So you enjoy tweeting from the office, but you can get fired for that. Or you’re trying to use Skype to share information with your project team or engage in a virtual conference, while the sysadmins are not really happy with that? Many large companies have found their solutions for that by developing expensive internal communication platforms or paying a lot in licenses to Microsoft or other giants. Now it can all be decided by your willingness to improve the inbound conversation and engage more and more of you workforce into one shared dimension. And the biggest surprise is that it’s coming in the form of Open Source platform from a defence giant – Lockheed Martin. Eureka Streams lets employees to engage into relevant conversations related to work issues or project while allowing them to share data, media and thoughts in real time. Almost like the ill-fated Google Wave, this tool lets multiple users to share real-time information. Unlike the Wave though, it has been tested in the last year and half by those more than 40 000 employees at Lockheed Martin and proved to be highly effective. Visit their website to learn more and make sure your developers download the SDK and play with it. (more…)
26/08/2010
30/07/2010
Microsoft Street Slide is a Better Google Street View
Microsoft Research are not wasting their time trying to develop something that’s already taking the online community by storm. Instead, they are making it better – much better. From what you can see in the short presentation, the Street Slide project definitely looks as a much more improved and intuitive Street View, which fascinated us when first launched by Google. Now, by combining two essentialy overlapping perspectives, it provides a whole new dimension to visual navigation and orientation, as well as a huge new marketing opportunity to countless street-based businesses and digital agencies. Street Slide basically allows you to escape the 360 degree bubble of Street View and get a multi-perspective strip view that gives you an instant snapshot of an entire street – including street numbers, local businesses labels etc. And with the ingenious “multi-slide” system by which the strip is divided you can get back into the 360-bubble view at any specific point on the strip lenght. I hope to see it implemented comercially soon enough.
22/07/2010
Be Part of History in the Making: YouTube Life in a Day Project
Just 2 days remain for you to prepare a short clip of your daily life on camera, no matter where you live on the globe. It would then become a part of the world’s largest user-generated feature film – a documentary that would be shot in a single day by you, me and all the other crazy users of the largest video web around. “Life in a Day” project is a historic experiment, produced by YouTube and the acclaimed hollywood director Ridley Scott. Anyone can contribute to the feature with whatever content they like, as long as it’s passable by the special commission which will be screening the uploaded material. YouTube encourages everyone to be as creative as possible and imposes no limits, as long as the footage is shot in HD, so that it can be watchable on the big screen at the end. For more info check out the Life in a Day Project official channel where the uploads should go and make sure you don’t miss the deadline, which is July 24 all day long.
19/07/2010
Twitter IS the Fastest Growing Social Network: Infographic
With just over 120 million users, Twitter is generating more buzz and more awareness per users compared to all other major social networks combined. That’s the main conclusion looking at this recent infographic by the The Blog Herald. The 140 character network’s awareness factor is 87% compared with just 88% for Facebook which has over 5 times the user base. That’s simply huge. And it’s growing at a rapid factor every week. Although a bit exaggerated, Twitter’s influence on social media and on media in general is an undeniable fact. This is especially true for the US, but evermore so in Europe. Just look at the graphics will you… (more…)
14/07/2010
Old Spice – New Tease, or The Best Social Campaign Ever
Is this the best social media campaign ever? Perhaps it is… No matter how you’ll percieve it, Wieden+Kennedy have done an envious job in creating the most talked-about viral campaign of the past years. It’s based on the ever so popular ads of the past few months that won them the Cannes Grand Prix in advertising. Now Old Spice is giving you personalized video replies to your messages either on Twitter or Facebook. Yes. It is personalized and the handsome half-naked guy is talking directly and solely to you. Now they’ve even added replies to comments on Facebook and YouTube. In the begining of the campaign just a couple of days ago they delivered almost 120 personal replies in 24 hours! Why is this probably the best social-to-viral strategy ever… simple – so far they have replied personally to the accounts of well known bloggers as GuyKawasaki, Gizmodo and even Ashton Kutcher. So when these guys see their personalized messages they will surely comment and retweet and blog about them and that will send the campaign sky-high. Check more of the Old Spice videos on their YouTube account…
04/07/2010
The Next Big Thing
Car manufacturers have been always known as sheer proponents of bulky, interactive, rich-content, shockwave-driven websites that they desperately need in order to explain the message behind their next facelift. Audi is no exception, bearing in mind that it is a part of the VAG Group who spare no money or talent when the time comes to launch a brand new model of the Audi brand or a well forgotten old one from the Volkswagen line. Remember the “new” Golf GTI and the interactive test-drive, where you chose whether to take the driver’s or the passenger’s seat and take the car for a spin at the docks? … and it’s “always the docks”. This is how one of the six episodes of a movie, dedicated to the new Audi A1 is titled. Can you imagine – they’ve even made a MOVIE! The interactive digital campaign for the new A1 launch is righteously called “The Next Big Thing”. And it’s not so much the car itself, which shares the same wheelbase and chassis as the new VW Polo, but the whole marketing effort, which is the true Big Thing. Check for yourselves at the A1 Microsite or Audi’s YouTube Channel, where you can find the movie starring Justin Timberlake and Dania Ramirez. First episode is also here, after the break… (more…)
30/04/2010
How Mobile is Changing Social Media
Another execellent analysis from Flowtown on how mobile is changing the social media landscape. As you see, the number of users who are accessing their social networking accounts from their mobile phones or other portable gadgets is steadily increasing. Overall more than 25% of Facebook users are now posting from the street. The infographic also shows, that the mobile user is as much as twice as active as the one sitting in front of the notebook or desktop screen. The most active mobile users are between 35-54 yro, but that number will soon enough change towards the previous group of over 18, as the teenage world is more and more linked to a pocket device. It’s interesting how these numbers will look like in 3 and 6 months – we bet on interesting results.
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24/04/2010
London Streets as Playfield for a Nike Experimental Campaign
If anyone living in Central London had noticed a sudden increase in the number of people running on the streets yesterday it has nothing to do with the Moon phase or Solar flares. The streets of London became the playfield for an experimental ARG campaign launched by Nike and so far proven to be a huge success. It was all about running and following some virtual instructions. The Grid was spread among 40 postcodes in Central London with the idea of running from phonebox to phonebox and calling a dedicated number to enter a “check-in” pin code. The goal was – Claim the most streets in 24 hours by getting the most points. The more you run, the more you get. The whole thing was broadcast via Facebook and you can also get all the results from the dedicated fanpage. Will there be another campaign like this? – sure there will. There’s hardly something more fun than having an entire city as your gameboard.
26/03/2010
Media Monsters – Addictive Interactive Marketing
Media Monsters is an extremely cool interactive marketing campaign by Mitsubishi Kagaku Media corporation of Japan. It aims to promote the company’s global brand – Verbatim, and although the initial target audience is the domestic Japanese market, the power of social sharing opened it out for the world. And that’s really great because whoever created the ai engine for the online flash competition did an extremely good job. You can choose from hundreds of thousands of combinations among funny looking “monsters” made entirely by Verbatim’s media products – from floppy disks to external HDD drives. They learn and upgrade by fighting other user-created monsters and climb up the ranking that currently follows more than 1.2 million custom build creations. The game is such fun that it quickly turns addictive and there is almost no chance that you ever get to fight the same opponent again. Make sure you check out the Media Monsters (Senshuken) website and think of a tri-letter codename for your media pet.
The State of Facebook – 2010
Time for yet another great statistical information on how Facebook is doing in Q1 2010. Bearing in mind that it’s almost impossible to take a correct snapshot of the state of the social network as it’s as dynamic as a nuclear core, this is a decent attempt at showing the key data of its most recent history. We all know that practically all of Facebook’s history is recent, so this could pretend to be a good review of the largest social web’s “baby years”. Check out the full infographic here… (more…)