It’s in the platform.

Tim O’Reilly hosted a one-hour webcast that took an in-depth look at Gov 2.0 — Topics included government efficiency and transparency, government as a platform, and how technologists can play key roles in this important transformation.
 
 
You can read Tim’s thoughts on open government at: O’Reilly Labs

Did you know 4.0

Facts and statistics focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology.

For more information, please visit:
mediaconvergence.economist.com
shifthappens.wikispaces.com
 
 
Content: The Economist / Xplane / Karl Fisch / Scott McLeod / Laura Bestler

Adam Broitman, partner and ringleader of the New York based agency Circ.us, has been working on some groundbreaking AR campaigns.

If you haven’t yet heard of augmented reality, or its applications in marketing, it’s time to start working on some serious mind-expansion. AR may be brand new cutting edge technology, but it’s already started creeping into marketing campaigns from organizations ranging from GE to Esquire magazine, even the U.S. Postal Service.

What’s augmented reality, and how does it apply to marketing?

The way augmented reality is being used today is not a proper definition of what it’s going to be. It’s overlaying digital information on a live digital feed. So in a football game you’d see the first down line on a football field when the players are playing. That’s not actually there. They’re overlaying information on a live video feed to augment the experience.

Other example of that are war movies when you see additional information that helps them navigate the world, for example. It’s overlaying of data on top of the real world.

Let’s talk actual marketing applications.

The stage that we’re in right now is what my business partner refers to as through-the-looking-glass. You’re seeing the GE example. If you look ecomagination it was done about a year ago. That kind of got everyone buzzing. It wasn’t the first implementation, but it was the first example the mainstream saw. You held up a marker and out came this landscape. It looked like a real landscape, very 3D, very whiz-bang.

There were a number of examples after that. Papa John’s did an augmentation on a pizza box. My agency looked at that and asked, “Well, how do we take this tech and do something that you couldn’t just do on-screen? What if that piece of paper was the input device for a game, and as you moved the paper around you moved the puzzle piece around, with gravity, you could program gravity into it.”

So it became a game and was a great success for A+E Network. For the TV-series ‘The Five Lives of Criss Angel’ you were able to move this thing around and have it look like you were doing it with your hand.

Since then everyone started doing it. Always, the tampon company, did it. That’s when you know something like this is going mainstream – hold the marker up and see something happen! We did something for Carl Jr. When you held the marker up Kim Kardashian did something – we took a video feed and turned it into augmented reality. It is fun, it’s engaging, but I like to ask, what does this mean? These forms are not going to last.

There’s no way people will be doing this into next year. The novelty will wear off. Around mid last year mobile augmented reality began gaining traction. The adoption of Android and increasing adoption of its open source architecture allows you to program within the environment. Apple doesn’t give you deep enough access.

So a couple of companies came out, one is Layar. Essentially what they did was create an augmented reality browser whereby you’d hold up your phone, it would take the coordinates of where you are, and you could look around and point it on various homes or a specific building and get an overlay: is this on the market? How much is it going for? And all kinds of other information about that market.

In five years we’ll look back and we’ll laugh that we used to type words into Google. Cut out the steps. If all you have to do is hold your camera up and you get all the info you need, why wouldn’t you do that? People are still talking about the buzz and the cool factor. What this really means is we’re moving toward a new model.

QR codes are simply a stepping stone to an augmented reality future. But we seem to skip steps. If augmented reality technology takes off, why do you need a QR code?

It’s not augmented reality, but Tesco has a wine app in which they’ve built a database. You still need to take a picture of a bottle of wine, send it, and have it return the information because it recognizes hat image. Imagine this is information overlaid on a live video stream, so take out the steps of a picture and a server call and cut right to the chase: this is what it is, how much it costs, where to get it, etc. It’s pretty profound when you think about it.

People say it seems like a gimmick. It’s not a gimmick. And so what if it is? Since when was it wrong to have some gimmicks in marketing? Rich media banner ads – what were they?

In the future, what are the real possibilities for marketers with augmented reality?

The through-the-looking-glass phase is still not done. There are also brand utility phase applications. Say you make eyeglasses and you’re selling them online. Wouldn’t it help if you could see yourself in those eyeglasses? Rather than taking a picture of yourself and uploading it, you could just do an overlay on a webcam image.

Ditto makeup, hair color, fashion. We’ve seen a lot of apps that do this, but nothing live. They’ve always been much more cumbersome.

That will be the coup here, the ability to make it simple. We’ve seen a lot of cool technology but consumer adoption is so low because no one wants to do the work to get it done. We’re trying to make it real simple. There’s an implicit simplicity in this technology if I say all you have to do is buy this lipstick or this hat is look into your webcam. We’re not there yet, but a year from now the conversion rates online will go up tremendously.

I don’t shop for clothing online now. With this you won’t know how things fit, but you’ll know how they look.

What other applications do you see this working in?

Fashion and beauty. Entertainment and gaming are a no-brainer. The ability to make offline or traditional media extendable, like Esquire’s efforts. Ultimately I don’t think it’s different from saying, “go to the website,” though I applaud them for the effort. It does have a certain appeal that would work for children and learning – they can hold a book up to the webcam and get a reveal.

Mobile and local are really where it will become important. When you think about the information Google already has on the world, and Google maps, Google earth, these are getting exponentially and further tagged with deeper information.

Imagine putting on a pair of glasses as you walk down the street and getting information from the world as you move through it. It’s almost like SEO for the whole world.

It’s just like search when, if there’s an instance where they want to buy something it there, it will be that way with augmented reality. It’s the hand raises, and you have to be there.

Five years from now, this is what will be the next generation of search engines.

What are the practical steps for getting started?

Learning at its core what augmented reality is. If you’re looking to building buzz there are always creative ways to do cool things. We’re working on a project now I can’t tell you too much about, but imagine you’re going car shopping and you were able to put on glasses that would take you on a virtual tour, kind of exploding the engine or enabling you to look at various elements. It would help sell the car and make the selling more interesting.

BMW did a digital overlay of an engine to help an engineer when he’s working on an engine that says things like remove screws here. For marketers there’s an utility in being able to add information to the sales process. I don’t have the answers for every vertical yet. In entertainment there are story telling elements.

For CPG it’s a little harder. I have yet to pick up the exact application for holding your phone up to a box of Cheerios. Beyond the wow factor, where is the utility? I challenge other marketers to think about this. Creativity is still at play, but so is familiarizing yourself with the toolkits and what they can and cannot do.

We’ve done some of it and we’re going to be doing a lot more. What can and cannot do. The difference between marker and markerless augmented reality is important. The next project we’re working on will not require a marker. You need a huge payoff to get somebody to print out a sheet and hold it up to a webcam.

So those are a number of example of things marketers should be thinking of today. Every marketer should have an information in everything strategy.

All forward thinking marketers should be preparing to think about how their product can be represented anywhere. Think about the product in the outernet, if you will.

People can overlay digital graffiti on the real world. Things like that will become a reality.

Back to consumer packaged goods for a moment. Since you were saying there aren’t good AR solutions out there now, what did Always do with tampons, anyway?

All they really did was you held up the piece of paper and the commercial came up. It was a 3D banner. Adidas just came up with a campaign where the shoes were augmented and this amazing world came out of your shoes. The Interactive Advertising Bureau hasn’t made standards of what you’re allowed to do with this.

The U.S. Postal Service created a campaign in which what you did was hold up the marker and you can get different size boxes so you know how big that box is relative to your person. It was at least a clever application.

Who are the players in the space?

Aside from the creative shops there are software companies. Total Immersion and Metaio. Those are the companies that are leading the charge in terms of software.

Everyone right now is talking about the real-time web, but this is the real-time information layer on top of the world.

 
 
Originally posted by Econsultancy, Al Haqq Advisory edit.

Socialnomics

Video by Erik Qualman showcases several social media ROI examples along with other effective social media strategies.
 
 
Via: Socialnomics

Socialnomics

Amy Martin from Digital Royalty shares their propriety method and formula for measuring a brand’s online Return on Influence (the new ROI).
 
 
See case studies on their site: Digital Royalty

100 things to watch in 2010

10 trends for 2010 in less than 2 minutes

 
 
Presentation: Ann Mack, director of trendspotting at JWT Intelligence

1/7 What is a brand? Definitions and taxonomies

2/7 How brands are build? Managing brand meanings

3/7 Luxury brand marketing keynote

4/7 – Understanding brand architechture

5/7 – Developing brand strategy 1.

6/7 – Developing brand strategy 2.

7/7 – Managing global brands

 
Dicussion threads and additional notes
 

Customer data initiatives are a top priority in 2010

Almost every company would like to extract more value from marketing expenditures. Research has consistently shown that personalised eMail campaigns lead to 2-3 times higher conversion rates than mass eMails.

But many companies struggle with personalisation because of a lack of data integration and bad data hygiene practices. If marketers can’t trust customer data, how can they use it for more relevant, personalized, timely interactions that drive revenue?
 
According to research study, “Customer Analytics: Leveraging Customer Data to Fulfill the One-to-One Marketing Imperative,” published by Aberdeen Group, the top two challenges with customer data include an inability to segment and target customers through customer data (50 %) and a lack of trust in customer data (34 %).
 

“Best-in-class companies are customer data champions demonstrating a strong organisation-wide culture that values customer data management and actively uses customer data to build more meaningful customer experiences.”

“Customer data is stifling marketing efforts across the world. Disparate data, lack of data hygiene practices, and a lack of resources to support customer data have left laggards and industry average companies with inferior performance in return on marketing investments.”

Ian Michiels, research director for Aberdeen’s Marketing Automation research practice

 
The findings represent a call to action for all marketers to start taking an active role in managing customer data. The study highlights customer database processes and procedures from 155 organisations to identify how top-performing organisations build trust in customer data and use this information to achieve superior performance in marketing.
 
 

Signs of things to come – According to Universal McCann study one out of every seven minutes of media consumption in U.S. takes place via mobile devices.

The study found that 80 % of smart-phone users are satisfied with the quality of the internet on their mobile devices. 19 million mobile Web users in the U.S. access the internet on a weekly basis, with mobile usage expected to grow by 60 % over the next two years.
 
According to the respondents:

95 % said they used mobile media to fill downtime
82 % said they use it at work
81 % while shopping
80 % at home
65 % while commuting to their jobs
 
The study concludes that those activities create an opportunity for marketers to transition with consumers as they move from activity to activity throughout the day.

73 % of respondents reported searching for maps and directions
55 % said they participated in social networking or sought out restaurant and movie listings or reviews
44 % reported seeking national news and information
55 % of mobile users follow brands across multiple media
56 % said they have been driven to mobile from other media
42 % said they have been driven from mobile to other media
 

“Mobile is a separate channel” that allows marketers to talk to consumers wherever they go.
Graeme Hutton, director of consumer insights at Universal McCann

 
And he notes that mobile users are surprisingly accepting of advertising, saying that:

38 % of respondents said they had taken action based on mobile ads
30 % said mobile ads had led them to share information
22 % said mobile ads had influenced a purchase decision
 
The study shows that 27 % of the respondents said that they were “completely focused” when using mobile, slightly lower than the 33 % who reported being completely focused when surfing the web on computers, but higher than TV, newspapers and magazines (all less than 20 %) and radio (6 %).
 

Intranets are becoming a higher priority for organizations. Intranet teams are growing in size, and the best of them are embracing new trends such as mobile accessibility and social networking.

These are some of the findings from Jakob Nielsen’s annual report on the top intranets for 2010. Companies that made the list this year include General Electric, Trend Micro Devices and Walmart. Nielsen is recognized as one of the world’s foremost usability experts. His findings appear solid, though it is apparent that intranet development is just on the verge of becoming a central communication environment for enterprise collaboration.

This year, Nielsen says, top companies on the list had a median size of about 6,300 employees, which continues a year-to-year trend toward smaller businesses. He attributes it to the increase in availability of small-company-friendly intranet technology.

In addition, intranet teams are growing, up to 14 people, 27 % higher than the average team size in 2006. This is not a big surprise.

The need to develop the best possible internal communications environments now cuts across multiple platforms, ranging from the web to mobile devices.

More resources are required to keep these platforms synced and accessible to the employees in the organization.
 

Mobile intranet sites

The best intranets had a separate mobile site for their employees. Of the companies polled, only 30 % actually had a dedicated mobile site. Expect this to change in the year ahead. People are still getting to know how to use smart phones. It’s still rare for companies to launch application environments for users, but at least one company did: an iPhone web app. Soon, though, users will expect to have access “anytime, anywhere,” to their organization’s network.
 

Social features

The social web is finding its way into intranets. Nielsen cites two trends:

• Social features for employees as individuals

• Workgroup support and other features that encourage work-related connections

He cites Walmart for its discussion and profile pages and Trend Micro’s TrendSpace, which includes the capability for employees to create their own content. Trend Micro goes as far as offering an elaborate system of reward points that accrue to employees when they contribute to the intranet’s community features.

It’s noteworthy that social features are still just emerging in intranet environments, especially with the advent of enterprise collaboration services. Companies still have the chance to be recognized as innovators in this space, especially if they implement real-time update capabilities and mashup environments.
 

Intranet design is maturing

Overall, Nielsen comes to the conclusion that intranet design is maturing. In many respects, the Intranet has come of age. In the year ahead, intranets will change even more. Mobile usability and social networking features will continue to evolve, especially as teams begin to experiment with the wide variety of enterprise collaboration services now available.
 
 
Read more:

10 Best Intranets of 2010

Intranet design is maturing and reaping the rewards of continuous quality improvement for traditional features, while embracing new trends like mobile access, emergency preparedness, and user/employee-contributed content.

Jacob Nielsen’s Alertbox