Client Recognition

One of our clients, InContext Solutions, was recently selected by Gartner as a 2011 “Cool Vendor in Consumer Goods.” We couldn’t agree more! The InContext Solutions’ approach is based on research and supported by breath-taking technology. They are a great partner for any consumer goods company interested in gaining customer insight on attitudes, behaviors and actions. Check out the full report from Gartner here and the web site we did for them here.

FourSquare: The Rise of Location-Based Social Networking Applications

For those of you who haven't heard, FourSquare is one of many emerging location-aware social networking applications. And like most social networking applications, FourSquare is a great tool to support and encourage the creation of communities around your brand.

While the growth of FourSquare has been rapid, the application still has a relatively limited reach compared to other social apps and the final marketing model is still being worked out. In the meantime, if you want to use FourSquare to reach customers, it is best to refrain from using the platform to aggressively advertise and instead tie promotions to community activity. This model has worked well with other social media platforms and it's likely that FourSquare will continue to follow this trend.

Here are a couple of ways to tie FourSquare promotions to community activity:

1. Create promotions that reward customer loyalty. This can be done by providing discounts for frequent visits or when customers bring in friends as new customers. In FourSquare, the person who visits your location the most times becomes that location's "mayor." Loyalty could also be rewarded by providing recognition of your mayors on your primary web site.

2. Create promotions that leverage the gaming aspect of FourSquare. FourSquare lets users gain points and unlock badges through the use of the service. Bravo Television and Intel have both created custom badges within FourSquare that users can gain through interacting with the brands. Creating similar custom badges is another way that FourSquare could be leveraged to support your own unique communities.

FourSquare is like other social media platforms, but with the added dimension of location. This gives rise to several exciting opportunities to engage your customers. In addition, with the growing ubiquity of GPS-enabled smart phones, the rise of apps like FourSquare that leverage user location will also continue to grow.

What will you do with your new iPad?

Customer research is a core part of the Method Engine process, so while we waited in line for the release of the new iPad, we took advantage of the time to ask other pad people what they planed to do with their new purchase.

The Uncanny Valley

I recently came across a term used in robotics that I found both fascinating and highly relevant to the field of digital effects.

The Uncanny Valley is a term and a hypothesis which states that when robots and other digital likenesses of humans look and act too much like actual humans, but not exactly, it causes a response of revulsion in human observers. The "Valley" is the actual dip in the graph charting human reactions to these likenesses.

When a digital likeness is created that is far from human (think a doll or a Saturday morning cartoon character) it is far enough from an actual likeness of a person that viewers react positively. Get closer and closer to an actual likeness and before you arrive at a likeness indistinguishable from a real person, you fall into a valley where your creation looks kind of like a person, just wrong. And the reaction of viewers is visceral fear.

This theory is good for anyone developing avatars, animated characters or even just photo editing to keep in mind. Straying far from reality is okay and sticking to reality is okay too, but slight deviations from what is real can be a dangerous place to play.

Augmented Reality at Method Engine

On January 25, Richard Alvarez, Method Engine's Director of Technology, hosted one of the first Augmented Reality (AR) seminars in Chicago.

Now that Flash has a toolkit for building Augmented Reality applications, the technology is much more accessible to marketers. Some early adopters like Lego and McDonald's have executed very exciting campaigns that utilize this technology.

During the seminar there was a passionate discussion about the future of AR and how we as marketers could leverage the technology to create applications and campaigns to help our clients build better relationships with their customers. You can view PDFs of the presentation here:

The State of Augmented Reality

Stay tuned for more. We intend to follow this new trend closely in order to bring relevant aspects of it to our clients.