W3Haus UK Labs

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W3haus launches 2 Social Media ready interactives for the V&A Quilts Exhibition!
28 Apr 2010

We have created two social media ready interactives to promote the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Quilts 1700 – 2010, which is open from 20 March to 4 July 2010.

We were tasked with creating web features to foster awareness and excitement around the exhibition, within the ever-expanding quilting community in the UK and across the world.

Rodrigo Cauduro (W3Haus) and Andrew Lewis (V&A, Online Museum) holding a quilt made using a pattern created by the V&A Patchwork Pattern Maker interactive tool

“W3Haus have produced two excellent web features to support the exhibition brief. They are easy to use, their simple elegant design belies a complex technical functionality and they unobtrusively integrate current social media features to allow visible discussion and encourage sharing. I am very pleased with their work on this project”

Andrew Lewis, Senior Web Content Manager, V&A

Quilt of Quilts

http://www.vam.ac.uk/quiltofquilts

For the first phase of the campaign, we developed an online feature for the V&A website to enable quilters to share their work and in doing so to create a user-generated gallery of quilts from around the world in the form of an ever increasing quilt – the Quilt of Quilts.

This feature showcases many wonderful and interesting quilts from around the world, and the stories and history behind them. The location can be indicated through an embedded Google map and the feature takes full advantage of the latest technologies, allowing visitors to browse for quilts by colour, location and year of creation as well as a standard keyword search.

There are facilities to rate and comment upon quilts with other users. This is further supported by features that allow sharing to platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs, to extend the reach to quilting communities and other target audiences active on the wider web as well as on the V&A website.

The Quilt of Quilts was launched in March, and is already proving to be a huge success with over 350 quilts contributed in the first 3 weeks. The Quilt of Quilts will remain open throughout the exhibition and will continue as a permanent feature after the exhibition closes.

Patchwork Pattern Maker

http://www.vam.ac.uk/patchworkpatternmaker
The Patchwork Pattern maker was launched at the end of April as an online pattern-making tool, allowing visitors to create their own, bespoke quilts. Users are invited to upload any image of their choice, which is then transformed into a quilting pattern complete with instructions.
The tool aims to generate more interest around quilting by providing an invaluable tool for people whether they are experienced quilting experts, or people who have never made a quilt before, but are inspired to do so by the exhibition.

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Great idea by Jimmy Choo – win products by finding them on FourSquare
28 Apr 2010

The luxury footwear company Jimmy Choo has created an interesting online campaign using FourSquare, the geolocation Social Media application for the IPhone. Find Jimmy Choo based on their FourSquare location updates and you could win a pair of their trainers.

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Social Media and ROI (Return on Investment) – can they be friends?
29 Mar 2010

We have created a report on our approach to measuring and achieving Return on Investments (ROI) in Social Media. This is hot subject right now as more and more brands are shifting budgets to digital and Social Media, the upper levels of management are starting to ask for ways to measure and justify the spend. We hope you enjoy! If you have comments we would love to hear them!

Social Media – how to measure and determine ROI

View more presentations from Rodrigo Cauduro.

*Press “Menu” in the bottom right and then “Download” to save a PDF version to your hard drive.

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Nice video to understanding a bit more about Chatroulette
26 Feb 2010

Learn a bit more about this new internet phenomenon

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

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Understanding Coke’s approach to social media and fan engagement
23 Feb 2010

Coke’s ‘fans first’ approach in social communities

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Creating an event that spreads in awareness using Social Media – Coke
13 Jan 2010

Short videos are the perfect packages for a viral effect in the social media sphere. Now, what to put inside the package? How about one of those events that you would definitely tell everyone you knew if you saw it live at your workplace/school/Football field? That is exactly what Coke did. Within their new mantra theme – spreading happiness, they created an event at a cafeteria and transformed something simple and ordinary like a soft drinks vending machine into an unforgettable event:

You can be sure this video won’t need millions in adspend to reach thousands of people around the world.

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Hyper reality – from the movie Avatar to the your friend’s phone, everyone’s getting touchy-feely
11 Jan 2010

In Ridley Scott’s recent blockbuster movie Avatar, a human being could control another living creature through the power of the mind and a wireless connection. This is impossible in today’s technology, but this futuristic approach is not as far fetched and distant as you would imagine. Of course, the technology for controlling living creatures and receiving instructions from a human brain are still in their very early stages of development, but if you dive into the world of hyper reality, it is already possible to mix the virtual world and the real world, even with affordable consumer products. A few gadgets are hitting the market which promise to blur the difference between “Reality” and “Virtual”:

Iphone Quadcopter

Last week we featured the Quadcopter by Parrot on this blog: an IPhone remotely-controlled helicopter with 4 blades (hence Quadcopter). The onboard camera, together with the IPhone’s advanced processing capabilities made it possible to turn your living room into part of a hyper reality game scenario. Very cool. Of course we want one too

Light Blue Optics projection screen

I’ve personally always thought that screens should not have fixed sizes, they should adapt to your needs – you want a big screen for watching movies, a small screen for private functions such as texting, writing emails, etc. Light Blue Optics has come up with a multitouch projection screen that nearly achieves this. The screen projects onto any surface onto which you can interact with multi-touch gestures (now popularized by the IPhone).

Augmented reality (used to promote Avatar)

Not really a gadget but a technology, Augmented reality has become a reality on the web by the use of a webcam interacting with a physical object. This allows you to manipulate 3D objects as if they we in the real world. Because of its recent port to the widespread plugin from Adobe – Flash, the technology still suffers from a few bugs and performance issues, but promises to be a new option for many websites that want that more “tactile” interaction. In its marketing launch, Coke Zero created a special Coke can which could be used to interact with an online Augmented Reality demo of the movie Avatar. Some toys for the game will even have this augmented reality feature for fans to play with:

Microsoft Project Natal

Seemingly always playing technology catchup nowadays, Microsoft will soon launch its new games console – code named Project Natal. Trying to “one-up” the successful Nintendo Wii, which uses a wireless infrared control that simulates the users actions in the real world into the games being played on the television screen, Microsoft has completely eliminated the need for any extra controls, choosing instead to detect automatically the human body’s movements. We will have to wait and see if it works and whether not having controls is a step too far:

New gadgets and interesting ways of interacting have always been a successful attention grabbers. I remember being awed as a child in the Louvre using one of the first touchscreen computers to view the Louvre digital archive. You can be sure I told as many people as I could about this novel technology and interaction. And so do most consumers when they come into contact with a cool and novel technology. But the novelty soon wears off and we have to go off in search of the next big technology. This recently happened with multi-touch technology and the IPhone. Initially, a massive difference and selling point for the mobile phone, soon after its release, a myriad of copycat phones have sprung up in the market making the technology very common.

Having a cool feature is a great way to achieve outstanding marketing results in this age os social media, where one interesting finding on the web spreads from user to user like an out of control wild fire.

Now that touch is coming to the digital world, It should only be a matter of time before more of the human senses become digital. Can you smell that virtual toast burning already?

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Is your website Social Media Optimised? Answer our LinkedIn poll!
11 Aug 2009

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TED – Clay Shirky: How social media can make history
30 Jul 2009

An interesting talk on TED by Clay Shirky and how the internet and social media have changed communications and conversations around the world.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
About Clay Shirky

Shirky, a prescient voice on the Internet’s effects, argues that emerging technologies enabling loose collaboration will change the way our society works. Full bio and more links

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People WILL talk about your brand online – will you be the one leading the conversation?
20 May 2009

In the role of a creative digital agency we spend a lot of time thinking of ways to use digital social mediums such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, etc. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that, right now, social media is AT THE CORE of our campaigns, no longer just an extension plugged into microsites, and virals.

So I will try and explain what it is about social media we like and how we are using it:

It’s an efficient and cost-effective use of ad spend

The cost of a successful social media campaign is almost the same as a failed campaign. Once created, scaling costs are minimal and it costs more or less the same if 10 people use it or 10 million. It is less about the money you throw at the campaign and more about whether people identify with your message and find it interesting enough to participate and pass it on to their friends. The key here is the intelligence behind the message.

A successful social media campaign will gain massive exposure through friend referrals. Because people are now more connected than ever, one individual can reach thousands of his peers easily through social networking, blogs and Twitter. And each person has the power to spread the word to his peers, creating an exponential word-of-mouth effect never before possible.

Successful social media campaigns have a potential to be incredibly effective, even with low budgets – if done right – as the online audience them becomes the media in which the message is carried, spreading virally from one friend to another without any ad spend costs.

The shift in thinking is from interruption advertising to branded content creation worthy of friend referral.

Done right, it will create an army of brand ambassadors and evangelists out of ordinary people

When people stop thinking about your brand as advertising and start treating it as content and a lifestyle option they become your fans. They identify with your message, visit your website frequently, actively seek out other individuals who are like them, who also enjoy your brand to trade experiences. We are, after all, social beings and long for peer interaction and social affirmation/confirmation.

It’s crazy for some of us who are a bit older to understand, but the new generations will defend some of the brands they consume with fervor only matched by sports fans. This contrasts with previous decades where interruption marketing would love to tell consumers what they should be doing and consumers would treat brands with a high dose of skepticism. Now it is our peers who are doing the selling to us and the lines between commercial and social are blurred.

An example of this is the Mac vs PC debate, where Mac supporters will spend countless hours debating why their choice is superior to PCs and proudly sport their support for Apple on their social media spaces and jump at the chance to defend the brand in any online medium.

People will, whether you want them to or not, talk about your brand online

And their message will be heard by millions. This is a reality and, depending on how people are talking, can increase or damage sales in a dramatic fashion. This is where we step in. We believe it is better to be involved in leading the conversation and engaging wherever the customers are then leaving them to talk on their own. We believe brands need to create tools for their fans to express their love and admiration for the brand and the lifestyle it represents.

Coca Cola PARC

(Porto Alegre Rock City)

We were recently commissioned to spread the word online about the upcoming Coca-Cola Rock Festival (PARC – Porto Alegre Rock City) and create a nice buzz with aspiring rock enthusiasts and fans online – an online PR seeding effort. Our first step was to identify a talking point, friend-referral-worthy – and luckily we had a great one – there would be a competition for amateur aspiring bands to win invaluable coaching sessions and pro tips to reach the next level in their careers.

Knowing that aspiring bands are very digitally influent, we knew that if we engaged with them and they liked our message we would be able to create a successful and seeding campaign as they would help us spread the word about the festival on their Myspace pages and Facebook profiles.

So what did we do? We interacted with our target audience online – through their Myspace pages, blogs, Orkut, Twitter and Facebook profiles identifying people who would spontaneously love to be our digital ambassadors for the event. Soon after, thousands of visitors started appearing at our competition site and we have since created a Twitter profile to talk about the bands that are signing up, thus creating a feedback loop, where more and more bands want to participate as they will not only get a chance to win but extra exposure.

Because they like you.

Social media is a new way of interacting with your consumers. It is all about giving up some of the control of your communications to your consumers. It is an incredible leap of faith for a brand, not without pitfalls, but done right, can generate fantastic results and make brand ambassadors out of ordinary people. And all because they love your brand and what it represents.

This post was written by Rodrigo Cauduro, one of the creators of w3haus and managing director of w3haus London. With a degree in Architecture and urbanism, Rodrigo abandoned all that when he met the Internet in 1994 and has been working with it ever since - advertising and promotion online.

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