Posts filed under 'design'
Is Your Facebook Personality Genuine?
Sean Kilpatrick/Associated Press
Defining yourself on Facebook.
Anyone who has ever spent time on a dating Web site like Match.com knows that the online profile often doesn’t match the person in real life.
So when University of Texas researchers began studying Facebook friends, they expected that users also would exaggerate accomplishments and offer an enhanced version of themselves. To their surprise, they discovered that Facebook profiles typically gave an accurate and realistic impression of the user’s real-life personality.
The scientists, led by a psychology professor, Sam Gosling, collected 236 profiles of young adults on Facebook as well as a similar social networking site in Germany. The researchers used personality questionnaires and interviewed friends to determine the profile owners’ actual personalities, assessing traits like extroversion, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism and conscientiousness. The survey also measured how they wished to be, assessing their ideal personality traits. Using the same rating system, the researchers also assessed each user’s personality based on the information provided in the online profile.
The researchers expected the Facebook profiles to match an idealized version of the user’s personality. But to their surprise, the online Facebook profile matched the real-world personality test.
Dr. Gosling said the findings suggested that online social networks could provide users with an opportunity for genuine social interactions.
“Is Facebook an opportunity to promote ourselves, a P.R. exercise? Or is it just another medium of social communication, like the telephone?” Dr. Gosling said. “This research suggests the latter. Young adults are using it as a way to communicate and leaving lots of clues about what they’re really like.”
The Facebook pages were particularly well suited for identifying extroverts. The personality assessment based on the online profile was least accurate for identifying traits of neuroticism, common in those who are anxious, uptight or worry a lot. Dr. Gosling said that finding was consistent with other studies showing that neuroticism was difficult to identify without a face-to-face encounter.
“This online social world is an important environment,” Dr. Gosling said. “If you look at the time people spend on it and the hours people devote to it, it’s not just a fad. It’s meeting some important social needs.”
Add comment December 4, 2009
The Last Campaign: How Experiences Are Becoming the New Advertising
Red Bull, Virgin America, Uniqlo and Mattel Lead the Way
By Garrick Schmitt
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Is advertising dying? It’s certainly fashionable to say so. Conventional wisdom holds that traditional media’s grip on consumers continues to slip as they increasingly turn to the internet and their peers for entertainment and purchasing recommendations.
In fact, any planner worth his or her salt can reel off a stream of statistics pointing to advertising’s demise — or lack of effectiveness, at least: Prime-time continues to erode as all the major networks saw significant declines for last year’s season; 77% of U.S. consumers trust businesses less than they did a year ago; consumers trust their peers’ opinions online more than any other source and a whopping 83% of Mad Men’s supposedly ad-friendly time-shifted audience fast forwards through commercials according to Tivo. The list goes on and on.
But perhaps it’s not that advertising is failing but that brand experiences (both on and offline) are really what are capturing the imagination of today’s consumer. In FEED, a new report that I authored with my colleagues at Razorfish, we found that digital brand experiences are having an inordinate sway on consumer purchasing habits and brand affinity.
For example, 65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand (either positively or negatively) and 97% of that group report that the same experience ultimately influenced whether or not they went on to purchase a product from that brand. In a nutshell, experience matters. A lot.
Of course, brands that were “born digital” intuitively know this. Google and Amazon are pioneering experiential brands. That’s why Amazon continues to pour money into improving its customer service rather than run traditional advertising or marketing campaigns. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said, “We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.” Zappos (which recently hired Mullen) built its brand the same way, as has Facebook.
But what about more traditionally-minded marketers who weren’t born digital? Can they succeed in an experience-driven world? The answer is “yes” and here are some of the best:
Red Bull: Red Bull basically pioneered the experiential category. Not only did the brand rise to prominence by sponsoring alternative athletes and lifestyles, it went further by creating its own events, like Red Bull’s Flugtag and even its own sports like Red Bull’s Crashed Ice, which takes over old Quebec with a mix of hockey and motorcross. Even the brand’s website has morphed into a blog, much like today’s most popular publishers.
Camper: Most of us in the U.S. think of Camper as purely a comfortable yet stylish shoe brand. But the Spanish company is much more and pursues a brand ethos that’s both traditional, cultural and fashion forward simultaneously. Proof: Casa Camper, stylish (but laid back) hotels in Barcelona and Berlin that embodies the brand’s essence. Ditto for Camper Together which taps up and coming artists to create one-of-a-kind boutiques.
Guinness: Guinness may be 250 years old, but it’s acting like a much, much younger marketer. The company has embraced experiential branding both literally and figuratively with its “It’s Alive Inside” positioning. For its anniversary, Guinness offered up Remarkable Experiences, including a trip into space. It also released a pub-finder iPhone application with a social media twist. More impressively, the brand created the Guinness Storehouse, a seven-story building that functions as both museum and pub, that has now become one of Ireland’s top tourist attractions. And, more recently, Guinness even wired up its rugby team with RFID tags (including balls and players) to capture a whole range of statistics about how fast, powerfully and effectively the game is played.
UNIQLO: Few companies have so used digital like Uniqlo to both build a brand and breakthrough to new consumers — and on a truly global scale.The Japanese retailer surprises and delights consumers at every turn, whether through innovative iPhone applications, calendars, e-commerce, stylebooks and microsites. Uniqlo’s experiential efforts not only express the brand, but reach new consumers who may live thousands of miles away from the nearest retail location.
Virgin America: Virgin America has gone further than most, ensuring that the experience is the marketing — and advertising in many cases. The brand targeted tech-savvy consumers early on with its Red system entertainment console and in-flight WiFi. It showed off its dramatic interiors in promotions with Diggnation and YouTube celebrities; became an early adopter of Twitter for customer service; and reinforced its brand values through its simple booking engine on VirginAmerica.com. And now, for the holidays, Virgin America is partnering with Google to offer free WiFi for travelers.
Nike: Nike, of course, has been moving in this experiential direction for a few years. ‘We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” Nike’s Trevor Edwards told the New York Times in 2007. ”We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.” And so they have. The company continually earns kudos for consumer experience breakthroughs like Nike+, its online running community; the Human Race, a global running event; and more recently the Livestrong Chalkbot which enabled users to submit a text message that would be painted (digitally) on the route of the Tour de France.
Experiences, it would seem, are the new advertising. Experiences reach and engage customers in new and more meaningful ways, they promote “trial” over simply messaging and — quite frankly — experiences are much more suited to our digital era when everything is just a click away. Our challenge now, as marketers, is to make sure that our products and brands can actually live up to the experiences that we advertise.
Add comment November 10, 2009
Purdue University Adds Twitter and Facebook to Class Participation
By Barb Dybwad
Students at Purdue University are experimenting with a new application developed at the school called Hotseat that integrates Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging to help students “backchannel” during class.
People who have attended technology conferences in the past several years are already familiar with this phenomenon, where social media is leveraged to allow the participants in a session or panel to comment and exchange questions and ideas in real-time. At Purdue, Hotseat is used to allow students to comment on the class as it proceeds, with everyone in the class including the professor able to see the messaging as it happens.
The Hotseat software allows students to use either Facebook, Twitter, Myspace (
), or SMS to post messages during classes, or they can simply log in to the web site to post to and view the ongoing backchannel. Right now it’s only being pilot tested in two courses, but has already become a fast favorite for both teachers and students. Professor Sugato Chakravarty, whose personal finance course is one of the pilot tests, said, “I’m seeing students interact more with the course and ask relevant questions.”
And although it’s been optional for students to participate, so far 73% of the 600 or so in the pilot classes have used the software. We’ve seen Twitter become mandatory for journalism students at Australia’s Griffith University to some negative reaction, but this is a less structured implementation which may perhaps account for its more favorable reception.
As Chakravarty goes on to note, though, the application is called “Hotseat” for a reason — and professors will have to be resilient enough to take any potential criticism or even corrections from students in real-time. Nevertheless, he cites it as a “valuable tool for enhancing learning. The students are engaged in the discussions and, for the most part, they are asking relevant questions.”
Check out a video introduction to the Hotseat application below, and let us know what you think. Does social media have a natural place in the classroom? What role should Facebook (
) and Twitter (
) play in education?
Add comment November 4, 2009
How I Got My Interaction On
At Razorfish we used to say: “Everything that can be digital, will be!” We built a Web site for Charles Schwab that could execute stock transactions faster and better than your broker–and unlike selling physical widgets, adding customers didn’t cost Schwab anything! We predicted that digital technology would do almost anything faster, cheaper and better–an unbeatable combination–especially if “better” meant the user experience is better.
Bill Moggridge is attributed with coining the name “interaction design,” because, as he says, “designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object–beautiful or utilitarian–but as designing our interactions with it.” Interaction design is also a lot nicer than what the engineers call it: “computer human interface.”
Digital technology makes inanimate things smarter and more intelligent when it’s interactive. Instead of only watching and embedding interactive media, the audience becomes an active player in its own experience. Video games are more compelling than plain passive movies–and are becoming a bigger industry! The NPA group reported that in September 2009 video-game hardware and software sales were almost $1.3 billion.
There are at least three levels of interactivity: 1) reactive, 2) interactive, and 3) co-active. Reactive is where the content reacts to the user–like those video projects in the subway that ripple when you walk by. It’s a simple level of two-way communication. Interactive refers to a more complex relationship with more subtle tracking and programming. Co-active is where the user becomes one of the authors, as in interactions among organisms within a biological community. Flash mobs and open source programming are interesting examples, but the ultimate is where the technology is invisible.
We want to bring the qualities of digital technology into our real life experience to make the real world better. The ideal is when the digital software and hardware become seamless components of the broader multimedia experience, using various kinds of sensors and programming blur the boundary between the real and the virtual into a new “realer” world. Working on an architectural scale, the edge is easier to disguise.
When we are successful the products act like our friends or pets and we have wondrous adventures in places that help us live better lives. But the ultimate is co-active experience, the kind that jumps out of the screen and runs across the room and plays with us in the street.
Read Tucker Viemeister’s blog What’s Cookin’?
Browse blogs by our other Expert Designers
Tucker Viemeister leads the Lab at Rockwell Group, an interactive technology design group combining digital interaction design, modeling, and prototyping for hotels and restaurants, casinos, packaging, and products. The LAB seeks to blur the line between the physical and virtual, exploring and experimenting with interactive digital technology in objects, environments, and stories. Tucker also co-founded the collaborative Studio Red with David Rockwell that was dedicated to innovation for Coca-Cola. Since joining Rockwell Group in 2004, Tucker has been instrumental in the design and development of JetBlue’s Marketplace at the JFK International Airport, “Hall of Fragments,” an installation that opened the Corderie dell’Arsenale at the 2008 Venice Biennale, a “living wall” for the lobby of the Sheraton Toronto, the traveling Red Lounge for Coca-Cola, and MGM City Centre in Las Vegas.
Add comment November 2, 2009
