If the product you market is made from non-recyclable material, it’s getting easier to convert that negative into a positive story. A company called Terracycle is helping CPG brands like Frito Lay and Mars turn their waste into upcycled products like speakers. These re-birth stories are not only good for the planet, but a golden opportunity for business (as evidenced by Terracycle’s success).

Founded in 2001 by a 19 year old Princeton University freshman named Tom Szaky, TerraCycle makes affordable, eco-friendly products from a wide range of non-recyclable waste material. With over 50 products available at major retailers like Walmart and Target, TerraCycle is one of the fastest growing eco-friendly manufacturers in the world. Every month it gives $100,000.00 in $0.02 donations and has are over 8.5 million people in the U.S. actively collecting waste to create its upcycled products.

Whether you Terracycle or not, the real strategic imperative for your brand is “Why do you need a garbage story now?” For a long time consumers felt good about throwing your products into the ‘recycling bin’; every week the garbage man came and the trash just went away (presumably to be recycled). But documentaries like “Bag It” are driving awareness of what ‘away’ really means, not only for the planet’s well-being, but also for ours. As awareness piles up and upcycles into activism, why not tell a garbage story with an eco-happy ending? Now is good…

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P.S. If you’re interested in Terracyle, here’s a look at the media buzz surrounding the concept…

(via: brandchannel)

• Users are playing, not watching sports – Fifa.com, NBA.com and ESPN.com all saw declines as regular visitors turned off their computers and headed outside to play.
• Users are, however, watching blockbusters – Fandango.com, moviefone.com, rottentomatoes.com and netflix.com all saw traffic increases.
• Users are being social – Cooking sites like allrecipes.com and cooks.com saw increases, as did dating sites zoosk.com and match.com, while twitter.com and hi5.com saw declines

So i guess we’re all having meals at home and then going out to watch The Expendables with a blind date.

That thing you geek out about, that you could talk about endlessly, obsess over the minutia, that’s your sickness. If you’re sick like we are, you’ll love itsasickness, an obsession network for an obsessive culture. Check out Get Sick from itsasickness productions on Vimeo.

Star power aside, the genius of itsasickness is two-fold:

1) the organization of both user generated content and expertise into focused intelligence: the obsessor as the expert, the obsession as the insight.

2) the truth that the way to be interesting is first to be interested.

What’s your sickness?

Everyone remembers the Old Spice adverts from the early 90s.  Cue manly man windsurfing through stormy seas…cutting to a handsome guy splashing cold water onto his rugged, but smooth complexion. ‘The mark of a real man’ the voice over purrs. Well, nearly twenty years on, the proposition is exactly the same. This time though, we smile not in admiration of the Old Spice man, but in jest of his charisma.

Weiden and Kennedy Portland have created numerous YouTube videos depicting their take on the optimum of masculinity. The videos are quite frankly, hilarious. I think the scripts are bang on. Too ludicrous for words, but harbouring a strange truth in female attraction. Isaiah mimics every boyfriend, husband and lover who chooses to spend his Saturday wearing his pants on the sofa, cheering on his favourite sports team. Oh no. Isaish hunts for his food, bakes you a dream cake in the gourmet kitchen he built for you with his bare hands, swan dives off waterfalls and rides horses backwards. Of course, you can’t have this. But your man CAN smell like a god with Old Spice.

Check out the first video in the series, ‘Smell like a man, man’:

This week on Twitter, the campaign set about involving the audience directly. The Old Spice man sent a tweet inviting users to ask him a question, any question. Those who were brave enough to participate were rewarded with a video form of their answer – all delivered in his now familiar husky drawl.

All in all, a thoroughly amusing and cunning campaign idea which elevates Old Spice to a brand new audience. I like the way it takes a classic brand and hurls it into the twentieth century by using contemporary, social media channels. And the way it creates a male character that is not only loved by women, but men too. Well worth raising a can of Old Spice to!

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Original Flickr photo by badjoni

E-commerce was at first a personal activity, where each user performed economically rational decisions regarding products and services. With wishlists, customer reviews and ratings, recommendations and referrals and shopping communities it evolved into what is now usually called Social Commerce.

The past few months have brought some new consumer patterns, that further confirmed the importance of the social graph for e-tailers as confirmed by recent studies by comScore and Performics/ROI Research , with consumers connecting with brand channels (40%), recommending products and services (32%) and finding out about new deals on social networks (37%).

Another study by Sage Pay, revealed that while on average 7% of visitors to an online store make a purchase, when directed from social media network, the percentage of visitors who will go to the transaction section goes up to 71%. Social proof is even more important for e-commerce, as Simon Black, managing director at Sage Pay, says: “The modern shopper often looks for reassurance from a positive review, a special offer to make it more affordable, inexpensive delivery options and a quick, easy and secure way to pay.”

Video case of Levis Friends store

Adding the social dimension to e-commerce website was once difficult, but with the release of social plugins by Facebook (Like buttons, Recommendations, Activity Feed) e-tailers have now instant access to a network of more than 400 million people, used with succes by global brands like Levis or TripAdvisor. It has also expanded the reach of social services and platforms like LivingSocial, SocialAmp or Fluid Fan Shop . And you’re not limited to Facebook: with Cheap Tweet, the best deals right are delivered to your Twitter timeline, with the site picking the best ones ranked by users’ votes and re-tweets. Altough this latest service risks becoming obsolete with the announcement by Twitter of @earlybird.

Image by Emarketeer

Entertainment, by definition, is one of the more promising areas where to apply this social dimension of shopping. Take for instance the Facebook app Tickets Together created by Disney that lets users buy tickets fo Toy Story 3, not only for themselves, but also inviting their friends.

Not only does this app makes it easy to choose where to watch the movie (local listing) but it lets you engage with the ones you’d probably will watch the movie with, and invite them right on Facebook, by integrating with ticket-buying services like Fandango.com
Exciting as it is, these are only tools and technologies. What’s really interesting are the new behaviors brought by the social web and connected consumers.

Group Buying

Making purchases together is one of the biggest web trends in 2010. It’s easy tounderstand why: when users reach for their friends to activate a deal (usually a minimum number of buyers is required), a viral loop is created. New models of authentication to social networks (Facebook Connect, Friend Connect, OAuth) have only made it easier and faster. From limited time offers, to price anchoring (show how much it would cost on a normal purchase), it’s one of the most effective ways to generate word-of-mouth.
These deals are available on social web services like Groupon, This Next, Tippr, LivingSocial, TownHog, Homerun , Milo or even as integrated applications such as ‘Special Deal’ group-buy app by preferred Facebook partner Wildfire.

Groupon

Groupon is the biggest player, with a simple proposal: advertise a special business offer, only valid if a certain amount of users purchase it immediately.
Launched in November 2008, it has sold over 7 million online coupons in 70 cities and is now expanding worldwide (UK, DE, ES, PT). Paying attention to small details is their main strenghts: from putting a phone number on every coupon to 2 way ratings (customers rating merchants and vice-versa) it created a vibrant community. Even unsusbcribing from their newsletter is funny.

Graphic by Compete.com

From June 2009 to January 2010, the number of monthly visitors went from 26,000 to over 2.1 million, increasingly engaged with an average of 2.5 visits per month for each user. And what’s really amazing is that these visits are not coming from unexpected sources. Last January, Facebook represented 44% of all referrals, Twitter 8% and search only around 3%.

And growth is not only in visits but also as a platform, helping third-party developers and affiliate members get the word out about its daily specials. Groupon’s API has become available both as Division API (about cities) and Deals API (about daily deals for specific locations), further explored by integrating with Groupon’s geolocation service.

Another example on how groups and communities will become increasingly important in shopping is Woot.

The basic idea behind Woot is to offer only one discounted product each day, a “One Day, One Deal” policy until the stock is sold out, with no announcement of what’s the next offering. Innovative events and product specials like “Woot-Off”, “Bag Of Crap” or “2-for-Tuesday” coupled with bold marketing have built one vibrant community where it’s members actually have fun shopping.

Woot shows their different business culture, on their Amazon’s acquisition wicked celebration rap

Recently acquired by Amazon, much of the coverage focused on how Amazon captured the opportunity of real-time shopping, but the real value might be on the social side, venturing into new business models where communities represent a bigger role than the usual 20th century e-commerce.

Collaborative Consumption

The concept of collaborative consumption is the subject of the upcoming book “What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers.

Recently speaking at TEDx Sydney, Rachel explains that “collaborative brands make it easy for communities to act on behalf of their brands”, where we are no longer defined as consumers by our personal possessions, but also by what we are part of, what we share and the groups we belong to.

Original Flickr photo by boostventilator

New trends like swaptrading (Such as Swaptree.com, sort of online dating service for all of your unwanted media), reveals new models of commerce, where trust mechanics and collaborative behaviors are principal. This groundswell of collaborative consumption, is further accelerated by the rise of mobile communication.

Rachel Botsman defines 4 big drivers of the shift to collaborative consumption:
1. A renewed belief in the importance of community
2. A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real time technologies
3. Pressing unresolved environmental concerns
4. A global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors

People are starting to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles or personal freedom, supported by 3 clear systems:
1. Redistribution markets (stretch the lifecycle of a a product, reducing waist)
2. Collaborative lifestyles (sharing of resources like money, skills and time) – coworking, couchsurfing or even landshare (http://www.landshare.net/) will become mainstream
3. Product Service Systems, where one pays for the benefit of a product without needing to own the product outright. Examples include rental services like Netflix or Zipcar .

You can get an overview of this new model of consumption on the promo video below:

Collaborative Consumption Groundswell Video from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

After the financial crisis, consumers are adopting new behaviors that will impact e-commerce for the years to come. Group buying and collaborative consumption are the latest of these behaviors that brands will need to pay attention to and embrace the value of social capital and not only the monetary side of commerce.

If you know more examples or want to discuss how communities are impacting e-commerce, please drop a note in the comments.

“Life In A Day” is an historic global experiment to create the world’s largest user-generated feature film: a documentary, shot in a single day, by you.

Every day, 6.7 billion people view the world through their own unique lens. Imagine if there was a way to collect all of these perspectives, to aggregate and mold them into the cohesive story of a single day on earth. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of “Life in a Day,” a historic cinematic experiment that will attempt to do just that: document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world. – Official Google Blog

Renowned director Ridley Scott signed on to executive produce the experiment and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald will edit the most compelling footage. The final documentary is slated to premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

Check out the video introduction for “Life in a Day” after the jump:

Life in a Day Introduction

If you’re inspired to join the experiment and determined to make the final cut, here’s some insight into what executive producer Ridley Scott is looking for:

Ridly Scott on “Life in a Day”

If you partake in the experiment, let us know. We’d love to see what a day in your life looks like.

There’s no excuse. You have a digital camera, go out and shoot your film. Seriously, there is no excuse. – Ridley Scott

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Digital media is like water; it’s difficult to pick up with your bare hands. Unless, that is, you have a digital eyedropper.

Using water as a metaphor, Slurp is a tangible interface designed to “extract (slurp up) and inject (squirt out)” information from one object or device to the next. As words do Slurp little justice, check out the eye-dropping demonstrations of the concept after the jump.

Scenario: locative media

Scenario: smart office

By providing haptic and visual feedback during the extracting and injecting process, Slurp is one genius step towards “physicalizing” digital media, a monumental task:

Digital objects come in many shapes, sizes, formats, packages, and levels of complexity; it is this very dynamism that makes digital technology so compelling. Abstract digital media resists being captured by physical form for good reason—the constraints of static physicality could overly constrict such media’s use. – Jamie Zigelbaum. MIT Media Lab

While Slurp may seem fanciful at present, its application could be everyday useful in the near future:

As computation spreads further into the real world one can envision a future where every physical object is created with a digital object attached to it. For example, it would be nice to have a spec sheet for the
light bulb you just bought incorporated directly into the light bulb itself, or to have media files showing the
history of an antique couch come embedded in the couch rather than on external media. These media files could be modified or added on to; in the couch example the new owners could add their own experiences to the couch’s history. The information stored in the physical object could be a simple url, allowing for the participatory culture of the current Internet to extend into physical space and objects. – Jamie Zigelbaum. MIT Media Lab

Would you Slurp?

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Inspired by sites like Craigslist and Freecycle, NeighborGoods is a network to help people save money by sharing things with friends. Started in sunny So-Cal, NeighborGoods has a bright future, hitting the sweet spot of the location-based sharing trend.

Here’s how NeighborGoods works (video):

According to NeighborGoods, the most common bit of feedback they get is, “I wish there were more people near me to share with.” To recruit new people, NeighborGoods integrated Facebook and Twitter into the user experience. Now the stuff people borrow, rent or sell will automatically be broadcast to their friends. With saving money and sharing stuff being über-spreadable, NeighborGoods numbers will swell the more current users share.

While Neighborgoods measures its tangible impact in terms of dollars saved, its intangible benefits as a result of community building could be priceless. On a lighter note, NeighborGoods is simply fun. As username ‘fever’ in Hollywood discovered, “Rockband for Wii. Check. Bike helmet. Check. This party just got a whole lot rowdier thanks to NeighborGoods.” If you’re ever in Hollywood and need a good neighbor, apparently fever is for rent. According to his bio, the going rate is $2 per hour. Now that’s a good neighbor.

Happy sharing.

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It’s a simple fact that the more we socialize online the more money we spend on virtual goods. If Facebook gets 500 million plus people to like its currency called Credits, could virtual goods soon become the new material consumption?

The notion of virtual consumption as an alternative to material consumption seems a little far-fetched at first, but it’s hard to ignore this: 10 years ago virtual goods didn’t exist; now they’re estimated to be a very real $5 billion industry. As virtual markets grow from $5 billion to say $50 billion, how will it change consumer culture?

Rather than dive into market data, we felt it more interesting to examine why people are buying virtual goods. By understanding the why, it’s easier to imagine how the digitalization of consumption will affect consumer culture. So why do consumers pay real money for digital objects that don’t really exist?

Most of the thinking we came across was of the “consumers purchase virtual goods for self-expression” or “for recognition” variety. While such motivations are true, we craved a different lens for looking at virtual goods and stumbled upon a PhD thesis entitled Virtual Consumption. Written by Vili Lehdonvirta, Virtual Consumption gave us the nugget we were looking for: what are being bought and sold on the virtual goods markets are permissions.

In popular discourse, spending real money on virtual goods is frequently attributed to Internet addiction and manipulation by marketers. The results of this dissertation suggest that the fundamental drivers of virtual consumption are rather found in individuals’ social and hedonic motivations….unlike information goods (such as music, software and news), virtual goods are rivalrous: one person’s use of a virtual good excludes others from using it. What are being bought and sold on the virtual goods markets are therefore not data, services or objects, but permissions: the exclusive right to use this feature or that corner of an online environment frequented by thousands of people. – Vill Lehdonvirta

What’s interesting about permissions is its relevance to the masses. Getting permission (i.e. license) to drive seemed like a bigger deal than what kind of car you got your permit in. In the same sense, our desire to use special features or gain exclusive access to corner of a network could make virtual goods as valuable or perhaps even more valuable than material goods.

Not only could permissions be valuable from a “consumer” perspective, but also from a branding perspective. In the real-world, it’s hard to get people who love Coke (the real thing) to drink Pepsi. But what if in a virtual scenario Pepsi offered someone who loves Coke real-time permission. Might that Coke fan try Pepsi, the virtual thing? If so, permissions could help challenger brands trump their competition’s higher status. As brands battle over giving us permission, the virtual goods marketplace could see an influx of ad dollars.

In the end, virtual consumption may never surpass material consumption. But it’s easy to see how the virtual goods marketplace could drastically alter the face of consumer culture.

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Here are 3 YouTube channels to keep an eye on:

1) Create or Else
To celebrate what inspires creative ideas, Ogilvy launched Create or Else. Featuring content from all fields, from arts to science to industry and beyond, Create or Else is a blend of UGC and Expert Curation. Guests from creative industries around the world will be invited to curate the channel, bringing content that provokes discussion and the flow of ideas.

(via: prnewswire )

2) YouTube Play
A collaboration between YouTube and Guggenheim, YouTube Play seeks to unearth and showcase the very best creative video from around the world. In contrast to Create or Else, YouTube Play is a contest with some serious perks. Videos submitted to the channel will be judged by Guggenheim’s jury of experts and the most loved work will get displayed at the Guggenheim in NY starting October 21, 2010.

(via: google blog)

3) Show & Tell
Before there was Create or Else and YouTube Play, there was Show & Tell, a collaboration between YouTube and the Art Director’s Club. Show & Tell is a new gallery-style brand channel showcasing the best marketing and advertising campaigns on YouTube. While the channel doesn’t have an intro video à la the previous channels, YouTube Car serves as a nifty proxy.

(via: Social Times)

As each channels grows, we’ll be interested to see which curation-style people gravitate towards. For the most part, YouTube is an endless source of videos. It’s the curation that’s needed to help us find the most inspiring.

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