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Zappos Implements “Video Experience” (CIO Magazine)
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Posted: 04/15/2010
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Zappos recently launched interactive videos detailing Nike products, one of the shoe and clothing company’s largest brands. Initiated from customer queries that were best addressed visually, Zappos used software from Overlay.tv to link videos about various Nike items to its supply-chain system. Among the perks: shoppers can click on featured items to view any current promotions and find out if the product is available in stock. Customers can post video links on Facebook, upload their own videos to Zappos.com and post comments. Zappos objective is not necessarily the bottom line, but it will track stats on customer click-thrus and purchases. "The goal is to create a more pleasurable experience on our site," Kalma says. "The general philosophy is that will lead to purchases."
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
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Where Only the Strong Survive: Market Testing on the Social Scene (Chief Marketer)
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Posted: 09/25/2009
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Given the ongoing technology explosion, it’s no surprise that consumers’ collective (and opinionated) voice is growing louder and marketers’ ears bigger, or at least more attune to what they’re hearing via the social web. Tapping in to social networks allows marketers to listen to what consumers are saying to not only drive, but refine market testing and distill the ideas that most deeply resonate with their audiences. Marketers must harness the power of social media by immediately engaging as many consumers as they can from the start. By the time ideas and messaging run through various tiers of sub-panels, what’s left is a virtual survival-of-the-fittest where only the strongest ideas survive and “smartness” is ruled only by the human imagination.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
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|
What's In A Name? The Term Cloud Computing Breathes New Life Into An Existing Technology (Forbes)
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Posted: 08/05/2010
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In an industry where fancy buzzwords abound, "cloud computing" really signifies more of a generational evolution than a new technology. While there may be some hype related to doing business "in the cloud," on-demand, internet-based computing leverages the same technology companies like Google and Amazon pioneered and perfected through trial and error. Now, companies can access even more highly evolved programs like Google App Engine and Apache Hadoop - as well as a steadily increasing list of other options - to write their own data center infrastructure applications. In a virtual world where complete computer security is always somewhat questionable, the flexible and economical strengths of cloud computing remains very attractive to corporate computing operations. The end-goal is to partner with trustworthy, security-focused services that respond to and eliminate threats as they are exposed.
|
 |
Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
|
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|
Wharton’s Future of Advertising Project (Knowledge@Wharton)
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Posted: 11/19/2009
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According to Wharton School's SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management, advertising has gone the way of the black and white television. Asking the question, “what will replace it?” Wharton’s effort is aptly named the Future of Advertising Project. Practicing what it preaches, Wharton is not only collecting case studies, data and fresh expert insight to identify best practices for the future; it is employing New Media techniques to expand its own audience. Wharton’s approach includes partnering on the launch of a new channel on Google's YouTube site called Fast.Forward. The site features short video clips called "quick perspectives" that elaborate on the future of marketing from executives, ad gurus and academic thought leaders. The project examines the creative combinations of old and new media that are defining the radical new terrain of advertising and expands it to a wider audience.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
Video Girl Barbie Goes Viral (Promo Magazine)
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Posted: 09/30/2010
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In true Barbie fashion, the social girl charged the virtual social world this July to build the buzz for her latest professional stint: videographer. Mattel tapped into social networks Foursquare and Twitter to launch a campaign that criss-crossed the boundaries of traditional marketing. The campaign celebrated the new Video Girl Barbie with a scavenger hunt that had fans scouring San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York to locate Barbie’s real whereabouts. The first follower to find the fashion-forward doll in each city won a Barbie Video Girl doll. “We really embraced social media as a marketing platform a year ago as part of a major campaign in support of Barbie’s 50th anniversary,” says Lauren Dougherty, director of Barbie marketing at Mattel. Barbie currently has 17,600 Twitter followers and about 440,000 likes on Facebook—more than 200,000 of those added since January. Future plans include a promotion that puts the camera in the consumers’ hands with user-generated video, as well as introducing other members of Barbie’s entourage, including Ken, onto the social platforms.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global,
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Uplift Modeling: The Upside to Marketing (Ecommerce Times)
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Posted: 07/08/2010
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The key to spending a lot less on marketing while receiving better sales results may be uplift modeling. Specific customers have specific wants and needs; uplift modeling uses intelligent predictive analysis to target relevant needs specific to certain customers. Uplift divides customers into segments, allowing companies to focus solely on the “Persuadables”- customers likely to respond to being contacted through marketing outreach tactics and begin or renew their purchasing as a result. Time and money isn’t wasted on “Sure Thing”, “Lost Cause”, and “Sleeping Dog” customers- those who always buy, never buy or just don’t want to be bothered. Uplift modeling saves valuable company time and money, while avoiding the negativity associated with uninterested customers.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
|
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|
U.S. Hispanics Prime Target for Internet and Mobile Advertisers (Marketing Vox)
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Posted: 01/06/2010
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The Hispanic online demographic is growing more than twice as fast as the overall national online population. Add to the equation that 88% of Hispanics consume content from their mobile phones, and the environment grows even riper for advertisers to target a population just shy of 50 million. Mobile initiatives from Yahoo include mobile search, US and global news in Spanish, and email and social networking connections, among others while those via internet from Orange Advertising Network include site-specific placements, customized branded entertainment, and direct-response campaigns. Mobile advertisers including HBO, Harley-Davidson, Rite Aid, Arby's and Cheetos have sent opt-in offers and ads to Hispanic users through HipCricket's Hispanic Mobile Marketing Network, which projects that Hispanic buying power will exceed $1 trillion in the next year.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
North America,
South-Central America
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
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|
Trigger Happy: Ways To Create Successful E-Mail Campaigns (Practical eCommerce)
|
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Posted: 02/03/2011
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When it comes to e-mail campaigns, there are a handful of strategies to use that can help capitalize on the power of triggered mailings, which have a proven track record of phenomenal response and conversion rates. The best approach is to begin with the simplest e-mails proven to elicit conversion, and then scale up the campaign to include more nuanced and complex e-mails. Here are six proven examples that can help your company establish a personal connection with your customers: (1) Welcome e-mails; (2) Reorder or order reminder e-mails; (3) Birthday or special-occasion e-mails; (4) Transactional emails; (5) Abandoned cart e-mails and (6) Abandoned site browse or search emails. All these examples offer the marketer’s toolbox a number of ways to create and maintain long-term relationships with customers and stimulate repeat business at the same time.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
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Transforming Innovation: New Technology. New Speed. New Price. New Customers. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Posted: 10/08/2009
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Technology continues to transform the face of innovation at breakneck speed. Where it used to take major moxie, manpower and minutes to launch comprehensive testing campaigns, the newfound ability to incorporate new Web features faster and immediately measure consumer response means companies can now achieve rapid fire results for next to nothing cost. The result? Innovation–the lifeblood of growth–is not only more efficient and cheaper, it also more accurately pinpoints behavior to identify exactly what consumers want. Sophisticated tracking systems enable businesses–from web-based companies to retailers–to exploit new information technology to conduct testing and collect meaningful consumer data to ultimately capture even more consumer spending.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
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The Name Game: The Web Becomes Truly Worldwide (BBC Business News)
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Posted: 12/17/2009
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Until now, Web addresses for other countries have only been written using the English language. Thanks to internet regulator Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the Web just became more accessible by allowing countries to request new internationalized domain names in their own languages, including non-latin languages and scripts like Chinese. "The IDN [International Domain Names] program will encompass close to one hundred thousand characters, opening up the internet to billions of potential users around the globe," said Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of Icann. Approved in June 2008 and expected to go live in 2010, the months in between were dedicated to working out kinks in the translation system.
|
 |
Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
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|
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly: Crowdsourcing Provides Answers For Online Marketers (Marketing Vox)
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Posted: 07/22/2010
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For marketers looking for solutions to a plethora of problems, crowdsourcing could be the answer. Marketers gain key insight while spending minimal dollars to survey the expertise of entire online communities. Still, crowdsourcing is not without limitations. Primarily, crowdsourcing is dogged by knowing how to separate the great ideas from the bad ones. To illustrate, Jez Frampton, CEO of Interbrand, tells of a creative director who tried crowdsourcing for a campaign and within 48 hours received hundreds of ideas, leaving him with the even bigger problem of how to sift through the crowd’s offerings. (via Forbes). Marketers should not be deterred, as crowdsourcing has a number of advantages, including web usability testing sites like UserTesting.com and Feedback Army, where companies post questions about their websites and testers choose which questions to answer.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
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|
The Divide Among Us: The Classism in Social Networking (CNN)
|
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Posted: 11/19/2009
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A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas Research points to a class divide online. The study finds that Facebook draws a more affluent crowd than MySpace, with nearly 23 percent of
Facebook users earning $100,000+ a year compared to 16 percent of MySpace users. Twitter and
LinkedIn draw an even more affluent crowd. 38 percent of LinkedIn users pull in $100,000+ per year. Ethnographer danah boyd witnessed a class divide emerge among American teens' use of social networks in a 2006 study. She uncovered a migration from MySpace to Facebook predominantly composed of the educated and the upper-class. Technology writer and blogger Sarah Perez says that people have a tendency to connect with similar people online as they do offline. Jason Kaufman, a Harvard research science fellow, says that with Facebook "The playing field is a lot more level in that you can find yourself having a wall-to-wall exchange with just an acquaintance. If you pick up the unlikely friend, not of your race or income bracket, the network may [help you]establish a more active friendship than if you met them in real life."
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction
Region:
Global,
North America
Audience:
Peer Groups & Communities
|
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 |
|
Tapping Into Customer Life Cycle Via Emails (BtoB Online)
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Posted: 03/04/2010
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Experian Marketing Services’ “The Remarketing Report” recently reported significant findings regarding the efficacy marketers experience when they send targeted emails to their customers based on where they are at in the sales cycle. From responding to new customer sign ups to bringing them back from the brink of abandoning their shopping carts, marketers that send emails when a targeted event occurs expereince as much as double the open rates and quadruple the click-through rates when compared to other email campaigns. Such campaigns not only influence consumer purchasing habits through cross-sells and up-sells, they also help build customer loyalty. The report clearly demonstrates that, when handled with care, marketers benefit from building campaigns around your visitors’ and customers’ life cycle events.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
|
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|
Subscribing Success: Memberships Keep E-commerce Customers Coming Back for More (Practical eCommerce)
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Posted: 08/27/2009
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In today’s competitive marketplace, the lifetime value of your customers cannot be underestimated. Committing a percentage of your marketing dollars to securing subscribers or members to keep your customers coming back again and again will pay long term dividends, boost sales, earn a better ROI, and may even recession-proof your business. Topical Newsletters, Exclusive Offers And Promotions, Preorder Discounts, and Product of the Month Clubs are among the four best tactics to transform your one-time customers into loyal shoppers. From earning second sales with preorders to gaining permission to shop for your customers through Product of the Month clubs, employing each of these four tactics will lead you to cultivate ongoing sales and increase the lifetime value of each of your customers.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
Study Finds That Mobile Ads Deliver the Goods to One in Three Smartphone Owners (Promo Magazine)
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Posted: 06/19/2009
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Now that nearly one of every seven minutes of digital media consumption takes place over a mobile device, it’s no small wonder that more smartphone users are actively embracing the ‘smart’ technology to enhance their lives. A recent study by Interpublic Group division Universal McCann and sponsored by Platform-A, AOL’s digital ad service, discovered that more than half of all smartphone users have responded to ads, requesting more information from their Web-enabled devices. The study also found that thirty-five percent actively requested to receive a mobile coupon, while 245 made purchases from their high-end handsets. UM director of consumer insights Graeme Hutton said in a statement. “Now mobile is less about ‘wireless online’ and more about being a highly personal, customized medium. Smartphone users are reaching for their devices to help answer unmet needs. Services that don’t have dedicated mobile formats are going to miss out on this huge and continual media consumption shift.”
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
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|
Strength in Numbers: Unveiling the Benefits of Eclipse (Forbes)
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Posted: 05/24/2009
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Faced with the increasing squeeze of a down economy, many companies are forgoing the expense of programming their own software without losing their competitive edge. The experimental Eclipse software consortium offers companies within sectors like technology, finance and insurance the opportunity to collaborate, build and share computer code. “People these days are interested in doing more with less,” says Michael Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. With a budget of $5 million this year, the company is seeking to expand its 185 member base even further into the automotive and telecom industries. Nonmembers can take advantage of the foundation's free software library, while companies who pay dues of up to $125,000 a year get to hand-select upcoming programming projects.
|
 |
Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
|
 |
|
Stay Out Front With Smart Mobile Marketing Tactics (Marketing Vox)
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Posted: 05/13/2010
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You know the mobile marketing drill: Offer local coupons. Allow customers to pay for purchases directly from their phones. Inject with a little vavavavoom and you’ve got a competitive mobile marketing package. In light of the ever-changing mobile technology landscape –which means competitors are always on the hunt for bigger, better, more creative tactics – it makes good sense to consider adding these four tips to your mobile marketing toolbox: 1. Matt Silk, SVP of Waterfall Mobile recommends including a store locator in your mobile plan; 2. When used like direct mail or email, mobile subscriptions lists can help you to target your subscribers on-the-go; 3. Build applications and then market them strategically. Paul Reddick, CEO of Handmark at MoCoNews, recommends brands to "distribute them from their own Web sites or other traditional media outlets;” and 4. Forget about the apps altogether and concentrate your efforts on building a mobile Web site, which may be the smartest tactic of all, according to Practical E-Commerce.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
|
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 |
|
Shopping-enabled Display Ads are Blooming Success for 1-800-Flowers.com (Internet Retailer)
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Posted: 08/27/2009
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|
Success bloomed for 1-800-Flowers.com during its 2009 Mother’s Day e-commerce campaign,
resulting in a 41% spike in sales per impression compared to traditional display ads. The
campaign enabled consumers to purchase directly from “buy” buttons planted into display ads
powered by Alvenda. According to Alvenda, consumer interaction among the ads, called Shoplets, flourished at more than 10.5 times greater than traditional banner ads. To accommodate the traffic spike and speed up response times, Alvenda shifted the bulk of the
floral Shoplet campaign content over to Akamai Technologies Inc’s content management server. “We believe the majority of future online sales will happen offsite. Customers will be able to shop with brands wherever they happen to be, whether they’re on YouTube, a favorite blogger web site, or on Facebook,” says Wade Gerten, CEO of Alvenda.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
|
 |
|
Sears Innovates with Multichannel Strategy (Chief Marketer)
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Posted: 03/18/2010
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|
Chief Marketer recently spoke with Sears' senior vice president online Imran Jooma to unravel the success behind the brand Sears Holdings Corp’s (Sears and Kmart) aggressive approach to bring merchandise and marketing to online communities (MySears.com) and mobile commerce (Sears2Go). The new campaign, “ShopYourWay”, is a multichannel strategy with new initiatives including Marketplace at Sears.com, which gives online shoppers the opportunity to locate and purchase products from outside retailers. Jooma credits Sears with having a robust fan community at MySears.com, which allows the company to pinpoint and deliver additional categories of interest. To maintain ease-of-use and minimize cumbersome navigation, Sears launched Quick View and ClickSee, which gives customers a quick visual of related and compatible products. The company is in-touch with customer feedback to improve both in-store and online shopping experiences, and recently added an iPhone app to its Sears2Go mobile shopping initiative.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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|
SaaS Hits the Sweet Spot for Business Intelligence (Intelligent Enterprise)
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Posted: 10/22/2009
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You’d be hard-pressed to describe a major business intelligence deployment as fast, flexible, and affordable. Which is exactly why BI service software (SaaS) is primed to change business intelligence. SaaS-based BI vendors aim to get the implementation process off the ground in days rather than the months it usually takes. Shaklee CIO, Ken Harris, views SaaS as more than a stopgap to on-premises BI software deployments. Harris deploys SaaS to stretch his small IT staff and budget by storing data in a PivotLink-hosted data warehouse and using report and query tools to evaluate the data across a network that has expanded from 50 employees to as many as 5,000 independent business people who sell Shaklee products. The cost is perfectly reasonable for small to mid-size companies with limited IT resources.
|
 |
Industry:
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
|
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 |
|
Rice University Study: Facebook Fan Pages Excel at Niche Marketing (ClickZ)
|
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Posted: 04/01/2010
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|
The results are in for Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business study to determine how creating a presence on Facebook impacts businesses. The study incited an article in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review, with the study authors calling the Facebook page a qualified success for niche marketing. Rice professors collaborated with social media virgin Dessert Gallery, a local bakery and café chain in Houston. The study revealed fan pages have impact; however, mostly when targeting niche groups. First, after taking a preliminary survey, 75 out of 700 loyal customers accepted the invitation to fan Dessert Gallery’s Facebook page. Three months later, respondents completed another survey that revealed Facebook had a significant impact on their interaction with the brand. The bakery’s fans stopped by the cafe 20% more than non-fans, spending 33% more. The fan page also seemed to cultivate brand affection and loyalty.
|
 |
Industry:
Retail & Products
Topic:
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
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 |
|
Retailers Dial-In To Smart Phone Shopping Trend (CRM Daily)
|
|
Posted: 01/04/2011
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|
With one-third of mobile phone usage to be “smart” this holiday season (Nielsen), retailers are getting dialed-in to e-commerce. The 21 percent increase over last year indicates that retailers can no longer rely on independent strategy for their retail outfits, whether they are bricks-and-mortar stores, Web sites or mobile shopping channels. Heather J. Brunner, chief operating officer of Austin, Texas-based Bazaarvoice, said a phone is "just a mini-computer, and our challenge now is to transfer the Internet experience to a much smaller screen." For instance, outdoor brand Patagonia recently launched a new application that suggests similar items and price ranges while customers browse. In-store, the app will recommend complementary items based on the tag’s bar code. Companies like Neustar are working on types of “second-generation” bar codes for smart phones that are square rather than rectangular while Pronto, a company owned by New York-based IAC, plans to launch a mobile app for product price alerts.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
Puzzling Together Business Data: Salesforce.com Buys Jigsaw (CRM Daily)
|
|
Posted: 06/17/2010
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|
Salesforce.com’s purchase of contact provider Jigsaw makes it even easier to access, create, and even clean up contact information for businesses all over the globe. Salesforce.com chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff, said it will be “as easy as Wikipedia to source data, as easy as iTunes to buy data, and as easy as Facebook to stay updated as the data changes.” Boasting a 1.2 million member count and a database with 21 million professionals working at 4 million companies, Jigsaw describes its role as “collecting, refining, managing, protecting, and organizing the global list of people in business – so you don’t have to.” Through the use of Jigsaw’s cloud platform, new applications can also be created by software vendors to better use business contact information.
|
 |
Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Experience & Interaction
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
|
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 |
|
Pulling Klout: Website Helps Users Measure Their Social Influence (CNN Money)
|
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Posted: 08/19/2010
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|
Users can now discover their social “Klout” by numerical rank by inputting their Twitter name into Klout.com. The San Francisco-based social media start-up is shoring up its position to become the online standard for measuring social impact by partnering with Virgin America to offer a hand-picked group of “influencers” a free flight from San Francisco or Los Angeles to Virgin America's newest destination, Toronto. Here’s how the new type of marketing campaigns (implemented by brands like Starbucks and Cover Girl) work: (1) Users accept product offers; (2) In return, Klout requests for disclosure of the freebie; (3) Klout measures some two dozen variables, including the number of times their comments are retweeted, the size of their Twitter audience, and the influence of those followers, to come up with a numerical value and ranking on a 0-to-100 scale.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
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 |
|
Programming With Screen Shots, Not Just Code (Dr. Dobbs)
|
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Posted: 03/04/2010
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|
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new system that allows one to program with screenshots. For more than three decades, the graphical user interface (GUI) has dominated computer programing, but its underlying reliance on code manipulation means it’s still relatively labor intensive for computer programmers to customize or build programs. The new system, Sikuli, enables programmers to develop programs using GUI screen shots. While it requires some knowledge of Python, the system enables even casual users to create new programs without mastering complex programming language. The user simply draws a box around the desired content, captures the screen shot and then places it appropriately into the Python code. The research team plans to present a paper entitled GUI Testing Using Computer Vision at CHI, the premier conference on human-computer interactions, where they will describe new applications of Sikuli aimed at large software development projects, both for programmers and non-programmers.
|
 |
Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
Procter & Gamble Seeks E-Commerce Innovation (Internet Retailer)
|
|
Posted: 07/08/2010
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|
Consumer favorites manufactured by Procter & Gamble are now even more available. P&G’s new retail web site offers 52 products (with more coming) for consumer purchase, including Tide detergent, Oral-B toothbrushes, and Gillette razors. Though P&G made $76.7 billion in sales in 2009, increasing those sales is not the Web site’s main goal. According to the manufacturer, the site will provide a “living learning lab for developing e-commerce innovation.” Data gathered about P&G’s online consumers will provide a better understanding of various shopping behaviors and preferences. “As big and influential as Procter & Gamble is, there is no doubt this is a sign of a broad trend with consumer goods manufacturers,” says Jim Okamura, senior partner with consulting firm J.C. Williams Group.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
Playing it Safe: Conservative Web Site Design (Fast Company)
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Posted: 10/08/2009
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There is one critical factor to Web site design that cannot be ignored: the reader rules. Designing Web sites with a conservative approach first addresses readers’ expectations, with just the perfect dose of panache to make your site sizzle. The conservative rule of thumb? Organize your information in a way that flows effectively. Fast moving elements like flash should take center stage while slower moving elements like columns and news bites should flank the outer rails. Smashing Magazine sampled 50 top Web sites to pinpoint the definition of 'readability' and establish some basic guidelines for effective type layout, including font type, font size and link styling. So the next time you try to equate "conservative" with "boring" consider this: sometimes slow and steady really does win the race.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
|
|
 |
|
Opening the Line of Communication with Feedback-Form Analytics (Electronic Commerce Guide)
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Posted: 02/04/2010
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We’ve all heard of shopping cart abandonment. Until now, companies have had no way of knowing if this so-called digital window shopper’s syndrome was due to Web glitches or other, more personal, reasons. Kampyle is changing that by offering on-demand feedback-form analytics so companies can improve their turnover rates by learning more about their customers. The customizable forms promote open communication between customer and company by directly asking customers relevant questions to reveal why they chose not follow through with their purchases. The software also features “smart pop-ups” that can be personalized to appear when the visitor clicks off the site. Easy to implement, companies can have the service converting clicks into sales in as little as five minutes.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
|
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 |
|
Online Game Features Upscale Brands To Give Users A Virtual Retail Fix (BrandWeek)
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Posted: 09/02/2010
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Popsugar's new online game, "Retail Therapy", merges social gaming with e-commerce to give users an insanely addictive fashion fix. Available on Facebook and at Playretailtherapy.com, the game can be played for free or users can purchase virtual goods priced from $1 to $100. Here's how the fashion-forward game works: players fill empty store shelves with virtual goodies from premier labels like Banana Republic, Barneys New York, Gap and Juicy Couture. Sponsors like Diane von Furstenberg and Topshop have even opted to launch virtual stores in which users can purchase products. Players can also make the leap into any of the retailers' sites to fill their shopping carts with real merchandise. Friends can visit other friends' shops or create unique looks to share among their networks. By modeling aspects of the game after the wildly popular Farmville, CEO Brian Sugar "believes that Retail Therapy can entice users to open up their wallets . . . to purchase virtual goods by promising competitive advantages and overall better game play."
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
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|
Online Communities Strengthen Brand Power (Chief Marketer)
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Posted: 05/24/2009
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No matter your product or service, building online brands means building virtual communities that cultivate customer loyalty and provide lasting value. Shaping customer experiences that allows for custom-control, targeted e-mail follow-ups and strategic communications will not only maximize the time your customers spend with your brand, it will also increase your messaging impact and build mindshare, too. It never hurts to make the experience enjoyable, too, through elements like compelling visual design, intuitive navigation and user-generated content. Take for instance, the Pen Collective, by eROI and Wacom. The group now boasts more than 3000 active members, due to the brand’s intuitive mix of tutorials, testimonials, wit and social networking to create an inimitable personal connection to the brand.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
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 |
|
On-the-Go with Target’s Mobile Gift Cards (Promo Magazine)
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Posted: 03/18/2010
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Now, with its mobile gift card option, Target, the second-largest U.S. discount chain, makes paying with plastic old school. The retailer is letting customers use mobile phones to redeem gift cards as more consumers use phones with Internet access. Shoppers simply save the account numbers for their Target GiftCards to a PIN-protected area at either online or at the retailer's mobile-optimized site. Customers access the mobile site on their phones, enter the login and PIN for the card and complete the purchase when the cashier scans the unique 2D barcode on the display screen into Target’s P-O-S system, which has been outfitted across all 1740 Target stores nation wide. Customers can also access the mobile site to view merchandise, check product availability, manage gift registries and find locations, among other things. Other retailers like Starbucks and 7-Eleven are testing similar barcode technology to incorporate into their mobile business strategies.
|
 |
Industry:
Retail & Products
Topic:
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
On-Demand Software Adds Flexibility to Direct Digital Marketers (Ecommerce Times)
|
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Posted: 01/21/2010
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The robustness of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products positions them to effectively tackle emerging trends in direct digital marketing. The secret to their success? They share the same “it” factor ideals that often boost the best new businesses to the top of the rung: they are cost-effective, easy to implement and inherently scalable. On-demand products must seamlessly integrate between the three primary channels of direct digital marketing–email, mobile and Web–meaning developers must create software that is simultaneously heightened in usability and simple to implement. The bottom line is that the functionality and flexibility of SaaS and universal profile management systems enhance direct digital marketers’ own flexibility and success in their drive to leverage customer information and boost sales.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
New Old Spice Campaign Aims To Go Viral With A Little Mystery (Fast Company)
|
|
Posted: 08/19/2010
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|
Ad firm Wieden+Kennedy has taken a successful “Old” television ad concept viral. Old Spice, owned by Procter and Gamble, is leveraging the appeal of its TV spot star, Isaiah Mustafa, by taping 30-second YouTube videos in response to Twitter feeds. The team behind the campaign works in conjunction with technology to scan responses and identify the social influence of those responders to choose messages that will create a wow factor and perpetuate themselves throughout “virally-relevant” communities. Wieden's global interactive creative director Iain Tait asserts that rather than using a dedicated proprietary site, the campaign gets maximum exposure on YouTube, especially since the current spots are being watched and re-tweeted extensively. The ability of embedded material on YouTube to be liked, shared, favored and dispersed quickly factored into the decision for which social medium to use. Heeding the nature of the ‘want it new, want it now” internet culture, the company strives to produce the video responses in real time to the keep the content fresh, relevant to the brand and newsworthy. The content goes successfully beyond pure entertainment value to make “the connection between the content, the product and the experience of the product.”
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
|
 |
|
Motricity Delivers User-Preferred Content On-the-Go (CIO Magazine)
|
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Posted: 10/27/2010
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|
Motricity recently launched mCore MobileCast, a service that allows wireless carriers and large companies to define content based on their smartphone users’ preferences. Requiring "zero touch" by the users, the cloud-based service takes a user’s location and prior usage into account before delivering audio, video, text and HTML5 content streamlined to the user’s preferences. For instance, a mobile user purchases tickets to a rock concert via a mobile device. Enter mCore MobileCast: The service ingests the concert data in combination with GPS data to disseminate auxillary information to the user, such as the concert's opening act, parking locations and even places to eat nearby. "All that information is in separate places today, but we aggregate it all up," said Jim Ryan, Motricity’s chief strategy and marketing officer. The company provides mobile infrastructure services to "hundreds of enterprises" and 10 major wireless carries, including the top four in the U.S., Ryan said.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
Microsoft Vine: A New Twist on Social Marketing (CNN Money)
|
|
Posted: 06/05/2009
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 |
|
In an effort to untangle a new path toward social networking prosperity, Microsoft Vine is branching out into unchartered territory: charging subscription fees. Hailed as the 911 for the 21st Century, the new platform will focus on climbing the social networking ladder into the public safety and emergency information arenas by limiting activity to two actions: alerts and reports. Users can customize profiles and bunch their friends and family into groups, creating a virtual safety net to keep informed about events as major as hurricanes or national crises, or as minor as a snow day. The testing phase offers the opportunity to discover how city emergency management agencies across the country might implement this new communication tool. While the basic service will be free, premium services like smartphone access will come with a price tag.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
|
 |
|
Maximize your Web Site’s Mobilization with CSS (Practical eCommerce)
|
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Posted: 09/11/2009
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With mobile internet use and mobile-friendly browsing on the rise, expert Armando Roggio is
encouraging businesses to consider his “Web Design Tips” before redesigning their e-commerce sites to address their mobilization. Simple techniques such as adding a second style sheet or slightly revising a page’s HTML can enhance mobile shopping experiences
without wasting time to register new mobile domains or create mobile-specific styles. The best
solution? According to Roggio, it’s more efficient to redesign your current site to render well
across multiple platforms including mobile, desktop, RSS, and more, using CSS. To illustrate his advice, Roggio creates a home page for an e-commerce comic book store with an instructional video demonstrating how to create mobile-friendly background images.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
Mastering The Whole Customer Experience (.net)
|
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Posted: 04/15/2010
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In a recent interview, Oliver Lindberg caught up with Paul Dawson, EMC Conchango’s experience director, to discuss the company’s methodology. EMC Conchango concentrates on what it calls “total experience design,” taking a comprehensive look at the customer journey from beginning to end, and all the points in between. EMC Conchango operates as the European arm of EMC Consulting, allowing it to leverage its global reach and cast a wider net to capture more global business. Based on fact, the experience planning process incorporates Agile methodology, regularly released software and eye tracking to analyze how people interact with the content of a page. The agency is also experimenting with electroencephalograms that are literally wired to reveal what consumer’s brains are thinking and feeling. The agency also partners with Microsoft to adopt new user-facing technology to better understand customer behavior and devise ways to prolong consumer interactions with brands and products.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global,
Europe
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
Mastercard Campaign Praises Hockey’s “Unsung Heroes” (Strategy Magazine)
|
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Posted: 06/09/2010
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“Unsung heroes” are typically the faces behind the scenes, eschewing the limelight to help launch others to the top spot. In an unexpected turn, Mastercard’s new campaign casts new light on the "unsung heroes" of the hockey world. In support of its title sponsorship of the 2010 MasterCard Memorial World Cup, MasterCard’s saucy, mockumentary-style campaign features live-action vignettes that pit inanimate objects against each other to battle it out alongside real athletes. The digital campaign celebrates mundane objects like alarm clocks, cups of coffee, garage doors, dumbbells, slush and shock absorbers, whose efforts are often overlooked in the hockey player’s quest to meet challenges. Designed to be dynamic, memorable and cost-effective, the campaign extends the creative theme with trading cards featuring each item and rich media ads on TSN.ca, Sportsnet.ca, CHL.ca and NHL.com, as well as the major Canadian portals that drive visitors to the Mastercard.ca site to vote on their favorite videos. Mastercard will run the "Unsung Heroes" campaign until the end of the Memorial Cup on May 23.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
Market Intelligence the Smartphone Way (CRM Daily)
|
|
Posted: 02/04/2010
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|
Context-aware software tries to connect the real world with the vast stores of information about places in a virtual world: the Internet. The technology channels the knowledge amassed to provide useful tools to the smartphone user. Consumers gain more control over their buying experiences and save time when they purchase from vendors who have critical insight into their shopping habits. The software’s diverse industry applications include retail, business management, hospitality, and food and beverage. Research firm Gartner projects the market for this technology will grow to $12 billion by 2012, with Google standing in prime position to address and profit from the new wave of demand. Other companies that stand to benefit are Nokia, Cisco Systems, Avaya, large telcos like China Telecom or potentially even social networks such as Facebook, Gartner says.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
|
 |
|
Latinos Make Up Huge Piece Of Mobile Marketing Pie (ClickZ)
|
|
Posted: 03/31/2011
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|
Mobile phone use is on the upswing among the Latino population, rising 26 percent from 2006 to 2010 compared to 18 percent of the general population. Three key markers indicate that the Hispanic population will continue to drive mobile marketing: they care about social connectivity, they are actively seeking fun experiences and they are open to innovation. The proof is in the pudding: 82 percent of the market has been penetrated; mobile phones are outpacing landlines among this demographic as the primary source of communication; this group is more interested in mobile web browsing than the average population; 24 percent of mobile users have downloaded at least one app; and the group has demonstrated that enhancing their lives through social connectivity is a priority.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
Kitty Crowdsourcing? New Service Helps Businesses Collect And Rank Innovative Ideas (Fast Company)
|
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Posted: 09/02/2010
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|
When Princeton sociology professor Matthew Salganik came across KittenWars.com, he knew he found a valuable model for his own crowdsourcing website, All Our Ideas, which merges sociology and computer science techniques to enable organizations to collect ideas and rank them more effectively. A virtual idea factory, the service allows users to launch their own question and answer websites. If neither answer presented is acceptable to visitors, they can simply add their new ideas to the mix. Those new ideas then get filtered into the voting pool. Salganik explains, “If you ask for suggestions, especially online, you may get thousands of ideas that can take weeks to sort through. On the other hand, if you use a survey with preset questions and answers, you can get lots of data but few new ideas." The service is already gaining traction with organizations like Princeton’s class of 2008 student government, which used the tool to pinpoint the most pressing issues on undergrads minds.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
|
 |
|
InterContinental Hotels Group Offers Hospitality With A Technical Twist (InformationWeek)
|
|
Posted: 10/14/2010
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|
It’s easy to chalk IHG's, InterContinental Hotels Group, ubiquitous success up to one thing: customer loyalty. Tom Conophy, IHG's CIO, said the company’s core focus is on making customers "the center of our universe," and customer loyalty is vital to growth in the hospitality industry. The ever-growing hotel group, which owns seven hotel chains, including Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, and InterContinental Hotels, keeps its guest doors swinging by making business intelligence one of their core competencies. 200 million guest profiles currently occupy the company’s 25 TB database, with detailed information on 43 million loyalty plan members. The company currently receives 30 million availability requests per day, supported by its own proprietary search technology, the Bottom-Up Optimum Search Strategy(BOSS). "Search is the killer app for us," Conophy says, and with IHG’s iPhone app as the industry’s most downloaded, adding mobility is another success factor with a concept the group has named “Virtually Me.”
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
If At First You Don’t Succeed: Give It Another Go (Ecommerce Times)
|
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Posted: 05/27/2010
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|
A new Google feature is giving advertisers another go at customers they may have baited, but didn’t fully hook with a purchase. Tested in beta last year, the “remarketing” feature is now available throughout the Google Content Network (GCN), including on YouTube. Although remarketing is not a novel idea, it does help marketers limber up their campaigns. The feature can be tied into search campaigns, leveraged with targeted messages across different Web pages or run simultaneously with other remarketing campaigns. Here’s how it works: companies drive traffic to their Web site via search ads and then retarget those same customers with customized ads as they browse other sites across the GCN. Remarketing is an often underutilized yet successful tactic – only 31 percent of marketers surveyed by Advertise.com and the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) have tried it yet 53.1 percent of those enjoyed great success with it.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
How Big Is Big? The Rise Of The Mobile Advertising Market (Marketing Vox)
|
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Posted: 12/01/2010
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|
eMarketer recently revised its assessment of the mobile ad market, predicting it will grow 79% to over $743 million this year alone – growing to more than $1.1 billion in 2011 and more than $2.5 billion by 2014. Based on these numbers, it’s safe to say mobile has been elevated to mainstream status. The report indicates that SMS is still the largest format, with an estimated tally of $327 million for 2010. Companies like Phizzle and Skycore are further enhancing their service offerings to engage audiences and allow increased functionality to their users, including enabling mobile marketers to run applications such as movie trailers sent with tickets or sports videos sent with tickets. eMarketer predicts that display formats will increase. Apple’s iPhone remains the top choice with 82.7% of marketers, but Android’s 9% increase since last quarter indicates it is quickly gaining traction. Other services new to the market include Opera Software’s Ad Marvel, Sprint’s Sprint ID and Burstly.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
Hooked on Location: Skyhook Plug-In Delivers with Pin-Point Accuracy (Information Week)
|
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Posted: 07/03/2009
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|
Building on the recent wave of location-centric applications, three leading Web applications–MapQuest, Flickr, and WeatherBug–are using Skyhook Wireless’s Loki plug-in to determine the precise location of any Wi-Fi enabled device that permits it. With a database featuring more than 100 million Wi-Fi access points, Skyhook triangulates signals from GPS and cell phone towers to deliver precise locations. The app can be seamlessly added to any Web site with a few simple lines of JavaScript. Companies utilizing the technology include Glympse, T-Mobile and Apple’s iPhone App Store. For example, T-Mobile G1 phone users can now download free software from Glympse that enables them to establish local links with other phones to track users' changing locations with pin-point accuracy.
|
 |
Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
Growing the List: Hot New Tactics for 2009 (Marketing Vox)
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Posted: 07/31/2009
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|
Research conducted by ExactTarget, Ball State University, and the Email Marketers Club, provides an insider’s view into successful list growth. Best practices include on-site registration and capturing information through inbound call centers. Collecting customers’ email addresses during times of active participation-at point of sale, during online shopping and in store via text messaging- is an actionable strategy with a 60% higher success rate than offline activities like list rental and display advertising. The fastest-growing tactics for 2009 include email subscriptions via text messaging and enabling consumers to share email content with their social networks, with growth projected at 500% and 348%, respectively. The study also reports that B2B marketers entice more new subscribers with ‘incentivized’ registrations while ‘non-incentivized’ subscriptions are more effective for B2C marketers.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
|
|
 |
|
Google and Bing Prepare Real-Time Searches to Compete with Social Media (BusinessWeek)
|
|
Posted: 12/03/2009
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|
In a socially-driven market it’s tough even for the big dogs like Google and Microsoft to stay relevant. Harder still when Web surfers turn first for information to the sites they spend the most time on like Twitter and Facebook. Google and Microsoft will soon feature information plucked from social media sites on search pages. Microsoft users can perform searches for tweets and eventually status updates posted to Facebook. Google will add Twitter updates in search results and offer a search tool that delivers feeds posted by the searcher’s friends on social sites. Traffic to U.S. search engines grew 15% in the past year while traffic to Twitter exploded tenfold and tripled on Facebook. Considering those stats, Microsoft and Google are hoping to diversify their offerings by adding the new features and functionality searchers expect and capitalize on new ad revenue generated through targeted advertising.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
|
|
 |
|
Global Spending on Mobile Advertising to Rise Exponentially by 2013 (Marketing Vox)
|
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Posted: 11/08/2009
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 |
|
New data from Gartner predicts that global spending on mobile ads will rise 74%, reaching $913.5M this year, escalating to more than $13B by 2013. The report claims that location-based targeting and bigger gains in GPS technology, along with wide adoption of smartphones, 3G network data plans and downloadable applications will incite the growth as early as 2010. Parks Associates reports that advertising revenues in the US and Canada will grow from $208M in 2009 to $1.5B by 2013, with smartphone sales accounting for 45.5% of all mobile phone sales that year. JiWire reports a 79% increase in the use of mobile devices at public Wi-Fi hotspots in North America in the first half of 2009, and while research from MRI shows early consumer disapproval with mobile ads, 20% of that same audience would like to watch live TV via their cellphones.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global,
North America,
Asia Pacific,
Europe
Audience:
Business to Consumer
|
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 |
|
Giving Voice to Smartphones’ Other Applications (Marketing Vox)
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Posted: 01/06/2010
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|
The advent of smartphones has virtually made it obsolete to use mobile phones solely as phones. Current consumer uses of smartphones are exploding for non-voice communications like connecting to the internet, emailing and text messaging. Mobile Market View recently revealed a growing class of "heavy users" of non-voice communications. One example MarketingCharts wrote about was the percentage of users making more than 10 mobile internet accesses per week. The percentage continues to rise and currently represents more than one-fifth of all mobile users. This rise blows the door open for mobile advertising based on the exponential increase of commerical searches, particularly for local products. "Between waves one and three of Mobile Market View, consumers have basically doubled their use of the mobile platform for non-voice communications," said Rick Ducey, chief strategy officer, BIA/Kelsey.
|
 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
E-Commerce,
Marketing Communications
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
|
|
 |
|
Getting Social with Adobe Flash Platform Services (InformationWeek)
|
|
Posted: 10/22/2009
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 |
|
Adobe partnered with Gigya, a social media management platform, to launch Flash Platform Services, to add more sociability and measurability to developers creating Flash applications. The service’s three core principles: Distribution, Collaboration, and Social, aim to take Flash viral and social in the online distribution of Flash applications over platforms like Web, desktops and mobile devices. Available later this year, users will be able to “Flash” forward with the service that enables them to share, collaborate and facilitate real-time application distribution, tracking, and monetization to get one solid application that can ultimately deploy over 70 social networks and services. 98% of PCs with Internet connections are equipped with Adobe's Flash software, but applications are not always installed.
|
 |
Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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