Build a legion of people that helps, like and want to get you new customers:

Make it EASY for people to show their competence, smartness, curiosity, generosity, warmth, intelligence, humor, engagement, excitement – in short who they want to be percieved as – to friends and the rest of the world. Give people both digital and physical rewards for their efforts – making them look even better. Build in game mechanics (sorry, but it works.) Make it fun? Sure, but better, make people feel good about themselves.

And help them to do it so that it´s not coming on as bragging.

Facilitate what´s happening in the market based on your activation initiatives eloquently and exquisitely.

How about a travel company making gogobot.com – awesome for building trust to your company. Throw in some opportunities for people to show off where they are going BEFORE travelling more than asking for just tips, and also WHEN on location. Afterwords, sure – but tend to be last minute news...

What if a TV Company made mombo.com (your profile where movies recommended for you and friends tweets is the most interesting feature) intergrated with Facebook - making TV social again.

Ongoing projects. 365 days a year.  Kickstart and help people to after rationalize with campaigns.

RE Greg Lindsay´s quote:
“Time spent with computers has tripled over the past decade among kids age 8 to 18. The bulk of this group's time is spent on social media, followed by games, video sites and instant messaging. The average kid packs a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into a daily seven and a half hours of media exposure. Just think how this group will consume media in 10 years when they enter the work world and start consuming in earnest.”

Just think how they will COMMUNICATE and ACTIVATE each other more. People love to talk, being seen and not least to belong.  What and how will you as a brand be part enabling this better? That´s the question. 

Some of 2010¹s most striking brand initiatives were ongoing projects as opposed to one-off campaigns:

Hear hear. A brand needs a pulse, 365 days a year, to be able to activate the market through continouosly giving something of value – the only way to build trust.  That´s how a brand will be able to be part of culture, of people´s everyday life – to assist people with finding and building meaning in life. A brand needs to build meaningful relationships with their market. In a relationshipeconomy  where transactions are by-products of meaningful relationships activating is key. 

Kids on Facebook want to have fun with as little trouble as possible

Damah Boyd just posted a very interesting article about some US kids and their behaviour on Facebook.

Super-logoff: When they go out of Facebook, they deactivate their account. When they log back in they reactivate their account.

Deleting activity: Every wall message, status update and likes is deleted shortly after posted.

Although this might be a symptom of a rough everyday life in some schools in the US, take into the consideration the growing examples of mobbing on Facebook also in Scandinavia amongst teenagers, might this be a visible early symptom of how teens might start using Facebook and other social networks?

Read the article here: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/11/08/risk-reduction-strategies-on-facebook.html

50% of the active internet universe has joined a brand community.

New wave report out. Active internet users = Those who use internet every day or every other day. Key findings:

- 30% accessing social media via mobile.

- 10% growth in the number of social network managers. (How about activate managers?)

- There are 1.5 billion visits to social networks, daily. Of those repsonding to the Wave survey, 61.4% have managed a profile in the past six months, a 10-point rise since Wave.4 in 2009

- Almost half of respondents have accessed brand communities on social networks. The highest motivations for joining were ‘to learn’ (78.6%) and ‘to gain advance news on products’ (76.1%)

- Of those who joined brand communities, 71% were more likely to purchase and 63% recommended others to join.


<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_5465006"><strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px">Wave 5   the socialisation of brands - report</strong> <div style="padding:5px 0 12px">View more presentations from Thorsten Linz.</div></div>

Online the quickest route to initial awareness

A multi-screen consumer is an adult (16+) who owns and uses a TV and accesses the Internet via a computer and smartphone on a weekly basis. The average multi-screen consumer spends 46 hours a week engaged in activities on media and entertainment devices – 12.5 hours more than the average European.

1. Rapid adoption of digital devices is driving convergence as consumers use several screens to perform the same activities. However, convergence has not led to cannibalisation amongst media devices. Instead, consumers find that each screen has unique benefits. Together they enhance the user experience

2. The purchase funnel has changed. Multi-screen media consumption influences consumers’ purchase path and each screen plays a critical role.

  • 83% of multi-screen consumers have researched products online in the last 3 months.
  • When asked where they first learnt about the last product they researched and went on to purchase, 38% cited an online source and over a third went on to purchase the product online.
  • Over just the past 3 months, 78% of multi-screen consumers have ordered and paid for products online.
  • 52% tending to stick to brands they like, and they are less swayed over price vs. brand.
  • They are willing to try new things (55% agree), are product advocates (54% agree) and can be swayed by advertising (27% more likely to agree that ads help them decide what to buy vs. all Europeans)


3. Campaign effectiveness increases incrementally with each additional digital media channel.

In fact, amongst multi-screen consumers, the PC is considered more ‘fun’ than the TV.

Read more here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/uk/multi-screen-consumer-research

The weirdest people in the world?

Cultures are different. But still a fun and interesting article citing results from The Ultimatum Game from people in the Peruvian Amazon.

“WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

If you're a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there's good reason to believe they're wrong,Dr. Henrich says.

After analyzing reams of data from earlier studies, the UBC team found that WEIRD people reacted differently from others in experiment after experiment involving measures of fairness, anti-social punishment and co-operation, as well as visual illusions and questions of individualism and conformity.

In other words, we do not know what we thought we knew about the human mind. We only know about the mind of a particular, unusual slice of humanity > westerners.

Our brains are distorted, Dr. Henrich says.”

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427126/story.html#ixzz10pXSzrfJ

Thanks: via @garethk

Almost a quarter of consumers would prefer to receive information from a brand through Facebook rather than its website.

“Our research indicates that digital marketing requires a much more integrated strategy that runs across the entire company, from sales through tocustomer service. It requires a convergence of thinking and an approach to deal with user-generated content”

3% from a company blog...

Read more here: http://www.nma.co.uk/news/quarter-of-consumers-want-brand-information-via-facebook/3018595.article