In the beginning of 2009 we placed our bet on Twitter as the up and coming new trend for the year. One year later and guess what – it’s still booming (actually it might be a little stagnant at the moment, but nonetheless, still showing impressive numbers). It’s time we do the same for this year – and I’ll put my money in Location Based Services using Augmented Reality.
First things first – what is a Location Based Service? LBS are services that use the mobile phone’s location via GPS to exactly pin point the users’ location. Through this information you can basically direct your communication in the most relevant way for the consumer.
The perfect example for recent LBS is the recently implemented upgrade for the Google Mobile Search Engine that allows users to give permission to Google to access the phone’s location and give them search results related to their coordinates. For example – you’re in Lisbon. If Google knows this and you start writing “museum”, you will get results related to Museums in Lisbon. This is genius while still being very simple.
The fact is that LBS aren’t new news – they’ve been around since 2001 but like almost every technology during the 2000 decade, it hasn’t been explored to its full potential. And with the advancements in Mobile Phone technology, practically ever phone comes with the necessary technology to further enhance the user of these services.
With Augmented Reality this has become a lot more interesting. Augmented Reality, as you might know, overcomes real image you obtain over your camera (like your mobile phone camera) and overlays it with a information layer that adds contents to what you are seeing. And using LBS only sweetens the experience.
Take two examples in consideration. The first one is Layar. Available for Android and App Stores, Layar adds a layer to you phone camera based on the service that is most relevant for you at the time. The service you can pick varies on the country you are in, as service providers vary. One example that is quite spread out in every country the app is available is Wikipedia.
Imagine you are walking around in Rome. You have no idea what to see or where things are. Sure, you can use a Map, but you are still confused on what is what. You simply grab your IPhone or Android Phone and access Layar. Layar will pinpoint your location via GPS and ask you what service to use. You pick Wikipedia. If you now aim your camera in 360º degrees, you’ll have an arrow pointing out to the monuments around you and with a small subtitle saying what it is and relating to an article on Wikipedia about it. Pretty useful, if you ask me.
Layar is already quite well known, but our next example isn’t – Google Goggles. While using the exact same mechanics of Layar (Pinpointing your location and giving you relevant content) the way it does is a lot less limited – as it doesn’t require you to use a service provider but Google itself.
So imagine you are walking around a supermarket. You get a phone call – “We need wine for dinner – and make it a good one!”. You go to the wine section and find one you think was well reviewed by a friend. With Google Goggles you simply open the application and take a picture of the wine. Using an image recognition technology via Augmented Reality, Google will match the picture with its own image database and give you back the results – be it wine reviews, the brand website, etc… This can be applied to buildings, clothes and even famous paintings. Sure, it’s still very beta, but its potential cannot be ignored.
So my bet for this year will rely on LBS using Augmented Reality. The potential for brands impacting their consumers where they need the most – outside where all the noise is – is huge. Imagine this – a brand places a product poster with an indication for the consumer to take a picture to know more about it. Depending on where the picture is taken, you can give feedback to the consumer and direct him to the nearest store to see the product while giving him a digital voucher for the purchase. You can also create scavenger hunt-like activations using a whole Mupi network. And these are just very basic off-the-head applications to it.
Some might say that it is still early to consider this technology as mainstream. And I agree. But consider mobile phone releases and the rotation associated with this type of product and we’ll all agree that phones with these capacities are quickly spreading. Now it’s up to the brand – will they be the pioneers or will they be the followers. It’s all up to their strategy, of course.

Everybody is (or should be) familiar with the KISS principle (keep it short and simple). It is widely applied throughout communications, marketing being no exception. It basically points out that things should be kept to a simple level as complexity only adds an unnecessary experience layer to the scene. This is also true for Online Marketing – the more complex the experience is, the more prone are you to losing your visitors. This applies to banners, sites and even social network interactions.

If you work in the online arena, then a lot of your clients have already come up to you and said, “Well, let’s go into [insert Social Network here]” – most likely Facebook now – and has tasked you and your team to strategize what the brand should do on Facebook. If you are going into a a group logic or just a fan page with some static information, then you should probably think about doing something more. However, if you are creating a more complex interaction, like a browser game or a new tool that you hope will be really interesting for the users, then you’ve got a lot of work ahead. The KISS principle will be your friend when figuring out what you should do, but I’ve got a new rule – the SSS Rule.

The SSS Rule simply stands for “Simple”, “Sharable”, “Scorable”. And it will help you evaluate your ideas before you take them to the client and even support them when you do your presentation. Let’s look into each of these:

Simple – No news here. KISS said to keep it simple. I’m telling you to keep it SIMPLE. The time people spend in Social Networks, although growing, is unbelievably fragmented. From tool to tool, game to game, post to post, users are prone to lose their attention in a very short time span. It’s a stresstetainment consequence. So if you want your tool to survive it has to be really time efficient – only requiring a little while to understand and about 1-5 minutes of the users time maximum. Beyond efficiency, keep in mind it also has to make them come back for more. One such example is Mafia Wars. With more users growing every day, Mafia Wars takes up to a few minutes each time you go in. But it always makes you come back in a few hours to carry on your game.

Sharable – Social Networks are all about sharing – and they make it easy to do it too! All you have to consider is that the tool has to have sharing potential – be it because it’s a natural mechanism such as the ingredient exchange in Restaurant City or because sharing it broadens the experience like adding more neighbors in Farmville.

Scorable – This is probably the hardest to explain. To keep users coming back for more, Social Network tools should create competition in an indirect way (e.g. a score or level that challenges users to develop new skills and ‘up their game’). Not only does competition open up more functionality in the application, it also becomes a status of its own. Consider the quiz craze on Facebook. What makes users crazy about quizzes like the Flixter Movie Quizzes is the fact that they see the results of their friends. This is what I mean as Scorable – it give a score or it contains an evaluation or evolution metric inside the application.

There you have it. The SSS rule will help you conceptualize and evaluate any application you create for a Social Network. Keep in mind, some applications might only fulfill two of the criteria such as Sharable + Simple; as one of the S’s might be more important to your target than another. Ultimately it’s up to you though, where you want to position the brand in the SSS matrix. In any case, using the SSS Rule will help you evaluate where your social application stands and what should you improve or not.

Facebook Connect has been around for a while. While some of us are still fooling around trying to find a real way to engage the Facebook audience – who’s definitely becoming tired of the overcrowded application scenary that feeds us with thousand of irrelevant quizes everyday – while other players are doing what seems right, which is using Facebook to communicate user necessities in a basic 2.0 fashion. Orbitz is one of those cases.

Having recently released a Facebook Connect application where users can share their travel plans with their friends. Not only this but it also allows friends to click on the trip in order to book their own travel, be it equal to the one they saw on Facebook. This makes group booking a lot simpler. The clever thing about this is:
1. The way it displays the brand and their product in a Facebook-friendly why. It’s not an invading application that you feel that is just another quiz, it’s actually something real (a trip a friend is making);
2. It generates opinion. Trip reviews – be it opinions on the destination or the Hotel – are the themes most commented on the web and regarded as valued knowledge coming from somebody who’s actually been to these places – it’s the basis of the 2.0.
While Orbitz is not the first vacationing app on Facebook, it definitely uses two important factors – simple and context-friendly. It is a natural fit with Facebook and users do not mix it with second rated applications. In an overcrowded social media scenario, it’s nice to actually see brands tone it down a bit and instead of creating complex in-Facebook mechanics, they just connect it in a natural way.

We all know the Wii has started a whole new way of interacting with videogames. Sure, it doesn’t have the most advanced graphics engine, but it’s simple, clean and fun, as well as it brings a whole new level of interaction never before seen on a home console.

As you’d expect, competition is soon following. The two titans of the home console industry have presented on E3 this year their proposals for engagement – while the PS3 has a prototype Motion Control wand that interacts with the PS3 Eye Toy and is very similar to the Wii’s control, Microsoft has presented something completely different – the Project Natal.

Project Natal is a motion sensing system that will be compatible with every Xbox out there. It has full body motion control by tracking 3D movement and it recognizes voices, thus totally immersing the players into the game. What it promises is amazing.

So now we have three players in the home console market that have motion control. While interesting at first and definitely exciting for the consumers, one big question rises – how will game developers react? I mean, if you were a game developer, would you develop a game just for those who bought a bonus feature for the console? One thing is the Wii which is a motion control console PERIOD. Another is a add-on that not all consumers will buy – which means you’ll only be targeting some consumers. On another hand, how will you port the games to the three consoles when you have three totally different motion control schemes?

We do not know what the future holds for the motion sensors, but it does show us something – hardware developments in the gaming industry need the game producer’s feedback. Without them it is unwise to go on. I do not know if Sony and Microsoft tried to talk it over with the producers, but one thing I do believe – it will still be hard to overcome the Wii on that field.