nokia | Maggie Fox

Yet Another Ill-Advised Tattoo

March 27, 2012 / Comments Off / Posted in: Blog

Cam Finlayson is a Director, Client Strategy & Innovation at Social Media Group. Follow @CamFinlayson

Rumour has it that Nokia is currently working on a new product idea that will ensure you never miss an important call or email. The patent, filed by Nokia back in September, outlines a device consisting of thin material that can be applied to the skin that will vibrate when triggered by a magnetic field sent via a device such as a smartphone. Or, as some folks on the internet are calling it: a vibrating tattoo.

When you break it down, this is got to be one of the wackiest product ideas in a long time. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that Nokia is looking into any and all opportunities to make up some of the valuable ground lost to Apple, Blackberry and Google over the last ten years.

Personally, I’m of two minds about Nokia’s product idea. From a tech standpoint I’ve gotta say that the concept is pretty cool. However, it does raise some concerning questions regarding where technology can lead us.

What’s most unsettling to me about this idea is how it illustrates our desire to stay connected and a growing dependency on smartphones. Have we actually come to a point where the anxiety of missing an incoming call or email has led to the need for this type of product?

I hope we’re not there yet, and if I’m right the market for this type of product will be quite small. That said, as smartphone adoption reaches critical mass, the lines between technology and culture begin to blur.

First, it was the infamous Crackberry that stole our 9-to-5 workday and cleverly redefined our understanding of work-life balance. Now we have a Finnish phone maker attempting to reinvent how we stay connected with their devices.

To put things in perspective, I encourage you to try a little experiment. Over the weekend, try to go a day without your mobile phone. If that’s not realistic, try to go for a couple of hours.

Those of you that keep your phone in your pocket or close by 24/7, will likely experience something really freaky: at some point you’ll either think you hear your phone ringing or will feel the sensation of your phone vibrating. This is commonly known as Phantom Vibration Syndrome—a fact that I learned a couple of months ago during a self-diagnosis with the help of Google.

For those of you eagerly waiting for Nokia to market this vibrating tattoo, count me out; I’m having a hard enough time dealing with the phantom ringing in my leg.

SMG Roundup for Feb. 17, 2012 – Social Media Week Edition

February 17, 2012 / Comments Off / Posted in: Blog

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This week’s roundup is all about Social Media Week.

Social Media Week “offers a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries. Annually, SMW attracts more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference online and through mobile.”

With that in mind, I’m going round up some of the most buzzed about items from Social Media Week 2012.

#SMW2012 Halftime Report

On Wednesday, Synthesio published a half-time report infographic of Social Media Week awesomeness. It includes a look at top influencers, most buzzed about keynote speakers and trending topics. Speaking of infographics, Social Media Week, with the help of Nokia and The Guardian is publishing a real-time infographic on their homepage that tracks a real-time Twitter feed, FourSquare checkins and the answers to polls.

There is a tonne of great content created and shared at Social Media Week’s 1,040 events. Here are few items of interest.

Highlights from SMW San Francisco

Michael Procopio collected presentations from San Francisco social media week events and published them via storify. I love the range and variety of topics covered.

Creating Music Community in the Digital Age

From Social Media Week NYC comes this report on a keynote by Chris Kaskie, president of Pitchfork Media, a site established in 1995 and devoted to music with a healthy dose of indie rock.

If anything, Kaskie was grieving over the disappearance of the carefully curated, tangible collections of music recordings we used to own — like the LP collection he still looks forward to handing down to his children, rather than the password to a cloud full of digital playlists that seem likely to be more commonplace. “You don’t own anything anymore,” he said. “How do you get people excited about anything when it’s so fleeting?” Of course, Kaskie and his panelists had a ready answer to that: you get people excited about music by turning it from an industry into a community. In days of yore — Kaskie joined Pitchfork in 2004, when Friendster was still in ascendance — building a community meant launching a music festival where people could share the experience of music. (Indeed, Pitchfork’s festival has become a centerpiece of the summer festival schedule in its hometown of Chicago. Last October, the franchise expanded to Paris.) Today, community means Twitter, where Pitchfork readers endlessly debate the site’s notoriously polarizing reviews. Community also means Spotify, feeding a steady, frictionless stream of your music tastes to your Facebook friends.

SAP Conference for Social Media Week 2012

Maggie was in Palo Alto this week with our clients at SAP for their Social Media Week celebrations. SAP is one of the most progressive social enterprises on the planet with over two million members in the SAP Community Network. Their Social Media Week offerings did not disappoint. Check out the video replays on their site. The most popular video is CMO Jonathan Becher on the challenges of transforming his organization to embrace social media as part of their DNA and not treat it as a marketing megaphone. Check it out.

Presentations from SMG’s own Social Media Week Event

Never ones to back away from a challenge, today SMG delivered an Ignite-inspired event called Spark! for Social Media Week Toronto. Six members of the SMG team delivered 5-minute presentations on topics as diverse as Data Democracy, creating content to cut through the noise and Transmedia Storytelling. Check them out on SlideShare.

We’ll be back with videos of each of the talks in the next week or so.

Social Media Roundup for October 1, 2010

October 1, 2010 / Comments Off / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Roundup

Influence and Popularity Not the Same on Twitter

(via Mashable):

Kim Kardashian isn’t the most popular celeb on Twitter. She’s a couple million followers behind the heavy-hitters of Internet-savvy entertainers; however, she’s accomplished something no other individual celebrity has done: She’s the celeb who gets the most traffic referrals from Twitter.

Kardashian’s stats prove that popularity and influence — quantity and quality — are two different things. And we think the ability to direct web traffic is a pretty big part of influence.

Nokia Ships New Smartphone

Thursday, Nokia began shipping their new smartphone, the N8. Intended to compete with the Blackberry and the iPhone, the N8 is the first to run on the Symbian OS. Also of note is the 12 megapixel camera, in comparison to the 5 megapixel cameras available on Blackberry and iPhone.

(via HuffPo):

Nokia said deliveries would begin immediately for pre-orders of the touch screen model, which had received “the highest amount of consumer pre-orders in Nokia history.” Worldwide availability would be “in the coming weeks” and will vary by country, Nokia said.

The N8, which looks like an iPhone, features a 12-megapixel digital camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a 3.5 inch display. It is built on a new version of the Symbian software with photo uploading connections to social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

SAP & B2B Social Media Marketing Excellence

Our friends and clients over at SAP wrote a great post this week over at Social Media Today. It offers four steps for best practice in setting up a B2B social media marketing strategy.

The Value of Facebook Likers

On Wednesday, Facebook released more information about “likers.”

People who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user. The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook — they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

As publishers work to identify the best ways to reach a younger, “always on” audience, we’ve found that the average “liker” on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, as reported by the Newspaper Association of America.

Google Takes Street View to Antarctica

While you probably won’t need to use it very often, it is pretty cool to get a street level view of what’s happening on Half Moon Island. The normal street level view icon of a green man is also replaced with an icon of a penguin.

(via The Daily What):

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