After having shown interests in 3D with Sketchup (which you can still use to design your home to put on Google Earth, and also use its power to make 3D speed modeling, this software being enough performing to do so), Google seems to have mashed up experiences from the Wii console and SecondLife strenghts and weaknesses and gathered a smart tech team to develop a new social virtual world experiment: Lively.com. More than a new competitor landing into the social virtual worlds field, Lively.com would certainly become the test field for Google to challenge current advertising and face the new opportunities, including social media advertising placement, value added advertising embedded into conversations, technology challenge to make it work and worth time spending, and above all new and relevant metrics and ROI calculation methods. Read More

coComment, a FireFox plugin to track and get noticed of comments around the web, has made an interesting move pushing live new features to establish itself more in the comments tracking and gathering business, including companies such as Disqus, Fav.or.it, SezWho, Intense Debate, in addition to already existing word-of-mouth tracking companies. It’s seems a crowded business, but competitors have chosen different paths to own the market. And that would definitly be an interesting battle to follow. Read More

Consumers are key for companies. Key because they’re clients and best advocates of the brand. Traditional marketing and communication is meant to develop awareness and stimulate consumers to become customers through seeding value added to people buying the brand products. CRM is meant to increase loyalty by offering information and generating repeat business. In that process clients, prospects, consumers, and users are restricted to receivers role. When asked to contribute they’re always lead, and in a way not inviting to engage with the brand (answer a survey isn’t that much engaging). But as Trendwatching said, consumers are the global brain, and brand should do much more to leverage that community of theirs, that would definitly be a smart way to shorten decision making process, help out-of-the box thinking, and generate more proximity with people that can become their advocates if included in the ideation and service enhancement process. Here’s some ideas of how to leverage that untapped and smart resource. Read More

Every day tons of information, personal thoughts, ideas, feedbacks, and content generated by consumers are spread, discussed, linked, digged, and commented. Stories become mainstream because of quality, innovative approach, but mainly because it’s about brands, brand customer relationship management, and ultimately about brand infinite ability not to respond users questions and cut down communication when asked to join the conversation. In that status lies an interesting opportunity to generate a competitive advantage. By observing social media users you can quickly learn how to address relevant answers to social media users, how to use the right channel according to the user’s request, and how to efficiently monitor social media channels/ users. Read More

Following the article “Social Media + Consumer Opinion + Brand = opportunities brands have to join the conversation“, it was necessary to add some words about ROI brands can leverage joining the conversation. I would look over 3 different stages of what I call “joining the conversation” to speak about the social media ROI: taking the floor by blogging, monitoring social networks and contributing to the social media, and social media advertising using knowledge and network acquired through social media activity. Read More