POST DIGITAL

24 Hours of #Reality

Al Gore, whose 2006 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," was the first PowerPoint presentation to ever win an Academy Award, is conducting a 24-hour presentation this Thursday to do what the two-hour film could not: convince skeptics that the link between climate change and extreme weather, like Hurricane Irene, is real.  Visit www.ClimateRealityProject.org  to get the full skinny.

I hope you'll join us here on POST DIGITAL, where we will carry the broadcast. Together, we're going to focus the world's attention on the scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis.  24 Hours of Reality begins at 7 p.m. Central Time on Wednesday, September 14. Over the course of the day, there will be 24 presentations across 24 time zones in 13 languages. We need your help!  

The Climate Reality Project's online toolkit is now complete with full resources for your involvement to spread the word about climate crisis online. Below is a list of how you can use the online toolkit to help The Climate Reality Project leading up to and during 24-Hours of Reality.

BEFORE THE EVENT:

• Donate your Facebook and Twitter feeds for 72 hours.
• Embed the 24 Hours of Reality live broadcast on your blog.
• Donate your website's homepage.
• Watch the ads and share them with your friends.
• Share the Denial Hits the Fan microsite.
• Tag yourself Five Times for Reality on your personal Facebook page.
• 'Like' the Climate Reality page on Facebook.
• RSVP for the 24 Hours of Reality live stream event on Facebook. 
• Follow @ClimateReality on Twitter.
• ReTweet our content and/or message us directly @ClimateReality.
• Use #Reality & #[your country] when calling out evidence of climate change.
• Host a watch party in your community for your local 24 Hours of Reality live broadcast.

 

DURING THE EVENT:

• Embed the 24 Hours of Reality live broadcast on your blog.
• Link to the live stream.
• ReTweet our content and/or message us directly @ClimateReality.
• Share/tag thoughts about how climate change is affecting your area and ask others to do the same.
• Instruct your audience to use #Reality & [your country] when calling out evidence of climate change.

 

Cartoon Via The New Yorker

on: the tesco virtual store

Imagine that on your walk home, every outdoor ad that you passed had a QR code that when scanned, would put the item into your shopping cart. As I stated in my post about the future of retail: The future of QR codes isn't about entering people into your sweepstakes. It's about making their lives easier.

This installation by Tesco, a market in South Korea actually puts a virtual store in unexpected places (like subway stations), and lets people shop with their phones.

Was This Effective? The move increased online sales by 133%, and made their chain the #1 online seller in Korea.

on: qr codes - nailing the basics and adding value for consumers

QR codes are quickly becoming a part of any integrated marketing campaign. Also known as quick response codes, they are a useful way to encourage consumers to interact with a brand. They can be used to direct a magazine reader to a product’s ecommerce site, give additional product information or deliver a special coupon. 

Who is using QR codes?

According to a 2011 study conducted by marketing firm MGH, QR code awareness is high among smartphone users. One-third of them have used QR codes, and two-thirds have seen one. Users who were aware of QR codes tended to be more educated and affluent, and the majority used one to get a coupon or additional information. The largest majority of users were ages 35-54 and users were almost evenly split between men and women. As more well-known brands incorporate QR codes into their marketing campaigns, awareness is certain to grow in all demographics.

How do I use them effectively?

There are some very basic steps to take before employing a QR code in a campaign. Before trying the fancy stuff, ensure the basics are in place:

• Give the potential user a website URL to download a code reader. Mobile-Barcodes.com has an extensive list.
• The QR code should go to a site designed specifically for mobile.
• The QR code should not be in a place with poor cell reception such as a subway stop or underground office.
• Measure the success of QR codes with a trackable URL, which will provide stats on the number of QR code scans per hour as well as the devices used.

The most important thing to remember in effective QR code use is to provide value for the consumer. This can certainly be a coupon or promotion, but also think of information or a service as added value. An instructional video that provides information on how to use a product (along with selling points) provides value. So does services such as a Store Finder or ecommerce solution.

Unique applications

There have been some excellent examples of how to use QR codes to increase brand engagement by adding value for the user. Starbucks got an early jump on the movement with the Starbucks Card Mobile Application. Customers load an account with money, and the pull up their account’s QR code at the register for quick and easy payment. The QR code provides the added value of convenience and time saving.

In February, Jimmy Fallon broke the late-night show tradition of holding up the performing band’s album cover. Instead of the album, he flashed a QR code that led viewers to an exclusive music video. The clip became a trending topic on Twitter, magnifying exposure for both the band and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Web-based event registration site Eventbrite experimented with using QR codes at registration desks. Whether it’s a conference or a concert, attendees hate waiting in a long line just to fill out an attendee form. When attendees registered with Eventbrite they were sent a QR code in their confirmation. Event coordinators quickly scanned the codes, gathering attendee information quickly and accurately.

These are just a few examples of the creative and engaging ways QR codes can be used. Think of the growing use of QR codes as an opportunity to develop new ways of engaging with the people who care about your brand.

on: word lense

Word Lense is one of the coolest apps in the iTunes store. The app takes an image stream from the iPhone's camera, applies real-time image processing and pattern recognition tricks to it, and it then "plays" with any text it finds in the scene before displaying it on the iPhone's screen. The PLAY part is the interesting bit. The app developer, Quest Visual, calls it a "real time translating app" and begs you to "turn your iPhone into the dictionary of the future--now!" The app comes with a toy option that lets you reverse words it recognizes in the scene, or delete them altogether.

on: project hope

Jigsaw a creative group based out of Milwaukee came up with an heart-warming interactive exhibit at St. Vincents Regional Cancer Center at St. Mary’s Hospital where 7,000 guests could engage with a 45′ X 7′ rear-projecting interactive wall. Guests could walk by the wall, engage with hundreds of hand written messages drifting around the color changing field. Guests could then us a stylus to write a message of hope on a kiosk which would be re-written on the wall. This wall was a living, breathing organism. Some of the messages would read “Hope is a smile on a child’s face,” “Hope is another year with my mom”, “Hope is my family”. This exhibit blurs the line between a creative campaign and makes an emotional connection with each member that views it, breathes it or lives in the space it is in.

The messages submitted are displayed in their original handwriting on an experiential site. The “Hope Is___” site [@ http://www.stateofthearthope.com/hopeis/] invites people to share their message of hope with the community and read other inspirational messages.

on: tv+web convergence

Can google capitalize on Apple's failure?

Sony is the second company to bring Google’s Android-based “connected TV” solution to market with their TVs and set-top box available @Best Buy.  Here are a few observations:

• It has the potential to make television content more democratic.
• It opens a foundation for Web/TV convergence by blending Over-the-Air (OTA) shows with Over-the-Top (OTT) streaming content in a unified search function.
• The streaming HD content is sharp – almost as good as the cable box.
• The “leanback” U/X works particulary well and is easy to navigate.
• The ultimate success of GoogleTV (and others) will be in the content partnerships they create. The ones they have “out of the box” just begin to hint at the potential of a true arsenal of content.

on: tv + twitter = social tv

Television has always been a social event.  Since the early days of broadcast people have used it as a reason to gather with friends and share an expereince.  Today, tweets give people new social context for content broadcasted on TV.  Here are a few TV and Twitter from this past year:

The 2010 World Cup: Although not real-time, the Guardian News’ instant Twitter replay made quite a lot of buzz during this year’s World Cup. It’s remarkable the kind of emotion a bunch of resizing circles can convey. Even better, is the story behind the project.

 

 

2010 Primetime Emmy Awards: This year’s Emmy Awards were the first time in 30 years that there was no west coast time delay. Not only did, host, Jimmy Fallon integrate Tweets into the live broadcast but NBC parallel broadcasted behind the scenes video on “the second screen” leveraging Ustream and its social stream Twitter (and Facebook) integration.

 

Brand Bowl 2010: It seems every year people talk as much about the Super Bowl’s TV spots, around the water cooler, as they do the actual game itself. This past February, Mullen & Radian6 visualized the “virtual water cooler” through a dynamic Super Bowl commercial leader board based on real time Twitter sentiment.  It was a fun way to keep score of the brand advertisers at the same time of keeping score of the game.

 
 

 

2010 MTV Movie Awards and VMAs: MTV first visualized live Twitter activity during the broadcast of the 2009 VMAs. They stepped up a notch this year with both the MTV Movie Awards and VMAs broadcasts providing in depth Twitter metrics and multiple views/filters of the real-time Twitter activity.

 
 

 

Modern Family Twitter Monitoring: Twitter doesn’t just benefit the content consumer but also content creators.  I love how Modern Family’s Steve Levitan and his writing team mines Twitter for real-time insights, “When the show airs live on the east coast we hit twitter and search Modern Family. What we find, is that people are watching the show and in real-time they’re basically laughing on Twitter. And we get instant feedback on what lines work.”

on: facebook's video chat parnership with skype

This past week I was able to tool around with facebook at an creative garage they held @wunderman. Like any good reporter / blogger I had a # of burning questions for them. [mainly to feed a few topics I am covering in a project I am working on called the "friendshift"] How connected can facebook make us? Will there be a facebook phone? With a trend towards "real friends" will FB be investing in a one-to-one video chat?  Those questions were ususally met with PR perfect faces.

The theme of many of conversations centered on the possibilities of the open-graph. Disperate data on it's own is usless history. When you combine data with a purpose to provide relevancy what you get is stonger connections.  When Tal Alter stumbled on to a random piece of code in the Facebook - it helped validate what I think may be the future of social media. 

Enabling REAL connections.

Location was the first phase. What happens when you combine it with live video?  Check this out.  It's an code object, which is called VideoChat. It appears to have everything one would beed to introduce video chatting functionality.  The most interesting portion of this code object  are the properties which refer to Skype. They clearly suggest indicate a video chat function that allows you to connect with Skype users. Or something as simple as being able to associate your Skype id with your facebook identity.

[ Via Tal Alter ]

Since the begining of it's launch, Facebook has planned it's interace as a platform - not a destination. With millions of active users contirbuting to the social graph across the web, is the next revolution as simple as providing a global conduit for real-time relevance with real people?  Could the "REAL" mean using augmented reality to develop 1-to-1 Holograms or something more sci-fi?

What do you think?

on: t-mobile's welcome back

T-mobile has made the flash mob core to expressing the emotion of how we connect through their services.   The life's for sharing flash mob just keeps getting better and better.

Check out all the action at http://www.youtube.com/user/lifesforsharing

on: designing data