Adidas has now included features when buying Adidas Original sneakers that allow people to interact over the Internet. Specifically:

On Feb. 10, Adidas Originals sneakers will include a code that lets consumers partake in an augmented reality program… By holding the code in front of a Webcam, consumers will be able to access the virtual neighborhood and interactive games (created by Xform)

What does this mean for Social & Online Marketing?

It means more than just conversing with our clients. Social Media has done a fantastic job so far of being able to reach our customers and getting them to engage with us, leave feedback, and in some cases purchase as well. But what it cannot enable consumers to do is interact with the brand and use the product at the same time.

Adidas are getting some top tier advice here as now not only are they getting people to buy and use their product, but they are getting them to use it online and log and track their movements. They can learn how shoe buyers behave online - which is information they could not have access to any other way previously, besides doing costly research.

So I guess the question is - how far away are you from tying your products to an online world and community?

I feel the fact that businesses in general still feel that social media appears to look like “play time” for it’s staff, or the agency that it is hiring. Coupled with the fact that there are many unscrupulous characters masquerading as experts and then basically auto registering branded channels and profile pages before jumping ship to a beach on the coast of some island.

It is actually very similar to the search marketing industry, with many abusing the system and the process in order for short term gains. Adding crazy expectations and immediate results that were never achieved, left a bitter taste in client’s mouths. But looking back now on around 10 years of search engine marketing and optimisation, we can see the fact that businesses would be crazy not to be taking search seriously. The industry involved, the snakes disappeared, and properly structured and specific campaigns are being setup and run effectively and generating a return.

Social media will get there - I am sure of it. We will look back on this time and comment how crazy it was that no business had someone sitting on their Twitter account and monitoring conversations and generating feedback. It would be crazy not to syndicate their content across all the available channels.

So I feel for the Population team, and I wish them all the best in their new endeavours. And soon, I am sure, the rise of the dedicated social media agency in Australia will occur, and the industry as a whole will benefit.

I actually was an active Bebo user for quite a few months a couple of years ago, when it was first launched in Australia. It was my network of choice for a few reasons:

• It was clean and easy to use - compared to MySpace at the time which frustrated me to no end due to the visual abominations that were MySpace page customisations. Bebo made it easy for everyone with a fixed template suggestion.
• All my friends were on it - Since many of my friends believed in the same benefits listed above, they flocked in droves and hence we were commenting and swapping photos all over the place.
• Good privacy settings - The customisable settings that were featured was a much better fit for my security needs, then MySpaces’s all-or-nothing approach.

So with all these good features, why did everything go so wrong? Well Facebook gained traction, twitter started to move on board, and there was also new networks springing up all over the place with very similar feature sets - trying to jump in and cash in on the fad.

And that’s where I think Bebo’s strategy feel down - they started to play Mr Me Too.

• Trying to do music - I remember logging in one day and noticing that everyone was becoming friends of bands and so forth, clamouring to get their attention.
• Trying to be YouTube - You then started to embed and share videos that you uploaded, something YouTube really has had on lock for a while.
• Poor Monetisation - the next thing the network is filled with banner ads, flashing gifs and other irrelevant information - when all I was trying to do was check out my friends photos from the weekend.
• No API - When Facebook released their API, that is really when things started going crazy and the developers spurred on users by offering them something to do when their friends were not online.

So by being a jack of all trades and master of none, I believe they really should have focused on doing one thing, and doing it well. If only Twitter was gaining traction, they would have learnt from their example and let the user’s define the functionality.

So thanks for the memories Bebo.

SlideShare.net Goes Business

SlideShare.net, everyone’s favourite slide sharing service (especially social media gurus) now offers you some nice data sorting and capturing functionality. Now you can track how many leads you get based on how many people checked out your preso. That is a pretty nifty feature, assigning a more accurate ROI on your hard presentations.

Tommy Lee Builds his Album Web 2.0 Style

This is a fantastic story mainly due to the fact that I respect Tommy Lee for going out and doing something crazy, let letting any Joe Blow contribute music to his new album. Tommy Lee puts up the stems, you can lay your licks over the top, he picks the best, and plans to give you a cut of the album. Too cool for school. Who said the music industry is out of ideas? Or maybe it was his social media consultant that helped him out. I’m wagering on the latter.

The Search Engines Want Real Time Data

What had started as talks about intergrating real time data into regular old fashioned search engines has now become a reality. Bing hit first saying its got Twitter updates built in. Google says ‘me too’. Bing goes well guess what we have Facebook status updates, so nerrr nerrr ne nerrr nerrr. Google fires back with, well we just made social search live, and you can mix into your SERPs your buddy’s SERPs and that we think is pretty cool.

And Yahoo? Oh yeah, they got some realtime search engine integration mixing everything all together into a big search mashup.

Phew, take a breath and go back to just clicking the first result of the SERP.

Wall Street Journal Says Watch out for Impersonators

It’s an increasing problem that people are spamming, scamming and impersonating businesses and people on social networks. They give the same old tried and tested advice to make sure you go run and claim up as many of the usernames as you can to stop this kind of action. You have been warned.

Thats all folks!

PS. This should be a public service announcement: when to use an apostrophe

News came through about a month or so ago that Facebook was setting up an Australian sales office and we started to get excited. Having a dedicated team focusing on the Australian market could really work in its favour, think of Google when they started with a sales team here.

So today they have announced that they are supporting billing in multiple currencies for their advertising network. What does that mean for marketing companies an agencies?

• Easier management of a campaign
• No international transaction fees
• No conversion rate/invoicing day inconveniences 

We applaud this move, because now thanks to the removal of these barriers, we can see a lot more businesses willing to at least experiment with a Facebook campaign.

Engagement Ads

Facebook also took advertising online to an interactive level by taking its Engagement Ads out of Beta. What this allows is for companies to insert movies, polls and other actions (RSVP to invites) all via an online advertisement. Whilst this does blur the line between advertising and using the service, Facebook clearly labels their sponsored screen real estate. With every company currently buzzing about interacting with the brand, this is the perfect medium to do so. 

How can an organisation take advantage of these two new improvements to the Facebook service? 

• Contact an Agency experienced with social media, particularly Facebook advertising.
• Create a specific campaign making sure you take advantage of every possible type of advertising available on Facebook (ie. the Engagement features)
• Make sure you give the campaign a significant time to collect data (2-3months is a great start)
• Do not go in with high expectations - Facebook ads tend to have huge impressions and low click thru rates.
• Make sure you segment ads by the relevant demographic - more and more baby boomers and seniors are networking online on Facebook, don’t serve them the ads you are serving to Gen Ys.

At the moment, to get access inside Facebook’s walled garden, advertising is the quickest and easiest way to break in, without spending the time building fans and relationships with people. Make sure your business is the first, not the last.

So the million dollar question is, will people use it? It often amazes me how active some comment on YouTube videos. There must be a specific niche or demographic of people that use it purely to interact with people. In my real life social circle, the sole reason it is used is to watch a specific video and resume whatever it was we were doing previously, or moving to a related video.

However, I cannot argue with the facts and the stats - people love interacting on Youtube. So for those that already power users, this could possibly be their dream come true. But as for the users such as myself, it probably won’t convert me, no matter how good the UI or experience would be.

One nice feature is the clear attempt at both replicating and tweaking Facebook’s chat and real time features to hopefully encourage people to share within YouTube itself rather than another service/network.

The final question remains however is what new data can YouTube mine from this feature? Can it draw a co-relation between teenager males and how much they share videos relating to cars, as opposed to teenage girls dancing in front of their webcam? Do people start to share a video halfway through because they enjoy it that much, or wait until the end before they share? How often does a shared video get viewed by the sharee? Or is it ignored and viewed at a later date?

This kind of information or notifications system would not be possible unless there was a network of people using one system to alert friends and the general public of events happening in their lives. Whilst some tweets were referencing articles on the major news websites, there was no real need (or desire) on my part to click through - all the information I needed was in 140 characters.

My attention wasn’t diverted too far away from my current task at hand, I did not have to wait until I got home from work and plonk myself down infront of the television, because I was kept abreast of the situation from my desktop Twitter client.

And whilst all this was happening, I realised to myself that I cannot remember when I devoted a morning - infact any period of time - to reading a newspaper. And then I had an even larger revelation that I haven’t dedicated any time to any major news channel or news show to inform me of what happened in my day.

It makes logical sense that my social network updates me of the news. And more importantly the news I care about. My core friends and I share events that happen in our social circle that included BBQs, dinner parties and nights out on the town between ourselves because we can inform and experience those events together.

I can now be informed about what is happening in the world via my online social network, by making connections with people that share like interests with me and make a point of sharing their experiences and information that can be of interest to me.

The newspaper cannot do that. Mass Media is officially dead to me.

Its mentioned that they should Twitter should charge for commercial accounts or maybe Twitter use affliate marketing or maybe anyone of these 7 Twitter monetisation strategies.

At the end of the day, Twitter continues to receive funding from various investors and is fast becoming one of the top 5 social networks on the Internet - no small feet in itself.

I like Twitter. I like the people use Twitter. I like what Twitter has done and how it treats its users. In fact, besides the fail whale, there is very little I do not like Twitter.

So I say lets just let Twitter be, and if they do start to charge users, it will just sort the wheat from the chaff.

Getting them to turn a profit.

So now Youtube has done some thinking and come up with a way to generate income without turning it into a mess of advertising banners. They go down the same road as other information sources have already tried and tested: is pay-per-download.

Authors can opt in and allow their videos to be downloaded for a particular fee, allowing them to store a copy of the video on their local machine. There will possibly be several licenses available, much like the system Flickr implements.

Of course this method is open for abuse and sharing, especially since it seems that initially the files won’t be DRM signed - which is fantastic for all you seeders out there.

Wired makes a good point though as the industry that seems to benefit the most from this setup are the music labels, as we all know that music videos are often in the most viewed/popular items in YouTube statistics. But if those labels choose to go their own way (a la Hulu) - what videos would actually be worth paying for and keeping would definitely reduce - think of all the rubbish that is stored on YouTube….

All that being said though, there are a few videos and such I would love to grab that cannot be found anywhere else besides video sharing websites, so I say bring it on!

Well ReadWriteWeb and The Telegraph UK report that Facebook is planning to launch in around spring a new ad-serving platform called Engagement Ads.

So when you login - a nice pretty ad which you can choose to click or not. If you do choose to click then guess what? All your friends will probably be notified as well. Isn’t that a great benefit, because now your friends know what products you are interested in. But not only that, the ad now has recieved a few more impressions depending on how large your friend network is.

Facebook has commented that the technology has not been implemented as yet, but its clear Facebook is pulling out all stops to improve its ad serving network. Having spoken to people who have tested Facebook advertising in its current state, it is clearly lagging in some key areas.

Also consider Facebooks previous attempts at captialising on user data (*cough* Beacon *cough*), they definitely have to do something that respects their users and yet help organisations who would clearly benefit from the Facebook community.