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Monday 30 July 2012

Celebrating sport not just Olympians

The Olympics are in full flow here in London, my train this morning was full of excited spectators, and the sun's still shining. The opening ceremony was by all accounts spectacular,  and worthy of it's hefty budget, so I'll be catching up on that at some point soon having been out the country on Friday. I've enjoyed watching Her Majesty the Queen & James Bond this morning.

But for all the hype, the buzz statistics about more tweets during the opening ceremony than for the entire Beijing Olympics, the medals tables, the marketing messages, so far this piece from non-sponsor Nike is the piece that's touched me most. Nice observation & sentiment, along the lines of sponsor P&G's "Thank you Mum/Mom" work, it's well executed, embracing and makes you feel good.  Video content alchemy. Watch:



Now admire this piece that sees Nike taking a different tack, leveraging technology to deliver innovation & participation. Good stuff.

Wednesday 25 July 2012

Samsung : Empowering people to do what they want to do

Happiness came to my inbox two days ago. This is a rare thing.

Touchnote, possibly one of my favourite favourite apps (which for the uninformed means I can send postcards all over the world from photos I take on my phone (and / or upload from desktop, not that I use that function much)) has partnered with Olympic sponsor  & leading smartphone manufacturer Samsung.  They sent me an email to tell me that thanks to Samsung, I can "share great moments" free, i.e send postcards all over the world. At least until the end of August at any rate. 

The trade off - well I have to allow a little Samsung / Olympics Sponsor branding on the cards I send & my pictures get shared in their gallery.That's a value exchange I can live with.  
This is one of the nicest examples I've seen recently of a brand understanding that they can add value and bask in a halo of positive brand sentiment from helping people do what they want to do anyway rather than trying to shoehorn people into doing what the brand wants them to do.  

Along the way they are also cleverly "earning media"  - not only do I get a Samsung related Olympic sponsor message going through the postcard sending process, chances are I'm using an image I took on my phone so I'm linking device to brand which may influence favourability for future decisions, and, the recipients of my cards (and I can send as many as I like - 2 so far) also get exposed to the brand message. 

Super smart. Well done chaps. I wish more brands could recognise the benefit of partnership and generosity of action and spirit rather than contriving awkward interruptive experiences that real consumers see little benefit in participating in or interacting with. 


Tuesday 24 July 2012

How socially active are you?

My lovely buddies over at Global Web Index have recently shared this nifty Slideshare deck looking at social behaviours - who's active where and what are they up to - very pertinent in a world where there is no shortage of platforms to choose from, and where clients too often default to Facebook without really thinking about what the real barriers they want social engagement to help them to overcome, where the communities they want to engage with play and what content they need to serve them.  Enjoy.




Then as a variant on the socially active theme, I struck social listening gold this morning (well bronze at least): I found a tool that appears at least to be a useful start point (wearing my training hat) to get people to think about how language rather than geographical borders define the word on the web.  I seem to have stood on that particular soap box rather a lot on the last month for one reason or another.

Tweeting Earth is a data visualisation of who is tweeting about the topic you specified where across the globe... here's one I did for the Olympics early this morning, bearing in mind I'm in London and as host city and with the Games starting this weekend, there's lots of marketing activity live, travel chaos warnings rife etc...




Then here's another taken just now (late afternoon UK time now, and the US is well and truly awake east to west), predictably it looks rather different to when I found the tool this morning given a broader perspective on interest around the Olympics elsewhere. For me, the key indicators are the number of tweets and the content angle if you look closely (Click to enlarge the images). 




I can't find any technical details so I presume it's just an API scraper at a given moment but nonetheless potentially interesting as a discussion igniter around listening. Have a play.



Tuesday 10 July 2012

Clever new toys as technology integrates more and more

It's been far too long since I've written a blog post.  Blame workload, holidays, too much crammed in (she says guiltily having read this very interesting article from the NY Times on "Busyness" ), and perhaps just a tad of digital jaded-ness.  2 weeks entirely disconnected from the digital world might just have cured me of that, even if my friends didn't believe I could do it!

So.. here's one of the first things that's tickled my digital fancy now that I'm back and reconnected...

Pebble: An ePaper watch that can be customised in both design and function to deliver not just the time but against a range of other tasks via connectivity with your phone. Fun and functional, not extortionate, and fuels my "turn data into useful things I can readily understand" soap box of the moment.  Watch: (forgive the pun)