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Foursquare is around you

Using Foursquare at the Tilburg University could be a nice and innovative idea. This way the University would make use of an already existing application whereby students can make use of. Foursquare is actually an application that people can download on their cell phone. After downloading the application you have to log in and synchronize it with your Facebook and Twitter account. When you’re logged in, companies and organizations that are linked to Foursquare, will provide all kind of information (promotions, news etc.) when you are in the neighborhood. The link with Facebook and Twitter takes care that you can see if your friends are in the café around the corner.

It could also come in handy if you want to see where your group mates are at the University, receiving news about the university and so on. Another nice feature is that you can become a mayor of a spot by, for example, being the one with the most visits to that spot. This is a good marketing tool for companies because they can connect being a mayor with receiving some discount. This way people could be triggered to visit your company more often. Now wouldn’t it be nice if someone could call him or herself “the mayor of the University’.

Using social networks VS. World Cup

The social network sites can provide a lot of information and insights. Those insights are fun to read, especially when those insights come from famous people who have many curious fans. During the World Cup there are quite a lot of those curious fans who want to know everything about the team that they support.

According to del Bosque, the coach from the Spanish squad, the players share often too much information and that is why he have forbidden the players to make use of Facebook and Twitter during the World Cup. That it could create problems have been proven by a Dutch player who used Twitter to share that he was enjoying a hip hop concert while he was too injured to join the Dutch team.

The fuss that was created by this moment of honesty and openness is not something that teams can use during the World Cup. Although it could be interesting to read what is going on during the training I think it is smart for the players to focus at one thing…and that is winning that golden cup!

Digital petitions

In the “old days” when you did not agreed with something and you wanted to change that by collecting autographs, it was hard work. You needed to visit the people physically and ask them face to face to sign their autograph to support your statement. When you collected enough autographs, in order to have a strong foundation for your courageous try to convince a stubborn person or institute, you handed the autographs over and hoped for the best. Now a days, the sweaty and ungrateful process of collecting the few autographs you can get for a greater cause is evolved into an easy and grateful process of collecting many times the amount of potential autographs you can get than before. An great example is the unfortunate news about the dangerous striker Ruud van Nistelrooij not joining our National team to the World Cup. This news seems for some Dutch football lovers a problem and consequently is the reason why someone started a website in order to get the Dutch striker to the World Cup. Could take the old way of collecting autographs weeks of precious time, with the help of the website ruudmoetmee.nl the number of collected autographs was after a few days already more than 18.000!

This shows again what a pitty it is...

Although I think Ruud van Nistelrooij appreciate this petition very much, everybody with a common sense knows that, as pitiful as it is, it will not work. Besides that, it is a very nice gesture to the Dutch striker and who knows, what can happen before the World Cup starts.

UK elections!

The elections in the UK are hot these days, maybe even hotter than ever. There is a lot of buzz about the rise of the LibDems and the fall of Gordon Brown but it gets interesting from digital perspective when you zoom in to the approach of the three big parties. The campaign teams of all the different parties took a good look at the unprecedented digital (media) campaign from Obama that his team used during the US elections. They saw that such a effective digital media campaign could win you a many votes and that’s all that counts during elections. So the plans of the campaign teams were to put a lot of effort into the digital media world to attract and influence the voters. But strangely this doesn’t seem to work because none of the campaign teams knew how to do this in an original way.

The trick with digital media is, because of the loads of information, to trigger the digital user so that he or she gets interested in your message. The way the campaign teams are using the digital world now is by just sending traditional messages in a modern way. You can subscribe to a newsletter and you will get the same information you also read at the posters that you see every day, see the same movies as on the television but then on YouTube et cetera. This is not the way Obama did it in his campaign and this is not the way the parties should use it in future elections. That is why it is also interesting that a traditional medium took care of the biggest shifts in potential votes, the television. But there will have to be said that this was also a new approach since the UK never saw a live debate with the three big parties on television. So there was some kind of modernization after all.

Social network sites; too much of a solution?

Social networking sites are growing to be more and more important. Sites like Facebook and Hyves come up with innovative ideas in order to play an important role in the lives of social network addicts. Those innovative ideas are very often an easy solution for important and/or practical problems in our daily lives. The social network sites began to offer an answer to the question: ‘what are my (old) friends doing now?’ Whereupon, for example Hyves, expanded the possibilities with showing what your own status is, showing where you exactly are in cooperation with Google Maps, paying to be a goldmember (which offers you extra possibilities) et cetera. In other words, everything to maintain and expand your (online) relationships.

But having social network sites interfering in your daily life seems to have no boundaries. Now-a-days it isn’t just to keep up with your friends and making new friends but also about practical things or even very serious questions you come up to in your daily life. The ultimate goal for those sites is that they eventually play a real important role in your life and that it is hard to live without. Hyves recently introduced the possibility to pay with your Hyves-account which means you have to put money on your account and then you can pay with your account in, for example, a bar. In the present, Hyves asks you the question whether you want to be an organ-donor or not. After answering that question the answer you have given will be shown on your profile, so everyone can see if you participate or not.

Regardless my positive opinion about the Internet as a really helpful, making-life-easier-tool, I don’t feel the need to share all my activities and thoughts on a social network site. I rather not want to show the whole world where I am every given time at the day, what I am doing, which jeans I bought and how much it cost or answering important questions like whether to be a donor or not. But then again, for the ones who really feel like sharing such information, the social network sites offer a great platform.

Social product development with Quirky.com

Social is the magic word these days. Next to keeping up with your friends and family at social media websites, you can also make money with the social force. The link between social and making money is product development; Social product development.

A quick quide into quirky

The website quirky.com is a great example of real social product development. People with a great, unique idea for a product can assign that idea to the website (after a submission fee) and the idea will upfront a jury. After that process the product becomes real social because many members of the website can, under the name of influencer, come up with colors for the product, a nice name, logo et cetera. After that there is another social step because when enough people on the website order the product they are going to manufacture and sell it for you. The revenue will be shared with Quirky, the inventor and the influencers. This is a way to develop and sell your idea/product with and to people all over the world.