How to catch people's attention and make them eat baby carrots? How do you make baby carrots cool? Well, the solution can be packaging them like junk food. You just need to adapt to people's needs and expectations. The question is whether the chips-like packaging will turn carrots into the new cool, people want to eat.
Packaging design by Crispin Porter + Bogusky
Via USA Today
Facebook Places has been launched in US and will soon reach probably the rest of the world. Some deaths are being discussed (Foursquare) as we try find out what Facebook places will mean for people and marketers.
Facebook for marketing as other geo-location services has a huge potential but how the potential turns out depends on the inventiveness of companies in adding more meaning to checking in. Checking-in is fun, especially in the first phase. It is like a game. The thrill of becoming a mayor, getting the badge. Then comes competitiveness. Ousting your friends from places and taking over their mayorship. Trying the first specials...and it appears there are no more specials near you. You just check-in less and less often. You ask yourself - why I should check-in. You lack the purpose. I believe the success of Facebook places for business will depend on the sense of purpose it manage to deliver to people.
As it goes for people, Facebook places will make geo-location accessible to broader audience. It will be another tool for sharing with friends where we are and what we are doing. As my colleague Lara wrote in her post on privacy: "Places provides us with another way of keeping tabs on our friends, of letting people know what we’re up to, of sharing what is basically unnecessary information with anyone and everyone we choose. It’s also another foray in to our private world, and will no doubt meet harsh critique from users who suddenly realise that what is actually private about their lives is diminishing at a very rapid rate."
Watch how you can check in with Facebook Places
Once we used to believe it will be Google and Amazon who share the power and newspapers will be dead. We had no idea about the role Facebook will play. Why? Because we are anchored in the present. We believe in linear development of media and technology. We believe that some of them will progress and evolve undisturbed, while other become extinct. Well, fortunately the universe and people are full of surprises. It is interesting though to watch this video from 2007 and see how things have already took a completely different route.
Hat tip to Helge Tennø
A demographic study within the Nordics of people mobile phone habits, and social ’s media network habits...men and women, boys and girls, from 15 – 55, from all over the Nordic regions, and from all walks of life....
The latest Chris Anderson's article in Wired on the death of web was rather provoking and caused quite a stir.
What always surprise me is the easiness with which we kill things around and present them as useless. Like we discard old clothes, we try to discard the technology. We've already tried to kill radio, TV and print. All three are still living and doing quite good, but the way they are used has changed.
As history shows, technologies evolve and being shaped by people and their needs they can coexist and merge.
There is some pinch of sensationalism in the way of declaring web dead. Alexis Madrigal from Atlantic responded to Anderson's article: "What's Wrong with X is Dead".
"From the vantage point of the present, it may seem that technologies are deterministic. But this view is incorrect, no matter how plausible it may seem. Cultures select and shape technologies, not the other way around, and some societies have rejected or ignored even the gun or the wheel. For millennia, technology has been an essential part of the framework for imagining and moving into the future, but the specific technologies chosen have varied. As the variety of human cultures attests, there have always been multiple possibilities, and there seems no reason to accept a single vision of the future." (David Nye, Technology Matters)
Killing the web seems like the attempt to simplify and feel more in control over the complex and unpredictable world of people behavior and interactions - choosing a single vision for the future. It is tempting to have a single vision, because it is more manageable and controllable but world keeps on evolving into plenty of parallel and intersecting paths.
There is no need to write an epitaph when nobody died.
In the constantly jogging, sweating, striving and starving to be fit world where sport achievements are highly valued, this spot from Puma is quite refreshing. It is cool you finished marathon, yes it makes you an athlete but you know what we are all athletes, after hour athletes. It makes me smile. Relax. There is no need to run so fast.
"Because we know it takes just as much effort to score a phone number as it does to score a goal."
Being teenager is hard - the feeling of being misunderstood by nagging parents, broken hearts, mean girl-friends. It is not easy being insecure. It is painful. You wish often you had superpowers and took revange for all those who were mean to you and didn't invite you to the party last Saturday...well this is where Twilight comes in play. See how it works
What do people want from brands? Utility and good experience. There is plenty of different services trying to deliver on it. Here is one fantastic example that integrates mobile device, check-in mechanics, coupons with the shopping experience - Shopkick. Shopkick is a hardware and application system to be installed in stores. It rewards people for just coming into the store, adds social sharing and customized offers overview to you while you are in the store. Judging from the video showing how the product works, Shopkick makes the whole coupon and check-in idea more social and more fun in relation to retail experience.
It opens the new opportunities for building loyalty and closer relationship between customer and retailers, where the latter one is not just products provider but improves the whole shopping experience.
Read the whole article and see the video on Techcrunch
Society's obsession with video and online gaming has advanced to
the point that virtual environments are indistinguishable from physical
ones.
“Play” is a conceptual movie by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman which imagines a future where the lines between games and reality have blurred. The film was shot in New York City in less than a week.
Good and interesting perspective how gaming and real life merge.The society of multiple choices. 'You decide' is just an illusion and you are left alone not knowing what to do with all those points you collected unless you move to the next level...play keep on going.
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This is definitely something one must share :) Great and not so surprising tips
Digital tools aren't really worth much unless they are enable people to do stuff, innovate, initiate the change. Brilliant.
I don't agree with Armano's theory of decreasing trust in people as the result of overall decrease of trust in media, the correlation doesn't imply the causation. Following Armano's deduction, we could easily come to the conclusion that we are on the way to slow social disaster of mistrust and alienation along the growth of social media. This is oversimplifying of human relations built on trust. Trust is essential to human relations and is fundamental for social interaction and their development. The question lies in how far circles of trust stretch.
"Trust surveys" suffer from the lack of understanding of what people define as friends/peers. Those surveys deliver mere numbers without any understandings. Facts.
As I wrote two days ago, the main culprit here are "friends" and our language. We should maybe look at the decreasing trust in friends / peers as the result of the devaluation of friendship caused by media as Facebook. We have experienced rapid growth of our circle of friends with people who were in fact strangers to us.
I say it once more: we still trust "people like us" but we are simply not sure whether Johns we follow on Twitter are really like us...
The couple of last years we've been sticking to mantra "people trust people like themselves" (Edelman Trust Barometer) to convince business establishment to jump into social media wagon, to understand better how people act and activate the power of WoM.
We've always trusted the circle of friends, so called significant others and their recommendatiosn mattered a lot us as the key influential factors. We've done this and will keep on doing this as anything else would break the social ties and lead us to alienation.
Edelman comes with the new 2010 results of the Trust barometer and something interesting happens - friends/peers as those whom we trust drop from 45% in 2008 to 25% in 2010.
It is quite natural the question about our skepticism and our ability to trust arise.
I don't think we trust less our friends and peers. I don't think we've become more skeptical. I just think we are in the phase where we rethink the word friend / peer. The word friend got stretched widely due to social networks. We call friends people we've never met in our lives and people we have no common history with. We do have hundreds of friends on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo...whatever you call it. The social networks devalued word friend. Anyone can be my friend today. It just costs one click and you have a new friend. But it ain't so easy and we are aware of that. We are aware that social networks bring also "virtual friends" we can't really trust because we simply don't know them, don't know their agenda and there is no really point of reference between our and their lives. Who are really those hundreds of people we follow on Twitter, we connect with on Facebook? We know the faces, we know the key facts we can find out from info tab and status updates. What really connects you with other people are common experiences...
Web revolutionized our lives for sure but there are still some barriers we need to overcome, like integrating online lives with offline lives. Meeting people we know online, exchanging offline experiences will be the way to create trust. Online relationships won't replace face to face time and sharing of real time experiences.
We still trust "people like us" but we are simply not sure whether Johns we follow on Twitter are really like us...
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"He had a hard time distinguishing the relationship between needs, wants, and technology."
The latest blog found - sharp and witty - Unhappy hipsters - musings on sad and deprived of joy life of urbanites. Really good and worth to follow for good pictures and commentary on the modern life.
HT: Angus Whines
