ml haynes design

We’ve been crowdsourcing everything from the clothes we wear to the logos sewn onto those clothes, so it’s about time we have the ability to put our salty snacks through the same rigorous process of popularity and pop-science. The fine folks making Terra Chips — at least the fine European folks — are doing just that.

Head over to Kreator and start putting together your “dream chip.” Ingredients, from soy sauce to smoke flavor, bananas to beer, appear on-screen in row upon row of images. Hover over your choice and the name quickly appears; click and you’re asked just how much you’d like to add (you choose from three different “amount” settings). Repeat this process to include up to five “flavors” and you’ve just created your own custom chip. But you’re not done yet.

After you hit the “create” button, you’re now on the serious side of the snack-crafting business. This is where they separate the weekend warriors from the chip masters. This is where you tap out your personal info, agree to the terms and conditions, and step into the ring. You’re chip crowdsourcing now as your creation heads into a gallery of contenders.

Of course, savvy snack-makers will also choose to share their new chip with Facebook friends, ensuring the votes they’ll need to move their flavor-packed snack to the top of the roster.

It’s still to be seen if the same can said of Terra Chips. Will this crowdsourcing-plus-social application get consumers excited about beet and carrot chips? Let the voting begin.

Bit.ly, the URL shortener service, recently surveyed links shared on social networks to determine the “life span” of links. As it turns out links shared on Twitter lasted only half as long as links shared on YouTube.

How did the researchers measure the longevity of (shortened) links? They looked at their half-lives — “the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak.” Auditing 1,000 popular bit.ly links, they found links posted on Twitter have the shortest half-life of any social network at 2.8 hours; Facebook links clock in at 3.2 hours and YouTube links sustain at 7.4 hours.

Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bit.ly, noted “Many links last a lot less than 2 hours; other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers. This leads us to believe that the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it.”

While links might get a slight edge when posted on Facebook versus Twitter, it is the (perceived) quality of the content that has the greatest effect on how long it will stay in rotation. And if what you share is likely more important than where you share it how will that effect your next social media initiative and how best can you posit and place your links?

Here’s bit.ly’s Hilary Mason at Strata 2011, speaking on ” What Data Tells Us.”

You know something’s gone mainstream when USA Today runs a piece, and food trucks are no exception. Foodies have known this for a long time. You know something’s hot when there are apps on virtually every platform, and apps for locating food trucks are also no exception. Tech savvy foodies know this as well.

The most recent addition to the collection of food truck–locating apps was developed by The Barbarian Group for the Android OS. Gastrodamus, a free app for iPhone and Android, is also uniquely built to aggregate Twitter content. Unlike other apps that rely on self/consumer reporting or GPS, the digital agency’s creation lists trucks and locations based on Twitter mentions. No location, no listing.

Developed as a side-project-in-progress — and taking recommendations for more food trucks — there are some obvious hiccups. The “nearby” functionality is glitchy and some vendors don’t show up as expected. The fact that the app is tracking and collecting specific content may have something to contribute to the less-than-perfect user experience, but should this app’s popularity pick up we may see that vendors and fans alike optimize their tweets, ensuring inclusion in each day’s display of not-to-be-missed locales.

Here are some of the mobile apps built to connect the hungry with local food trucks. Take a look. Is your favorite on the short-list? Could your agency design and develop something better for you and your famished colleagues?

Food Truck Fiesta

Eat St.

Roaming Hunger

Road Stoves GPS

TruxMap Lite Food Truck Map

Just when you think you’ve got your social media strategy down — constituents profiled, contingencies considered, centralized messaging plotted — REI pulls up the stakes and takes their show on the road.

Well, they’re taking their show out to the 53 markets they have a presence in nationally. And with an approach that takes into account the regional needs of its customers rather than the restrictive needs of corporate, it would appear that we all may want to slip a look out from under HQ’s tent.

REI will now be tweeting via market-based handles, talking up climbing gear in home-base Washington state and cycling wear in NYC, one of its newest locales. Retooling brick-and-mortar stores to better serve consumers partaking of local and regional recreation aligns perfectly with a social and digital direction designed to better dialogue with friends and followers.

“We are not moving away completely from a national presence. The local teams will be in addition to our national presence. Also, in terms of staffing, we have a handful of employees at each location participating in social media. They may play different roles within retail (customer service, outreach, product specialist, etc.).”

Jordan Williams, manager of digital engagement for REI, told AdAge recently that certain staff members are being identified as experts at handling customer complaints, others at communicating new product arrivals and features, and others as people who can provide local travel advice. Claiming no real difference from the offline world, he entrusts more than 9,000 employees every day with these responsibilities as they communicate with customers in person. Why wouldn’t he and the company trust them to do the same online?

Is your company or employer engaging in localized social media? What would it take to make the switch and how likely is it that Twitter would be the channel of choice?

Much has been written in the last few years about gaming and the users that play, and how much we might learn about experience, usability, and strategy from perhaps the least obvious source. Game on!

In a recent Mashable article titled, “7 Winning Examples of Game Mechanics in Action,” Gabe Zicherman suggests that “seven gamified innovations should inspire you to strategize via game analysis.” Here, some quick cheats point you to the starting gate. Read the entire post and see if there’s something to putting some play into your work.

1. Make a Market: Foursquare
Foursquare’s founders, exposed to gaming while working at Area/Code (Zynga’s recently acquired New York City-based game design shop), believed mobile social networking would work as a “single player” experience. Competing for badges and mayorships — whether or not anyone is there — proves that location-based networking and simple game mechanics can affect the behavior of users.

2. Get Fit: NextJump
NextJump built a custom application that enabled employees to check in to each on-site workout and rewarded top performers prizes. After double-digit adoption by staff, NextJump’s CEO retooled the fitness “game” to become a team sport. Leveraging the game themes of tribalism and competition, 70% of employees now exercise regularly, and have improved workplace and staff health and attitude.

3. Slow Down and Smell the Money: Kevin Richardson
Kevin Richardson, game designer at MTV, re-imagined traffic cameras and tickets using game thinking. The Speed Camera Lottery idea rewards drivers who obey the posted limit with a split of the fines colllected from speeders. Richardson used gamification concepts to turn a negative reinforcement system into a positive, incremental experience.

4. Generate Ad Revenues: Psych and NBC/Universal
Club Psych, the online branded and gamified platform for the popular show Psych, has incorporated game-like incentives to raise page views and return visits. Registered user counts are at nearly 3 million since the launch of the gamified version and NBC/Universal has incorporated gamification to online platforms for Top Chef and the The Real Housewives.

5. Make Research and Evangelism Count: Crowdtap
Crowdtap offers virtual and gamified rewards to complete research tasks and to share brand advocacy with others — something mere market research simply cannot do. CEO Brandon Evans reports that competition-oriented users are four times more likely to create quality comments and 12 times more likely to refer others to the platform. Instead of competing against the system, they challenge themselves and peers to excel — an extraordinary achievement by any measure.

6. Save the Planet: RecycleBank
Across the U.S., incentives experts at Recyclebank are using gamification to improve home environmental compliance. They’ve used game mechanics such as points, challenges, and rewards to drive double-digit increases in energy conservation, sustainability and recycling.

7. Make Teaching Fun: Ananth Pai
Executive-turned-school-teacher Ananth Pai grouped students by learning style and retooled the curriculum to make use of off-the-shelf games (both edutainment and entertainment) to teach reading, math, and other subjects. Points are up on leaderboards. Reading and math levels improved and students call learning “fun and social.”

There’s no escaping social media and the rise of social commerce as the new marketing frontier. Trendwatching.com just released their latest brief on the influence of friends, fans, and followers on consumers’ purchasing decisions, and the sophistication and power of that influence. They call it the F-Factor, and it’s never been more important for brands to make sure they too have “it.”

Why is the F-Factor important to consumers? Offering a more efficient, more relevant, and more interesting purchasing experience, consumers no longer have to spend endless time and effort trying to discover the best of the best or rely on distant, unknown or untrusted (read: brand-driven) sources that could be potentially unreliable or irrelevant.

Sure, consumption has always been social: people have forever been influenced by what others think and buy. KellerFay, a U.S. word-of-mouth marketing research consultancy, estimates that there are nearly one trillion conversations about brands every year in the U.S. alone. And while the core consumer behavior isn’t new, technological developments are enabling new forms of that behavior, amplifying its importance and impact.

The F-Factor is being fueled by new tools and platforms available to consumers and brands. Both groups are evolving and improving these tools as well. A few recent stats demonstrating the reach and power of the F-Factor and how brands are leveraging this power today:

• The F-Factor is currently dominated by Facebook, as more than 500 million active users spend more than 700 billion minutes a month on the site. (Source: Facebook, April 2011)
• Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook across more than 2.5 million external websites. (Source: Facebook, April 2011)
• The average user clicks the “Like” button 9 times each month. (Source: Facebook, 2010)
• Three quarters of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. (Source: AdAge/Ipsos, February 2011)
• Juicy Couture found that their product purchase conversion rate increased by 160% after installing social sharing features. (Source: CreateTheGroup, February 2011)
• Incipio Technologies, a gadget accessory retailer, found that referrals from Facebook had a conversion rate double the average. (Source: Business Insider, March 2011)
• But it’s not just about Facebook. Take for example the explosive rise of the daily deal site Groupon, which used referrals from friends and colleagues to drive sales of more than 40 million deals in the 2-1/2 years since it launched in November 2008.

And five ways that the F-Factor is influencing consumption behavior:

1. F-DISCOVERY: How consumers discover new products and services by relying on their social networks.

2. F-RATED: How consumers will increasingly (and automatically) receive targeted ratings, recommendations and reviews from their social networks.

3. F-FEEDBACK: How consumers can ask their friends and followers to improve and validate their buying decisions.

4. F-TOGETHER: How shopping is becoming increasingly social, even when consumers and their peers are not physically together.

5. F-ME: How consumers’ social networks are literally turned into products and services.

Are you seeing conversion improvements like the examples above? Does your brand have the F-Factor?

If you’ve ventured into Facebook as an advertiser — social marketer, I should say — you know the hell that awaits as platform changes fly out from nowhere, guidelines vaporize before they can be found and apps that promise relief do little but confound your efforts. Well, you can rest now, weary Creative, for the fine folks at Facebook (actually a new crew brought in to create this new initiative) have brought you Facebook Studio.

This community site is “a place to celebrate the agencies and marketers who are creating and innovating with Facebook.” Actually, it’s an online space where agency creatives can submit work on behalf of their clients, comment on and “like” the work submitted by others, and with enough positive feedback make it to the “Spotlight” position and then on to the “Awards” area. For a publisher/portal that’s pretty much stayed hands-off when it comes to giving guidance and forewarning on rules and redesigns this would appear to be a welcome — and much needed — change.

“We need to do a better job of engaging with agencies,” said Blake Chandlee, head of Facebook’s newly formed agency relations team, adding that the site will focus on best practices and highlight quality campaigns uploaded by the creators.

One quick read, however, of the comments on a recent post shows that Facebook will need to do much more than throw up a creative “contest” and stroke those agencies that stuff the ballot box, so to speak. I pulled up the “Most Liked” and “Most Shared” tabs on my first tour of the site and was not surprised to see a Coke campaign sitting in the number one position. The beverage brand seems to have cracked the code early on and typically appears in how-to resources for “Build Your Brand on FB” along with other brands with enough firepower to make the social network “work” for them.

If your client does business in a highly regulated industry you may be charmed by the display of love and appreciation for “good” creative. Aren’t we all? But it’s something altogether different when you’ve finally convinced your financial services or pharma client to dip a toe into social and you’re on your own in navigating the space. It has not been uncommon for those of us adventuring out to be “on hold” indefinitely, given conflicting instructions or none at all, or surprised to find (just when we thought we had it down) that wholesale changes had upended our efforts. Made for quite a rocky ride.

It’s been a week and already there are plenty of submissions to review and remark on. Time will tell if this becomes the resource that is so sorely needed or if it’s just another creative cul de sac for self-reflection and snarky comments. Facebook’s continued involvement, pro-active engagement, assistance, and active listening will be the first hints that this might be real help and not hype.

Earlier this year, CMO.com released their second annual “CMO’s Guide To The Social Landscape.” Billed as an “up-to-date analysis of the rapidly shifting world of social media channels” this color-codified chart breaks down the most popular — and currently most effective — sites according to their value in:

• Supporting Customer Communication
• Furthering Brand Exposure
• Generating Site Traffic
• Enhancing SEO

Working with SEO and social media firm, 97th Floor, CMO.com provides a clear and comprehensive look at a marketer’s social network choices and presents compelling information on how best to move in this ever-shifting landscape. Take a look and see how you’re using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg and others — are you optimizing each unique channel? Could you better position your brand for optimal exposure and effect in these social media spaces? And are there others, not mentioned, that you’re having success with?

Download a PDF version of CMO’s Guide for 2011 here.

Please note all copyrights belong to CMO.com and 97th Floor.

Twitter — and some very public Twitter mishaps — have been entertaining to read over the last couple of months. The most recent example is a Friday night tweet-fest and tirade produced by a Marc Jacobs Intl (@MarcJacobsIntl) intern who had time to post and pack before leaving the company. Seems that this temp insider was the social media manager while a Twitter-based search/promotion was in place to find the hire that would permanently hold the position.

Posting to the fashion brand’s official account, the anonymous insider shared his/her true feelings about the company’s CEO, Robert Duffy, calling him a “tyrant” and “difficult.” And as the night turned to morning, the “true confessions” continued to show up. Here’s the thread that’s making the rounds:

Duffy has been “presented… with 50 people,” but is “not happy” with any of them.

Duffy is a “tyrant” and @MarcJacobsIntl followers “have no idea how difficult Robert is. I am only an intern.”

“My last day is tomorrow. I wouldn’t be tweeting this if not!”

“Good luck! I pray for you all. If you get the job! I’m out of here. See ya! Don’t want to be ya! Roberts a tyrant! Seriously! He is tough!”

“I can call him out! I’m out! Won’t work in this town again! I know that! Learned a lot. But, I don’t have the energy for what is expected!”

“Yea, walk in my MJ shoes! Don’t judge me! I’m alone in this office having to try and entertain you all. This isn’t easy. I have tried. Done!”

By 4am Saturday all tweets were removed and replaced with:

“All is well here at MJ. Twitter is a crazy place. Protect your passwords.”

Twitter is “a crazy place” if you’re a brand without a social media strategy, plan and policies for implementation. Aflac fired Gilbert Gottfried (the voice of the duck/mascot for the last decade) for “insensitive” tweets post-tsunami. Chrysler fired agency, New Media Strategies, for the now-infamous f-bomb tweet. And the Green Bay Packers are convinced that they’re suffering from a “Twitter Curse.”

How often are we asked to fire up a Twitter feed, a Facebook page or other social media “must-have”? How often are clients prepared to look internally, at how they’ll manage the care-and-feeding of these fast-paced and very public forums? And how much “trouble” will they (and we, as their representatives or agencies) find themselves in, entertaining — and exasperating — those of us watching?