 November 11, 2008
 Sherwin-Williams Color Visualizer Finalist at Adobe MaxTagged as: O.P.E.N., branded manufacturers, technologyPosted by: Chris Berk As some of you may or may not know, the Sherwin-Williams Color Visualizer Tool, designed and developed by RI, has been chosen as a finalist for the 2008 Adobe MAX Awards! And the Finalist Gallery is now live and People’s Choice voting is open. Please visit and share the following link to vote: http://adobemax08.com/na/experience/#?s=5&p=3 There is no limit on voting, so do it to it!! And you can check out the Visualizer itself here: http://www.sherwin.com/visualizer/ November 7, 2008
 Obama continues to deliver on OPENTagged as: O.P.E.N., Open brand, social web, technologyPosted by: Nancy Kramer
I was inspired today when one of my colleagues pointed me to the new president-elect transition web site. I continue to be amazed at the remarkable communication strategy of the Obama team, and this new digital hub builds on the team’s OPEN approach. From the invitation to submit your ideas, the presentations of the top agenda items, to how to apply for a job in the administration, it’s all there for everyone to share, comment, and post. I think our very own Karen Scholl summed it up best when interviewed about Obama’s approach for the March cover story of Fast Company. She said, ” With Obama, not only do people feel they know who he is, they feel trusted to share their views,” Scholl says. “And they get constant feedback from the campaign and from each other.” November 3, 2008
If you haven’t already started having conversations with your web team Beyond the stats, there are lessons to learn from companies who’ve already wrangled with accessibility. Target, for example. It could have resolved its accessibility issue quickly and economically, but instead it grew into a $6 million settlement. Most brands can’t afford that hit to the bottom line or the hit to their reputation right now. There is a better, smarter way and marketers need to be awakened to the importance of creating accessible brand experiences. October 18, 2008
These days I am the road more frequently and realized how much the DVR (which I still refer to as Tivo even though it’s a no frills Scientific something or other) has altered my television consumption. Even when I’m home, I very rarely watch TV “live.” I rationalize how much TV I watch by getting in 2 or 3 shows in a time frame that would normally include 1 or 2. This past week, I realized a few things:
For me, the DVR is an empowering technology—it allows me to forget about what I want to see because when I press the list button, it will tell me what I want to watch. It also empowers me to avoid living my life around that must see show—whether it’s the NBA finals, the Olympics, Gossip Girl or Mad Men. It empowers me to consume more television in the same amount of time—I don’t have to horse trade shows that are on at the same time. I may need to invest in the Slingbox PRO-HD.
Outside of my personal addiction to the DVR, see below for penetration statistics for US households from Forrester Research. I’m glad to see that I’m not alone. September 22, 2008
“You are here.” How many of us have scrutinized this inadvertently philosophical assertion when wayfinding in the subway or at the zoo, mall or amusement park? The X designating one’s location vis-à-vis other highlights on the map is practically the universal symbol for being slightly lost. In my experience, it always seems to have little to do with where I feel I am, or where I wish I were, or where I thought I had finally arrived. All manner of perspectival negotiation of the 2-D maze of lines and dots before me ensues: moving in closer, tilting my head to align the landmarks with my sightline, squinting so as to project myself onto the smaller plane of impervious reality before me. A cartoon check on Google reassured me I’m in good company finding humor in the incongruity between my existential self and this confident cartographic depiction of it. But a really funny thing has happened recently while navigating our way to the forum—or big box or nightclub. Something dislodged this incongruity, this mismatch between our selves and our public maps. Location awareness has become the new “there there” of our digital devices, and not just of the mere 17% of phones that are GPS-enabled (as of late 2007, pre- 3G iPhone). Low- and mid-tier mobile phones and PNDs (personal navigation devices) have been serving up location awareness to millions.
Location awareness, in case its killer app-ness is initially lost on you, means the navigator is embedded in the map. That inscrutable X that once stood for you is now the real-time longitudinal and latitudinal (and sometimes altitudinal) equivalent of you. And if that isn’t enough of a kick for the navigation-challenged, or the socially mobile (as it were), the map in which you are embedded can be populated exclusively by the geo-information in which you’ve indicated interest. So the world arrays itself around you and your immediate needs and desires as if you were Zeus on a daytrip. The digitally prescient have been talking about this paradigm shifter for some time—how web surfing is giving way—or at least sharing the stage with—world surfing. We in the RI:Lab have been studying the macrotrend of Cartocracy for months. But brands might be wondering what the heck these apps and maps offer that their store locators don’t. We’ll need a few WeThink posts to answer that one but, for now, here’s a handy list of five reasons a new kind of X marks the spot, and how mega value creation is sure to follow.
More mapping mania to come! September 2, 2008
Google is throwing its hat into an already crowded browser market with the announcement of the “Chrome” browser. It will be available for download sometime today. Information about the new browser, which was shared in comic book form, is fairly sparse at this point. According to Google, the browser will be more “secure”, “faster”, “clean, simple, and efficient”. A few more details are provided in the comic book regarding its technical approach to address existing browsers’ faults. Clearly, this is another shot directed at Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft plans to role out version 8 of IE soon. What does this mean to the digital marketing? In the short-term, increased browser compatibility testing will be required to ensure current and future web experiences function correctly in these new browsers. Longer-term, the hope is that better browsers will help reduce and simplify the testing process while enabling greater experiences and functionality. But with 30% of web users still using IE 6.0, including many corporations, that promise might be far off. Until then, browser diversity will be the rule of the day and Chrome will simply be another one to add to the list. August 26, 2008
We’ve had quite a few requests these past few weeks for our perspective on Social Media for B-to-B brands. We field a lot of web 2.0 technology questions, but the dialog inevitably comes back to the value of social media. A recent Aberdeen Group report (free through 8/29/08 – chock full of interesting stats you can use), examines the social media practices of 360 companies. Those considered best-in-class for social media experienced an average 11% increase in Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI), improved customer retention and year-over-year improvements in product development, blowing the rest of the field out of the water. For technology companies, the need to “communify” the digital experience is even more apparent. No sector has been more impacted by social media than technology, for obvious reasons. According to Forrester Research, nearly three quarters of IT professionals use web 2.0 features in a professional capacity. From code writing to documentation to problem solving, IT professionals have come to expect a certain level of accessibility and interaction with their technology providers as well as their peers. Here are just a few ways prospects in any industry might expect social media to add value to the complex selection & implementation process:
The last bullet can’t be overstated. Social media isn’t just a channel, it’s a change agent for best-in-class companies. The Aberdeen Group data suggests a key to success is the internal process that supports and capitalizes on customer-facing social media. Successful processes
The challenge for organizations we talk with seems to be this: Lead generation is still the digital strategy du jour — the big kahuna of online measurement. To capitalize on the value social media can bring, best-in-class brands are engaging customers at all stages of the customer lifecycle– not just the selection process. This is easy if you are a starting from scratch but a bit of a challenge for organizations built on delivering digital content in exchange for capturing leads information and funneling them to a commissioned sales force. Marketing teams in this boat will need to take a good, hard look at the real decision process and their role in serving their community in a broader sense. They’ll need to adopt metrics that quantify their participation in the entire, end-to-end process. Social media is an extremely powerful tool for building and nuturing relationships. If you are in B-to-B marketing, ask yourself this: How can we put our wealth of content and better still, our experts, into the service of our community, independent of lead generation activities? If you are like most of the b-to-b companies we work with, you have expertise to spare. What do you think? The technology part is easy. Is your organization ready to capitalize on the promise of social media? August 21, 2008
Technology-Enabled Social Network, Old-SchoolTagged as: O.P.E.N., networked, on-demand, social web, technologyPosted by: Chris Berk
Right there on I-70, I was about to give up on the OPENness of my technology, when my wife suggested an alternative technical solution, “Why don’t you get out of the car, walk over to that truck, and ask the truck driver what’s going on? Doesn’t he have a CB or something like that? Can’t he just talk to one of his trucker buddies way up at the front of the line?” I coyly walked over to what must be one of the original, technology-enabled social networks – a truck driver and his CB radio! Of course the trucker knew what was going on – an overturned truck was blocking the highway. The more I thought about it, his CB radio network functions much as the web does, truly enabling an O.P.E.N. experience that serves the needs of its participants. Forget the iPhone, I need a CB. August 21, 2008
Chris Anderson is an expert meme splicer. The Long Tail, as a marketing strategy recently flattened into financial negligibility by Anita Elberse in the July-August 2008 HBR article, “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?,” is now part of Anderson’s broader economic argument for the value (variously defined as revenue, reputation, consumer attention) of making much of your service or product offer free. Anderson’s splicing occurs by attaching both the long tail and the marketplace-of-free memes to our economy of abundance. Many would argue that by the time the Free meme winds its way through Wired magazine article to blog and “open source ideation” to best-selling business book (following the winning and not entirely free formula of The Long Tail), many of us will have finally read or reread Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture or Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, both of which Amazon reviewers by and large think cover the same conceptual terrain. But such is the nature of free information exchange. There is much that is derivative, but more people are exposed to—and contribute to the ideas in the long run, er, tail, er, run. And if you want to preempt the long tail of derivation, you can always, well, pay for premium content, that is, buy the book. Yes, indeed, we’re having some sporting fun with what admittedly are essential, galvanizing ideas, which marketers should decide are worthy of implementation or not. To be clear, Elberse’s HBR article doesn’t dismiss the long tail altogether; it is best, for instance, to offer a wide assortment of products—including niche ones—to your high-value customers because they’re “disproportionately active in the long tail.” (Her most shocking finding to me: those connoisseurs who favor long tail choices don’t rate them higher than the more popular, less esoteric products. So much for our extreme private delight in that rare find—the book, the song, the band, the blog—and its transcription into larger cultural currency. To social network theorists like Duncan Watts, it’s been proven again and again that the popularity of a cultural product and the pleasure taken in it or the affinity one feels for it are inextricably linked.) The debates around Anderson’s free stuff argument are in full swing. And to contribute to them, we need go no further than the recent auctioning off of that part of the spectrum freed up by the imminent national move to all-digital TV. You might have read some of the bloglines about these so-called white spaces of the spectrum. Invisible, intangible assets. Free like wi-fi sometimes is? Well… In order for Verizon Wireless to attract more customers for high-speed mobile internet access, they shelled out $9.4 billion on airwaves. Anderson argues that phones are often free so carriers can charge for services. But Verizon’s acquisition of the coveted C-block spectrum must follow “open access” rules, meaning the network must be accessible by any compatible gadget and any software application. Not all of which will be “owned” by Verizon, obviously. This is where “free” gets very complicated and comes off as the frontman for an extravagantly expensive business model. But then the recent spectrum auction aligns once again with Anderson’s free argument when you consider Google’s stake in it. They didn’t take home any spectrum licenses (they were outbid) but the open access rules (which, I hasten to point out, AT&T’s spectrum doesn’t require) suit them just fine. They’re happy to “provide technical support, including intellectual property, design, databases, etc.” And why not? More free internet access with all the bells and whistles=more ad revenue for Google! Stay tuned for Part Two of my free meme free associating, where I take on the three forces Anderson says are driving this new economy—“fremium”, third-party (advertising) support and the gift culture—and hazard some advice about where marketers should be headed. August 8, 2008
 Let the (digital) games begin!Tagged as: O.P.E.N., creative, digital millenials, engaging, iCitizen, mobile, networked, new consumer journey, on-demand, personal, retail, social web, technology, trendsPosted by: Dan Shust
Here are my podium picks: Bronze Medal: McDonalds “The Lost Ring” In March 50 bloggers received a mysterious package in the mail. It contained an Olympic poster and a ball of string that, when unraveled, revealed a web address. Thus began “The Lost Ring” an Alternate Reality Game (or ARG) that is currently being played in 7 languages across 100 countries. The players work together to hunt for clues to solve an ancient Olympic mystery. Immersive gameplay leads them to websites, blog posts, wikis, podcasts and even Twitter. 4 million people and counting have visited the launch site. Silver Medal: Lenovo “Voices of the Olympic Games” In an attempt to bring attention to a variety of less mainstream Olympic sports, Lenovo has given laptops and Flip video cameras to 100 athletes. (No other compensation is being provided.) Their only direction was to tell the rest of the world about their Olympic experience. Their blog posts are revealing, touching and sometimes humorous. Mainstream media will blast us with Phelps, LeBron, Kobe and Torres, but Lenovo’s athlete bloggers allow us to partake in the “common” Olympian’s experience. Gold Medal: NBC - Digital Coverage In 2006 NBC streamed one hockey game live form the Turin Winter Olympics. This year the network will stream over 2200 hours of live coverage and 3600 hours of on demand video will ultimately be available. Their custom video player is ground breaking, allowing the user to enjoy such features as closed captioning, expert commentary even for less popular events, integrated trivia, picture-in-picture and a “control room” view in which you can enjoy up to 4 live events simultaneously. NBC’s coverage also includes a robust mobile web site, text messaging, e-mail alerts and mobile video. So, there are my “Digital Olympics” medal winners. Each effort is game changing in its own way, but just imagine if they were all on the same team. When you do, you can almost see the future… |
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