At 2 p.m. ET on Friday, Ted Baker London will open the first live, Twitter-operated styling studio.
Over a two-hour period, a rotating selection of seven U.S. fashion bloggers will use a live video stream and Twitter (Twitter) to direct hair stylists, makeup artists, runners and models to create a number of different looks from 450 pieces of Ted Baker’s Autumn/Winter 2010 collection. Spectators can follow the styling session, which takes place at Ted Baker’s headquarters in London, live on takeonted.com and on Twitter by following @ted_baker.
Viewers are also encouraged to tweet in their own styling suggestions with the hashtag #takeonted. The best ideas, the company promises, will have a chance of winning a prize.
We think this is a clever promotion to raise awareness of Ted Baker’s clothing line among fashion bloggers and their readers, and is sure to boost the follower count of Ted Baker’s Twitter account, which currently sports a little less than 600 followers, as well. This marks the first big social media promotion we’ve seen from the company.
ORLANDO, Fla. (AdAge.com) -- When a New England Patriots fan last month was irritated at his inability to get tickets to a game against the New York Jets, he tweeted his issues to the Edge shaving gel brand.
Edge has created an 'anti-irritation community' at its website EdgeShaveZone.com.
Within days, the fan, Matthew DeCoste, an interactive designer at Euro RSCG, New York, had tickets to the game as part of an "anti-irritation" campaign in which the Energizer Holdings brand is seeking to soothe some of the many gripes lodged in social media.
Mr. DeCoste had heard of the promotion from a friend at a time when Edge was giving out iTunes and Starbucks gift cards, and he thought he'd try upping the ante, he said in an email.
Of course, Edge can't solve every problem. Mr. DeCoste, who said he got tickets 20 rows back in the end zone, tweeted friends jokingly about the goal post blocking his view. "As the game started getting away from the Pats, I was getting text messages from the same Jets fans about the train schedule back to Manhattan in case I wanted to leave the game early," he said. "So, that was kind of irritating. That being said, I'm still appreciative."
Via its @EdgeShaveZone Twitter handle and #soirritating hashtag, Edge is slowly developing a following of gripers like Mr. DeCoste as part of a long-term campaign with big aspirations to own the position of irritation prevention.
Jeffrey Wolf, Edge's senior brand manager, terms it "the anti-irritation platform," which started last month via Edelman. It included releasing a ranking of the 50 most-irritated U.S. cities (Atlanta was first, thanks largely to traffic) and the Twitter campaign, which is backed by promoted tweets and e-cards to brand fans. Edge also has an "anti-irritation community" at its website, EdgeShaveZone.com.
Ultimately, the brand has bigger things in store for the effort, including as-yet undisclosed work coming later this year under development by WPP's JWT, New York, promo shop Ryan Partnership and media shop MEC.
The social-media effort has started slowly, with still fewer than 900 followers since it launched last month. But the following is likely to swell once more of the Twitterverse, a veritable cauldron of gripes, catches on to the chance of getting problems solved by adding the #soirritating hashtag in a sweepstakes for the social-media age.
Edge last month also sent a megaphone to a University of Alabama professor who said her husband wasn't listening to her and a Blu-ray disc player and the movie "Office Space" on DVD to ease the irritation of an employee annoyed by a coworker.
A few irritations are harder to tackle, such as recent ones about a neighbor's barking dog, a UPS package stolen from a porch, a ham-handed blood drawer, high Ticketmaster fees and a "power-mad boss" who's made employees cry for eight straight days.
Mr. Wolf is part of a panel of Energizer and Edelman employees who review the irritations and then decide which to address and how.
He's not sure what tangible effect the effort has had on brand sales just yet, but notes that it's part of a shift from a heavy focus on promotion under former Edge owner SC Johnson to more brand-equity-building activity since Energizer bought it last year. Energizer and Edge have continued to gain share in shave preparations since the sale (up 5.1 points for the four weeks ended Sept. 5, thanks in part to sibling Schick entering the fray earlier this year, but despite a new push by rival Procter & Gamble Co.'s Gillette Fusion ProSeries products).
"What I'm most encouraged about is where we're going to take this brand moving forward with this robust campaign we'll roll out within the next year," Mr. Wolf said.
Edge led the category with the introduction of shave gels 40 years ago, he said. "What I'm hoping to do with this brand is be the innovator or thought starter in marketing communications as well."
Aiming to highlight the potential dangers of location-based services, website “Please Rob Me” features a running list of Twitter users declaring they’re not home.
While the setup is humorous, in reality this kind of open physical location sharing could lead to trouble.
They explain:
Don’t get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome.
…The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet
…The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.
Couple different articles on the PEW Research's latest look at online teens. My out take - most people are consumers, rather than creators (hence the blog stats levelling out) and they still want all the content that sits outside the social web, but they want to be able to choose when and where they get it i.e. mobile, social site integration, etc. And twitter... well to me it just feels a little too restrictive, and one sided, for what teenagers what from digital interaction. Thoughts?
While most teenagers reject Twitter and blogging, 62% of them like to read their news online, US research reveals
Will the next generation read news reports? It looks like it. Some 62% of US internet users aged 12 to 17 are going online for news and political information or find out about current events, said a study conducted by the Pew Research Center published yesterday. During special events such as general elections news consumption rose to 77%.
This is indeed an impressive number, even more so if you compare it with the 73% of teens who use social networking websites or the 89% of boys and 70% of girls who report they have a game console.
It also stands up well compared with the 72% of adult internet users who get their news online, a number that has held fairly constant since 2002 according to Pew. In general, it says the use of online news has increased dramatically since its first analysis, in 2000, when it found just 35% of online adults were reading political news online.
As was expected in all age groups educational attainment and income are positively correlated with getting news online: 81% of college educated internet users get their news online, a figure that drops to 59% with a lower education.
Blogging, on the other hand, may become more and more of a side issue. In fact, among all the content creating activities the decline in blogging among teens and young adults is striking as it looks like the youth may be exchanging "macro-blogging" for microblogging with status updates. Since 2006 blogging among teens has dropped from 28% to 14% and among young adults (aged 18 to 29) by 24% to 15%. Some 11% of those aged 30 and over now maintain a personal blog, and 14% of them maintain a personal website.
According to the research, 26% of adults post comments online, a while 30% share online content. Teens on the other hand are enthusiastic online commenters within the social networks. A massive 86% of social networking teens post comments to a friend's page or wall on a social network site and 83% post comments on friends' photos posted to an online social network.
They don't really like to use Twitter, though. While 19% of adult internet users use Twitter or similar services to post short status updates and view those of others, only 8% of 12- to 17-year-olds do so.
Young adults lead the way when it comes to using Twitter or status updates as a third of 18- to 29-year-olds post or read status updates, and they are also the only age group which prefers to use laptop computers to desktop computers.
Mobile internet access is becoming more important
However, the study found out that access to the internet is changing in general. Teens and adults no longer access the internet solely from a computer or laptop but now go online via portable devices such as mobile phones or game consoles as mobile access to the internet becomes more and more important.
And finally some more background figures: 75% of teens and 93% of adults aged 18 to 29 now have a mobile phone. Some 93% of teens aged 12 to 17 go online, as do 93% of young adults aged 18 to 29, and even an impressive 74% of all adults aged 18 and older. Among them, Facebook is currently the most commonly‐used online social network as 73% of online adults have a Facebook profile. More than half of them say they have two or more different profiles.
So what do these figures say, apart from the fact that teenagers obviously like to read the news?
Conclusion
Mobile access to the internet is on the rise, and the reading of news on the platform is likely to follow this development. Offerings such as the New York Times's Times People or the HuffingtonFacebook are likely to become more common to encourage young people to share articles and debate with their friends. Post's deep integration of
That might be a reason why social networking sites such as Facebook are taking over from blogging – as it appears that blogging has levelled out at a figure of about 15% of internet users.
A new study published today by Pew Internet finds that teens and young adults are blogging less and using social networking sites more, with the prominent exception of Twitter.
Pew’s Report surveyed 2,253 American adults and 800 U.S. teens to get a reading of how they use the Internet, which gadgets they own, and which social media tools they use the most.
Some of the data will surprise you.
The Internet’s Everywhere
Here’s a no-brainer: Young adults use the web far more than older adults. In its study, Pew found that 93% of teens and young adults go online, compared to only 38% of adults over 65 years of age. It surprises us that 7% of 12-29 year olds still don’t browse the web, but some just don’t have or can’t afford access.
Among those teens going online, 63% say they go online at least once a day, with older teens more likely to go online than younger teens.
Most are connecting with high-speed connections as well. Seventy-six percent of families with teenage children have broadband connections, while 10% still use dial-up, 8% have no computer and 4% have a computer but no Internet access. For comparison, 49% of families used dial-up in 2004.
The Internet’s getting faster and more accessible. As computer prices drop and Internet access becomes more readily available, we should see these Internet usage numbers continue to rise.
The Laptop Is More Popular than the Desktop
In terms of gadgets, more teenagers have cell phones (76%) than a computer (69%). More than half of 12 year olds own a mobile phone, while a rather impressive 83% of teenagers carry a cell phone in their pockets. That number only rises with age — a full 93% of 18-29 year olds own a cell phone.
The mobile trend even continues into the computing realm: Laptops have overtaken the desktop for those under 30. Sixty-sex percent of adults 18-29 own a laptop, while 53% own a desktop. Other interesting trends: Males are more likely to own a cell phone, income dramatically affects computer ownership but not cell phone ownership, and race is a non-factor when it comes to the percentage of adults using cell phones.
Teens Just Don’t Blog. Or Tweet.
As you might have guessed, Pew found that teens are avid social networkers: 73% of 12-17 year olds, in fact. They are posting pictures, commenting on status updates and sending IMs.
What they aren’t doing much of, though, is blogging and tweeting.
Pew’s study finds that blogging has dramatically decreased in popularity with the younger crowed since 2006, where 28% of teens reported that they were bloggers. Now that number has dropped to just 14%. Interestingly enough, lower income households (under $50,000) report more blogging than higher income ones. With Facebook (), Twitter () and other social tools to keep your friends updated about your life, blogging just isn’t as necessary.
Perhaps we shouldn’t include Twitter in that list of social media tools teens use, though. As we’ve reported on multiple occasions, teens don’t tweet, and Pew’s numbers don’t disagree with that assertion:
Yes, only 8% of teens use Twitter, remarkably small when compared to most social networks. Only one in 10 high schoolers use Twitter. Among this small group though, the girls are more likely to be microblogging: 13% of 14-17 year old girls reported using the service.
Conclusions: Teens Aren’t Heavy Content Creators
First, it’s important to note that most of this data was taken from September 2009. A lot changes in social media in a five-month period.
With that said, though, the trends seem clear: Teens love to be online, but they’re not terribly interested in writing blog posts or maintaining a stream of tweets. Creating content takes time and energy that they’d rather exert on Facebook, texting, YouTube () or other online activities. And of course, they have school and friends.
Let’s face it: Teenagers haven’t had the time to build up expertise, life experiences or a career that would merit content creation. Without that expertise, fewer people are inclined to listen to what they have to say, and without that knowledge, teenagers have less to talk about.
As my colleague Barb Dybwad also brings up, a teenager’s social circle is far smaller and more closely defined than an adult’s network. Perhaps this is why more closed networks like Facebook are more appealing to teenagers than Twitter, which is a completely public experience. Blogging was a more intimate experience a few years back, which could also explain why more teens have abandoned personal blogs over the last few years.
Combined, it means that Twitter just might not be for the average teenager. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Thanks PSFK for this. I know there is some much hype about the AR space these days, a lot of it unfounded, but the sheer scale of this just makes it incredible. Wonder if i can get a client to turn a whole building into a comms channel?
January 7, 2010
Located in the shopping district surrounding Tokyo’s Tachikawa Station, the exterior of the mall-like N Building has been covered with QR code data so that store information can be captured from street level. The design teams at Qosmo and Teradadesign Architects have also put together an iPhone app that gathers real-time information and conversations within the building through an AR-like interface.
It was a huge year for data. There's no denying it. Data is about to explode.
Applications sprung up left and right that help you understand your data - your Web traffic, your finances, and your life. There are now online marketplaces that sell data as files or via API. Data.gov launched to provide the public with usable, machine-readable data on a national scale. State and local governments followed, and data availability expands every day.
At the same time, there are now tons of tools that you can use to visualize your data. It's not just Excel anymore, and a lot of it is browser-based. Some of the tools even have aesthetics to boot.
With all the new projects this year, it was hard to filter down to the best, but here they are: two honorable mentions and the five best data visualization projects of 2009. Visualizations were chosen based on analysis, aesthetics, and most importantly, how well they told their story (or how well they let you tell yours).
Honorable Mention: MTV VMA Tweet Tracker
The MTV VMA Tweet Tracker, a glorified bubble chart from Stamen Design and Radian6, showed the buzz on Twitter over the MTV VMAs. As I watched iJustine talk about the visualization on television, pointing out highlights in the bubbles and tags, I thought, "Visualization sure has branched out." Plus, the explosion of Kanye West's face on my computer screen was hilarious.
Honorable Mention: Crisis of Credit Visualized
We all know there were major problems going on with banks and credit this year, but it's a safe bet that most didn't quite know why. Jonathan Jarvis attempted to explain with his thesis project, Crisis of Credit Visualized. It isn't perfect, and it doesn't explain every detail, but it does explain a lot.
5. Photosynth
Photosynth, by Microsoft Live Labs, smartly strings photos together to create something of a browsable 3-D environment. It was actually released last year. I don't think it was really put to good use until this year though. With the inauguration of President Barack Obama, a historic event people won't soon forget, MSNBC used Photosynth to provide a view of the inaugural stands.
4. The Jobless Rate for People Like You
Unemployment rate was another important and recurring topic this year, and there were a lot of visualizations - maps, bar charts, and graphics - that showed it. None did it better than Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, and Kevin Quealy of The New York Times. In The Jobless Rate for People Like You, we were able to see the changes over time and filter down to different demographics. Transitions and browsability were top notch.
3. OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits
OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits showed all the changes to OpenStreetMap data in 2008. The visualization itself, by ITO, is beautiful, and what the animated map represents - a worldwide effort in providing an accurate geographic data source - is even more amazing.
2. Protovis
Protovis, from the Stanford visualization guys Mike Bostock and Jeffrey Heer, is a "graphical approach to visualization." More importantly, it uses Javascript and SVG for web-native visualizations, which is where things are headed with, uh, visualization on the Web. True, there are plenty of Javascript libraries that let you make basic graphs, but none are nearly this advanced, and true, Protovis doesn't work in all browsers, but if you're reading this, you're probably smart enough to be on a modern browser, unless you're locked into Internet Explorer at work.
1. On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces
On the Origin of Species, by Ben Fry, shows the changes to Charles Darwins' theory of evolution over time. I think a lot of you missed this one, because I posted it on Labor Day, but nevertheless, it's an elegant visual. It's a simple concept executed really well. Origin shows the full growing (and shrinking) text as little blocks with an emphasis on the evolution of Darwin's ideas. They were 20 years in the making.
Origins is actually an offshoot of a much larger project yet to be released (if ever), according to Fry, so I'm of course really looking forward to seeing the rest.
There you have it. It's the top five visualizations of 2009. There was a lot of great stuff churned out this year, and no doubt next year will be even better.
Back to you - what do you think was the best visualization of the year? Leave your picks in the comments below.
Twoddler Allows Toddlers To Communicate Through Twitter
December 7, 2009
Combining an Arduino microcontroller with a Fisher Price Activity Center, Bart Swennen, Gert Vos, and Johannes Taelman have put together a device which allows toddlers to communicate non-verbally with their caretakers through Twitter. Dubbed ‘Twoddler,” the device captures data from toddler interactions within the activity center and translates them to tweets that can be followed by the toddler’s parents; the toddler mashing the image of his mother for a predetermined amount of time might be translated to a tweet like ‘I’d like to see my mommy now.”
Also not the newest article, but do like this on Twitter as social mind. Thanks Springwise
4 September 2009 Published on 4 September 2009 in Marketing & Advertising
If two heads are better than one, it's hard to argue with the premise of crowdsourcing, which taps multiple brains for a common end. Now offering such capabilities overnight is Ideas Culture, an Australian firm that puts creative thinkers around the globe to work via Twitter to solve a client's problem by morning.
Businesses with a challenge to solve can enlist Ideas Culture's "Ideas While You Sleep Service" to get a pack of ideas along with an evaluation matrix and implementation plan by 10 a.m. the next morning. After registering, they need only submit their challenge online by 4 p.m. By 6 p.m., Ideas Culture gets the challenge out to its Twitter-based Ideas Agents, who spend 15 to 30 minutes each on the problem. There are more than 200 agents from eight countries on the books, and each earns AUD 100 for four sessions, according to a report in the Age. Problems tackled so far have included recruiting more male customers for a singles matching service and increasing attendance for professional development events, The Age reported. Pricing—normally AUD 880—is now AUD 495 through a special trial offer.
Is there no stopping the power of the Twitter-enabled crowds? London's Royal Opera House is another organization that apparently doesn't think so. For more on putting that power to work for your brand, check out trendwatching.com's briefing on foreverism. Time to start thinking in 140 characters! ;-)
Thanks Contagious... love this approach to making content interactive
Smokescreen
08/09/2009
While teens, and the majority of other web users, are aware of threats that exist online, they have a tendency to seem relatively seem distant and remote. With this in mind, Channel 4’s web adventure Smokescreen has just launched, challenging teens to increase their awareness of some internet dangers, while taking part in a 13-part web adventure aimed at 14-16 year olds.
Developed by the production company Six to Start in London, which also produced Penguin’s We Tell Stories ARG, the game challenges players to uncover a mystery behind a sinister new game, Rumour Mill, hosted on a fictional social network known as White Smoke. Players must set about uncovering information via chat rooms, IM, widgets, profile pages, emails, voicemails, CCTV footage, twitch games, puzzle games to drive the plot forward.
Alice Taylor, commissioning editor, education, explains: ‘We wanted to help teens learn about data issues through play, while exploring big ideas such as privacy and surveillance, Orwell and CCTV. We focused the plot down to within social networks, where teens spend a large amount of their time, looking at issues such as stalking, fishing, data awareness, privacy settings and policies.’
The various missions can be played over the next eight weeks, after which the game will form a complete three hour playing experience. Taylor adds: ‘We have a presence on social networks because we wanted to turn up in teen’s attention streams, but these spaces are really crowded with a lot of brands searching for attention. Teens love to play games, even if they don’t label themselves as gamers. Therefore, we decided to spend at least half our budget on games.’
She adds: ‘We are building these games to try and be as native to the internet as possible. We are seeding content by behaving like a dandelion, including on US sites, such as www.kongregate.com as well as UK ones, because nine out of ten sites visited by teens are based in the US.’
Adrian Hon, co-founder Six to Start, says: ‘Smokescreen is the world’s first game about life online. Every time you hear about a teenager being hauled up at school because of their Facebook profile, or someone being conned out of their password on Twitter - that's what Smokescreen aims to explore. And because our game puts players in a simulation situation, we can give them an experience that is far more powerful and immersive than any other media.’
Doesn’t it just feel great when you get stuff for free? Free t-shirts? I’ll take five. A contestto win a Macbook? I’m game. There’s even an eBay for free stuff now.
Still, finding free stuff is tough because it isn’t easy to find all the great free offers on the web. More and more though, people have turned to Twitter () to help me find those deals. Many (myself included) have saved a bundle on quality clothing and free giveaways. But Freezly looks to be the coolest and most efficient way to find free stuff yet, and its discovery algorithm is powered by tweets.
Freezly is a lot like Tweetmeme () in that it finds link and tweets and shows you their popularity based on retweets. Freezly though only picks up free giveaways and items with its algorithm. You can see the hottest free deals being shared on Twitter, the most recent deals Freezly has found, and an archive of past giveaways.
Nothing new here, but a nice video summary of some of the more interesting social media stats. Thanks Digital Buzz Blog
By Eric Qualman from Socialnomics. This is another great visualisation of the latest social media statistics that always makes for a few minutes well spent watching! It provides a range of great stats like these…
By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers
96% of them have joined a social network
1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year have met via social media
Facebook added 100 million users in 9 months
If Facebook would be a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
There are over 200.000.000 Blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.
1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian
Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.
The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.
2. RFID Tags & Transponders
While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.
For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.
But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.
And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).
Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.
3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices
The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.
Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.
But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.
Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.
That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.
That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.
5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph
Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.
OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook () are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.
Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.
6. Mind Reading
My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.
But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there areproofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.
7. Natural Language Processing
Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.
Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.
The Future
Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.
Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.
SEATTLE: Starbucks, the coffee house chain, and Unilever, the consumer goods giant, have teamed up to promote their jointly-produced ice cream brand on Facebook, using an application that encourages consumers to download coupons via the social network.
It has been argued that the current financial crisis has forced Starbucks to reassess its priorities after years of growth, and the company has also come under increasing pressure from rivals such as McDonald's.
By way of a response, it has not only sought to move into the retail space, but also to utilise social media like Facebook and Twitter to connect with consumers.
Unilever signed a licensing agreement to produce an ice cream range based on some of Starbuck's most popular coffee flavours, such as Caramel Macciato, Mocha Frappuccino and Java Chip Frappuccino, last year.
Simon Clift, the FMCG giant's chief marketing officer, has also previously championed the use of social media as a means of engaging a broad audience.
Running for two weeks, the two firms' current Facebook campaign will see 20,000 pints of Starbucks ice cream being given away each day.
Some 280,000 pints will be available overall, with members of the social network being required to download a voucher which they can then send on to a person of their choice.
According to a statement from the companies, "participants can treat others or – if the temptation is too great – indulge themselves by claiming one of just over 800 coupons available at the top of each hour."
Other brands that have recently been active on Facebook include Volkswagen and General Motors, which have used "widgets" – applications that feature on "profile pages" – produced by RockYou.
Gap has similarly employed some of the company's products, which vary from games and quizzes to video and tools that allow users to "decorate" their personal profile.
Microsoft and Experian are also among the major advertisers that are now using Facebook's own "engagement ads", which appear on user pages and contain interactive features.
Marc Andreessen, a board member of the social networking pioneer, has predicted that the company will make "over $500 million (€357m; £309m)" in revenue this year.
Furthermore, he added that "if they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year."
"There's every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now," Andreessen concluded.
Data sourced from BrandWeek/Forbes/Reuters; additional content by WARC staff, 08 July 2009
UPDATE: Follow me at @rohitbhargava if you liked this post!
Last month a social media analytics provider named Sysomos released a comprehensive report on Twitter usage. The problem with most analysis on Twitter, though, is that it is limited by the minimal amount of data that Twitter collects. So, to fill the gaps, most reports do things like guessing gender based on real names or pulling data from keywords in people's biographic information. This often yields some questionable results - and the Sysomos report is not immune to this (for example, they find that 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25, but base this on only the 0.7% of users who actually disclose their age).
Looking past these small points, the report does share some fairly interesting observations and stats as well if you dig a bit deeper. Here's my read on the 10 standout conclusions that the report offers to help you (and your brand) better understand the potential uses of Twitter:
21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to "follow back" all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for "lifecasting" their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
Half of all Twitter users are not "active." If you take a general description of being "active" on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
APIs have been the key to Twitter's growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter's notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.
Bonus Geographical Stat/Quote: "The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Los Angeles is the fastest growing city on the list."
Remember early Jib Jab cartoons where you’d manually upload your own photo and that of your friends? Now, it’s much easier with just a few clicks to Facebook Connect.
Last week, I had dinner with Chris Pan (linkedin, twitter), Head of Brand Solutions at Facebook, who pointed me to a new social interactive marketing advertisement for a video game called “Prototype”. Upon accessing the site, Prototype Experience, (try it for yourself) you’ll be prompted to login with your Facebook account. After a rather lengthy loading period (it’s worth it, hang tight) you’ll watch a short teaser trailer.
This isn’t a normal trailer, as it uses your own social information in Facebook from your profile picture, your profile information, and photos from your friends. Here’s what I saw, see screenshots below.
What’s going on here? This is an example of more contextual ads based off social profiles, which is a trend as you can see my coverage of VW’s Twitter and Facebook campaign). These are early examples of the era of Social Context, where content, media, and ads will be personalized in the future based off your social information, learn more about this in the future of the social web.
User Experience: Screenshot Storyline Here’s the blow by blow, with my thoughts.
Above Image: First, users are encouraged to login with Facebook Connect –a few clicks. If you’re already logged into Facebook, it’s just a few clicks –all without entering a password. Expect more people to interact as there’s less commitment and up front investment than finding photos and uploading them –Facebook already has the inventory you need.
Above Image: Promo video includes my profile pictures –making things a bit more interesting and personalized. As this evolves, imagine how your face and profile info will populate other experiences and content –we’re instinctively drawn to look at ourselves.
Above Image: “Is that me?” Yes it is, this promo video includes information from my profile –I’m right in the game. In consideration of my friends, I didn’t include their photos –which you’ll see in your own trailer video. Expect future ads where friends ‘promote’ or even sponsor content –some opt-in, some not.
Above Image: Participants are ‘hooked’ into the registration form in order to win in the sweetstakes, a good example of gathering leads from an engaged audience. Facebook isn’t a great way to generate leads, while you can get users to be ‘fans’ of your Facebook page, getting their true identity and email is often limited –as dictated by their Terms of Service.
Above Image: The participants are encouraged to share the campaign with their Facebook or Twitter friends, thus staring a “Viral Loop”. It spreads.
Key Takeaways
This is clearly a trend, expect many interactive and digital agencies to offer this social campaign to their clients.
Consumers will initially ‘freak out’ and be concerned that big brother is watching them –then will accept this as mainstream media over the next few years.
At some point, nearly every campaign will have social content influencing the content –hitting a saturation point that disinterests users
Expect site wide Facebook Connect initiatives to happen, allowing all of the media, content, and ads to be socially contextual. Expect media sites and eCommerce sites to launch this first.
Expect recommended products and ads to appear from your friends and those connected to you in your social network.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Nestle's Juicy Juice isn't the first brand to try to integrate Twitter in to an ad campaign (see Skittles and TurboTax). But it may be the first to allow users to post tweets within an ad unit that can appear anywhere on the web.
Juicy Juice's Twitter display ad
Juicy Juice is testing the unit, from SocialMedia, for one month on mom-targeted sites BabyCenter and CafeMom. The units ask questions such as "How do you stimulate your child's mind?" or "How important are vitamin-enhanced foods to you?" and users can answer the queries as short messages, or tweets, directly in the ad.
If users are logged on to Twitter, the answers will be posted to the ad directly; otherwise users are first directed to Twitter.com to sign in. Posts, which also appear in users' Twitter feeds with a "hashtag" (the symbol #, used to group keywords or events for simpler searches on the site) are moderated by Nestle, but there's the option for that to be turned off.
Clicking on the ad unit, meanwhile, takes the user to Juicy Juice's YouTube site, which is chock-full of helpful videos, including a scary one about how many more germs per inch are on a water fountain than your average toilet seat.
The difference between this campaign, dubbed "Twitter Pulse" by SocialMedia, and other recent attempts is that it allows a conversation to be instigated by -- or occur within -- the ad unit, rather than just syndicating tweets already posted on Twitter.
"The ad unit is paid placement but the additional impressions are effectively earned media," said Seth Goldstein, CEO of SocialMedia, a technology company, noting that the hashtag then reaches the follower base of those who have entered tweets, and potentially sparks more attention and conversation.
SocialMedia is tracking a number of metrics for Juicy Juice, including traditional views and click-through rates but also number of tweets posted and the number of followers exposed to the hashtag on Twitter. Like other executions with Twitter, there is no revenue involved with the microblogging service, but, as Mr. Goldstein pointed out, it could be a potential source of new sign-ups and increased usage.
A new study published today by Pew Internet finds that teens and young adults are blogging less and using social networking sites more, with the prominent exception of Twitter.
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Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at 
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