Have you ever seen an appartment that had been abandoned for decades and opened again only recently? What does it look like to see austronauts from inside a bubble? Which brands are most influential on social media? Some of this month’s links will give you answers to these questions. The others are little bit more serious and mostly related to (localized) marketing, (crowdsourced) design or creativity. Here are 9 links from November. Don’t hesitate to share yours in the comments!
Klout has published its first list of the 50 global brands with the most social influence and engagement, called the Klout 50. The list has been compiled based on the Interbrand 2014 Best Global Brand ranking and measures these brand’s social influence on the Klout scale (it’s a bit like what I do with the crowdsourcing timeline). Amazon topped the list, beating Microsoft by just one hundredth of a point, and MTV, Google and Facebook round out the top five.
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A rich Parisian woman, Madame de Florian, abandoned her apartment in 1942, when she fled to the south of France during World War II. She kept her apartment in Paris on the Right Bank near the Opéra Garnier in case she wanted to return, but she never went back to it after the war. Since 1942, the apartment has been sitting untouched, until recently when an auctioneer entered her apartment. What he found was a time capsule, covered in dust, but full of treasures and perfectly preserved. Watch the photos!
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A cool post by Percolate’s Chris Bolman, which explains that in today’s highly interconnected digital economy, brands are thinking more and more about international reach and consistency? But the “think global, act local” reality creates persistent challenges for marketing executives across their org structures, agency relationships and technical infrastructure. He proposes five strategic pillars for successfully localizing global marketing campaigns and empowering local marketing autonomy within a global framework (one of which includes using Percolate – of course).
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Google has released an iOS app called Primer, which gives business owners quick, crash course lessons in marketing (mini marketing lessons, featuring insider tips, interactive quizzes and marketing success stories) that can be completed within five minutes or less. Designed to give startups an easy, jargon-free way to navigate marketing basics, is a great way to gather data about possible clients and to hook them up to Google’s thinking and products. A truly great way to market yourself, Google. I honestly think that!
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As part of an experiment on ‘the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity,’ the European Space Agency’s astronauts Alexander Gerst and NASA’s Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman of Expedition 40 trapped a GoPro inside a floating sphere of water. The result is quite funny to look at, PetaPixel nicely puts it: it’s “about 10% science and 90% astronauts/science nerds having the time of their lives.” The footage was captured this last Summer, but is only just now being revealed to the general public.
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This post is by @shereebekker, a South African PhD student now based at the Australian Centre for Research into Injury in Sport and its Prevention (ACRISP) at the Federation University Australia. It explains how Twitter can help junior researchers – but i think that applies to all people who start a career – to get a foothold into a particular field. “Twitter allows for opinions, debate, and input from others. The conversation that is stimulated is often thought provoking, and helpful when forming your own opinions, especially as a PhD student,” she explains. Marcel Bogers, who tweeted the above, has a great presentation about the matter too.
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How do people consume video across countries? This study by Unruly finds that the speed of social diffusion varies greatly by country (for example, South Koreans are the fastest sharers, and they are also more likely to click, replay or share an ad than any other territories worldwide). This leads Unruly to conclude that countries such as South Korea may prove to be the best target for video in terms of creating a viral smash. Why not. For more information download Unruly’s Geography of Sharing. For more research about the geography of crowdsourcing, see here or here 🙂
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I don’t like the discourse of this post, but I do like its topic a lot. In 1981, Sony asked the public to redesign their logo and received almost 30,000 entries for a new logo from the United Kingdom, Europe, North and South America, Japan, and Asia. They then narrowed these 30,000 entries down to three winners, which look very 80-ish, and published the winners in Time magazine. John Brownlee from Fast CoDesign says that it’s “an object lesson on why you shouldn’t try to crowdsource design” which I disagree with (was Sony’s aim really to redesign its logo or just to engage people around a smart PR initiative?). But still, the example is very interesting to discover. I only knew of Toyota’s 1936 contest so far… and this contest’s output is still used today.
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In May 2014, Adobe commissioned Forrester Consulting to investigate how creativity influences business outcomes. The study, called “The Creative Dividend: How Creativity Impacts Business Results,” surveyed 324 decision-makers from large enterprises in the US, UK, France, Australia/New Zealand, Korea, Japan, and Germany who influence creative software purchases (it’s Adobe!) to quantify and qualify how creativity impacts business. The results show that companies that embrace creativity outperform peers and competitors on key business performance indicators. “82% of surveyed companies believe a strong connection between creativity and desired business results,” the study says, underlining one of the weaknesses of the study: it’s based on declarative data. How will prove the “creative dividend” with hard data?
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Yannig Roth / This is my blog 