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New Tweet Button Simplifies Sharing (Digital Arts)
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Posted: 09/16/2010
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In an effort to simplify sharing and make retweeting one of its core functions, Twitter recently launched a new Tweet Button, which prompts a pop-up box allowing visitors to share a Twitter feed without leaving the site they are visiting. The feature also allows publishers to incorporate custom text into their Tweet Button box, as well as suggest other Twitter accounts to follow. "The Tweet Button will help publishers grow traffic and increase their Twitter following," reads Twitter's announcement. While TweetMeme will be phasing out its popular “retweet” service, the company plans to launch other Twitter-related services. "We have grown to more than 750 million daily retweet button impressions.... That said, the market requires an official solution that can accelerate this growth. So today Twitter is launching its own Tweet Button and we are very pleased to be partnering with them to continue to grow the overall Twitter ecosystem," reads a TweetMeme statement. CNN.com, YouTube, Time.com, Hulu and USA Today have already incorporated the function into their websites.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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The Domino Effect: Popular Pizza Company Taps Into Social Marketing (ClickZ)
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Posted: 09/16/2010
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On the heels of a 61 percent increase in online sales in the UK and Ireland from the same period last year, Domino's is singing the praises of Facebook and Foursquare promotions. The global pizza chain credits growth in web-based sales (jumping from 26 to 33 percent this year) to its social media marketing tactics – which include cultivating a strong presence online with both a global Facebook page and individual local pages, as well as securing 531 Twitter followers and launching Foursquare’s geo-location service. "We've had nearly 10,000 check-ins since it launched from around 3,500 unique visitors," Georgina Wald, spokesperson for the London-based division, said. The company has also enjoyed recent growth in sales by turning their attention to search marketing.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Europe
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Asian Persuasion – Social Media Marketing In Japan (ClickZ)
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Posted: 09/16/2010
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Before MySpace and Facebook were even a glimmer in the virtual eye, Japan had Mixi – one of the country’s most popular SNS (social networking sites). While businesses in the U.S. are really only just beginning to tap into social media as a viable marketing tool, savvy businesses in Japan have been on the social bandwagon for more than 10 years, using platforms like Mixi, Gree and 2channel. Japan’s preponderance of social media might even prompt some to say that Japan was the genesis for social media marketing. The country’s rich social media platforms include: general social networking sites; video and photo sharing sites, social bookmarking sites; blog network sites, mini-blogging sites and micro social networking (SNS) sites. With most services available for both PC and mobile (unlike the U.S. where mobile is just gaining traction), mobile is already a key part of the countries inhabitants’ online lives.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Content Strategy,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Asia Pacific
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Get The Scoop: Ben & Jerry’s Launches Sweet Twitter Campaign (Promo Magazine)
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Posted: 09/16/2010
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This summer there was a new way to get the latest scoop, and this time it wasn’t breaking news – it was free samples of ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s. Led from destination to destination by consumer tweets via Twitter, the “Scoop Truck” went on a sampling tour of New York City in June and July. While the initial campaign plan left one weekday open to a virtual “see-which-way-the-tweets-blow-the-truck” kind of spontaneity, by the end of the nearly two-month tour nearly half of the sweet stops were those requested by the 3,000 local followers the tour handle @benjerrytruck amassed. Responses to outgoing tweets yielded anywhere from five to 100 responses. Although followers will still be able to get the latest scoop through Twitter and view images of the happy samplers on Flickr, the next tour is aimed Boston, where stops will be announced primarily via Facebook.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Social Media Becomes Key Tactic For Strategy Execution (Forbes)
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Posted: 09/02/2010
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Scores of consumers are using social media to connect, express and impact the world around them, and savvy marketers are tapping its power, too, with nearly 80% implementing the medium to bring their customers to the table rather than talk at them from the proverbial soapbox. While much of the literature highlights how companies can implement social media outside of their organizations, there is significant room to use social media as an inside strategy tool, too. Bad communication can freeze any organizational idea, especially if employees feel ostracized from the process. What better way to get the entire organization on board with a branding initiative or new program than using social media as a strategy to help organizations better talk with, rather than talk at their employees. The tool will not only help companies build and execute better strategies but build stronger employee cultures in the process.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
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Social Sampling: The Campbell Brand Joins Facebook (BrandWeek)
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Posted: 08/19/2010
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In an effort to grow sales of its healthy beverages and baked snacks, Campbell Soup Co. has launched a Facebook campaign to promote its new V8 V-Fusion + Tea line via social sampling. Each week through September 30, the Camden, N.J.-based maker of Chunky and Select Harvest soups will give away 1,000 free samples. Another Campbell brand, Pepperidge Farm, also launched a page to promote its new strawberry flavored Milano cookies, gaining nearly 9,000 fans in the month since its launch. Taking a cue from other big name brands – like Ford and P&G's Gillette – Campbell is incorporating more social media marketing into its overall marketing plan to drive consumption. The strategy to connect with consumers online seems to be working: In the first 24 hours, all 1,000 samples of V8 V-Fusion + Tea were gone, Campbell rep Juli Mandel Sloves said.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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New Old Spice Campaign Aims To Go Viral With A Little Mystery (Fast Company)
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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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Text-Happy In 2G:GupShup Offers Simple Texting Service To Millions (Forbes)
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Posted: 08/19/2010
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With 1.8 billion global Web users and 4.6 billion mobile phone subscribers, including multiple SIM cardholders, the reach of social media is hard to ignore. Beerud Sheth, cofounder of Webaroo, gets the message loud and clear. Text messaging via basic handset and SMS opens up a path to reach an overwhelming market of hundreds of millions, particularly in India and other parts of Asia. UK’s Portio Research expects the $100 billion market of simple texting to grow by 20% by 2014. Taking text messaging social through a service called SMS GupShup, Sheth aims to enlarge the social scope of interaction from one to one to one to many, or even many to many. Much of GupShup’s (Hindi for "chitchat") revenue comes from a feature that allows users, called publishers, to send messages to users signed up for a group. Another feature targets smaller groups for more personal communication. GupShup makes ideal sense for mass consumer products – Webaroo suggests that as many as 150 brand advertisers like Pepsico and 10,000 smaller-size enterprises like Mumbai Traffic Police are using the platform.
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 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Asia Pacific
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
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.
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Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
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Fuel Your Facebook Fan Page In 4 Easy Steps (Ecommerce Times)
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Posted: 07/22/2010
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Marketers may successfully be racking up the fan numbers on their Facebook Fan Pages, but they are ultimately failing to establish long-term relationships with customers in the process. Companies shouldn’t lose hope, however, because the code to successfully reaping rewards on Facebook lies in four critical steps. According to an E-Commerce News article, in order to retain customers, marketers need to “1) develop a strategy; 2) create a solid presence; 3) motivate [their] fans to take action; and 4) use Facebook to amplify other campaigns, promotions and marketing activities.” Committing to the management of their Facebook walls after business hours, considering brand contribution cadence, and asking if they are doing what their fans want will also aide companies in amping up their fan totals.
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 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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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.
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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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Get The Most Out Of User Experience On Your Website (New Media Knowledge)
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Posted: 07/22/2010
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Are you aware of what users really experience on your website? Monitoring your website performance has hit a new level of complexity since Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are more frequently being incorporated into Web pages. Knowing how your browser interacts with RIAs is crucial to discovering how fast your Web page renders. To get an accurate result, use a real browser. Why is this important? Browser emulators are far less sophisticated at interacting with Web pages than real browsers and only real browsers can accurately track information in various situations. Real browsers also accurately capture client time – when actual page element execution is taking place. Ultimately, using a real browser with RIAs lets you know that your end-user is getting the best experience possible on your Web page.
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Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
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Powerade Dives Deep In YouTube Social Campaign Video
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Posted: 07/08/2010
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In preparation for the FIFA World Cup, Powerade will provide players sports drinks and promote the importance of rehydration through a social media campaign. The campaign is a digital, viewer-interactive video of a never-ending football game on YouTube.com. Using the "Deep Dive" technique, viewers are able to click on a player in the video and "get a glimpse of that player’s psyche, showing them what effect Powerade has on his game", according to executive creative director Juan Morales. Click-through hotspots lead viewers further into players' stories providing a deeper level of meaning to the campaign. Following the digital ad world philosophy to "fish where the fish are", Morales says it makes sense to feature the video on YouTube where the viewers already are.
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 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Content Strategy,
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Marketing Communications,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Procter & Gamble Seeks E-Commerce Innovation (Internet Retailer)
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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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Developers Build Native Mobile Web Applications With Titanium 1.0 (Info World)
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Posted: 04/29/2010
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Appcelerator recently released Titanium 1.0, a cross-platform development system for mobile and desktop applications. The open source system is compatible with JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby, which eliminates the need for mobile application builders to learn the Objective-C language for iPhone or Google's Java language for Android systems. A translator enables building mobile and desktop applications that will run natively on different systems. The system supports development for PCs, Macintosh, and Linux while mobile platforms include Apple iPhone and Google Android. Plans include Research In Motion Blackberry support within the year. Scott Schwarzhoff, vice president of marketing for Appcelerator attributes Titanium’s competitive advantage over other cross-platform development frameworks to its ability to “offer native performance as well as native UI (user interface) and access to device capabilities.” Eliminating the barrier of learning Objective-C makes Titanium highly attractive to developers. Appcelerator will also develop a version of Titanium for Apple's new iPad.
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 |
Industry:
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services,
Telecommunications
Topic:
Creative & Design,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business,
Business to Consumer
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Discover Technology’s Next Big Star At South By Southwest Interactive Festival (CNET News)
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Posted: 04/29/2010
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The competition is on to see who emerges as SXSWi's (South by Southwest Interactive Festival) biggest technology star. This year’s hottest ticket? The rivalry brewing between Gowalla and Foursquare, competing “geolocation” mobile applications which let users "check in" from their smartphones, share locations, and compete to earn Gowalla virtual goods and Foursquare "badges". With round-the-clock parties, panels, meet-and-greets and apps like Foodspotting, which uses GPS to help users locate specific menu items at local restaurants, the festival is poised to take over the entire city. Other geolocation start-ups want in on the action: Sunday night’s "Geobash" is co-hosted by SimpleGeo, HotPotato and Yowza, Loopt is launching a revamped, events-based iPhone app and Powered’s iPhone app "Snark It" earns users “liquidity” points to use toward free drinks.
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 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global,
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer,
Peer Groups & Communities
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Filling The Gap With Enterprise-Wide Business Intelligence (CIO Magazine)
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Posted: 04/29/2010
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With multiple clothing brands to manage, including Old Navy, Banana Republic, The Gap and online retailer Piper-Lime, senior vice president of IT for The Gap, Michael Jones understands what it takes to operate a successful business intelligence project. Jones recommends that organizations adopt a single enterprise-wide data warehouse rather than operating separate data marts for each individual project. With one single system, Gap managers can mine data and reports across all of its brands and 3,100 globally dispersed stores. "Our challenge is to try to provide information across an entire enterprise," Jones said. With ten years of experience in enterprise-wide BI, the company has aligned data from all of its units into one data warehouse which allows it to answer a total of 96 questions, significantly more than if it operated single silos. While the cost of setting up a comprehensive data warehouse is higher, Jones claims the added flexibility is well worth the extra cost.
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 |
Industry:
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Business Intelligence,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Business
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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."
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 |
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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Opera Offers Android Users Faster, Nimbler Mini 5 Browser (InformationWeek)
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Posted: 04/15/2010
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The beta version of the Opera Mini 5 browser for Android is alive and well. The mobile browser features standard Opera features such as speed dial, tabbed browsing, password manager, speed and a slick design. The proxy-based browser is connected to Opera’s main servers, making it capable of remotely compressing data by up to 90% before sending it to the phone, a beneficial feature for low-bandwidth data connections. In addition to highlighting the browser’s desktop-like Web experience, initial reviews from InformationWeek blogger Eric Zeman said, “…the "killer feature," is the browser's speed. Opera Mini 5 loads Web sites dramatically faster than both the native Android browser and the Dolphin browser on both the Droid and the myTouch 3G."
|
 |
Industry:
Telecommunications
Topic:
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
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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Turning a New Page: Penguin Demos Interactive Books For The iPad (Digital Arts)
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Posted: 04/01/2010
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Imagine pointing on an interactive screen to accurately reveal constellations lighting up the night sky. Penguin Books recently unveiled fantastically interactive books like this one, which uses iPad’s compass app, at the Financial Times Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference in London. Taking Apple’s ePub application beyond the traditional narrative text it is designed to support, CEO John Makinson demoed how a number of titles ranging from popular children's literature to medical textbooks could be ported for the iPad. Makinson views the iPad as an out-of-the-box approach for e-book publishers, saying that "the definition of a book itself, as we can see, is up for grabs." Extended capabilities include embedded audio, video and streaming for both “learning and leisure apps” to further strengthen “Pearson’s, the publishing powerhouse that owns both Penguin Books and The Financial Times, push into digital and online education.”
|
 |
Industry:
Retail & Products,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
Creative & Design,
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
Global
Audience:
Business to Consumer
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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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|
From Buzz to Buy: Social Commerce and Word-of-Mouth Marketing (ClickZ)
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Posted: 04/01/2010
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There’s a new buzz in town: social commerce skilfully links customers to customers online and then bridges them into commercial connections... driving customers to transition from "buzz" to "buy." The ultimate goal for delivering a meaningful and measurable social commerce program is to integrate all marketing activities into one streamlined campaign, blending social programs like Facebook, Twitter and company blogs with more traditional programs like in-store, direct marketing and mobile advertising. Building a social commerce program entails the following: (1) give your customers a venue for creating user-generated content; (2) expand your customer-voice from the outside-in and (3) leverage customer feedback in all your marketing initiatives. The challenge then is to deliver meaningful products and services that meet your customers’ needs.
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 |
Industry:
Marketing, Design, & Interactive Communications,
Technology, Consulting, & Professional Services
Topic:
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.
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 |
Industry:
Retail & Products
Topic:
E-Commerce,
Experience & Interaction,
Technology Implementation
Region:
North America
Audience:
Business to Consumer
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