Friday, October 16, 2009

Satnav meets SNS

Garmin has recently brought out its new nüvi 1690. The satnav has lane assistance which always keeps you on the right track, photo navigation, ecoRoute fuel saving routes and park position recalls.

But what is really cool is that the device has a built-in mobile phone connection, allowing it to connect to a whole range of communication services like those of the TomTom LIVE range. Because of this technology, Garmin provides Instant Traffic information, Speed Camera alerts, Google Local Search and Telephone Directory, weather forecasts and Ciao! Friend Finder (Garmin’s Social Networking application which also features on the nuviphone range).

According to Garmin, Ciao! is a patentpending social network application that can link multiple networks onto one application. Caught in traffic and already late for an appointment? Put it on Twitter. Cruising around in your vacation? Immediately post your photo's on Facebook feeds via your satnav device.

On its site, Garmin says: "Imagine you’re out and about and you’re hungry. You really don’t want to eat alone. With one click in Ciao!, you can see the location of your friends who are near your location! Then you can use your phone to call, text or email them with the location of a restaurant and see if they would like to join you."

Sources: Gadgeteer (October, 14 2009), Garmin (October, 16 2009)

Bloomberg buys BusinessWeek

In other, more general communication news: media corporation Bloomberg - founded by New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg - recently bought BusinessWeek. This way Bloomberg, active as a financial software developer, press agency and data provider, enhances its grip on its main market and opens up to a broader public.

BusinessWeek is read world wide by 4.7 million readers and was previously held by McGraw-Hill. With a drop of 32 percent of its advertising revenues, the magazine was put up for sale. Bloomberg will try to create synergies between its existing media channels and the business magazine.

Bloomberg News, the company's news show on Bloomberg television and on its website, alone employs 2,000 staff in 125 bureaus around the world. It provides information to approximately 350 newspapers and magazines worldwide, including The Economist, The New York Times and USA Today.

Sources: De Tijd (October, 10 2009), Wikipedia (October, 16 2009)

Monday, October 12, 2009

The Future of Legal Online Music

Recently the Dutch copyrights organization Buma/Stemra (equivalent for the Belgian SABAM) announced that it will start charging websites that offer YouTube movies. So not only YouTube itself, but also sites that have embedded music clips (blogs, for example) will be fought openly.

And yet this is not the first time that the problematic nature of online music has become the talk of the town. Music downloading and music streaming have come into collision with the judicial system that much, that it makes one wonder if they still have a bright future in store.

In any case, these two smart numbers have succeeded in streaming legal music: both We7 and Spotify enable users to listen to music for free. How did they manage to do this? With the occasional ad! In the beginning of each song adverts can be attached dynamically, and the revenue generated from these ads goes directly to artists, labels and other right owners.

If legal online music has a future, this is probably it. Besides, it's definitely a smart way of digital advertising in general.


Sources:
- http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/06/technology/tommy_lee_motley_crue.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009100711
- http://www.we7.com
- http://standaard.typepad.com/eland/

Nike goes web2.0 with Nike+

Nike is entering the world of web2.0. On Nike+ the sports shoes manufacturer tries to stimulate people to join their running competition The day the world runs held Octobre, 24. Actually, the event is a brilliant undercover promotion campaign for the brand's Nike+-chip. The device, inserted into your shoe, communicates with you Ipod. Registering different statistics like running speed, distance and burnt calories and on top of that giving direct feedback via the headset, the Ipod backs up the info and lateron syncs it with the Nike+-website. A great way to compare your own running achievements with the rest of the world!
Later more on this subject.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

What will the future bring?

Today, social networks are omnipresent in the lifes of youngsters. Due to the ever-changing nature of the internet, there is more than one future possible for social networks. Here are some possibilities.

A first scenario is an explosion of small niche networks, centered around common interests or hobbies (for example Couchsurfing.com, Hobbything.com). Question is whether these networks will complement or threaten the bigger ones? Or what about ‘silent networks’: back to basics. Young people want to regain control over the ever-expanding possibilities of social networks. Another scenario could be that the line between the offline and online world would get thinner. For example: with the use of satnav technology in smartphones it is possible to know where you are at each moment of the day. So when you walk into a bookshop, you could get a message saying that tomorrow is your girlfriend’s birthday and she really wants the new book by Dimitri Verhulst.

More details on these and other future scenarios can be found in the article by Trendwolves in Pub magazine 11.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Put your best face forward on Facebook!

Cosmetics brand Estée Lauder has proven to know its modern consumer quite well. It is offering free makeovers and professional photo shoots in department-stores across the United States’ coastline to create shots women can use as profile pictures for their online profiles. The advertising campaign kicks off next Friday at Bloomingdale’s in New York. Quite unconventional for the prestigious cosmetics industry is the fact that no purchase is required for these gifts. Off course, the brand hopes to receive long-lasting presence on social network sites like Facebook since the profile pictures will include the Estée Lauder logo in the background. The strategy proves to be smart in more than one way. Younger women love this kind of opportunity to experiment with high quality make up and a promotion like this one helps the brand settle in with a younger audience. At the same time however, it also gives the prototypical middle-aged consumer the incentive to be more engaged in the social media and to maybe set up an internet profile herself. It seems to me that the connection with social media can be very valuable to the cosmetics industry, which must have been hit hard by the recession, and that it can give their business a significant boost.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Banner Ban! Sneaky Success!

Mastering the act of internet marketing can help you to achieve success and to survive competition. Big banners can be too intrusive for people and the outcome will not be positive. Creating entertaining ads are a solution, but they cost a lot of money. That's why writing articles or blogging about a product or service is a successful method to promote your product. A lot of people surf the internet for information. Writing strong, eye-catching articles that mention the excellent quality of your product or service will help to create traffic to your website and make people familiar with your product or service.

The click thru thruth

The amount of money that brands are willing to pay for online advertising is huge, but it is not always a key to success. As a matter of fact, many ads on websites suffer from a low click thru rate. The reason might be that people are not in the right mindframe. For instance, they aren't looking for information about certain things when they are using social networks. But this doesn't mean they can't do anything about it. Eventually, Facebook can use its news feeds to create new and repeated traffic to a lot of websites. If this creates a large volume of e-traffic, Facebook will make a lot of profit selling increased distribution. The biggest challenge will be to preserve the quality of the user expercience. At that point, Facebook will become more powerful than 'google', because Facebook is situated between people and their friends.

Advertise your online advertising business

E-marketing allows truly personalized marketing. A business can create a strategy to deliver the right message to the right person. So the online advertising will keep on booming. That's why it is important for an online advertising business to have a strong brand that advertisers want to be associated with. Facebook did a great PR-job, by highlighting the impact that facebook makes on people's lifes. It is often mentioned how many users login every day. This way Facebook has become a very attractive medium for brands.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

iPhone votes Earth


Holler Sydney, a digital agency in Australia, has created an iPhone application to support Earth Hour’s Vote Earth campaign. In the lead up to the UN Climate Summit held in Copenhagen this December, where world leaders will gather to decide upon the dealings with climate change, iPhone users around the world can download the application for free and cast their vote for Earth. A very smart way of advertising environmental concern if you ask me: Through an interactive dynamo voters are able to create enough energy to send their vote to Denmark. They can spread the word to friends via Twitter, Facebook or MySpace among others and join millions of other participators as they watch their votes travel thousands of miles across the world on a rotating globe in real-time. Communicating climate awareness to such a huge amount of people is an enormously challenging task. By creating a highly interactive and visually interesting app a global campaign like this one can definitely be delivered in a successful way.

Sources: http://www.dynamicbusiness.com/articles/articles-news/sydney-agency-launches-first-climate-change-iphone-app4448.html
http://www.earthhour.org/
http://www.adverblog.com/

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Slim Facebook

Felt relieved too when Facebook introduced that ‘Ignore all’ button in the ‘Request section’? Not interested in 5 different kinds of ‘birthday reminders’ which fundamentally all do the same thing? ‘Geintse kádookes’ (Ghent gifts) are the last thing in the world that can spark your attention? Believe me, you are not alone out there! Recently I hear a lot of people complaining about the futile applications and connect-services distracting people from what they use Facebook for: as a supplement to other interactive communication media like e-mail and their cell phone.

Nevertheless – what is actually rather interesting – these curmudgeons, although complaining about Facebook, keep using it. Maybe an indication that Zuckerberg’s project is here to stay? As a matter of fact, these people should not even have to abandon Facebook anyway!

Recently Facebook Lite was developed. Introduced this summer in the United States and India, the stripped Facebook version is now also available in Belgium. When entering lite.facebook.com the site is introduced as a “faster, simpler way to keep in touch with your friends” and that’s just what it is. In that way it much resembles Twitter with the emphasis on short notifications about what users are doing or have done recently – a trend which has grown stronger and stronger with every new Facebook update.

Sources: lite.facebook.com, October, 3 2009, De Tijd's Tzine, October, 3 2009