> September 2010 <
Innovative Social Media Channels
Let's take a look at how various forms of Social Media are being utilised by some of the leading players in the market, encapsulating the plethora of avenues available to brands in today's world of technology.
Written and researched by Luke Ryan at MEC, with permission to reproduce.
Facebook Integration at the Coca-Cola Village
If you’ve been wondering how to seamlessly integrate an experiential event with Facebook, here is how to do it, in real time! This is a great example of how offline PR can facilitate online content seeding through social media. Attendees at the Coca Cola Village Event are given a wrist strap that stores the data from their Facebook profile. At different checkpoints around the event, the attendees swipe their wrist to a reader. The reader automatically updates the users profile & status. Auto-image uploads and tagging is also enabled. Over the course of one event cycle, 35,000 pieces of real-time Facebook content were generated by only 650 attendees totalling over 100,000 posts for the event!
Barclay’s Bank Advergame
Your first reaction when watching this game trailer will be something like… how does a Grand Theft Auto style game educate people about banking? Well, when your intended market are teenagers not interested in what banks have to say, it all starts to seem a little simpler, particularly when you combine the best selling Sim City style of game in a more engaging Grand Theft Auto package infused with financial challenges. Throw that combination online, for free, with complete Facebook connect functionality and you have something pretty exciting. The game is built around a teenager that comes to the city in search of making it big, along with characters like landlords, fraudsters, old ladies, partners, banks, businesses… the lot. The game was played by over 55,000 teenagers in the first month!
Flipboard: The iPad social magazine
Flipboard is an iPad magazine made dynamically from your social content and connections on Facebook & Twitter along with some other publicly available feeds that are all pulled into your Flipbook. It’s taken off like a rocket since launching a few weeks ago and the founders are looking to expand the apps capabilities in the coming months, and that’s only IF you can get an account!
Audi Augmented Reality Calender
In 2010 Audi didn’t create just another beautiful calendar, they created an unexpected experience! Yes, they printed the calendar purely as landscape images, blank, no cars, nothing, and then prompted people to download the special iPhone app that would allow you to activate the calendar through an Augmented Reality feature to bring the images to life on your iPhone. This introduced the worlds first premier of the Audi A1 prototype!
The dawn of the iAD
Apple has created their own advertising platform to the ipod touch, iphone and ipad products.
The iAD platform uses rich media ads such as txt, video, audio, games, maps, and more to interact with users.
Apple sell, serve and host the ads, with developers receiving 60% of the advertising revenue.
Digital Graffiti – The SMS Slingshot
This little project from VR Urban (a group dedicated to creating interactive street art installations) seems to have flown under the radar since launching in January this year. Their digital installation integrates projection, laser guidance and SMS to create graffiti painted a digital slingshot. With a phone embedded into an over-sized slingshot, users simply type a message they’d like sent as part of their graffiti splat, and, guided by a laser, shoot that onto a wall that is being projected onto. The camera sitting above the projector tracks the laser point and then accurately projects the splat with message included onto the wall in real time. Very cool!
iPhone App Makes Barcode Scanning a Social Experience
Ever wonder if the product you’re about to buy is worth it? Scan its barcode, see what your friends think and make the right choice. Bakodo is a barcode intelligence service for the iPhone that aims to take the scan to the next level. The next version of the iPhone application is coming soon and promises to introduce social functionality around barcode scans. The idea is to encourage barcode scanners to rate and review products and create a community around products and goods. Users can see what their friends are scanning and reviewing and ideally make more informed purchase decisions.
Commonwealth Property Guide App
The Commonwealth Bank has just released its Property Guide iPhone application. The Property Guide app helps users retrieve past sales history, current property listings and recent sales, mapped on to a real world view through the iPhone’s camera on more than 95 per cent of residential properties in Australia. The app is supported by data from realestate.com.au and RP Data.
Miracle Film Turns Any Surface into a Touchscreen
An interactive hardware company called Displax has begun marketing Skin; a paper-thin, flexible film that would transform any non-metal surface into an interactive touchscreen. Displax’s multi-touch technology can detect up to 16 fingers at once and can also detect air movement. Business presentations can now look like a scene form the Minority Report!
All of the above Social Media implementations are great insights to the endless marketing opportunities available to brands today. They are prime examples that in our society's Social Media driven world, anything is possible!