Make $3 Million on Twitter

Twitter is currently not monetised, at least not by Twitter itself. But Dell tell a different story. This week they revealed that they have made a total of $2 million in sales thanks directly to @DellOutlet, and a further $1 million in sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere. What is the secret to their success?.

Dell sells refurbished computers through @DellOutlet and has about 600,000 followers. The way it uses @DellOutlet is quite simple. They message their followers with deals, special offers and discounts. This is a form of real-time coupons - Dell can alert people to offers and discounts as they arise. And change the offers immediately when they sell out.

People love a bargain, they love feeling that they are the first to know something, and they love a personal connection and interaction. It is the combination of all three of these in @DellOutlet that makes it so successful.

• Dell’s approach to Twitter fosters a personal connection - rather than have a single corporate Twitter account, they segment their followers by having different accounts for different customers with different needs and interests. Those following are interested in what that particular Twitter account has to offer and will feel that it is meeting their needs.
• The use of a real-time update system like Twitter allows for offers to be promoted when they occur. It offers an immediate notification of any offer or discount and as such those who follow @DellOutlet are the first to know about deals.
• Through @DellOutlet, people can find out about genuinely good deals.

By Matt Rhodes via FutureLab

Talk to me

Consumers Itching to Talk to Brands

by: Matt Rhodes

A new study from ExpoTV shows that 55% of consumers want an ongoing dialogue with brands. The study investigates how brands and consumers interact, and in particular how consumers want brands to engage them. And the results are exciting. In addition to the 55% wanting an ongoing dialogue, 89% of respondents said they would feel more loyal to a brand if they were invited to take part in a feedback group.

These results mirror our own experiences, where involving people in a true feedback process has positive impacts on loyalty and advocacy. The ExpoTV survey looks into this in more depth and shows also how consumers will spread this positive message.

Of those who have a positive experience, 92% said they would recommend the brand to somebody else. Perhaps more striking from the perspective of generating buzz, 60% of people said they would tell 10 people or more about a brand they liked and a third would tell 20 people or more. There is a lot of willingness to create buzz and word-of-mouth for a brand that you like. There is a real strengthening of positive feelings when a brand engages a consumer. And there is a real willingness on the part of the consumer to take part in such engagement.

These are the building blocks of a really successful word-of-mouth and advocacy campaign. People want to be engaged and if you do it, this will only have a positive impact on feelings towards the brand.

For every 100 consumers about 55 want to engage with you. And nine out of ten of those that you engage would feel more positive about you as a result. So from any group of 100 customers that you try to engage in a feedback group or online community, 50 would be more loyal to the brand as a result.

From these 50 people, about a third (or 16 people) would tell more than ten people about the brand (so at least 160 people from our group) and another third would tell more than 20 people (so at least 320 people from our group). So as a conservative estimate from those 100 people you try to engage:

• 50 of the original 100 become more loyal to the brand, and tell a further
• 480 other people about how positive they feel about the brand.

This survey helps us to understand motivation for taking part in an online community or feedback group, and the benefits it will cause.

As a conservative estimate, these results suggest that for every 100 people you try to engage in an online community, 50 will leave more loyal to the brand and a further 480 people will hear about this loyalty through word-of mouth. That’s a huge impact for engaging a relatively small number of people.

There is a real willingness on the part of the consumer to engage with brands, and a real and demonstrable benefit to the brand of them doing this.

via FutureLab

Pantone fun: Everybody Dance Now

By MELENA RYZIK

LVHRD

The party-loving, vowel-hating organization LVHRD is back with another installment of its creativity competitions Tuesday night. DNCHRD, held in a secret space in Midtown Manhattan (the location will be e-mailed or texted to ticket-buyers a few hours before the event), features six color-coordinated dance teams vying to make you think they can dance. The soundtrack comes courtesy of the British D.J./V.J. crew Eclectic Method, who remixed for the likes of Fatboy Slim and U2. And of course, it’s got an interactive video wall. To participate, come dressed in the color of your ticket, or go rainbow and join them all.

via New York Times

Putting Innovation in the Hands of a Crowd

By BOB TEDESCHI

IF executives are going to rely on the wisdom of the masses for business help, it’s probably time the masses get a little compensation for it.

Paul O. Boisvert for The New York Times

On Ben Kaufman’s site, Kluster, companies pay users for ideas.

That’s the theory behind Kluster, the newest in a lineup of companies using the Web to channel the collective wisdom of strangers into meaningful business strategies. With a cash reward system for contributors and a big beginning at the TED conference last week in Monterey, Calif., Kluster hopes to attract just enough visitors with just enough business smarts to gain early momentum.

Along with members of the public, the 1,000 attendees of TED, a conference named for technology, entertainment and design that attracts leaders from many industries, used Kluster to generate ideas for a new product, then chose the most promising one and collaborated on the design. The result was “Over There,” an educational board game intended to promote cultural awareness, with questions like, “What percentage of the world’s population lives further than one mile from their nearest pure water source?”

According to Ben Kaufman, Kluster’s 21-year-old founder, there were a few parameters, including provisions that the product could not be wider or longer than eight inches and only specific materials, like single-injection plastic, could be used. Going into the process, Mr. Kaufman said he hoped the product would “be something that doesn’t just serve an uninteresting consumer need, but a humanitarian product that can be used by everyone.”

Mr. Kaufman said that would actually be a departure for him. As a founder of Mophie, a manufacturer of iPod accessories, Mr. Kaufman last year held a product design contest at the Macworld conference, with attendees submitting ideas and using a company Web site to refine designs and vote on the winner.

Out of that came the Bevy — a key chain and bottle opener built into the case for an iPod Shuffle — which Mophie sold by the thousands to retailers around the world. On the heels of that success, Mr. Kaufman in August sold Mophie for an undisclosed sum, then set out to build a business out of the process he used at Macworld.

Kluster includes a number of refinements to that process. Those who join are given 1,000 units of Kluster scrip, called “watts,” and they may earn more by telling the site more about themselves, like their area of expertise, age and income. Meanwhile, businesses are invited to post specific tasks to be addressed, like creating a new product, logo or corporate event.

Participants browsing the ideas offered by Kluster members can bet some or all of their watts on the ideas they most believe in, or post ideas of their own. Those who had winning ideas earn at least 20 percent of the bounty offered by the company that sought the idea, as well as more watts, while those who bet on the winning idea earn watts. Those who bet wrong lose what they wagered.

•

Mr. Kaufman said several well-known manufacturers would offer projects on the site after the TED contest. He would not disclose the identities of those businesses, but some, he said, would offer $50,000 or more for winning ideas, while others expect to give far less and hope that they have enough good will among their customers to spur ideas.

Kluster will make money, he said, by taking 15 percent of any rewards offered to projects and by charging fees for prominent placement of projects on the site, among other things.

Don Tapscott, the business strategy consultant and co-author of the book “Wikinomics,” said executives were quickly warming to the strategic value of “P.F.E.” ideas, or those “proudly found elsewhere.”

“Throughout the 20th century, we’ve had this view that talent is inside the company,” Mr. Tapscott said. “But with the Web, collaboration costs are dropping outside the boundaries of companies, so the world can become your talent.”

Mr. Tapscott, who credited Procter & Gamble with the P.F.E. concept, said executives can go overboard with the idea of outsourcing innovation if, in seeking such help, they expose too much of a company’s trade secrets. But so far, he knows of no business that has done so.

“They always err on the other side,” he said. “They don’t do enough.”

Among the obstacles in Kluster’s path are sites like InnoCentive and Cambrian House, which operate similarly. InnoCentive, based in Waltham, Mass., was until late last year a forum for solving science-related problems, typically for cash rewards. In September, it expanded into business, engineering and computer science, among other things. Since then it has grown by 15,000 participants, to 140,000, the company said.

Cambrian House, which is based in Calgary, Alberta, and has 64,000 participants, will also expand its Web site this year to accommodate projects across a broader range of industries. Until now, said Jasmine Antonick, a Cambrian House founder, the site has attracted mostly software and Web entrepreneurs.

Ms. Antonick expects the site to be profitable later this year, when it receives a share of payments made by businesses to several of Cambrian House’s participants, like two men who created Gwabs, an online video game that is to be distributed by an undisclosed company this summer.

•

Next month, it will introduce VenCorps, a site on which venture capitalists and other investors will review business ideas from the public and, after about 30 days, reward the best idea with $50,000 in exchange for a share of ownership.

VenCorps is a partnership between Cambrian House and Spencer Trask Collaborative Venture Partners, a division of the New York venture firm Spencer Trask. Sean Wise, a Collaborative Venture Partners founder, says he has high hopes for the site.

“No matter how good a V.C. I could be,” he said, “I could never be smarter than the wisdom of a collective community.”

Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that Kluster had “commercial potential.” “Asking communities for help with solving problems is certainly going to help businesses,” he said. “It’s just not something you can count on delivering business value yet.”

via NY Times

Designboost at Stockholm Furniture Fair

The Knowledge company Designboost and Stockholm Furniture Fair, the premier design fair in Scandinavia, start a collaboration.

During the period 6–10 February Designboost will stage a “mini boost” event at the Stockholm Furniture Fair themed around the concept of “sustainable design”. It contains BOOST CHATS, BOOST TALKS and BOOST SHOWS. It’s one of a couple of “mini boost” events that Designboost will stage until it is time for the next main Designboost event in Malmö this autumn.

The different activities:

AT THE FAIRGROUND

-Designboost will arrange 15 different BOOST TALKS using a concept called the “design sofa”. Among the persons that will do presentations and be involved in discussions are designers Satyendra Pakhale, Stephen Burks, Ilse Crawfoord, Jean Marie Massaud and Matti Klenell to mention a few. Further on representatives from companies and organisations like Giulio Cappellini/Cappellini, Ewa Kumlin/managing director of Svensk Form, Mirkku Kullberg/managing director of Artek, Christel Vaenerberg/design director at Iittala, Yvonne Karlsson and Maria Midby Arén/Alcro and Irene Bernald/marketing director at Audi Sweden are invited to the “design sofa”.

-Designboost will arrange 8 BOOST CHATS where each of them consists of one designer, one producer, one journalist and one student. The theme of the BOOST CHATS is how companies and organisations can conceptualize on the notion of “sustainable design” to gain business advantage and consequently benefit the society. Among the participants are designers Damian Williamson, Alexander Lervik and Gabriella Gustafson. Producers and journalists are represented by Kersti Sandin/Materia, Johan Lindau/Blå Station and Peter Jiseborn/Swedese, Mark Isitt/freelance, Daniel Golling/Forum AID and Dan Gordan/Sköna hem to mention a few. Students from Beckman college of design and Konstfack, University College of Arts Crafts and Design will be involved as well.

-Designboost will visualize the seven parts of the Sustainable Wheel in seven different mini environments in collaboration with Alcro. The environments will contain products, descriptions and filmed interviews.

-Designboost will present two different conceptualizations of ”sustainable design” by Artek and Iittala.

-Designboost will use Audi as an example of a holistic view on “sustainable design”.

The complete program is available here.

AT TOWN

-Designboost will arrange a BOOST SHOW on the theme “sustainable design” at the Audi showroom, Hamngatan 17 in central Stockholm. It’s an updated version of the BOOST SHOW presented in Malmö in October 2007. It includes products and strategy descriptions from companies like Biomega, Apple, Electrolux and Nior Illuminati. Designboost will also present different filmed interview on the topic of “sustainable design” with Eero Koivisto, Tom Dixon, Tejo Remy and Stephen Burks among others. The BOOST SHOW at Audi will be up and running for a month.

via David Report Blog

Cool Concepts - The Optimus Tactus Keyboard

Art. Lebedev Studio, the guys behind the Optimus Maximus OLED Keyboard have come up with an amazing looking keyboard concept, the Optimus Tactus Keyboard. This new keyboard has no physical keys, which means there are no restrictions on their shape or size. They keyboard can be programmed to display any images and perform any function. This is an amazing looking concept, lets hope this goes into production. via Gadgettastic via Geek Alerts

When the user makes the difference

The report “User-driven innovation: when the user makes the difference” aims to clarify the awareness and use of user-driven innovation in the Nordic countries. The authors — a group of students from the Norwegian University of Science And Technology (NTNU) — have contacted numerous companies and experts in their effort to show the variety and diversity of the awareness and use of user-driven innovation among Nordic countries. Although the report has a professional graphic design, the same cannot be said for the style of writing — which betrays its student project origins — and for the quality of the English. In the report’s first part the student authors introduce the term user-driven, its relation to other types of innovation and the diversity of the definitions. The history of user-driven innovation is also presented. The report then continues with an overview of which companies in the Nordic countries have utilised knowledge of their users in developing new products and services, including a shortlist of success stories. Featured companies are Electrolux (Sweden - white goods), Lego (Denmark - toys), Coloplast (Denmark - medical products),Nokia (Finland - mobile phones), Laerdal Medical (Norway - basic and advanced life support training products and emergency medical equipment), Tomra (reverse vending machines), Trolltech (Norway - computer software), Plastoform AS (Norway - Nordic Seahunter), Funcom (Norway computer and console games), Deuter (Germany - backpacks, suitcases and bags), Sweet Protection (Norway - protective sports clothing), Cycleurope (DBS) (Norway - bicycles), and HardRocx (Norway - bicycles).

via Putting People First

Connecting Cultures Through Film

Nokia has just announced it’s global partnership with Pangea Day, a project created by TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim. The aim of the organization is to create a greater understanding among different people and cultures through the power of film. On May 10, 2008 - Pangea Day - they plan to broadcast a live 4-hour long program of “powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music” to sites in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv. In addition to the physical sites, the program will also be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Nokia is able to contribute to the cause by distributing video-enabled phones to aspiring filmmakers in disadvantaged areas and conflict zones around the globe. With this technology, marginalized peoples are empowered to create and share their own stories with the world.

Pangea Day

by Jeff Squires

Friending, Ancient or Otherwise

Gary Fogelson

THE growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make “friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.

We’re making up the rules as we go. But is this world as new as it seems?

Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication.

“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”

The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like “talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving Gertrude Stein’s maxim that “literature is not remarks”).

“If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

An early student of electronic orality was the Rev. Walter J. Ong, a professor at St. Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan who coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe the tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures. The work of Father Ong, who died in 2003, seems especially prescient in light of the social-networking phenomenon. “Oral communication,” as he put it, “unites people in groups.”

In other words, oral culture means more than just talking. There are subtler —and perhaps more important — social dynamics at work.

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons and ritual objects to cement their social ties. On Facebook, people accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls and hula girls.

“It’s reminiscent of how people exchange gifts in tribal cultures,” says Dr. Strate, whose MySpace page lists his 1,335 “friends” along with his academic credentials and his predilection for “Battlestar Galactica.”

As intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. There are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. In tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the Internet, far less so. There is presumably no tribal antecedent for popular Facebook rituals like “poking,” virtual sheep-tossing or drunk-dialing your friends.

Then there’s the question of who really counts as a “friend.” In tribal societies, people develop bonds through direct, ongoing face-to-face contact. The Web eliminates that need for physical proximity, enabling people to declare friendships on the basis of otherwise flimsy connections.

“With social networks, there’s a fascination with intimacy because it simulates face-to-face communication,” Dr. Wesch says. “But there’s also this fundamental distance. That distance makes it safe for people to connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a connection because it’s safe.”

And while tribal cultures typically engage in highly formalized rituals, social networks seem to encourage a level of casualness and familiarity that would be unthinkable in traditional oral cultures. “Secondary orality has a leveling effect,” Dr. Strate says. “In a primary oral culture, you would probably refer to me as ‘Dr. Strate,’ but on MySpace, everyone calls me ‘Lance.’ ”

As more of us shepherd our social relationships online, will this leveling effect begin to shape the way we relate to each other in the offline world as well? Dr. Wesch, for one, says he worries that the rise of secondary orality may have a paradoxical consequence: “It may be gobbling up what’s left of our real oral culture.”

The more time we spend “talking” online, the less time we spend, well, talking. And as we stretch the definition of a friend to encompass people we may never actually meet, will the strength of our real-world friendships grow diluted as we immerse ourselves in a lattice of hyperlinked “friends”?

Still, the sheer popularity of social networking seems to suggest that for many, these environments strike a deep, perhaps even primal chord. “They fulfill our need to be recognized as human beings, and as members of a community,” Dr. Strate says. “We all want to be told: You exist.”

By ALEX WRIGHT

via New York Times

Service Design and Advertising

In postindustrial societies, not many days go by before a new kind of service emerges (at this site alone you'll find quite a few such as this, this and this.). The trend is reflected in both the public and private sector, and so naturally also in the advertising industry.

Services, if well designed, can offer dynamic and alternative touchpoints between the user and the brand, thereby allowing new kinds of interactions and experiences that are not necessarily so tightly controlled as ad agencies and brands traditionally prefer them to be.

To my knowledge, Nike is one of the front runners, when it comes to creating brand experiences through services but lots of others are exploring the field and coming up with interesting concepts, some of which are very basic.

A recent example that I like because of its relative absurdness is Broad Shoulders, which is a service provided by the mobile carrier Optimus to festival goers at music festivals in Portugal.

Basically, Broad Shoulders is made up of ten strong men who offer (female?) members of the audience the possibility to climb on their shoulders in order to get a better view of the concert or to find a lost friend amongst the crowd. Perhaps a bit sexist and possibly also annoying for those standing behind them but nonetheless, a simple way of addressing mobility without dealing wih complex technology.

Broad Shoulders is created by the ad agency Torke.

• YouTube: Broad Shoulders

via Guerrilla Innovation

Phone Battery Street Charging Services

Jan Chipchase is Principal Researcher in the User Experience Group of Nokia Research Center. A part of his fascinating job is to observe and describe how different cultures use mobile technologies differently - often in ways unintended or unpredicted by the industry that he represents.

He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork around the world, such as in Uganda where access to electricity and mobile phones is limited and the user need thus quite basic.

As a consequence of these limitations, people have developed an alternative solutions and service economies, such as phone-sharing systems and battery-charging services (photo) where batteries can be recharged for a relatively small price.

Documentation of this and other of Jan Chipchase's interesting findings are available for download at Nokia Research Center.

• Street Charging Service Uganda (PDF file)

Coup D'art

When they’re not busy attempting a coup d’etat on Denmark’s Constitutional Monarchy, the ArtRebels spend their time banding together for the causes of creativity. Originally, founded by Carla Cammilla Hjort as a record label boasting 100% artistic freedom, combined with an on-line music, art, and film shop whose sales would go towards supporting causes working to make the world a better place, ArtRebels has become much more.

As Hjort’s ambition to make “the coolest site online” grew, she began to amass a talented team to turn her dream a reality. The current ArtRebels Crew consists dj’s, musicians, film makers, graphical designers, promoters and selfmade rebels alike. All the members operate in the interest of attaining their own measure of success while assisting others in their artistic endeavors forming a global artist support system. The ArtRebels website features the work of all of its constituents ranging across the wide spectrum of artistry…from music, to fashion to the realm of visual arts, It is truly an amalgamation of talent and ideas for the benefit of creative folks everywhere. If you fancy yourself a rebellious artist perhaps you should join the revolution.

via Josh Spear