Director Lance Weiler’s Pandemic 1.0 was one of the most talked-about experiences at Sundance 2011’s New Frontier program. This story-telling project is equally part-film, part-interactive game, part-sociological experiment and part-genius.
How is Walmart, the world’s largest company, planning to boost sales this winter? By taking a page from Groupon, the world’s fastest growing company ever.
This week Walmart introduced CrowdSaver, a groupon-like, or should we say, a groupon “like” tactic. Every week Walmart will post a deal on its facebook page. If enough people like the deal, then the deal is on.
CrowdSaver’s first deal, posted on Monday, was already a success – over 5000 people liked the 42″ Plasma TV offered at 18% below the store price. On Tuesday, when Walmart confirmed the deal was on, over 4000 people liked the news (note: the announcement and the confirmation of the deal are by far the most liked posts on Walmart’s page).
While CrowdSaver clearly takes a page from Groupon, the tactic is still brilliant on many levels.
Control
- It allows the brand complete control of each and every deal.
Recruitment
- It requires people to “like” Walmart, before they can like a deal.
Engagement
- It motivates the existing community to rally their friends to like a deal and to check back each week for a new deal.
Data
- It will help Walmart understand “who” likes “what” and “how” likes convert to sales.
As the holidays draw near, will CrowdSaver be the only groupon “like” tactic? We hope not. Given the record growth of Groupon and the early success of CrowdSaver, we all love a good deal and would easily like more of them.
We have all kinds of friends: best friends, friends with benefits, even frenemies.
Now there’s a new kind of friend called “likers”.
Likers simply like things a lot and as a result, they’re more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user. The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook — they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.
What’s interesting about likers, besides being more valuable targets for brands, is that they offer marketers a valuable lesson: the more you like, the more likely you are to have more friends (i.e. the more interested you are, the more interesting you will likely be).
Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services – think apps – are less about the searching and more about the getting. – Chris Anderson, The Web is Dead
There’s no denying that apps are efficient at helping us get what we want. But in all this getting, will we miss what we loved about the web? Will we miss getting lost?
Increasingly apps are focusing on getting us to a fixed destination and getting us to check-in when we arrive. One of the most popular apps, regardless of smartphone platform, is Google Maps. Without question it’s the best app to get from point A to point B. When you get to point B, you can then use a host of other location-based apps to get things at that location. But in our focus on the destination (the getting), are we missing what makes life magical?
Long before the web was dead, people believed that it was the journey, not the destination that mattered. When the journey is our focus, we’re more conscious of our immediate surroundings and more open to serendipitous discovery. How many times while traveling, despite a good guide book and destination recommendation, have you gotten lost, only to then find something truly amazing?
In all this efficiency, this getting, are we’re becoming less conscious of our journey? Missed a turn while fiddling with an app? No problem. Re-routing. While we all need uber-efficiency in our lives, at some point we also need to get ‘semi-lost’. One such app that is working to create this experience is an alternative navigation app, aptly called Serendipitor. Check out the wonderful intro video for after the jump.
Simply enter an origin and a destination, and Serendipitor maps a route between the two. You can increase or decrease the complexity of your route, depending how much time you have to play with. As you navigate your route, suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear within the step-by-step directions. Try a suggestion and who knows, serendipity could be just around the corner.
If the web is truly dead and we only focus on the efficiency of getting, let’s hope that a thousand alternative apps bloom and we use them. When we’re lost and more consciously aware of our surroundings, serendipitous discoveries happen (and that’s what makes our journey often magical).
Many companies are using RFID (radio frequency identification) to manage the supply-side of the equation. But what about using it to stoke consumer demand?
Here’s a look at 3 brands linking RFID to social media:
1) Vail Resorts, Epic Mix App
Vail Resorts in Colorado has launched a new social gaming app which enables skiers and snowboarders to track their activities and share them with their friends and family. The app is powered by RF chips embedded in season passes and lift tickets.
Befitting its name, the Epic Mix app mixes up, as Mashable points out, “Nike+ and miCoach, which allow you to track your physical activities, and Gowalla, which rewards users for exploring new areas via its Trips feature. Like Gowalla, EpicMix rewards users with special pins for various accomplishments, such as being on the first chairlift of the day, or skiing a certain number of vertical feet over a designated period of time.”
This summer in Israel, Coca-Cola hosted the first ever, real-life RFID event tied to Facebook. As teens engaged in activities, like waterslides, even sunbathing, they automatically updated their status by swiping an RFID wristband across strategically located readers.
Judging from the updates, the event was wildly successful – “there were more than 35,000 updates each day even though the village only hosts 650 teenagers at a time.” (via: allfacebook)
Izzy’s, an ice cream cafe in Minnesota, can make 100 flavors of ice cream, but only has space to serve 32 at a time – a conundrum for customers who scream for a particular flavor that’s not available. To help customers know when their favorites are being served, Izzy’s started using RFID flavor tags. Now every time a flavor enters the dipping case, an RFID tag sends customers, who crave that flavor, a real-time update. (via: techworld)
Ice cream flavors, ski slope and amusement park activities – check. What will RFID broadcast next?
In researching this post, it was hard to find cases studies, which begs the question: is the lack of RFID applications linked to social media a massive opportunity for your brand?
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