consumer engagement

September saw the launch of our report into how online engagement can drive action offline published by vInspired, the UK’s leading youth volunteering charity. The research worked with young people across the UK to understand the role that digital technologies play in their lives and how best to use engage them online to inspire them to take action offline.

Airports play an important role in many travel plans. Few people will feel that they are choosing and buying services from airports as they probably travel through an airport because the cheapest or most convenient flight goes through there. In fact in many cases the best airports are either those that make your experience so fast and efficient that you don’t need to spend much time there, or those that make you feel that you aren’t just waiting for a plane whilst you are there.

This is such a good way of getting users engaged with a problem that they probably aren’t even aware of. Perhaps playing to the idea of “giving consumers something they didn’t even want” this evolves as the more people engage with it, with an engagement simply being walking over the artwork.

Guest Post by: Stephanie Shaw

Social gaming has seen explosive growth in recent years, with 250 million people playing social games every month. Zynga leads the pack with its hugely successful Cityville and Farmville games on Facebook. These games alone are forecast to pull in revenues of $5 billion by 2015, five times what they were valued at in 2010 by Parks Associates.

So I've gone and written something about crowdsourcing. The concept du jour. Partly because I think it genuinely has the potential to change how we do what we do, partly because my belief is that (many) media owners are missing out on a big opportunity to incorporate their audiences far more into the fabric of the way in which they work, and partly because I agree with Saneel that "serving as a scaffolding for customers to engage with brands beyond transactions" is a real opportunity for agencies.

“Why would customers want to create content for our brand?” is a question we commonly come across at FreshNetworks. The truthful answer is often  “They don’t”. In fact, the question is the wrong one altogether.

Guest Post by: Jo Stratmann

When it comes to FMCG brands, social media mostly consists of having some kind of Facebook or a Twitter presence to raise brand awareness and spread word-of-mouth.

Guest Post by: Mark Jennings

WaveMetrix have published their review of Q4 2010 social media trends and it highlights some interesting moves for fashion brands using social media, especially Facebook.

I joined RecycleBank for many reasons, one due to an observation regarding the application of rewards in the green space. Quite simply, rewards have the potential to change consumer behavior without necessarily changing attitudes first. I first wrote about this in a 2007 blog post. Today, it remains a powerful way to expand the appeal of green.