You-interface

Very cool dev stuff from TEd that turning hte net into a 6th sense. The cybernetic future vision is just gettting closer and closer

Interesting social experiment from 'old sckool' P&G

Thanks Cincinnati.com for this report on an social/reality TV mash-up experiment conducted by P&G. Fantastic to see a company like P&G, or any company in fact, stop the theory and speculation and really start putting things to the acid test. My only question is around the use of 'social media experts' in the experiment. Would be really interesting to carry out something similar here in Australia, but use 'normal' people instead. After all any success in the real world is going to have to come from engaging real people and them offering the right value/values that stimulate behaviour, advocacy, loyalty and all the other yummy social payoffs

P&G's digital summit socially adept

By David Holthaus • dholthaus@enquirer.com • March 11, 2009

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Executives from the evolving world of social networks had a meeting of the minds with Procter & Gamble executives Wednesday evening, as the 172-year-old Cincinnati-based giant held a four-hour, reality-show style exercise to help it figure out how it can best use rapidly growing online destinations such as Facebook and MySpace to target consumers.

With a potential audience of more than 300 million people and still growing quickly, social networking sites are seen as the newest frontier in advertising.

About 40 executives from major social networking companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere were invited to P&G’s downtown headquarters to meet with about a hundred P&G marketers to help them unlock the potential of these online sites to reach consumers.

P&G set up an exercise creating four teams whose goal was to see who could sell the most Tide T-shirts in four hours, starting at 5 p.m., with the money going to charity, using only the Web and a $1,000 budget. With team members hunched over laptops in four conference rooms, they used Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube to appeal to potential T-shirt buyers.

The group used their professional and personal Facebook accounts and also their Twitter accounts among many social media tools. To follow the Twitter effort you can link here.. The group also launched www.tide2.com as part of the effort.

Two hours into the exercise, they had sold about 600 T-shirts at $20 a pop.

“We need to become skilled and effective at social communication,” said Lucas Watson, who organized the event as one of P&G’s digital team leaders.

Notably absent from the evening was anyone from Twitter, the explosively growing site where users can update what they are doing, in real time, in short takes.

“They’re growing so fast they haven’t had time to think about the commercial aspects of their company,” Watson said.

But Twitter was one of the main methods the teams used to sell their T-shirts digitally.

Using traditional advertising methods to reach consumers on Facebook and other sites won’t work, Watson said: “You have to be invited in.’’

The potential for advertisers like P&G is enormous. Time spent on social sites is growing more than three times faster than the rate of overall Internet growth, according to a new report from media tracker Nielsen Online.

Just as importantly, the audience is becoming older and more globally diverse, Nielsen found. Social networks started out with a young audience of college age and younger, but has become more mainstream over time.

This shift has been driven by Facebook, whose greatest growth in 2008 – a gain of more than 24 million users – came from people aged 35 to 49, Nielsen found.

“Facebook and social networking is actually becoming more popular then e-mail,” said John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online, who participated in the Wednesday night event.

The audience is a marketer’s dream – it’s considered engaged, diverse, global and relatively youthful.

But experts say tapping into this audience is more complicated than advertising in the traditional media of television, radio and print.

Users of Facebook and other social sites are usually online to communicate with each other or for entertainment.

They aren’t accustomed to finding advertising there and aren’t very tolerant of it, says a November report by IDC, a technology research firm.

Of all the Internet users in the U.S., only 3 percent would allow the sites to use their contact information for advertising, IDC’s survey found.

“To understand the social media space, you really have to step into it,” said Pete Blackshaw, an executive vice president with Nielsen Online and a team leader in the Wednesday exercise.

That’s what P&G Digital Night, as it was called, was all about. “Any social media environment is space where consumers are choosing to spend their time,” Watson said. “We need to learn how to connect with them there.”

Beerenberg embraces transparency

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.

Hats off and i'm feeling like some toast...

Facebook’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior

Behaviour on Facebook - thanks InsideFacebook

February 27th, 2009

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.

10 Corporate Twitter Accounts Worth Following

Thanks PCMAG for this on business tweating

These companies have found interesting, inventive ways to engage customers on Twitter.

02.28.09

Total posts: 2

by Sean Ludwig

Buzz up!on Yahoo!

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.

Customer reviews featured in Argos catalog - goes to 17 million Brits!

Thanks Bazaarvoice

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!

Argos joins the masses of Bazaarvoice clients who are also amplifying the power of user-generated content beyond their websites. Halfords, another huge UK retailer, also features reviews in its catalogues, Cars.com mentioned customer reviews in their Super Bowl ad this year, and TurboTax now shows reviews on mobile phones and on huge in-store displays.

Look for reviews to continue to expand far beyond the sites where they are captured.

some cool augmented reality work

Great stuff from the guys at Squidder here. Thanks Mark

Augmented reailty desktop car

Augmented Reality Driving Demo (flash + flartoolkit + xbox controller) from squidder on Vimeo.
It’s no secret that we’re obsessed with augmented reality. Using this fantastic car demo whipped up by John Lindquist over at pv3d.org, we added in some FLARToolkit love to create a cool experience of driving the car around on a table.

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!

Augmented reality drum kit

Augmented Reality Drum Kit (demo #1) from squidder on Vimeo.

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.

We’ve (for once) posted a usable demo, so you too can rock out at your desk. Below is a quick video demo of all four sounds and after the break, you can see the demo of using multiple instances of the same drum.

And my personal farourite, T-shirt, twitter and augmented reality mash-up. Awesome stuff Squidder

PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo.

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!