In remembrance of the fatal crash of the Malaysian Air flight, the Malaysian government has created a website, www.momentofsilence.com.my, which allows users to register a digital minute of silence in remembrance of those who lost their lives.  How do people digitally register this minute of silence?  Simple.  Just access the website and then turn on Airplane Mode on your device using the mobile site.  A countdown timer then locks your phone until a minute is elapsed, then reconnects and allows you to share your commitment on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.  To

Since Remembrance Day was not too long ago, I can’t help but wonder if this is a useful way to engage those who do not attend a formal ceremony on Nov 11.  If you’re stuck working on Nov 11, this could be an excellent way to show your support when crunched for time.  This Malaysian campaign also shows a total of the minutes of silence completed by users, but Remembrance Day could leverage it’s universal symbol of support by awarding users a digital poppy for their commitment.

Today it was announced that Rogers and Vice Media have created a $100 million partnership to build a Toronto studio, create a 24-hour Vice TV cable station and use the company’s vast social and web presence to boost Rogers’ prominence in the 19-34 age demographic. Vice, recently valued at $2.5 billion and founded by Canadian Shane Smith, has made it’s name by investigating and reporting on everything from global issues to fringe cultural trends, many of which are completely unmentioned by TV news and newspapers. Vice has traditionally created web-based content and Youtube videos but won and Emmy recently for it’s first season of Vice News.

Rogers Media has been pushing for years to better capture the business of younger viewers by offering free shows online to allow customers to keep up if they miss an episode. However the company has struggled to expand its presence beyond TV and actually engage customers online. Rogers hopes that by leveraging it’s experience with classic media, it can bring Vice’s traditionally online viewers into regular TV viewership offering relevant content complete with an added social and online dimension.

Getting current and potential customers to engage with your brand is always a daunting task.  While appropriately targeting your target market with relevant, interesting and frequent content is essential to increasing brand awareness and engagement, Ikea’s latest campaign illuminates the qualitative side of content generation.  Enter the Bookbook video, released in September 2014 by Ikea to promote their latest catalog.

With over 12 million views for a video which originated from Ikea’s Singapore Youtube channel, somewhere North Americans were never likely to look for content, it’s safe to say that Ikea’s video has gone viral.  Let’s break down the 3 main elements that make this video so appealing:

1. It’s Topical: with Apple’s new iPhone and Apple Watch releases looming, Ikea knew what sort of promotional videos Apple would be rolling out.  White background, clean shaven speaker, and claims of revolutionizing our lives with the latest release.  While many brands are trying to copy Apple, they end up coming off as Me-Too campaigns.  Instead, Ikea pokes fun at Apple with it’s Bookbook, playing on consumers’ feelings that Apple marketing has become fairly ubiquitous and expected.
2. It’s Self-Reflective: Where Ikea really capitalizes on this opportunity is by Incorporating a few jabs at their own brand, to show they understands how Ikea is perceived and that they know they’re a little weird, Swedish, and that’s just their thing.  The ability to show that the brand is keenly aware of how it’s viewed by the public makes the video far more endearing.
3. It’s Not Mean: Many campaigns that poke fun at another brand tend to fall into the trap of coming off a bit snobby, better than, or otherwise just disrespectful.  By balancing the above 2 points effectively, Ikea keeps the tone fun and innocent.  Ikea has a laugh, customers have a laugh, and crucially Apple does too.  This means Ikea reaps the rewards for it’s campaign through brand awareness and engagement, and avoids any backlash for doing so at Apple’s expense.

By incorporating these elements into their own campaigns, when the opportunity presents itself rather than just forcing the joke, brands can similarly create engaging content which goes viral, reaching their own customer as well as a much more general audience of potential customers.  Well done Ikea.

Social media has immense power to gather data about the entire purchasing process. From the first moments of consumer awareness to post-purchase customer care and everything in between, social media can record valuable data regarding user demographics and click-through rates. However this high level of powerful data collection is not being used to it’s fullest. The problem is a lack of robust analysis.

Social media analytics are an ever-shifting field with few best practices in place but one theme is common: each entrant wants to build out an all-encompassing platform that incorporates social listening, engagement and analytics reports to maximize revenues. Unfortunately, this protectionism has led to each platform only reporting the collected data in its own unique way. This leaves marketers who wish to do analysis of their efforts at the mercy of the reports programmed into the platform. The only alternative is to manually enter the data into programs like Excel which takes far too much time. This hinders the ability of marketers to find new correlations and gain an advantage in the field, furthering our understanding of how to best use these media.

I would argue that future succes of these platforms is to release their hold on the big data they collect. By adding functionality which exports to Excel or other robust, commonly-used software capable of enabling analysis of raw data (like the open source statistical software R), platforms will leave those with a handful of bespoke reports in the dust. This is particularly true for large multinational clients who have extremely large data sets. And as social media usage and data collection continues to increase, even mid-size organizations will soon feel the need for this same functionality.

Intel thinks that Jimmy is the future of robots.  I’m not so sure but I think their hearts are in the right place.  In the greater scheme of sharing of printable, consumer goods which can be printed they’re on the right track.  But JImmy has some very real design issues, like what I can only imagine is an inability to climb stairs.

Still, this trend of 3D printing extremely complex designs, which would be more expensive to manufacture piece by piece and assemble using traditional methods, is becoming ever more popular.  And while 3D printers are still expensive, companies that you can send designs to that will print based on volume are becoming extremely reasonable.

As a result websites are springing up to serve the sharing of designs, places like Thingiverse.  These sharing services of open-source designs are potentially a fantastic new channel of distribution for already established companies.  I believe Intel is extremely smart to get behind open-source design sharing by creating an easily customizable platform.  Monetization of “premium” designs seems like the next logical step, not unlike the freemium model many apps have followed.  This also has massive ,market research potential as well.  With a low up-front cost to test designs, customers can update their designs and companies can look to better incorporate the most successful designs into their future platforms.  This engagement with lead users can reduce the time between upgrade release times and give companies vital information in how consumers prefer to use their products.  This could well mean robots like Jimmy may not be that far away from entering our homes after all…