Digital Insights

Rich snippets provide you with the ability to help Google highlight sections of your website which might be helpful or be a point of interest for them while researching for information (i.e. receipes search) or simply doing a comparison of product reviews for a camera.

With that being said,how do you actually get started? Here's a couple of videos from Google to help you get started.

Still not enough? Here's more tips in implementing those rich snippets.

Forget about yada yada Social Media....from how do business get sexy to how do I monetized my social media ROI. Have you instead thought about building and interacting with your customers from a one to one personal propsective instead? In the following Gary Vaynerchuk shows his thought on building a one to one approach at the 2011 Inc 500 Conference.

What percentage of your traffic is driven through mobile devices? Large increment over the years? Or? And how are you presenting your offering or solution to your current and potential customers alike.

Mobile devices present an incredible opportunity for companies to create truly delightful brand accretive marketing and digital existences. In the following video Avinash Kaushik shares insights on how you can apply the framework for bringing fast, innovative measurement to your business.

What's in for the future of product development for Google? Larry Page chats about his thoughts from Search, Android, YouTube, Chrome to Google+ in the following session at Google Zeitgeist 2011.

Larry Page: "But if you have a healthy disregard for the impossible, you actually get better people to work on your project. You know,they get really excited, they work really hard. You know,they work late at night. And it also turns out that most companies aren't crazy enough to do anything like that. And so you don't - they - nobody else is doing it. So you're the only ones. And, again, you get the best people."

Want to brighten up your friend's day? How about popping by a vending maching which allows you to send a personlized message or video to your friend along with a bottle of icy cold soda especially during hot noon? Earlier this year, Pepsi launch a Social Vending System that enables anyone to gift a friend by selecting a beverage and entering the recipient’s name, mobile number and a personalized text message.

Which also allows that individual to further personalize the gift with a short video recorded at the vending machine. The gift can be redeem it at any PepsiCo Social Vending system. That is not all,the recipient could also pay it forward and gift a beverage to someone else too.

“Social Vending extends our consumers’ social networks beyond the confines of their own devices and transforms a static, transaction-oriented experience into something fun and exciting they’ll want to return to, again and again.” Mikel Durham, Chief Innovation Officer, PepsiCo.

This could be the future of transforming something static to a multiple touch points for more brands in the near future.

Why bother spending the time to manually update your friends where you are having your holiday when you can just easily swipe and do that. Ushuaïa Ibiza Beach Hotel has made it possible for you to do that - simply by just swiping the wristband provided and you can start taking pictures, checking in and updating your status at various points in the hotel. Not getting enough yet ? How about posting this message on your Facebook wall "Hanging out at the Ushuaïa Ibiza Beach Hotel…Jealous?"

This is not something new we have came across and will see RFID technology getting more hardwired into real world setting as social API becomes more mainstream. Seems like a novel idea in driving the buzz but how could the hotel or other brands actually translate that into actual business outputs and not just riding onto RFID integration scene.

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swipe-and-check-in-on-facebook-at-ushuaia-ibiza-beach-hotel-GuHBnvDheglxyiifeDCE.zip (131 KB)

How many times have you received an email which is really HUMAN when you have signed up for their service or even purchase something from Amazon? Many times what you will receive are automated or simply a robot saying "Hi thanks for your support....blah blah". Dave Hyndman shared a uncommon "your order has shipped" order confirmation email from CD Baby, which not only wow him but also getting me excited to actually share this with you all here reading this.

Here's the somewhat uncommon but awesome way to excite your customers:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year".  We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby

Points to ponder:

• Are your current email communicating to your customers somewhat automated or humanized?
• How can you take the approach above by CD Baby and derive a more humanized approach in communicating to your customers?

Are you considering adding on location based services i.e. Foursquare or Gowalla for your business? If so, are your customers actively utilizing the services from the providers? And what are their motivations behind it?

Summary of research findings:

• Privacy is still a huge issue for the adoption of any applications that ask the consumer to disclose their location.
• Facebook and Groupon are well placed to exploit the Social-Loco opportunity through Facebook Places and GrouponNow respectively.
• Discounts and coupons are by far the largest single motivator for disclosing location. Status rewards, such as badges and being named “mayor,” are of little interest to the mass consumer.
• Whereas a lot of the focus to date has been around small local businesses benefitting from location-based technology, there is a huge opportunity for big brands that can connect with people at a local level.
• In the future, consumers are more likely to check-in at a friend’s house than they are to cafes, restaurants or bars.

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the-reality-and-motivations-behind-the-check-ins-yokkbHftGbFiEyvDoAxb.zip (527 KB)

Lately there has been an on-going trend covering on "gameified" applications and "gamification" vendors which promises anything from increased user engagement and retention to alteration of consumer behaviour. While some hold that adding such game elements to non-game applications opens a new decade of design, others criticize current implementations as shallow "pointsification" and overselling of a new digital snake oil. Which criticisms are actually valid?

In the following talk, Sebastian Deterding provides an overview of the current gamification movement, its most troubling blind spots, the motivational powers of games, and how to design for a playful experience that is truly meaningful to its users.

McKinsey research estimates China could have as many as 750 million people online by 2015, up from 420 million today.And between now and 2012, an additional 100 million individuals could easily logged onto the web via their mobile devices which translates to 333 million users.

But Who are these Internet users? And what drives them online, and what will make them stick - how will that change over time? These are the questions business operating in and or moving into China needs to consider in order to succeed in the fastest growing market.

In a recent research conducted by McKinsey with over 5000 digital consumers from across more than 20 different cities in China have revealed China's seven digital consumer segments as follows:

1. Digital Junkies (6% of digital population)
• Spend more than twice as much time online as all other segments
• Early adopters of high tech gadgets

2. Gamers (9% of digital population)
• Spends most time on PC games
• Heavy users of social networking

3. Info-centrics (17% of digital population)
• Looking for information to enhance productivity at work
• Prefer PCs when going online

4. Mobile Mavens (8% of digital population)
• Heavy mobile internet users, prefer listening to music and reading
• Early adopters of portable digital gadgets

5. Traditionalists (25% of digital population)
• Little interest in hi-tech devices
• Light users of internet; spend more time watching TV

6. Online Traders (18% of digital population)
• Most time online spent tracking and trading stocks

7. Basic Users (17% of digital population)
• Play games on mobile phones
• Least time spent on all media

(download)

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understanding-chinas-digital-consumers-segments-jCoFAGwcajyCCtsJdizd.zip (211 KB)

Device markers
• Have you segment your consumers based on their preferences and usage patterns? And further segmenting them by habits, unqiue preferences etc?

Telecom operators
• How do you go about striking potential partnerships with companies from across the verticals to provide co-services catering to the specific vertical segment needs and requirements?

B2B / B2C
• How do you craft the overall consumer strategy taking into considerations of the unqiue preferences, devices and habits across the segments that are essential to your entity?

Download the PDF report here > Understanding China’s Digital Consumers