Today we contuinue to get tips on social media and how to make ads and websites.   

• Filmaking - how they are putting films together with music in the background
• Editing skills - tweeting, blogging
• Website development - Aboriginal-inspired, hyperlinks, promoting MAKET

The aim of the work experience is for the students to learn more about promoting their school leadership group - MAKET, while getting some secrets from the advertising and PR gurus!

Japanese Advertising vs Western Advertising

Japanese Advertising is said to be more:

• Indirect

• Emotional

• Intuitive

• Use of Physical symbolism

• Company identification holds a greater weight than product identification

Western advertising can be described to be:

• Direct

• Verbally oriented

• Logical

Indirect:

Japanese ads are indirect in their message where most aim to tell a short story or act out a brief scene. This particular ad follows the life of a boy who begins to lose his sanity as masculine voices come out of every girl he checks out. He comes to understand that all those girls go to the games where they lose their voice as they cheer their team on. The  commercial is advertising the Ajinomoto Stadium.

click here to video>>Ajinomoto Stadium ad

Western ads are said to be more direct and “to-the-point-messages”

Intuitive

The Japanese language and culture has trained the consumer to complete ideographs, complete sentences or fill in missing words in conversations. Therefore, commercials that are left “incomplete” are common, requiring the consumer to fill in the blanks. The online campaign below is a flash based clock that showcasese the Japanese clothes brand Uniqlo where actors perform brief dance moves to illustrate the clothing brand. Here, the Japanese consumer is to “fill in the missing blanks”and decide what the dance moves are conveying about the label.

click here to video>>Digital clock

In comparison Western ads are said to be more logical.

Emotional:

Japanese ads aims to appeal emotionally, provoking feelings, sensibilities and images that they wish the consumer to relate with the brand. Style and execution becomes the point of differeniation between products.

In this Toyota commercial, it uses people as metaphors to communicate ‘the human touch’ only a Toyota can offer.

click here to video>>Toyota-Human touch

Compare this ad to a western ad for Honda cars, the concept of focusing on the pure mechanics of a car would not reach wide acceptance in Japan.

click here for video>>Honda ad

K-tra

K-tra is a mobile campaign that attempts to appeal to people’s “joy of mobility”. This campaign is also a great example of how company identification holds greater weight than product identification.

• Car sales among young people have decreased in Japan, therefore in order to create a relationship with the next generation and foster brand loyalty, Honda developed a mobile application to remind the younger generation of the “joy of mobility.”
• It is a Virtual mobile hitchhiking game that utilizes the GPS to allow people to experience mobility through other people’s movement.
• Based on virtual avatars, users can pick up other people’s avatars and take them along for a ride. These avatars can communicate with them via messages where players receive points in relation to the kilometers the avatars have traveled.

In comparison, western ads can be said to be more verbally orientated. Below is an SMS ad dialogue which focuses on conversation to promote the product.The concept also assumes a heavier weight than style and execution.

Foursquare is a location-based social network application for smartphones, currently available in all the major app stores. The application allows users to connect to other friends on Foursquare and share - or ‘check in’ - their location along with a message or ‘shout’. Users can also add notes (‘tips’) to the places they visit, or submit new locations to its ever-expanding library. Foursquare currently has $21.4m in funding and is one of the fastest growing and most popular location sharing applications available.

Game Mechanic and Adoption

Foursquare draws much of its popularity from its easy to use game mechanic, where users earn points for various things from multiple check-ins a day to mass check-ins, and Foursquare’s most popular feature - mayorships.
If a user accrues the most check-ins at a venue, that user is crowned the ‘mayor’. Gaining mayorships is mostly just for bragging rights, but works well as a way to generate competition and participation in the community.
Another way the app pulls in users is to award them with ‘badges’ for various achievements. For instance, the ‘Adventurer’ badge is earned by checking in to 20 different venues.

These badges vary greatly and can be specific to places such as certain cities, universities, and even specific to a certain company (the People Magazine’s ‘People Hotspot badge’ is earned by following their Foursquare page then checking in to 3 venues listed on their profile). A fairly comprehensive badge list can be found here.

As of July 2010, of its over 4 million users:

• 64% of users are male, 33% are female, and 3% did not specify a gender
• 55% of users have uploaded a photo
• 28% of users have linked their Foursquare account to their Facebook account

(Source)

According to Alexa.com, the vast majority of visitors to Foursquare.com are between 25 and 34, and are visiting from work. As the service is still in its fairly early stages, it would appear that most of Foursquare’s users would be comprised of young people who are already very connected to social media, most likely having Twitter and Facebook pages and wanting to be part of the next big service, or working in an industry related to social media in some way.

People begin using the service for a wide variety of reasons, the most common seeming to be the game mechanic, followed by social reasons / meeting up with friends. People also use it as something of a ‘personal history’ or record of places the user has visited. A good cross-section of adoption reasons can be found here.

Facebook Places

In August of 2010, Facebook announced its foray into location based social networking - ‘Facebook Places’. Much like Foursquare, Facebook Places allows users to check in their location, add notes to venues and submit new venues as Facebook Place pages. You can also tag your friends at the venues you check into – a feature Foursquare is currently lacking.

Facebook Places has, as of yet, failed to stem Fourquare’s growing popularity - although its user base instantly crossed the iPhone-using chunk of its over 500 million users. According to Business Insider, ‘Since Facebook introduced Places, Foursquare registered over 1 million new accounts.’ And ‘Foursquare check ins outnumber Facebook Places check ins by 5X.’

It could be said that the two services aren’t really competing at all – much of Foursquare’s user base aren’t really using it to see where there friends are, but rather to participate in the competition and gaming elements it offers.

(Source)

Facebook Places is slowly rolling out across all the major app stores, and is already seeing a huge amount of usage among both Foursquare users, and people new to location sharing.

Usage

Companies can partner with Foursquare to offer promotions, giving a unique way of connecting to their consumers - these popup in the app’s interface when a user is in the area of one of the promotions.

Earlier this year, noodle bar Wagamama became the first company in Australia to partner with Foursquare, offering unique rewards to customers who check-in to their restaurants and higher rewards for people who become Foursquare mayors of their restaurants. According to them, ‘through its partnership with Foursquare, Wagamama will be able to access a range of real-time information about its customers including who has “checked in” to its noodle bars, when they arrived, the male-to-female customer ratio and which times of day are more active for certain customers, who the most frequent visitors to the restaurant are etc. Wagamama has also launched a national Foursquare promotion that provides instant offers to engage new customers and keep current ones connected with the brand.’ No measurable results for this campaign have appeared online, although this article is a small peek into how it could be performing.

Starbucks is rewarding its Foursquare mayors with $1 off its frappuccinos, and also has a Barista Badge, awarded to people who accrue 5 check-ins at one of their cafes.

The upcoming movie ‘Monsters’ is generating buzz about its release by strategically posting Foursquare tips at various locations such as cinemas and tourist attractions, shown below.

You can view all their Foursquare activity on their page.

Recently a Foursquare partnership with Domino’s was tested in a small market of the US and proved successful enough to expand nationwide, eventually accompanying other social media strategies to help the company increase revenue by 29%. (Source).

McDonald’s has also found success in partnership with Foursquare, being ‘able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare ingenuity. McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.’ (Source).

Foursquare could also potentially be used for cause marketing (as suggested in this blog post) by encouraging purchases with a reward partnership, sending a percentage of purchases made through this promotion to charity.

Further Foursquare campaigns can be found here.

Privacy

All location based social networks create privacy issues and Foursquare, as a pioneer, is not immune. Simply the fact that users are broadcasting where they are is a potential issue - though users can choose whether or not to share to everyone, there are possibilities for people to use this information to know when you’re out of the house and rob you. A good little site concerning over-sharing can be found at http://pleaserobme.com/.

As with all social networks, it’s up to only the user to share responsibly, and Foursquare has privacy measures in place to try and protect its users. That said, and as with any social network, the only way to really ensure full privacy is not to use the service - but how are you going to earn badges that way?

]]> http://www.bwm.com.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=244 http://www.bwm.com.au/blog/?p=240 http://www.bwm.com.au/blog/?p=240#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 03:40:04 +0000 jakester http://www.bwm.com.au/blog/?p=240 A website’s footer is one of the most neglected and overlooked components of website design, so in this article i’m going to discuss how the footer is evolving in modern web design and how the footer space can be taken full advantage of to open up more opportunities for:

Traditionally, the footer is a very boring part of a websites layout, containing things like a contact link, privacy and legal links, and copyright information - usually run very plainly along one line, trying not to get in the way of the more ‘important’ parts of the site. This style of footer is common as it’s the last thing on a designers mind when making a website and is about as far below ‘the fold’ as you can get.

The whitehouse’s footer in 2007

The footer has far more potential than just plain text links and legals however. Luckily, many designers have noticed this and taken to a whole new method for creating footers. These footers are generally a lot bigger than the classic one line minimalistic approach - some even filling an entire screen. They are brilliantly designed to fit in with and cap off the website.

The whitehouse’s footer today

One argument for footers built in this way that i read all the time is that when a user has scrolled to the bottom of the page, a plain footer will often leave the user with no obvious place to go next - either scroll back up to the header or leave the page. A content rich and well designed footer will make it very clear where to click next and will increase the time the user will spend on the site, and how deeply into it they will navigate. Here are just a few methods for creating an effective footer:

Sitemap Footers

It’s very common in modern web design to place the website’s sitemap in the footer. If layed out well, the sitemap will give the user easily readable options for where to go next - though one could argue that with larger sites, having all those links could just get confusing and do just the opposite of what is intended. Here is an article discussing the SEO issues arising from using many links in the footer space.

Apple’s Mac footer

Informative Footers

Footers can also help to inform or solidify a site’s message or purpose. Some good features to include might be:

• An ‘about’ section
• Social media links and streams
• An in depth contact form or map if appropriate
• Photos relating to the site’s subject or author
• Recent posts

It never hurts to recap important information from the top of the page in summarised form at the bottom, like a conclusion to what the website is trying to tell the user. A simple way of doing this is to just repeat the header nav as part of the footer. A ‘back to top’ button is also a good idea.

Ectomachine’s footer

Illustrative Footers

Depending on the websites intended audience, faster internet connections will allow for more complex use of design without having to worry about slower loading times - as is always the case. The footer can be very illustrative and become an integral part of the site’s overall design. Large and nice looking icons make it clearer where to go next than just using a text link.

kulturbanause.de blog footer (German)

Paired with the benefits offered in usability, it’s a waste not to take advantage of the possiblities offered design-wise by a nice big footer - there are hundreds of examples of how it can be incorporated to make a well rounded, high usability page - and though there’s still a lot of different methods i haven’t mentioned, the creative possibilities are very open ended.

Further reading:

• Footerama: a gallery dedicated to footer designs
• How to build a footer that doesnt stink
• 10 techniques for a fantastic footer
• 29 websites having admirable footer design
• Big, informative and creative footers

BWM has edged out major competition to win the coveted AdNews Creative Network of the Year, beating BMF, Clemenger BBDO and DDB Group.

Here’s a few the key points from the AdNews article from 26 February 2010:

BWM’s strong financial performance and client stability saw the agency win from a quality field. The agency’s success followed a string of new business wins and revenue growth in a year of difficult economic conditions.

- BWM raked in $114.5 million in new business and achieved a 25% rise in revenue

- Lowest level of staff turnover down to 18%, while the digital department grew from 17 to 28 full-time staff

- Creativity ramped up across big brands including Telstra, BigPond and Sanitarium’s Weetbix

Congratulations to everyone involved - we’d show you the celebratory photos but they could come back to haunt us.

What better way for him to make up for a bad year than to give away free gifts at Christmas? This stellar campaign worked its socks off and was a fun new twist on Christmas giveaways.

Who could forget a goat with a frog on its head and together they say “Bargain! Reckon!”? The teaser began months ahead of launch with a talking goat blog including a viral video, leading to the anonymous goat and frog before the full campaign was launched upon the unsuspecting public.

With the increase in the volume of shared, social content, making sense of it all will be an increasing challenge, particularly as brands are starting to join the conversations.

Mashable refers to the Phone app, my6sense, as a “perfect example of semantic intelligence applied to social media streams. The app functions as an RSS reader, but you can share stories with Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook. The stories you read and share are then used to recommend articles, and the more you use it the better it works.”

I’ve just registered and downloaded the app to my iPhone and you can import your existing RSS feeds from a variety of readers (mine are all in Google Reader), which I’ve done and this tool is fantastic, all my feeds are there in my hand whenever I need & the more I consume content via this application, the more the app learns about my content interests. I’ll keep you posted.