Category Archives: Mobile

Metric – Not So Unplugged

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I went my all time favorite band-Metric’s concert about a week ago. I got there early enough to be right in front of the stage. Needless to say, they blew my freaking mind.

So close I can taste ya

Musicians, not unlike politicians these days, can’t turn their backs on social media if they want to survive. Rather than begrudgingly buy into the latest “gimmick” that is the social media, Metric is one of the musicians that embraces social media as a tool to better communicate to their fans in order to close the gap. They provide genuine value for their fans to subscribe to them and visit their website, through exclusive track release, early ticket sales, and merchandise.

For their most recent tour, Synthetica, they have been utilizing social media even more to increase engagement. Many artists simply post the link to their ticket vendors continuously hoping to encourage sales from their fans. Metric, on the other hand, has been placing their concert tickets at hidden locations of the city they are touring, and they post them on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, few of their fans can have a chance to come watch them for free. These few tickets may cost them couple hundred dollars (maybe none if the concert is not sold out), but the emotional engagement and the buzz the campaign is generating probably far outweigh the cost.

Lucky bastards!

Nice to see my favorite band excel in a craft that I care about!

Hopscotch Listens

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Last Saturday, I went to Hopscotch, the largest premium Scotch, Whisky, and Beer festival. The tickets sold out weeks ago, and I was lucky enough to get an invite from a friend who had a spare ticket. I had no idea how popular this event is until I got to PNE Forum where it was taking place-line around the block. After you give them a $45 ticket at the door, you are handed a Hopscotch shot glass and five tokens upon entering.

Basically, you’re on the floor packed full of alcohol “enthusiasts” and vendors from around the world, and you walk up to stations you’d like and give them however much token they ask for a tasting portion of what they are serving. The token price can range from 1~3 tokens, and they are more than happy to explain the history, company, and even the unique manufacturing process of the booze you’re gulping down.

My five tokens were gone after 10 minutes, so I just went ahead and exchanged more tokens in bulk to carry around with me all night. I felt like I was a kid again, in a very adult arcade. As I was thinking this, I made a tweet saying, “Is this paradise?” with a picture attached. Few minutes later, I got an alert saying Hopscotch replied to my tweet, and it was up on the giant screen at the venue as well.
Reply from Hopscotch

Being a dork that I am, I thought of Social Media Monitoring & Engagement we learned in class. Not only they monitored Twitter for their specialized hashtags for the event, they took what is purely a digital interaction and put it up on a physical screen for everyone to see, encouraging the rest of the consumers to follow suit. Of course this is common practice, but it was still nice to get an unexpected response from an event, and I must say, I did feel an immediate attachment to the company.
The giant screen where the Twitter feed was broadcasted
Sir. Movember?

Grandma Gangnam Style

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Today, I thought I’d share a light-hearted personal story.

So, I have a grandmother who is 79 years old. She lived very close to our family growing up, so naturally, our family has a very close relationship with her. Ever since I came to Canada she misses me tremendously and always lets me know of it as well. Although she is almost 80, she is still very mentally agile, and when the iPad 2 was about to come out, I demanded my dad to buy her one. All I expected her to be able to do with her iPad 2 was for her to make Facetime calls to see my face every now and then. Ever since then, she has been using it to listen to radios through Internet, read the news, browse the web, play Tetris & Angry Bird, send me messages with picture attached, oh and of course, lets not forget Facetime. Her latest pastime is searching for YouTube videos and Podcasts – Can you believe she brought up Psy’s Gangnam Style before I even thought of mentioning him because she watched his video on her own?

Betty, you got competition.

Yes, I love technology and I am a rational consumer who is aware that Apple is not the only one innovating these days. But there is something to be said about creating a software that achieves such intuitive integration with its hardware that an 79 year-old lady, who can’t operate a computer to save her life, can learn to communicate through it and consume digital contents on it. On paper, Apple may not wow anyone, but in experience, it still wows me whenever I get a Skype call from my grandma.

By the way, her new iPad mini just arrived last week. There is something very strange about our family picture if my sister is getting my grandma’s iPad 2 as a hand-me-down, as she gets the spanking new iPad mini. Strange indeed.

Blend in Your Product with What Everyone Is Talking About

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rofgMueCOqo&feature=plcp]

Last week in my e-Marketing class, Paul showed us a video made by Blendtec, a company that manufactures premium blenders that sell for hundreds of dollars. Tom Dickson, CEO of Blendtec, has been starring in his company videos for years, delivering humor and entertainment for countless viewers by answering one question: Will it blend?

The man has blended iPhones, iPads, superglues, and more things that would make you think, “Why would you even think to blend that? But I’m curious now cause nobody probably ever will again.” For a company that makes such premium products, those gadgets are probably very cheap alternatives for what they would have spend on a full-fledged marketing campaign of the same impact.

He posted a new video today blending both iPhone 5 & Samsung Galaxy S3 side by side. It occurred to me that Blendtec is not just blending whatever gadgets in their hands or just any high-priced items randomly. They have blended roses on Valentine’s Day, skeletons on Halloween, and now they are blending the phones of these two companies, who seem to make the headlines day after day for their rivalry, to tap into another question that has been drilled into consumers minds over these recent months: Which is the better phone?

Blendtec

They are reading into what is most relevant and current to the demographics and making it the topic of the video for maximum impact. I’ve watched many of his videos over the years but never made that simple connection. I guess I just mindlessly clicked on those videos. While not every single one of their videos is viral, many of them garnered respectable amount of viewer counts for its production value. It’s a good example that one can’t hope to create a viral marketing campaign without understanding the target audience.

Wix

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Frontpage of Wix.com
Wix.com is a website creation service where a regular user without any education or experience in professional coding can create his own page by doing something as simple as dragging-and-dropping elements into a template. Their business model is that of a Freemium, allowing consumers to use their tool but offering higher values for paid services, such as hosting, storage, vouchers for online advertising, and so on.

This week, Wix.com has announced that it is bringing an app market where third party developers can use its SDK (Software Development Kit) to develop, publish, and sell their apps for people to integrate into their website. If it’s a paid app, the company splits the profit with the developer at the industry average rate of 30:70. I think the company serves as such a good example of Freemium business model and its spirit–opening its content and benefits to the general public so it can quickly penetrate the market and provide enormous incentives for trial by eliminating risk.

Also, in this day of age, in order to have any kind of business, you have to have a website–preferably a one that looks half-decent. More and more businesses are investing on their online presence, which means that average level of sophistication is increasing in terms of quality of websites. If you are an average entrepreneur who’s strapped for cash, as many of them are, creating a polished & presentable website can be a huge barrier for you to break through to establish yourself. I find this category of service contributes greatly towards levelling the playing field somewhat for them. However, whoever decides to use it should of course go beyond considering their webpage as a functional tool, but possibly a focal point of their marketing. Once they acquire their website, it is still up to them to continuously work on SEO, monitoring website analytics, and etc. It’s a tool, not a magic wand.

Can Slate Make a Splash?

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=des3dpKtfIM&feature=plcp]

While the media is buzzing again with iPad mini around the corner, Microsoft just announced the specifics of pricing and availability for the upcoming Windows 8 RT version of Slate. It’s a toned down version of Windows 8 that’s aimed at the tablet market. I love the idea of Windows 8 tablets, but the pricing makes me pause a little. An entry-level surface with 32GB capacity starts at $499 without the touch-sensitive keyboard cover featured in the video, while one with the cover costs $599. For $699, you can go up a capacity to 64GB with the cover included.

Now as a disclaimer, I’ve been very interested in Windows 8 tablets in general for a while. I also really like the commercial. It is not your regular “look at our product, look at it some more, and a little more,” but it has a heart-warming entertainment in it. But since the early announcement of the product, I subconsciously framed the RT Slate as a tablet since it can’t run x86 based programs, and would provide a full Windows 8 experience, and framed the pricier Windows 8 tablets as a fully functioning Windows computer in your hand. When they announced that they are going to have an RT version to have a competitive price point with the competitors, I imagined they were going to price the RT Slate lower than at $500, for the sheer purpose of market penetration.

Among countless contenders, I can only think of Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 as the ones who succeeded to take a bite out of that Apple’s market share. I am sure Windows 8 tablets are here to stay, but how fast they will make people put down the tablets they already own and pick theirs up instead will be interesting to watch.

Where the Hell Am I Going to Sleep Tonight?

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(Source: HotelTonight)

HotelTonight released a mega-update of its “same-night-accommodation-booking” app. HotelTonight is not a new idea, but a good idea executed very well: You’re traveling in a strange city, and want to find a place to stay spontaneously for the night, you grab your phone and select the offer best suits you.

Just like airlines where they want to fill empty seats as much as possible, accommodation companies are constantly looking to do the same as long as it turns minimum profit. While Priceline and others like it have been brilliantly capitalizing on this niche by introducing “bidding,” one of the biggest deterrent for consumers was that it often cannot meet your spontaneous needs. When most businesses are trying to slap a mobile app onto their existing business model these days, this one seems so organic that there is no doubt it was built ground-up with this platform in mind.

Personally, I think it’d be kick-ass to see features like “Midnight Flash Sales!” where you can stumble out of a bar and turn on your phone to find that last-last minute booking at the lowest price. Think about it, it’s a win-win, granted you don’t throw up on their sheets, no? I say vodka-soaked money is still green as anyone else’s.