get off of there cat. you cannot lay in my journal. i am trying to write down what happened to me today and i can’t do that when you are in the way. i can’t even write down that you are preventing me from writing in my journal cat.
get off of there cat. you cannot lay in my journal. i am trying to write down what happened to me today and i can’t do that when you are in the way. i can’t even write down that you are preventing me from writing in my journal cat.
As a retailer, you spend a lot of time and money in deciding what products are sitting at eye level on the shelves, what potential impulse purchases appear just before the till and what point of sale material will entice shoppers to buy more.
Chances are they won’t be looking at any of that. Why? Because more and more shoppers have one eye on their smartphones.
Like buses on a rainy day, today three new stories about Twitter have arrived at once. Keep reading about the latest on Twitter Pages, improved follow suggestions and the latest security scam…
Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley emphasises that the game mechanics of Foursquare (badges and mayorships) are a device to get people to keep checking-in day-to-day- and that the real point is using your mobile like a passport.
To me, that sounds like a wiser long-term strategy- but there’s no evidence that they were thinking like that from the outset. It’s their rival Gowalla which has more obviously been acting along those lines from the beginning - even with the same terminology.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/04/foursquare-dennis-crowley
Most promotional competitions on websites are pretty simple - people enter because they want the prize, companies do it because they want the data/’like’/follow. Qype’s birthday competition is in essence no different, except it goes a bit deeper - for every review you write, you gain one entry. For me, this feels a bit cleverer - I imagine that most people are like me and would LIKE to contribute, but need a reminder or slight push to do so. And because I’d quite like to win cool stuff, it’s done the trick - I’ve written two so far and plan on writing more. A winner for Qype, as (for the most part) it’s only as useful as its users choose to make it.
(Every Tuesday one of us picks out a selection of favourite Tumblr sites. Up this week is Kate)
Lush: http://lushlimited.tumblr.com/
Lush is the best example of a UK brand using Tumblr I’ve seen - and it’s easy to see why, as Lush’s fans are keen to ask questions about the products and to post pictures of what they’ve bought - two of the things that Tumblr handles well.
It’s a bit like an online, user-generated version of their own Lush Times, and the team behind it work hard to interact with fans, following them back and reblogging their Lush-related content.
Google’s new Recipe Search function favours large sites that feature low-calorie and quick recipes, perhaps to the detriment of independent bloggers:
‘Furthermore in setting up parameters for refining results based on cooking time and calories, Google explicitly, if subtly, gives privilege to low-calorie recipes that can be cooked quickly, as shown in the options it allows for refining a recipe search.’
(Link: PSFK)
Really interesting read about how gamification could improve employee’s experience of work, with good examples of companies doing this. Brings to mind Epic Win, an app which aimed to make your to-do list more interesting by applying the same ‘level-up’ principles of RPGs.
“We’ve got several hundred thousand game designers out there but they’re all designing games for our iPhones and our computers and our Xboxes. And I think that’s a lost opportunity. [Businesses] need to start to compete with the games industry for these kinds of minds and thinkers… start bringing on some of these minds to their HR team, to their training team, to their employee-development team and say, ‘Hey, apply that skill set to our world for a minute and let’s see where the opportunities lie’.”
(Link: Silicon.com)
