slideshare. However, what makes it quite different is its admission of serendipity under a proposition dubbed pivot browsing :  on Quora shortcuts are plentiful and you can easily move from one subject to another as if jumping from one tree branch to another.

And a little bit of a Small World

This will have the supercilious wince but a great part of the –initial- attraction of Quora is based on its Silicon Valley insider aura. At launch, the service made good use of its beta invite system and made sure (by seeding accounts to the right people) that you could be dabbling about your latest technology infatuation with the most prominent stars of the digital world: XXX. Much like twitter in its heyday, Quora is an insider medium and that has everyone eager to jump-in – you can ask us for invites here: planning@vanksen.com.

• Why so successful so fast?

Maybe one of Quora’s most impressive achievement is the recent doubling of its user base over the span of less than a month (see above Dec-Jan). Many ponder as to how the service got so popular in so little time and Sysomos even applied its social wizardry to testing the source of such a boom – potential links to Techcrunch reviews explored here. It’s more likely that Quora’s instant success, at least in terms of user base growth, can be explained through a mix of various factors:The insider effect: Quora’s early adopters also happened to be vocal tech leaders, bloggers and broadly speaking influencers. For others, it was enough to make it look like a club membership worth pursuing.The Social graph effect: leveraging both twitter and facebook’s API, Quora is a shiny example of how tapping into already existing connections is paramount to a new service’s success. Within five minutes of logging in, users are usually flooded by friends requests also adopting the service out of social curiosity / envy. The dopamine cooking : Quora takes great care to always prompt its users with novelty to keep their dopamine machines going;  it may be a friend feed, a notice, a vote to your best question or just checking out whatever great new questions are in the making, the novelty machine never stops, making it even more addictive than Facebook, and the next best thing to a Zyngafied Wikipedia.

• Is it worth it ?

Like any “new bright and shiny object”, Quora has its fair share of detractors and has already prompted a series of spoofs, among which all time fav. may well be Cwora.com, “a continually spamming collection of unanswered questions created, edited and organized by no-one who uses it”. Joke aside, with user base and service still in their infancies, it’s hard to tell if Quora is here to stay or just a fad (see graph below provided on Quora.com by Quora’s team).

So should brands and individuals join the Quora game or not?

A no brainer for individuals/professionnals

If you are an individual and unless you have a specific aversion to things like Twitter, getting onboard is a no brainer – you can ask us for invites here: planning@vanksen.com. Three, among many, of the most obvious benefits from being active on Quora are listed below:

-         A direct reach to leaders and shakers in your market, area of expertise. The beta invite mechanics still makes it a more selective network than any other

-         A vividly active answer-based community: this will soon be an optimal platform for personal branding allowing you to get much more of a rep than by posting on Linkedin answers – a recognized self propping tool – while providing more interactivity and requesting less than a lasting slideshare contribution.

-         Insight generation. Prominent US bloggers have confessed to using Quora as a blog item generation maching, vibing off insights and discussions blossoming on the platform

A no-go for Brands ?

As of today, Quora does not provide for the equivalent of a Facebook Fanpage and brand presence is only tolerated inasmuch individuals representing brands may have a personal account on Quora. The moderation community will be very active in having spamming users cease and desist, so any brand presence will have to abide to the rules.

One of the other usages for which an instant interface like that of Quora would have been a boon is to set up quick polls, preferably geared towards early adopters, influencers. Alas, moderators won’t allow them which may point at a dedicated feature in the near future.

This being said, and via the account of employees, there are at least – and no doubt there will be more still to be devised – three key advantages for a semi-branded presence on Quora :

(creative) S.E.O (Search Engine Optimization): Quora results have started to surface on Google and the platform is limitless in terms of referencing semantic items of interest or key assets. Some have already taken advantage of this as evidenced by the slate of rhetoric questions some brands are using to get more exposure via the service (see screen capture below). A more balanced use, could allow for brands to make sure they reference key personnel, key items and key semantics associated with the brand’s process, know how or specific culture. The catch on Quora is that it has to be curated into questions, answering the needs of a community and cannot be a dump of senseless keywords as it would automatically be flagged as spam.

-         Knowledge Management & E-learning : Be it from an external standpoint (teach your clients) or internal (train your employees or students) Quora could make for an extremely interesting knowledge management and learning tool. The ability to follow items, posters, questions and memes naturally provides for multiple entries to a subject. It could also help for brands with a very specific offering either from a technical standpoint (e.g. offshore drilling) or know how (e.g. luxury craftsmanship) to make sure the brand is recognized for its unique expertise and for what it does right.

-         Ultimately, Quora could become quite a Social Relationship Management tool. If you are familiar with Twitter-based initiatives such as Twelpforce where the whole sales force of Best Buy – a US based specialist high tech retailer- has been made available online to answer tech questions via their tweeter handles, then you can grasp the potential of a socially connected answer service for what specialist dubbed the future of Customer Relationship Management: SRM.

Undoubtedly more creative branded usages will be found and stimulated by the availability of a fan page equivalent and undoubtedly Quora’s greater promises remain untapped. After all, mankind’s most thrilling narratives from thrillers (Do you like scary movies?) to epics (What is the matrix?) start with a good question.

That’s why we’re so keen on Scoop.it (@scoop.it), which launched in private beta a few weeks ago. See demo vid:

I’ve been fooling around with it and have managed to start curating three subjects, fed every two or three days (give or take): Non-Terrestrial Life, Social Storytelling, and Advancements in Light, AR Tech.

How this differs from an offering like Pearltrees: your curated media is automatically put into a paper.li/Flipboard-style format, making it pleasant and easy to read, skim and share. All you have to do is grab the link to a piece of content related to your topic, be it a Tweet, YouTube video or link, and Scoop.it automatically grabs the title, imagery and first few sentences. (You can edit all of this for clarity or to explain its pertinence to your topic, too.)

Based on keywords you input when you first create a topic, it will also crawl social/news sites and recommend content for you to post. (Your topic followers can also recommend material easily.) The process becomes more intelligent as you refine keywords, accept or refuse certain material. And as there’s no Flash, it’s ultra light and accessible from Apple mobile devices like iPhone or iPad. (They’re working on apps for those, though.)

Scoop.it is promising. With scale and backing, anybody can create the next niche HuffPo. But I like it mainly because of its intuitiveness (I don’t have to baby-sit it like a blog, or spend too much time learning how it works), its speed and the responsiveness of the devs behind the platform.

If you want to give it a go, shoot me an email – angela [dot] natividad [at] gmail [dot] com – and I’ll send you an invite.

As a tongue-in-cheek way of steeling itself – and your precious ears – against the ubiquity of buzzwords (the audio variant of HFCS), it’s developed Buzzword Bingo, an app that lets you, uh, play the hand you’re dealt if you’re being forced to listen. In the unlikely instance that you don’t score “synergy” at the next marketing meeting, just go for the low-hanging fruit: “strategy,” “brand,” “leverage,” “buzz.” There’s no way you can’t win.

The game is free for iPad users. An iPhone variant is in the works for those of you who want to score some under-the-table action. Nice way to get Modea’s culture and name in the hands of plenty of phones – particularly those of creatives in competing digital service agencies. (Like this one.)

To its happy holiday message, Modea also wishes you a buzzword-free year. That ain’t gonna happen, but it’s a very pretty hope.