I'd never heard of them before, but this sort of openness from Beerenberg is certainly going to attract my shopping dollars from now on (whenever i buy jam that is, which i don't, so sorry guys. But hey, if i did i would and at least you've got me talking about jam.... serious tanget sorry). Anyway, Not only have they made inroads (albeit not the most advanced) into social media spaces with Facebook, Youtube and Flickr presences featuring prominently on the company's site (are providing a 'real' face to the company which i love), but they have also made a huge leap in addressing what i can assume is the basis of many of the social conversations occurring around their brand and products i.e. what the hell am i actually eating here?
Their Provenance Pathway tool allows people visiting the site to enter either a barcode, or expiry date from a jar of jam to get trace "... the origin of each jar's main ingredients, the day it was made, and even who made it. We've done this because we're proud that our products deliver the true taste of the farm to your table."
Great stuff and something i think that makes a great leap in the category from talking about issues, products etc (which a lot of companies are still yet to do), to actually doing something tangible i.e. show you the sources of ingredients in a specific product, rather than just talking about some neblous, happy farmer somewhere.
The famous Dunbar number, or “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”, is generally accepted to be about 150. However, in a recent interview with The Economist, Cameron Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, shared some interesting stats on Facebook users’ social behavior patterns.
His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only actively communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”
Here’s the data from Marlow:
The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:
Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 4 friends
The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:
Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 6 friends
The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:
Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 10 friends
The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:
Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 16 friends
In other words, Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men.
“People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says.
Twitter isn't just about finding out about plane crashes and what your best friend ate for lunch. Its uses are evolving, and big corporations are joining the fun. Some corporate accounts serve as a boring PR tool that spews press releases and follows everyone who tweets about their company. But others have found interesting, inventive ways to engage customers on Twitter.
Some corporations, namely @Palm_Inc and @WholeFoods, have used the service to release news and answer questions. Others, such as @DellOutlet and @MotoDeals, have become a hot place to go to find great deals on merchandise. And not to be outdone, companies like @ComcastCares, and @HRBlock, have used Twitter as a new extension to customer service, allowing near real-time responses to difficult questions.
We've compiled a list of 10 corporate Twitter accounts that can either help you in a jam or allow you to give instant product and service feedback to someone who will actually get the message.
1. @Palm_Inc – Palm has taken the inventive step of using Twitter to break news. It also uses the account to respond to customer queries.
2. @JetBlue – JetBlue gives travel tips and answers customer questions all day long.
3. @WholeFoods – Whole Foods gives trivia tips about its company, answers questions, and makes suggestions on where to donate to charity.
4. @HTC – HTC answers customer questions and lets them know about the latest product news, often before it lets the media know.
5. @DellOutlet – Dell's Outlet Twitter feed has more than 100,000 followers, and rightly so. It lets users know about incredible, and often very brief, deals.
6. @HRBlock – Just in time for tax season, H&R Block has a Twitter account that answers your tax prep questions and gives helpful hints.
7. @SouthwestAir – Southwest Airlines answers customer questions and gives a glimpse into the lives of Southwest employees.
8. @MotoDeals – Motorola's deal Twitter account gives followers links to great offers and tips on using the company's products.
9. @ComcastCares – The official Comcast Twitter account is a useful extension of its customer service outlet. One of our very own staffers tried the service out and was able to lower his cable bill through it.
10. @Starbucks – Starbucks uses its account to receive customer feedback, give information about new products, and quickly answer questions.
March 4th, 2009 by Justin Crandall | Managing Director, United Kingdom
Argos is an enormous UK brand, with over 700 stores throughout the UK, serving over 130 million customers a year and takes four million orders via phone or online – and that’s in addition to in-store sales.
Argos is well-known for its catalogue. On average, 17 million UK households, or around two thirds of the population, have an Argos catalogue at home at any time.
So you can imagine our excitement when we saw they are now displaying their customers’ reviews on the pages of these well-read catalogues!
But we didn’t stop there. Using the mind blowing-ly good ControllerMate and some simple keyboard mapping classes, we hooked the car up to a wired xbox 360 controller for maximum nerd. Next step, get some shaders going on that sweet Ford Focus. Ah, we couldn’t resist, so we added a shader.
UPDATE: YouTube was being unhappy with our videos for some reason (we suspect it doesn’t get along with Snapz, but who knows), so we’re moving over to Vimeo. We’ve also updated our demo video here, too, to include a slight shadow under the car, as well as part where the car does it’s business without the flar symbol present. Enjoy!
This actually came about as a happy little accident while trying to bend FLARToolkit to our will (tracking multiple instances of multiple symbols – a total pain in the ass. But that’s a story for another time). It just so happened that we were rocking out to Kiss’ “God Gave Rock & Roll To You” and it suddenly occurred to us that “Hey, it wouldn’t be so hard to make these things make sounds when they disappear.” So we did. And it was awesome.
So we here at squidder have been playing around with the FLARToolKit a lot recently. Pretty amazing stuff really. And while fooling around with it, something (perhaps obvious) occurred to us: We love flash. And we also love t-shirts. And Papervision. And Twitter.
And, suddenly, we had a way to combine them all together.
Below is an early technical demo, in which a barcode, containing a twitter username, is embedded within our FLAR pattern. This is important because you don’t need to create a new pattern for each username. Instead, the flash reads the person’s username (up to 8 characters, encoded in 6 bit chunks) and then pulls that person’s latest post from twitter.
The source code is a mess, but we’ll be posting some more how-to details soon. In the meantime, enjoy the video demo below!
(THanks to Futrelab for this post by: Roger Dooley)
Most of us have gotten over our short-lived obsession with the 2009 Super Bowl ads, but at neuromarketing firm Sands Research technologists have been slaving away analyzing all 72 of those commercials. Sands measures viewers’ EEG activity to gauge both emotional and cognitive responses to ads. In addition, they collect questionnaires before and after the ads are viewed.potato_head_RD.jpgWhat makes an effective TV commercial? Dr. Stephen F. Sands, Chairman and Chief Science Officer, says,”We have found that an engaging story that maintains the viewer’s attention throughout the commercial, like this year’s Bridgestone Tire’s Taters (Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head) commercial or Coke’s Heist spot with the animated insects stealing a bottle of Coca-Cola, provides an overall strong and sustained brain response and a better measurement of favorable brand opinion.” Here are Sands Research’s top 10:
The number following each ad is what Sands calls the Neuro-Engagement Factor (NEF).
The worst scoring ad in 2009 was E-Trade’s Talking Baby ad, which scored a mere 2.61 on the NEF scale. Sands attributed the poor showing, at least in part, to the fact that a similar ad had been running throughout the preceding year.
Check out the complete comparative scoring of the 2009 Super Bowl ads at sandsresearch.com.
