Still smoking? I bet you can quit…

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About 5 years ago, I quit smoking. In those days, I stopped from enjoying one package a day to none – in only one day. Just by having a strong will and an appropriate reason, I was able to get away from it. We are responsible for our own health. We know it is not good for us with the risk of getting cancer but still we do what we do. If we can explain it or not…

So, sometimes it is better if your friends look after you. And maybe they give you a reason to stop smoking. The American Cancer Society created a Social Media approach that brings the power of friend crowdsourcing and Facebook straight to those of you who still cannot resist. I like the idea as we sometimes need to get the right push from those we trust most. Those who believe in us. Our friends…!

Hey smokers, would you not be proud of you if you could get away from the fags? Get your friends to bet on you…

QR Codes: A trend already gone, or still on the rise…?

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In the last weeks, I have spoken with many clients and interesting people in the industry, whether QR codes are still an emerging topic for marketers, or if the trend goes thanks to the latest innovation from Layar. The new Layar technology let’s the importance of QR codes in some way vanish…

So, the question is: Are the QR codes an over rated technology? Let’s bear in mind how many people know how to use QR code technology, and how often those who know really use the QR code reader? Now, the team from Lab42 comes up with as great infographic on the use of QR codes.

And guess what, 60% of the respondents say they are not familiar with QR codes in general. Most of the people using QR codes (46%) scan them for discounts. interestingly enough, for 42% of the people these codes serve as a ticket (for a concert (62%). And 67% see the QR codes in print magazines. So, my assumption that QR code technology could become the access point for the extension of print (Augmented Reality) seems to proof correct.

Check out the rest of the data yourself…

I am interested to get your view on the future of QR codes. Is this a remaining access hub for companies, brands and services, or will it end when Augmented Reality evolving, and finally detecting 3D objectives…? Let us know your thoughts…

Hyperspecialization – The future of work 3.0?

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All people engaging in the Social Web are eager to pull, push and share all kinds of specializing topics in different areas of thoughts, interests and visions. In some way these people define a new development where the work of generalists is being cut into workload of networks of narrow experts or specialists. At least, Tom Malone, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the Harvard Business Review article “The Age of Hyperspecialization,” sees this trend and explains in an HBR video why breaking jobs into tiny pieces yields better, faster, and cheaper work.

Malone sees the key “trend” behind this movement in “cheap communication technology” brought to us all over the world – more or less instantly and costlessly. Having said that, Malone’s illustration of scambled eggs being made ready to eat via the locations, Boston, China, Moscow, Paris and Singapore shows the limitation in the theory. For “brain workers”, it definitely makes sense and is a valid and applicable theory. Managers need to figure out how to break up traditional single job descriptions into pieces of hyperspecialist work and maybe rearrange their business processes if they want to make use of hyperspecialization.

What I definitely see is greater flexibility for employees in this movement. The development offers also some massive opportunity for freelancers being integrated into different projects. Thus, I would ask, whether the work of employees, sitting in office, could not easily be outsourced to even more specialized freelancers. Or if it will be more difficult to coordinate these specialists? Or would this be the work of a hyperspecialist again?

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Is this really a new trend? Is this the normal evolution of worklife and business? Is this another step towards workplace 3.0, the mobile workplace? How do you see that…?

Why you might join Google Plus one day… (Video)

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Epipheo Studios created many funny videos around the modern business and social web world. If you still wonder why Google Plus has some value for the future of Social Networking, and if you will need it in the future, just think about segmentation and the clever (however challenging) usability. Or just watch this video which will tell you why Google will get you on Google Plus one day…

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News Update – Best of the Day

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The vision of Big Brother is still one that separates the generations. Some are scared, some don’t even see that they are engaged to make things happen. But what happens if Augmented Reality becomes Augmented Humanity and merges the world of tomorrow with Visual Search? What a new form of sensual contextuality and the internet of things means to us, explains Tracy Falke.

Have you ever thought of the Initiative Generation? Not Gen X, Gen Y, Gen… whatever. Just simplified with the thought of change, and what creates leadership and how much initiative constitutes leadership? Ed Brenegar takes the initiative to inject our minds with a new generation that leaders just need to see and rate…

After nine years of absence the new Golf convertible is about to launch this year. The launch campaign is based on Augmented Reality and QR codes…

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Study: C-level executives still unsure how to leverage Social Media for business growth

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It seems to be a love and hate relationship: Executives and Social Media. On the one hand, companies see how critical a social business strategy is for their business. On the other, they still don’t know how to harness the value of the new modern media landscape and the feedback channel online world. This is the insight we get from a survey of C-level executives conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini.

The findings, which are part of Capgemini’s Executive Outsourcing Survey, were published with their launch of the social media management service. The survey asked 302 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies.

The question where to position Social Media inside the company seems to be omnipresent: Marketing? Customer Service? Corporate Communications? Or really change the company to become a social business operation? Does someone have a crystal ball? More than half say that Social Media is a part of their company’s customer care operations. However, 64% of those responded that it is a pure responsibility of their social media marketing department.

Surprisingly enough, 74% executives stated in the study they were not even sure how many employees are dedicated to customer care via the Social Web activities of the company. The value of Social Media can be seen by 57% of responding executives who think that it is “inviting customer input on product and services, lead generation, responding to complaints, internal reporting, and measuring customer satisfaction.”

And it is best to forget the 13% who still believe that Social Media is not important for future success of the company.

Spot On!
The attitude from executives towards Social Media also describes the fact that less than half of executives (41%) are monitoring online conversations about their brand, product and/or services. They only respond to an online conversation when a customer poses a direct question, representing a significant missed opportunity for companies to proactively solicit feedback and enhance the customer experience. The ooportunity to engage with the customer is there but executives (and probably their management teams) need to embrace the opportunity and change their business into a social business strategy and align it with their web strategy team.

News Update – Best of the Day

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Although the mobile hype is massive, there are studies that question the power of smartphone mobile advertising and it’s efficiency. A new research from YouGov shows consumers accept placements as part of their day-to-day mobile experience but consider them intrusive (79%) and tend to ignore them altogether. Only 5% think mobile ads are a good idea and welcome them. However, the general apathy smartphone users have toward seems to equal ignorance: 88% ignore ads on applications and 86% have ignored placements on the mobile internet.

The security company Imperva released a study that states “web applications, on average, experience twenty seven attacks per hour, or roughly one attack every two minutes.” Imperva monitored 10 million attacks between December of last year and May of this year “targeting 30 different enterprise and government web applications.” Of the 27 attacks per hour most of them are trying to identify vulnerabilities on websites. If a vulnerability is found, attacks can increase to 25,000 per hour which would be seven attacks per second.

What is the future of Twitter? During a keynote interview at Fortune BrainstormTech in Aspen, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo gave insights in his vision of the company’s business model.

PS: Just in case you ask why Twitter is cool, Steven Winterburn has got the answer: “”Twitter is like a fridge. If you’re bored you keep opening & closing it every few minutes to see if there’s anything good in it.”

The Social Travel Revoluton (Infographic)

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There is not one industry today that is not effected by the way we interact through Social Media. The Swedish start-up Tripl illustrates with a fantastic infographic how much the travel industry is influenced and effected via modern online conversations and check-ins. The necessity for hotels, airlines and restaurants to engage and understand Social Media is obvious: 50 Mio. reviews have been created on tripadvisor only 495.000 rated hotels!

Some key facts…
– On a daily basis, 72% of social network users access their social network sites while travelling
– The top 5 airlines have 2,566,000 fans on Facebook
– 200 Mio. passengers will board GOGO-WiFi flights in 2011
– Traffic growth of travel companies from social networks? Facebook 69% and Twitter 46%!

…and that is only 7% using mobile internet while tarvelling internationally!

Can I be your friend?

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The English National Opera is making fun of our odd social web online lives with the new opera production of Nico Muhly’s new opera ‘Two Boys’. This film is a great trailer that everybody should see, and think how much fun it is to transfer the online to the offline reality. Can you be a friend of somebody you don’t know in real life…? I know you will say “Yes!”, right…?

Well, watch the video… and always remember my lead theme: Online is just a catalyst of the offline reality! Especially if you log into real life in a 1-to-1 online mode like the guy in the video…

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Honesty – The ambient campaign driver that brings virtues back…?

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Some years ago, Billy Joel sang his song “Honesty” and I always remember this one first line… “Honesty is such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue.”. Apparently, it seems that Billy was not quite right with his statement (although he took a different approach to his somng argumentation). It is interesting to see that more and more campaigns seem to pitch with that virtue proof…

I wrote about the interesting HonestTea campaign. That campaign not only proved the value of Earned Media but more importantly how honest people in the world were. And it also pointed out that honesty as a virtue might become a wonderful topic for campaigns – a real ambient campaign driver.

The National Australia Bank (NAB Group) is another example how companies come up with that topic. Some while ago, the NAB was shaking up the financial services industry by encouraging the customers of other banks to “break up” with their bank. The campaigns continues now to a next level now…

The NAB is challenging the honesty of consumers with a series of social experiments on the virtue of honesty. The honesty project of the NAB proves that Australians are very well behaved and very honest.

The bank is publishing the results in little clips. Watch the results…

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Spot On!
This modern ambient approach to make a change in the communication to consumers from banks I found quite refreshing, compared to the traditional annoying and boring print letters I still get today. If banks open up to customers with some clever ideas like these it will be a perfect way to get Earned Media which leads to Owned Media and puts a question mark behind the honest value of “Paid Media”. And that is a fact, that is my honest truth.

PS:: What is your view on the campaign? The honesty approach? The value of honesty from a bank’s perspective?