Participatory Media Best Practices

Arguably one of our favourite agency resources, Contagious Magazine offers a best practice benchmark for strategy and marketing, with guest articles with notables like Martin Lindstrom and a wealth of innovative case studies.  Contagious have an uncanny knack of effectively articulating those things we're trying to get our head around. To that end,if you've not seen these they're excellent overviews on the state of the digital nation.


Branded Utility

Branded utility is part of a redefinition of advertising. It is about the move away from interruptive 'push' models towards more meaningful ways of connecting. As people become immune to ad clutter or tune out the noise, brands have to work harder than ever for their time and attention. Branded utility offers one way for advertisers to earn a place at the centre of people's lives. This exert looks at BU activity across the spectrum, including real world case studies, as well as the union of offline and online products and the phenomenal growth of widgets. It highlights the brands that are leading the way, alliances being forged and agencies that are making it their mantra. It guides you through the potential and the pitfalls of this new approach to marketing.   View Overview


Retail Trends - 2011

As social media proliferate and smartphones become mainstream, how are retailers staying relevant across all touchpoints? Which retail businesses are flourishing in this new landscape?  From high street brands and multi-channel retailers to small local boutiques and new tech start-ups, in-store technology, democratic consumerism, developments in social and mobile commerce, and the resurgence of retailing with a conscience are changing retail.  Retail Trends

Brand Communities

The relationship between brands and communities is becoming ever more complex. Both online and off, on social networks and elsewhere, marketers the world over are attempting to engage with existing communities, or encourage the development of new ones. But the path to community engagement is strewn with tough decisions - a presence on an existing social network or your own specialised hub? Organised offline activity or a global network of fans brought together through the power of a 'Like' button?  Brand Communities.

Entertainment Marketing 

The explosion of digital channels has left movie studios, TV networks and producers, publishing houses and games developers gasping to keep up with the pace of change. Now we have more platforms, more consoles, more hobbies, more means of communication, and much, much more content. The most successful entertainment marketing is that which embraces fluidity, in the content itself, in the way it is distributed, and in the way it is promoted. Entertainment Marketing.


Mobile

In recessionary times, having access to a new channel of highly targeted, interactive content that has the capacity to reside on the one device that no one leaves home without makes it easy to see why so many brands have rushed into the mobile apps space. But which ones have been the most successful? What are the opportunities? How can brands stand out amidst the din? Apps are changing mobile usage and consumer behaviour. Mobile Apps Overview.


Goodvertising 

People and organisations are reordering their priorities and causing global change across a range of interconnected spaces from honesty and fair employment to communal, social and environmental responsibility. The marketing community is helping drive this ethical movement and Goodvertising is an umbrella term that Contagious is using for the role advertisers are playing in the return of ethical marketing and business practice. Goodvertising overview.

♔ The Goodbuzz 'Six-Step' Process Model

Certainly every client and engagement is unique, however, having a proven process ensures your initiatives are on track and on budget. The following is the evolving articulation of our Goodbuzz process (and how we consistently get to the heart of the matter to ensure our clients business goals are met).

First, we listen to you. Successful engagements always involve clear communication and a deep understanding of your business. To get to the heart of how real-life users interact with your products and websites, our assessment clarifies your competitive space and your customers, paying special attention to what they say, what they do and where they click. This clarification phase involves, but is not limited to, stakeholder and customer interviews, digital benchmarking, usability (UX) assessment, user-flow modeling, and a competitive audit.

Goodbuzz understand today’s business engagement has multiple stakeholders and goals. As our Discovery phase ensures a clear understanding of your organizational needs, this Strategy + Planning phase develops a framework or roadmap to meet them. We'll carefully study your technical and content constraints, and help you rank everything into an actionable roadmap that can drive the design process. This phase involves, but is not limited to, goal mapping (business and user), Vision, Content Brief, and Roadmap development.


After articulating a clear, concise understanding of the goals, constraints, challenges and opportunities for your brand – this is really where the fun comes in (and the magic happens). This is where we look at harnessing creativity and technology to disrupt - while amplifying and differentiating your brand.  This is also where we introduce our Goodbuzz Scorecard; which has proven a worthwhile tool in ensuring we focus on optimizing any/all activities and getting the highest ROI.   

Modern web platforms resemble complex software products, and require painstaking definition before any development to ensure efficiency. We can work for or with your team depending on your level of technical expertise and resources. In all cases, detailed designs and specifications will be provided whether client- and server-side development, e-commerce, content management systems, or legacy CRM. This phase involves, but is not limited to, user-workflows, conceptual design, Information Architecture, User Experience (UX) Design, Interaction Design and Prototyping.

Our specialists develop your platform following the Semantic Web’s best practices and thorough user testing, quality assurance and reviews are conducted to ensure seamless engagement is optimized across multiple platforms. This phase involves, but is not limited to, style guides, system requirements, performance requirements, and quality assurance.

Whether all at once or phased, our detailed management and optimization process ensures your most valuable assets are available when you go-live and a roadmap is in place to meet your ongoing needs. We also guide that growth, by continuously evaluating, refining and evolving the effectiveness of designs to ensure highest return on investment.


The results?  See for yourself.  Check out our Rickie Fowler (PGA) Case Study. What can we do for your brand? 

♔ Google Goggles App Identifies Virtually Anything

Have you seen Google Goggles yet?  Albeit still a bit of a novelty, it’s a quantum leap in web search and collective intelligence that allows users to scan any object or place (without the stickybit). 

Google Goggles is a downloadable image recognition application created by Google Inc. Currently, it is used for searches based on pictures taken by handheld devices. For example taking a picture of a famous landmark would search for information about it, or taking a picture of a product's barcode will search for information on the product.

Google already uses artificial intelligence to interpret cryptic human queries, so a natural step to extend to interpreting cryptic images.   As you’d imagine, it works best on books, landmarks, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, barcodes, or text. Typically static elements that don’t change.  It can also recognize up to three items at a time and any item you scan automatically linked to associated content. As an example we scanned a Red Strip Beer Can and voila.

The program proposed will be capable of identifying virtually anything. Currently the system is able to identify various labels or landmarks, allowing the user to learn about such items without needing a text-based search. The system can identify barcodes that allow users to search for similar products and prices, as well as save codes for future reference, similar to the failed CueCat of the late '90s, but with more functionality. The system will also recognize printed text and using Optical character recognition (OCR) produce a text snippet, and in some cases even translate the snippet into another language.

Google’s already mapped the streets and stars - so what’s next? They’re currently working to make the system capable of recognizing different plants and leaves, which aids not only the curious person, but also botanists and environmentalists searching for invading or rare plants. Google also plans to turn the app into a full-blown API set that will allow developers to create a number of branded visual search based applications for mobile devices including Augmented Reality (AR).  The wonders never cease - check out the video below.

Have you seen a brand use Google Goggles in a relevant, contextual way that amplifies the brand experience?  If so we’d love to hear about them.  Please send any/all examples to info@goodbuzz.ca

♔ SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE CHANGING ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY - TED (2010)

From Evan Williams to Seth Godin - here are just a few recent and exceptional talks from TED in 2010, with a specific focus on social media and the changing role of technology.

How Social Media Can Make History

Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.

The Tribes We Lead

From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.

Make a Splash in Social Media

How the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all-powerful and it cannot be controlled.

Listening to Twitter Users

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.

How the Internet Enables Intimacy

Stefana Broadbent explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.