Few days ago Wired posted an article about the newest approach from Adidas on Augmented Reality as part of a campaign to be launched in February. Adidas shoes will come with codes in the tongue that allow you to hold it up to a web cam and launch a 3D world right in the palm of your hands.
Adidas plans to introduce three games into the virtual neighborhood. The sneakers will then serve not only as the key to get in, but also act as the controller for the games.
Augmented Reality has been said to be one of the trends for this year, but in fact it is not something new. Four years ago, Latin American agencies such as Iconolab, were already working with that technology for digital marketing campaigns.
Today, almost every company trying to increase its online presence wants to be part of the conversation. Most of them ask their agencies to develop strategies to “use” social media as part of their online marketing campaigns. Starting from here, the approach is wrong. As said previously, companies must not try to join the conversation, they must CREATE the conversation; and using social media must not be considered as part of the advertising activities. Until you don’t get that, you won’t be successful with social media.
It is clear that you, as a Marketing head of a company, might not necessarily know all about the Social Media stuff, and thus want hire a Social Media Expert to do the job. Jason has just published at MarketingHackz his selection of the 5 things your social media expert should know:
How to pitch bloggers: “Pitching bloggers requires more of a relationship than anything else”
How to monitor social media campaigns: “Monitoring social media campaigns isn’t like loading up Google Analytics”
Strong personal profiles: “If your expert doesn’t have a strong presence online, they aren’t going to get the job done for you either”
….
Digital Inspiration posted about a set of 900+ interviews that Michael Stelzner did to Internet Marketers to find out how marketers are using social media to grow their businesses. On the report, he also found the top 10 social media questions marketers want answered, including what social media tools are most popular, how they are using social media, what are the benefits of using social media, etc.
The results are interesting. Regarding the most popular social media tools: Twitter, Blogs and LinkedIn and Facebook are the favorites.
As for the benefits of using social media, marketers answered the following:
If you are planning to jump into the social media, you might want to take a look at the full report. Here.
Microsoft just launched this video to promote the new version of Internet Explorer. Instead of talking directly about the product, they made a funny video with celebrities talking about the Internet history. As Faris says, “The cool thing about being this huge gray corporation is that every time you don’t act like it, it’s awesome.”
Skittles has recently redesigned its webpage and btw amazed the whole online marketing industry with the new Skittles homepage, which is based entirely on content published on Social Media.
Yes, if you want to know more about the products, within the Skittles website you are sent to a Wikipedia article, if you want to see photos, then you are directed to a Flickr profile.
What about friends? Facebook. Videos? YouTube. And chatting? Twitter.
You’ve got to check it out to understand the concept. It is also good to read the interesting analysis from ViralBlog.
The Inspiration Room has published a great collection of blogs focused on advertising and marketing around the world and sorted by country/region. Check it out.
I just saw an interesting diagram posted by Todd Defren at PR-squared that shows the evolution of advertising vs. public relations in this Social Media era.
“As you can see, PR is becoming increasingly interpersonal: there is a daily flow of interaction, responsiveness and adaptation going on amongst PR people and their ever-expanding publics. [...] Meanwhile, the advertising folks are coming to embrace more and more user-generated content, but as PAID media (versus EARNED media).
Advertising’s intrinsic, long-term value to the corporate brand is declining in the Social Media era. And the PR industry is the happy beneficiary.”
The diagram is really insightful and yes, I agree with Todd, but the counterpart of this is that nowadays in Latin America (for example), there are no agencies that can advice corporations on a complete Digital PR strategy.
Of course, you will find the traditional PR agencies that will offer some kind of “exercises” on the digital world, like including the posting of a video on YouTube or creating a “fan group” or a profile of your product at Facebook. On the other hand you will find also Online Marketing agencies that will offer the inclusion of “social” into the online marketing campaign… all good ideas but, all of those are just tactics…what about the REAL strategy?
Companies must first be clear on what they want to achieve when they are going online, nevertheless if the effort is conducted by marketing or PR, and this is a great opportunity for agencies to make interesting proposals. Companies need answers to questions like: What is the best approach FOR US to go online?, Are we prepared to make a conversation?, Do we really want to make a conversation?, What we need?, How is the roadmap-to-digitalPR or digitalMKT traced?
All of those tough, but really necessary questions to be answered prior to jumping online… What do you think?
Stumbling around the Internet I found “The New Math“, a great work by Craig Damrauer. Check it out. BTW, Stumbleupon is not only a great way to discover new & interesting stuff, but also to promote your website.
It is impressive how good Absolut maintains absolut.com with attractive and innovative content. Following the “In an Absolut World” campaign and doing more that just copy-pasting the mass media versions to the online world as some other brands might be doing, Absolut has launched a site in which the visions of artists, writers and actors from around the world have been collected and arranged in an interesting interface that, according to Martina, is powered by Flash and Papervision 3D.
In this website the visions of twelve selected persons are shown but it also lets the users to submit their own vision. For more visit absolut.com
One of the leading car rental companies in Europe, Sixt, have found ways to be remarkable when they experimented with a new way to make their Google Adwords ads stand out from the crowd. As Coolz0r said, pretty clever.
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