Sime11 – can you afford to ignore social branding?

As a theme blogger at Sime11, I had the privilege of spending two days in the company of many inspiring and passionate speakers (read more about the art of presenting here). While the first day kept a high pace with presentations such as showcases of tomorrow’s superstars, the importance of going mobile and quick extreme makeover tips for your website, the second day had a bit of a calm to it.

One of the highlights of day 2 was the panel with Krister Karjalainen from P&G and Erinn Marzo from Buddy Media talking about social branding. A majority of the speakers pushed the content and context issue, but few touched the core of content. Providing good content to your users is good – providing them with content that originates from the users themselves is better.

(Image by @emiliablom)

The main discussion focused on the engagement factor of the client and brand; we need to listen to our consumers across channels, and we need to build our brands together with the consumer. Transparency is key, and if you engage in your customers and make sure they know you listen to them, the result will be a great communication process.

If the customers experience that they are able to interact with the brand, the influence will not be B2C but B2C2B. This is good, because we want and need strong brand ambassadors communicating with our brand. Karjalainen made a great point about reaching and engaging the customer: ”Most important is to listen to consumers, we need to build our brands together with the consumer”.

Got great content and not a clue where to push it?
Erinn especially mentioned travel, tourism and FMCG as wonderful natural fits for social media. ”In a social media environment, we can gather feedback and engage in a conversation and respond back to the consumers”.
To get to the client, be where they want to be. To push content we need to be transparent to our consumers. Because who owns the brand – really? The company or the consumer? We can do as much as we want with products and maketing but in the end it’s the consumer who drives the brand.
Co-creating brands is the future and by this we don’t mean the H&M collaborations with designers. If the designer is crowdsourced, it might even be a better business for H&M than just choosing one. The result might not be what they asked for but the answer will be a great conversation with engaged customers online.

Get your game on
Two recurring subjects during Sime11 were gamification and going mobile. Both are great players in the social brand universe. You have probably experienced the gamification factor, especially the intrinsic (play a game because you want to play, not to win) recently in any sign up process you’ve been through. Who doesn’t want to be 100%? It’s win-win: the brand gets more info about the user and the user gets a feeling of achievement, unlocking features etc. Going mobile might be the buzzword of the year but is too important to ignore. Again, it’s all about content and context. If you don’t engage in your clients, someone else will. If you’re not where your customers are, someone else will be.

Key takeaways:
Make sure your content is relevant
Make sure you engage with your audience and share back with them
Be transparent. Even as a brand you can get personal = easier to relate to

The future of payments

Passion wins was the official mantra for the SIME conference of 2011, and that is exactly why I love this kind of events. You could almost touch the passion when Jacob de Geer entered the stage at shared his story about his latest startup, iZettle.

Jacobs wife, who sell spectacles, asked for his help when she needed to charge her customers by credit card at trade shows, but did not want to buy an expensive card machine.  He did some Googeling around it and did find a company in the US, but who couldn’t give any help until about 3 years. Jacob continued to scan the market and realized that there was a need.

There is a new way to charge, for individuals, non-profits and small businesses, and by connecting the iZettle chip card reader with an iPhone or iPad everyone can charge by credit cards. Since the iZettle was released in August the retail outlets that accept credit cards increased by 5% in Sweden, and they already have 12 000 users, of whom 60% are private individuals, according to Jacob the Geer.

Bonus tip! Drink the best coffee in Stockholm an pay with an iZettle on Cocovaja.

Highlights

Jan Marsalek from Wirecard gave the participants in the workshop Pay Day his insight about the online payment highlights for today and tomorrow:

Trend: convergence

Integration of mobile, payment card issuing, coupons and loyalty. The e-commerce and m-commerce is comming closer together and the point of sale becomes one.

Local is the new global

More countries are launching their own local credit cards and the number of national payment schemes keeps increasing. With more local credit cards, the revenue maintains in the country. The use of as MasterCard and Visa decreases.

Mobile – the hottest topic in payments

Today is the leading mobile payment method is by premium SMS,  but we will see considerably more solutions within the mobile together with Google wallet, Isis and mpass.

The ecosystem of tomorrow

Within ten years it will still be a broad ecosystem of payment solutions as the situation is today. The major difference is that we will use our mobile for 50-60% of our purchases, and the rest will still be a mix of credit card and invoices.

Creating for Mobile – Day 2 and round-up of SIME

For day two of SIME, and as a round-up of the whole conference from a mobile perspective, I thought I’d focus on creating in the mobile arena, and bring up some of the interesting tid-bits from our day.

The first presenter that really grabbed everyone’s attention during the day was 12-year old Puck Meerburg, founder of Puckipedia. He’s a young, very curious kid who has single-handeldly created and released 2 apps to the Apple AppStore, learning English in the process to be able to understand the programming language. Interesting is that an American kid, Thomas Suarez, also 12, just circulated the web for having done exactly the same thing, and speaking at TEDx like a pro. This is just incredible, and says a lot about how easy it is to get into digital creation today if you’re curious enough and don’t see limitations. I also think it says everything about the mobile field. It’s so accessible and tangible, you feel apps are more of an object than software, which makes the concept less abstract to young people. And mobile is simple, it’s about doing small things in a delightful way, which is very easy to get in to. Have there been other young kids creating their own apps for desktop computers before? Definitely. But most probably not as many, and definitely not reaching out to as many people as these kids are today.

The day’s other big mobile evangelists were Maks Giordano, a digital guru now running a mobile agency, and Leif Eliasson, mobile expert at TradeDoubler. Leif is a numbers guy, once again showing the stats on why mobile is on track to outgrow desktop computing within the not too distant future. Maks is a Creative, and presented some great examples of interesting things that are being done on mobile that I’ll present you with below. What both of these people mentioned though, and also Zennström, Hjalmar, and a lot of other speakers at this years event, is that today, right now more than ever, all the bits are in place for truly great services and marketing to be created on mobile. We have the right hardware at a mass consumer price point, we have the software distribution ecosystem, we have the payment solutions, we have the networks and the bandwith, and most of all we now have the users.

But, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to think hard when you start creating for the mobile space. On the contrary, it’s important to really have mobile mindset when creating, and remember that it’s all about context. And also, something isn’t “fun” just because it’s in a mobile space, but contrarily we are more inclined to get tired your campaign or service if you’re not making it easy enough.

Here are some companies that have gotten it right:

• Heineken Star Player, an app that taps into people’s multitasking behavior when watching football (ie soccer) games, and for doing it right they’ve gained the opportunity to have a whole 90 minutes of brand interaction with it’s users.
• Nike+, a mobile app that helps you get your running going. The app, apart from being great in and by itself is probably the best example out there of how to leverage mobile and social networks to add value to your brand.
• Chase QuickDeposit, an app from the bank Chase, that has enabled it’s customers to cash their checks (US company, obviously) from anywhere just by photographing them with the app. It’s also worth noting that Swedish banks have enabled paying bills using their apps and the phone’s camera, but the user experience is unfortunately very bad, which is inhibiting adoption.
• Target, the US retailer has made great apps for iPhone and iPad that are shopping companions that help make shopping at Target more pleasant experience. Here the execution is of greater importance more than the concept, and Target got it right, giving them high App Store ratings which is unusual for a marketing app.
• Jamie Oliver has a set of apps that align perfectly with his brand, making cooking a pleasant experience, and recommending his favorite restaurants.
• Northface in China launched a location based game where you could claim land, which is totally in line with the explorer mentality of the brand, and the winner had placed over 4000 flags over all of China.
• Google Wallet, Google’s initiative to let you make your phone your wallet. This is happening, it’s just a matter of who will rule, and Google is a good canditate to say the least, going down the NFC path for money transactions.
• Tesco in Korea, launched Homeplus Subway Virtual Store where they put up virtual stores in subway stations where you can shop using your phone, scanning QR-codes on life-size grocery shelves while waiting for your train, and having the groceries delivered to your home when getting back from work. Genius, and the only really good use of QR-codes to date.
• There are several price comparison apps, like Prisjakt, where you can scan the barcode of a product anywhere and quickly receive a list of where you can get the item at the lowest price. Retailers – be worried.
• Mobile makes the perfect companion for house/apartment shopping, where Zillow and Trulia on the US market are among the most prominent, telling you what’s for sale around you, letting you peek in before you go in, and telling you if the price is reasonable, all on the go.
• Rabble, a Swedish app that provides digital redeemable coupons based on you location. Providing cheap marketing opportunities for local businesses.

Some other examples Maks mentions, it think fail in the fact that they’re gimmicks, and don’t deliver any real value to the end users in the long run. These apps will be removed very quickly from the users phones after the novelty has worn off and waste the potential you have of making truly meaningful long running relationships with your users or customers.

• Beck, the beer brand, has an app that helps you get home safe from a night out. It automatically calls a cab for you to get home if you don’t pass the in-app sobriety test.
• Axe Auto Romeo, an app that helps you stay on good foot with all your girl acquaintances, gained of course because of the “Axe effect”, by sending the girls your not with texts while you’re on dates.
• IKEA Interactive Catalogue, which lets you test placing IKEA furniture in pictures of your home using augmented reality. See the video at the bottom of the linked page to get an idea of how it works.
• Ebay launched an app that tries to deflect the biggest problem with buying glasses online; you don’t know how they will look on. Using augmented reality technology, you can try their glasses on live using you mobile phone. (Interesting to note is that Favoptic launched this concept long before Ebay on our advice, but their execution was just not up to par)

These are all interesting examples of what can be done with the technology that exists today in mobile. Only your imagination sets the boundaries. But I would really like to stress the importance of thinking about the bigger perspective when working in mobile, and make something truly engaging, that adds real value in the lives to your target group. It’s always possible, and if not taken advantage of you waste a big opportunity in working with mobile, or even the digital space at large. It might require a bigger budget in the short run, but will keep on giving long after your usual “campaign period”.

To send you off, I would like to bring up, a very relevant question was posed at the M-Commerce workshop that I feel didn’t get a good answer. Why, when mobile is showing such large numbers in adoption, is it still such a small part of the digital commerce? I think it’s quite obvious why. A minute part of businesses have yet to adapt to mobile. When we’re talking about companies and services that have been rethought for mobile, we’re talking about very small percentages. How much business do you think a retail store would make if it had locked doors or a 1 m ceiling height, next to a normal one? We have to get to work adapting if we want to get that business.

And lastly, a BIG thanks to SIME and everyone behind it for inviting us to cover our passion, and for being such great hosts for the bloggers this year. Really hope we get the opportunity again. Now back to creating great useful and valued mobile experiences. And keep in touch if you want to hear more.

SIME and e-commerce

As you know by now, the theme of SIME this year was Passion. And there was a lot of passion, as well as buzzwords and all the stuff we’ve already heard a million times before. That does not necessarily mean something bad, we might often need to hear it a million times before we actually go back to our offices and try to do what we have been told can be the key to success. As a theme blogger I had my focus during the two days at Circus in Stockholm on how we can turn the inspiring talks, discussions and the buzzwords into something that can help to increase and improve e-commerce.

Niklas Zennström from Skype talked about how we can acquire customers in a very calculating way today as we have so much data. It does not only give an opportunity for traditional retailers to tap into the digital marketing, but also for everyone that already have an e-commerce business to really take advantage of what we can measure and embrace the possibilities we have with analyzing current data and the simplicity of doing A/B testings.

Other hot topics during SIME was mobile and the importance of content in the right context. Rikard Steiber at Google talked much about the rapid increase in mobile usage, how we soon will se more people connected through mobile devices than via lap tops. Even if that does not come as a surprise, Google states that less than 25% of advertisers have a mobile optimized site indicating that there are yet many companies that not only need to step up when it comes to mobile, but also have a lot to gain!

Martin Deinoff and Fredrik Marcus from Creuna did an inspiring presentation about the importance of content, context and that the devil is in the details. More or less that we need to do marketing they way people want you to market them, and remember to keep the focus. There was also an interesting discussion about gamification at SIME. Elísabet Grétarsdóttir from Eve Online described gamification as “…a way to give people motivation” and “It’s about achieving something, not necessarily winning something”.

I like the idea of merging together all of above quotes, information and inspiration and use it to improve the communication on web sites and web stores. What would happen if we sat down with a couple of customers, ambassadors, a few from your staff and did a brainstorm about your product/website/e-commerce platform with the focus on how it can be possible to create a process that motivates and takes the customer constantly forward, towards a goal (purchasing your product) to give the customer a the feeling of achieving something, rather that they just purchased a product and now has a little less money? If we take the conclusions from that session and combine them with an analyze of consumer data (what do your customers search for when they visit your web site or web shop, when do they make a purchase and when do they visit your site from a mobile device?) I have a feeling that we would get a very good base to work from to develop everything from a great web site, a good e-commerce platform and also find where the needs are when it comes to mobile.

Day one at SIME, a mobile perspective

This week, MobileApps and me, Christoffer, have been selected to watch the mobile space at SIME Stockholm, the largest conference in IT and media in Scandinavia. We are very excited about it, and since we’re watching the mobile space closely anyway, we thought it would be a really good opportunity to share our thoughts here on our blog.

The first day at SIME Stockholm has delivered some great shows and presentations, and a lot of it touching on, or being directly about the mobile field. We thought we’d summarize it all with the one all-encompassing key take-away:

We’re going mobile, and there is no turning back

First of all, it’s evident already today, that if you’re mindset isn’t in mobile, you’re doing it wrong. How do we know this? Just look at the two biggest actors in the digital field today: Google and Facebook. Google, shifted their main focus on to mobile last year. Now everything they do is mobile first. Facebook, they have already today just under 50% of their 800 million users accessing Facebook on their mobile phones. The shift to mobile has already started to happen in a huge way.

We also heard a lot of other interesting stats, spottings, and predictions from the speakers, supporting the mobile trend:

• Mobile searches have increased 4-5 time under the last year alone
• 30% of all restaurant searches are done on mobile phones (a big stat considering how many non-mobile optimized, or even Flash(!) restaurant sites that are out there. Here’s a great exception by the way)
• 79% of Smartphone users use a smartphone to help with shopping and 70 percent use phone in store.
• Youtube has 200 million playbacks from phones per day (up from 100M a year ago)
• 550.000 new Android Smartphones are activated per day (and Apple is adding another 200.000 iPhones to that)
• Two of this years biggest conference stars iZettle and Wrapp, are businesses completely focused around mobile
• All TV discussions are surrounding the interaction between TV and the mobile devices taking up more and more of the watchers attention
• The biggest websites in Sweden are all seeing exponential growth in mobile visitors, with Aftonbladet, Sweden’s most visited website, predicting mobile surpassing desktop in 1-2 years

The big disparity here is that with all this mobile web usage, very few websites are actually optimized for mobile use. Of advertisers, less than 25% have a mobile optimized site, even sometimes linking to it through campaigns geared towards mobile users. This is why Google has launched a mobile initiative, GO MO, helping businesses go mobile. The initiative is great and we of course love the push from Google telling people to go mobile. When you’ve visited the site and seen what you should do, contact an experienced developer like us to help you get sorted out.

MobisleApps view, that’s supported by what we heard at SIME today, is that mobile is indeed where all digital communication is headed, and we think it’s quite evident. The era where we had to sit down in front of a desk, screen and a keyboard to do everyday interactions was just a phase, forced by the limitations of technology. While we might want to do certain high concentration tasks in a controlled desktop environment, we think the barrier for what these are is being erased, and everything else is just very unnatural to do on a PC on a desktop. Period.

PASSION AND COMPASSION

Agenda

We look at how leading marketers make supporting non-profit organizations and good causes a profitable strategy. With Johnny Linqvist, Head of Digital, MEC, Rolf Skjoldebrandt, Co-Founder Non Violence Project and Maria Trädgårdh, Editorial projectmanager at newsdesk Aftonbladet.

Key takeaways:
- How non-profit can be very profitable.
- How to raise money for non-profit.
- GOOD examples.

Read more

- Summering av dag 2, blog.halvarsson.se

Photos

RETURN OF THE DOTCOM BOOM – BUBBLE TROUBLE OR ALL IN?

Agenda

Reflections by Pontus Schultz, Bonnier Money is back in advertising as well as venture capital. What can we learn from the last dotcom boom and bust and how do we make sure we at least make new mistakes this time around.

Key takeaways:
- It smells like the 90’s but is different indeed.
- Why substantial value will be created during the next years.
- Why many will also loose their shirts.

Listen on Soundcloud

 #sime11 Return of the dotcom boom – bubble trouble or all in, Pontus Schultz, Bonnier by Gunnar R

Photos

Chris Elam

Sketchnote by Emilia Blom

About

Chris Elam is the Founding Artistic Director and CEO of Misnomer Dance Theater, an award-winning innovative dance company based in NYC. Heralded as “a true original” (The New York Times), whose “clarity of vision delights the soul” (The Village Voice), Elam’s work with Misnomer has toured globally in fourteen countries and the breadth of his creative projects includes choreographing for Bjork, the Sundance Channel, Apple Computers and the Danish Dance Theatre. An innovator in connecting people with the arts, Misnomer has developed GoSeeDo, an audience engagement web platform designed to give audiences new ways to directly interact with artists and incorporate arts into their lives. Elam is a frequent speaker at conferences ranging from TEDx to Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Tech summit. misnomer.org

Listen on Soundcloud

#sime11 Chris Elam – Founding Artistic Director and CEO of Misnomer Dance by Gunnar R

Photos

SOCIAL BRANDING – THE ART OF COLLABORATIVE BRAND BUILDING

Sketchnote by Emilia Blom

Agenda

Where creativity meets social and create a new type of social branding that can pivot a brand to unparalleled engagement. Erinn Marzo, VP International Sales, Buddy Media, the fast growing social media marketing phenomenon, Krister Karjalainen, Head of Digital, P&G.   Key takeaways: - US and European leaders sharing best in social brand building – Bad mistakes – Transparency in brand building

Listen on Soundcloud

#sime11 Social branding – The art of collabrotive brand building, Erinn Marzo, Buddy Media by Gunnar R

Read more

- Social branding när P&G intar Sime, dagensmedia.se

Photos

Photo: Isabelle Minou/Picbomb

THE WORLD’S BEST MOBILE MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Agenda

A guided tour into the most successful campaigns in the evolving mobile communications arena. With Maks Giordano, Germany’s leading mobile business expert and marketer.

Key takeaways:
- Mobile case stories.
- Inspirational insights.

Listen on Soundcloud

#sime11: The world’s best mobile marketing campaigns – Maks Giordano, Nunatak Group by Gunnar R

Read more

• - Said on Twitter, storify.com
• - Day 2 and round-up of SIME, mobisleapps.com
• - “Summering av dag 1″ at blog.halvarsson.com