Innovate

Well, that’s another way of creating a TV commercial for a hybrid drive car. It sure got my attention.

By AB5TRAX

That’s exactly what Funki Porcini’s has done when they have designed the cover for their new album Fast Asleep

ILoveTypography served and I recieved.

Some companies get it, some don’t but now at least it’s easier for you to do something about it.

Dell hosts this fantastic site called Ideastorm where they invite everyone to be involved in their products and services development. The site allows anyone of us to post ideas, then the community (including you) can have a say if an idea should be promoted or not. The management (yes, the real management) then evaluate the ideas from Ideastorm every month and on top of that even give feedback which ideas the might develop.

This qoute from last weeks evaluation meeting illustrates the power of the community:

“This has been a busy couple of weeks!  We had almost 250 ideas submitted and more than 225 new IdeaStorm users in the past two weeks.  It’s great to see Dave (davnmc) and Petzy again in StormRoom and badblood back on the site!  A special welcome to a few new IdeaStormers natakuc4, idangold and inkslug!”

So how can you get going with your company?

That’s where Kindling comes in.

Kindling is this new Web 2.0 service where every company (even yours) out there can do exactly what Dell is doing.

Straight from their own site: Kindling is a place where companies, organizations, and small groups can share and collaborate. Kindling cultivates ideas from the ground up and believes that everyone in a group has something valuable to say, from the interns to the CEO. 

So if you’re one of those people sitting on a management level thinking: Wow, this collaboration, social media, community, consumer involvement, interaction…thing seems fantastic, but it’s to much of a hassle to get going - get your but over to Kindling, request an Invitation and start now!

Nothing impresses me like a company that has found out exactly what they should do to build their brand and then sticks to the formula.

I don’t drive a BMW but I must say these guys from Germany are not far from making me into a customer.

  Their brand has been closely connected with innovation for some years now. I first noted the positioning when they associated themselves with the artist Theo Jansen, maker of Kinetic Sculptures back in 2006. Since then I’ve seen tons of great stuff making BMW = Innovation.

This new concept car called Gina is amazing. BMW here I come!

404 made me go wow!

Right now people all over the world tune into Eurocup 08 in Switzerland/Austria. I live in Sweden, so TV4 and Canal+ are the channels of my choice since they are the ones holding the rights to the show. They paid a shitload of money for it.

This will not be the case in Eurocup 2012 when the event is held in Poland. Then I’ll turn into Socialtelevision.com where the TV is a result of Social Broadcasting edited live online by it’s users for it’s users.

Let me tell you about Social Television

The community

I guess you’ve seen that Apple launched their new 3G iPhone the other day.  The new phone got GPS, Video-camera, 3G connection and a browser that follows web-standards.

  Imagine now that we launch a site called Socialtelevision.com (or YouTube Live) that let’s any signed up user upload video streams, much like the ones we see on YahooLive or Bambuser for that matter. On the site, users can now sign up as plain users, producers, broadcasters, editors or commentators. When an event comes up,  say Eurocup 2012’, basically users express their interest to become part of the broadcasting of the event and take on different roles.

Kick off the game

It’s match day. On the stands 247 SocialTV users turn on their iPhones and connect to socialtelevision.com. On the site, 19 pro editors collaborate by social voting to decide how the broadcasting of the event will be edited. Through the built in GPS, it’s easy to understand which camera can cover what. A free kick is coming up and users positioned behind the goal all get the order “close up on Zlatan Ibrahimovic”.

  By using the dynamic circle tool integrated with Google Map, the editor in lead (by voting) draws a circle around the left corner of the field and sends out the order “focus on corner kicker” This results in another 24 cameras covering the kicker.

  Through the integrated motion sensor the editor automatically get the most stabile shot of the situations (if he doesn’t override it). The cameramen on site get Kudos (rating) depending on how much their specific coverage of the event is used. 

Access to all areas

90 minutes later the whistle blows and the first ever Live SocialTV event is a fact. Aware of his most loyal fans, Zlatan avoids the “paying” media crowd and approaches the side of the field.

  36 SocialTV “cameramen” cover the interview performed by a SocialTV journalist who has received a Titanum Status on socialtelevision.com. The questions asked by millions online and decided upon by social voting are delivered in his right ear. The interview ends after Zlatan draws his autograph on the iPhone, the touch screen senses the pressure and the result is a unique date-stamped autograph with information about Zlatan’s pulse among other things.

Just like ordinary TV but different

At home, me and my family eat up the last snacks on the table. My youngest daughter (almost 5 year old in 2012) is eager to show her friends Zlatans “time-stamped autograph”.

  Next week Disney On Ice turns up in Stockholm, and she is already signed up to cover the story. Her best friend will cover the back stage scene where Poh, Tiger and the rest of the crew hangs out.

The old generation…

In boardrooms of TV networks all over the world, directors asks themselves…what are we gonna make money on now? (or maybe they are the founders of SocialTV…but that would have to call for some innovative digital thinking, something they still lack)

The end

Is there such a thing as Social Television? No. But I truly believe that there will be within the next couple of years and it will change the business of broadcasting rights forever. Social TV will change all kinds of events there are.

Feel free to steal the idea and challenge the dinosaurs.

As fresh as it comes.

Apple already published lot’s of info on the iPhone 3G.

Let me tell you about our latest campaign for Stadium. This fall we were challenged by Stadium (Sweden largest sports retailer) to create an online campaign for the Swedish championships in Football Freestyle. 

This project is extra dear to me as Stadium really listened and we got them to try social media in the way I think it should be used.

The brief was to create an online plattform where kids could view movies from the events around Sweden and then upload their own movie to compete in a web based competition aside from the ones taking place offline.

Our solution was to create a Wordpress based website with all the plugins you should stick in there to gain maximum SEO performance. We then used a YouTube channel to host the videos instead of putting them on Stadium’s servers. Flickr provided us with the gallery functionality. A Facebook group was dynamically updated as the competition went along. Last but not least we set up a Yahoo Live account for Stadium where they could broadcast all the events live online.

The result was a cost effective campaign that was spread far outside the website itself. Stadium didn’t put any money into media but thanks to social media the campaign found it’s way outside their own domains. A cool thing was to see kids commenting the campaign in the online place of their choice…not one single site. The fact that a movie published on the site was shown in 2 more place that ultimately lead to 3-10 times more viewers was a great result.

I look forward to try something like this again with support of external media investments and integration into traditional media would most definitely create a great effect.

Met a guy today that said: “iPhone is kind of overrated, it’s just like another mobile but not as good”

What he and a lot of other people don´t understand that it’s not about the phone, it’s about the open platform, the touchscreen and motion sensor. This is a cool example of both of them. Combined with geolocation it sort of kicks ass. When 3G is a fact - then nothing competes (that we know of today).

Techcrunch pointed me in the right direction.

I visited Twingly today to see the rating of my Whiskyblog when I noticed this little screensaver. Unfortunately it’s only available for PC users. But it seems like a pretty cool thing.

The Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.

For you guys and girls who haven’t heard about Twingly
Twingly is a spam-free, next-generation blog search engine, currently closed beta but soon to be available for everyone. And it’s made in Sweden. What I personally enjoy with Twingly is the fact that you can set up queries and then get that query and then subscribe to it in your favorite RSS reader. (Netvibes in my case). What I don’t enjoy is that the blog search indexes blogs way to slow, but that will hopefully get better.

Quick note from London.

As always I’m on the look-out for new gadgets. This time it led me to the Apple concept store on regent street. And as expected I didn’t find anything new since Apple seldom surprise you instore. The new things turn up online first.

But what did make me go wow was the entire shopping experience. Apple are smart guys. They sell computers, ipods, harddrives etc, etc, etc. What better way to sell them than putting more than 200 computers hooked up online and letting people do what ever they please with them. This way people who loves Apple loves Apple even more when you get instant access. And people who have never used them will go bananas over the fact that you don’t have to buy an expensive internet connection card somewhere. And while using internet you learn about the products.

Inside the store there was also a genius bar where 20+ people help you with complex problems. And in the back of the store a new seminar about Apple products and services starts every 30 minutes.

So if you’re in charge of a brand and especially a in-store experience. Come here and breath the air filled with potential consumers.

One of my daily reads - the David Report Blog posted a short one on a new book called The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption by Gaurav Mishra. One of two cool things with the book is that it is a year-long blog-as-a-book experiment in why we choose to consume. Basically Guarav decided to go ‘off consumption’ for a year and then blog about the learnings while doing it.

The other cool thing with Guarav is his list that tells us how consumption will change:

- From brand-consciousness to background-consciousness.
- From synthetic to organic.
- From mass-produced to hand-crafted.
- From global to local.
- From short-term to sustainable.
- From fashionable to durable.
- From valuing things to valuing insights.
- From fitting in/ standing out to being.
- From buying more to buying less.
- From doing more to doing less.
- From multi-tasking to down-shifting.
- From buying to sharing/ exchanging.
- From owning to experiencing.
- From having to giving.

Bang on target!