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Wie de klant heeft is in charge

By equadraat
October 27, 2011 //

E-shop+ beleving

De uitdaging van door Seqwood geproduceerde e-shops+ is om de koopbeleving via internet steeds meer te laten lijken op de koopervaring in het echte leven. Aan de multi-disciplinaire Seqwood Agile tafel is het doel dit uurlijks te bereiken voor onze opdrachtgevers en beter; beyond that.

Social activatie

In retail wordt de consument gedurende z’n bezoek aan een sociale omgeving ook niet continue met call to actions belaagd. Zinvol is het om interactie te creeeren dmv een gerelateerd event zowel online als off-line te adopteren of beter te organizeren. Hierdoor ontstaat een sociale longtail waar je als brand gedurende een periode op kan leunen.

Het op grote schaal in sociale adoptie investeren was in het pre-social tijdperk enkel voorbehouden voor the bigger brands; Drum Rhythm, Heineken Music of Bavaria street races, wie kent ze niet. Deze kostbare social events zorgde voor aandacht en/of kennismaking met het merk. Met de opkomst van websites, bloggers, nieuwsbrieftools en facebook is het voor MKB+ mogelijk om op grote schaal fans te mobiliseren, te informeren en of te laten kopen. Wie de klant heeft is in charge en klanten wil je pamperen en binden.

Onlangs stuiten we op een case van deze trend, hoofdpersonen zijn Macha, Melissa & Rowena.

Het event

Een offline Beautygloss Party georganiseerd door de Nederlandse blogger Mascha. Leidend voorbeeld van deze post, Mydress is 1 van deelnemende online mkb-ers die de online consument in de gelegenheid stelt om offline te ervaren. Mydress vind als fashion e-tailer haar doelgroep op beauty event en heeft daar daardoor geen fysieke winkel nodig. Melissa is blogger van pink sensation en is een bezoekster van het event en het schrijnende verhaal van Rowena die spijt heeft, omdat zij voor haar studie meer tijd nodig had. Veel gedoe om een relatief klein event (650 bezoekers), honderd duizenden viewers beleven dit echter online mee.

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Hieronder Rowena & Macha, gelukkig nog steeds vriendinnen.

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Categories Creative application, E-Commerce, Interactive advertising, retail, Social media, Viral

What if you stopped tweeting and dropped Facebook?

By Bartel Scheers
December 15, 2010 //

The other day Brad Harkavy, CEO of BPG Motors and owner of a consulting practice Harkador Partners posted some honest thinking on his weblog questioning the impact of “What if you stopped tweeting and dropped Facebook?” to his businesses.

Besides some other interesting insights the following lines were quite striking. I mean, I know we all ‘warn’ our clients to not lose focus on their social media presence, but ‘hey, we’re the consultants’, and having an actual business owner admitting to this is valuable as it is quite rare.

“My consulting business, Harkador Partners, however, has several objective indicators that my decreased social media presence has negatively impacted my business; specifically, a decrease in existing business and potential new business.”

Read more about Brad’s learnings

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Categories Social media

Facebook Book

By Bartel Scheers
December 1, 2010 //
0

Sometimes I go through old posts and pictures on my Facebook and forget about hilarious posts from friends. Imagine being able to export your entire Facebook profile and turning it in to a hard back book! Well that is what 1000 users did thanks to a pretty cool app that was created for Bouygues Télécom. Here is what the agency — DBB Paris — who created the app had to say…

Bouygues Télécom asked us at DDB Paris to come up with an idea to launch their Facebook platform. They wanted us to create something that would go beyond using your profile picture in a funny way, or pranking your friends with a small joke. We decided to look at the way we use Facebook and found that even though we use the social networking site everyday, we forget our favorite moments we share online. So we created an app that could change that, and keep your facebook, in a book. Facebook ads engaged people to participate in the creation of their books and receive a printed copy of their statuses and photos. You could chose up to 10 friends to add into your book, as well as the desired timeframe, whether it be your birthday, wedding, or from the very beginning of your profile. After only two days we received 15.000 fans and the limited edition of 1.000 books were gone in only an hour.

What I love about this campaign is it shows great creativity and a way of marketing on Facebook that translates to the real world. There is no doubt that it’s a once off and they’ll get more mileage and coverage out of the video below than anything but love the creative idea. Smart.

This would be a great gift for a best friend of family member for Christmas no doubt!

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Categories Social media

The Facebook Chronicle of Your Life

By Bartel Scheers
November 17, 2010 //
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Remember how you – as a child – loved flick books; a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change? These books must have inspired – or at least partly – Maxime Luère when she created this must watch video ‘A Life On Facebook’.

The video animation scrolls back through the life of Alex Droner using his Facebook profile and recounts the young man’s life via postings and updates on the social network.

The video is not only beautifully animated but is also a scary demonstration of how much of our lives is on record within a single social network.

UPDATE Nov 18th: w00t! That was fast. Copyright claim censorship within days. Artists 0 – Dictators 1

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Categories Social media

Facebook + WP for Small Businesses

By Bartel Scheers
November 11, 2010 //
1

WordPress has almost become the universal CMS for small websites. With more and more business’s seeing the need for keeping their users up to-date using blog-style websites instead of static webpages.

Smaller business’s though have had a notoriously hard time since the beginning of the web boom. They usually can’t afford a “proper” web designer/developer or digital agency, so either settle for a site through a student web designer; which can be great aesthetically, but usually there’s no support or updates and they become hugely frustrating. Even worse than this is the dreaded “site in a box”. A few hundred Euro for everything that you need for your online business or for giving you a migraine…

Is their a solution? We think so. Pretty much everybody knows how to use Facebook. Over half a billion users and growing, with anyone being able to set a up a “fan page”; a website inside of Facebook.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Technology

National UnFriend Day for Facebook

By Bartel Scheers
November 10, 2010 //
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Just to give you a heads up for next week’s Wednesday November 17th. American TV Host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel (Jimmy Kimmel Live) announced that day to be National UnFriend Day for Facebook. So if you – the day after – feel something very bad has happened to your friend list, and many of your intriguing, sexy, sensitive, professional dear friends have been deleted from your life, don’t start sending support mails to Facebook cause you may be ‘unfriended’. Don’t feel victimized either. Like Jimmy argues; who wants to be friends with somebody that asks you what Harry Potter character are you? Or what flower identifies your psyche? What city resembles you best? Not to mention the latest; ‘what liquor suits you?’ doodle.

Well, let Jimmy himself – with a little help from William ‘the best Captain the Universe has ever faced’ Shatner – explain to you why he thinks it’s a good thing to unfriend or to be unfriended once a year.

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Categories Social media

Taste of Facebook

By Bartel Scheers
June 25, 2010 //
0

Last week we executed an excellent example of a promotion through Facebook that didn’t ask for a huge budget to be effective. The promotion, developed for Taste of Amsterdam, ran for little more than a week exclusively on Facebook and aimed to generate awareness for Taste of Amsterdam, a multi-day exclusive openair food-event in Amsterdam. The whole idea was centered around playful participation aimed at people’s natural curiosity and willing to share, a few very cool prices thanks to participation of Philips, Gassan Diamonds and others, and enthusiastic active participation of the organization itself. The latter being, imo, the most important factor why this promotion was such a success. Often we find ‘advertisers’ executing their campaigns and then sit back to wait for the results. Although this was the way of yesterday’s marketing – could you do anything else? – but it sure isn’t what is required on the social web. Staff from both Taste of Amsterdam and Seqwood were active contributors to the contest promotion and maintained a high presence on the network replying to all questions and comments swiftly.

Each day within the campaign a set of photos was published through Taste of Amsterdam’s Facebook fanpage and a special action site challenging participants to be the first to recognize the exact location where the photo was taken. Each day a new winner with a price was announced. All leading to the grand prize; an exclusive shiny diamond from Amsterdam’s most famous Diamond House Gassan Diamonds. As an extra the campaign was supported by a few movies portraying the winners often with a spontaneous and hilarious twitch presented by our team’s talented presenter Laura Tabrizi. You’ll find the video’s here.

Already within a few days the campaign, supported by a small low-cost Facebook ad campaign, generated millions of pageviews and quadrupled membership of the Taste of Amsterdam fanpage. The campaign targeted only Facebook members in the central Amsterdam area being Taste of Amsterdam primary audience.

I think this friendly promotion is an excellent example of being successful without the sometimes ridiculous investments similar promotions seem to ask for, such as Samsung’s YouTube 3D and the Kaiak scented banner promotions I talked about here and elsewhere. But most of all the campaign was a success because it did just what is was designed for; generate exposure, participation and increase awareness and active contribution to the fanpage and sponsors.

With all modesty a textbook example of how to campaign within the new context of the social web.

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Categories Social media

Facebook is becoming the ‘Google of Social’.

By seqwood
April 21, 2010 //
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What Google is for search, Facebook is becoming for social connections on the internet (which includes mobile). Today at the Facebook F8, click here for the video captures [Live], Mark Zuckerberg announced a new push forward by Facebook. The essence of the push forward is opening up Facebook social functionality to external sites so that next to Facebook-Connect, people can also share likes and recommendations on products and such.

More simply put, on the websites people can add ‘likes’ to products, people, services and events. These ‘likes’ are broadcasted to friends, and other friends coming to the website can see whom from their incrowd appreciates the products or services offered. That way being ‘Facebook connected’ will add information to websites, awarding the user with social context from friends and people they know.

The combination of people, liking and recommending items in the world wide web, is what Facebook coined as the ‘Open Graph‘. And Facebook assures the implemenation of this ‘Open Graph’ by providing web-builders with very well-documented and open API’s (application programmer interfaces), thus attracting and enabling innovative websites to augment their sites with social information provided by Facebook and its’ many users. Google used the same strategy by enabling (third-party) websites with their search and analytics technology.

Bottomline: Facebook is quickly becoming the ‘Google of Social’. Or should we say that Google is the ‘Facebook of Search’?

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Categories Social media, Technology

Facebook’s Changing Rules

By Bartel Scheers
April 16, 2010 //
1

Last month we posted this quote about the infamous and highly successful Ikea Facebook Tag campaign:

Some of the best campaign strategies are simple, and none simpler than using the default “tagging” tool on facebook to help create a bit of buzz for an online competition. People were told that the first to tag their name on any item, would win it. (quote from: Digitalbuzzblog)

Ever since we got numerous requests from clients and others to come up with some kind of similar concept to promote their brands or products. Although we do think the Ikea was one of the smartest campaigns ever to be executed on Facebook and we did develop some differentiated but similar concepts our answer has been, is and will be: ” NO, we can’t. It’s ILLEGAL!”

“Illegal you say?” Yes, illegal and could and probably will result in Facebook blocking your brand page. Forever! You should not want to take that risk.

What happened? Well, all that happened is that Facebook has changed its policies on promotions last December. You’ll find the new Facebook Promotions Guidelines here. Long read and complex legal mumbo jumbo, but a must if you consider using Facebook for your marketing programs.

InsideFacebook quoted a Facebook spokesperson on the Ikea campaign as:

For example, a few weeks ago, an Ikea store in Sweden ran a promotion on their Facebook Page in which users who tagged photos of furniture with their names first won the items as prizes. A Facebook spokesperson told us today that the promotion was indeed in violation of the new policies and would not be allowed to run today.

Now what’s illegal and in violation of these new policies? Illegal and ban worthy are all promotions that requires a user to;

  • tag themselves in the photo.
  • to change their status in any way
  • to change their profile picture
  • to answer a question in a status update
  • any kind of response in the status
  • like a photo or an update
  • add friends
  • respond with a photo not in a specific application

And last but certainly not least all promotions need to run through an application that does not use any of the basic functionality of Facebook.

Does that come across to you as Facebook took away all the fun? It shouldn’t and it didn’t to us neither. We’ve been developing and building a variety of great, funny and very successful Facebook certified promotions after these new policies came to be. Also with some smart thinking and the skills or our engineers we build clever simulations that generated the same effects or even better.

So be advised, do read the new Facebook policies on promotions and contests, and do play it Safe! There’s a lot we still are allowed to do; give us a call and we’ll show you some of our pretty smart solutions, but do not start promotions or contests similar like this or ban doom will be upon your Facebook brand page:

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Categories Social media, Technology

Fashion E-Commerce: Handel uit angst of kans …. ?

By equadraat
March 21, 2010 //
0

In barre tijden worden de kerels van de jongens gescheiden. In confectie land zijn het moeilijke tijden, dat mag duidelijk zijn. Gevulde winkelstraten en rinkelende kassa’s zijn nu eerder uitzondering dan regelmaat. Daar waar enkele jaren geleden Men at Work, 5 pocket en Vero Moda maandelijks een nieuwe vestiging openden hangen nu de borden van DTZ Zadelhof , consolideren of sluiten is het motto. Niet zo gek, maar hoe ga je in deze tijd groei realiseren, stilstaan is achteruitgang en daar houden ze in de vooruitstrevende mode branche niet van.

grafiek: Sentiment voor online kleding kopen (NL) blijft onverminderd stijgen (bron: Google)

“We starten een webshop” is het textiel adagium van 2010, al lettende op de competitie kiezen de ‘brick’ winkels voor uitbreiding met een ‘click’ store. Als paddenstoelen schieten de .nl’s uit de grond, “doe je niet mee, ben je er sowieso geweest” is het motto. De vraag is of deze “angst incentive” de beste start is om een nieuwe uitdaging aan te gaan? Wat is het plan, de strategie, business-case en budget?  Wil je als e-tailer echt online succes zal je moeten investeren. Ook in jouw webshop kan het angstig stil zijn als je geen reactie bij de consument uitlokt, ook op het web wil je als merk of e-store daar zijn waar je klanten zich begeven. Ie: Social networks, In-game, Video pre-rolls op Youtube fashion shows, Fashion blogs, etcetera, etcetera. Onze ervaring (red: Seqwood) leert dat echter de veel, misschien wel meer dan helft, van de startende online mode ondernemers een angst strategie varen i.p.v. de “ik zie een kans” aanpak.

Bij het Engelse bedrijf www.asos.com zagen ze de Nederlandse online markt als een uitdaging en zette daar gretig met een groot budget op in. Via affiliate, banner, video-fashion & google ad campagnes op diverse mode portals, blogs en landelijke online dagbladen verkreeg ASOS grote naamsbekendheid bij de door hun gewenste doelgroep.

ASOS zag online retailen in Nederland als een kans, een volgende stap naar nog meer succes en heeft binnen 2 maanden 35.000 Nederlandse fans op Facebook. Het is voor Asos een kwestie van deze groep onderhouden en aanvullen.

In korte tijd, van begin 2009 tot heden is de online-omzet van Asos.com, binnen Nederland, gestegen van nihil tot 300.000 Euro per maand. Op dit vlak laten de cijfers van andere e-tailers binnen Nederland wel groei zien, maar eerder online-organisch (10 – 20% groei) dan de krachtige, bijna exponentiële, curve die Asos.com heeft neergezet.

De paypal en creditcard budgetten van mode liefhebbers gaan over de grens zolang Hollandse textiel e-tailers hier geen eigen authentiek en gedegen plan neerzetten, en zelf over grens gaan e-tailen. Vanuit deze positie inzetten op marktpenetratie binnen, en buiten, Europa. Bijna business-as-usual dus, maar dan online.

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Categories E-Commerce
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