As part of London Fashion Week, Topshop unveiled an "advanced, immersive and engaging social experience".  Fans of the fashion phenomenon could watch the live catwalk show online, but rather than just a video stream; the site allowed consumers to access the clothes and accessories on the model, change the colours and share the look on Facebook and Twitter.  The show was also covered by an extensive film crew, allowing online viewers to get back stage, watch interviews with celebrities and fashionistas and feel part of the action.  Topshop called the show "social entertainment", stating that it wanted to take the energy and excitement from the Oxford Street store to millions of people globally.

Tracking trends and reacting in real-time to consumer behaviour is one of the aspects to social media campaigns that can make them so effective.  The growth in use of smart-phones and ‘check-in’ apps offers potential to extend this strategy offline by tracking how consumers are interacting with a real-world location. But the level of insight that can be gleaned from Foursquare and Facebook Places has, until now, been fairly limited.  With check-in deals also a relatively new concept, launching and managing promotions is still quite a disjointed process, especially if it involves more than one platform.  Multiple locations mean multiple deals and venue pages, so a national campaign can become quite resource intensive and complex to manage. This month Hootsuite may have provided an answer with the addition of Geotoko to its ever-expanding suite of social media campaign tools. Geotoko offers brands and agencies a platform to manage campaigns across key location-based social networks including Facebook Places, Foursquare, Twitter and Gowalla. Geotoko also addresses the need for insight and offers a more joined-up approach to campaign management with the following tools: A promotions builder that allows check-in deals and offers to be launched simultaneously across multiple networks & multiple locations.  QR codes can also be automatically generated, opening up the promotion to an even wider audience. An analytics dashboard that presents check-in data in a variety of ways, including check-in time / day trends, key influencers, sentiment, demographic trends and consumer feedback by location. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s8BNZ4bpc8 So how will these tools aid experiential marketers?  Here are some examples of how we think they could be used: 1. Inform strategy Use historical data from venue check-ins to inform sampling strategy.  For example, what day of the week do people tend to be checking-in? What time of day are they more likely to leave feedback?  Which locations are check-in hotspots? 2. Real-time feedback Track the effectiveness of a campaign in real-time by monitoring check-ins and consumer feedback across the locations where field staff have been placed.  Trends in sentiment and product/brand/event feedback can be monitored and acted upon as the experience or sampling happens. 3. Tailor content & promotions Location-specific online content and promotions can be created (or revised) and posted on the fly, based on consumer feedback during an event.  With the addition of the QR code generator, this content / promotion can also be attached to real-world objects and events by field staff at the location. 4. A clearer picture of success Support results from consumer surveys and other measurement mechanics with check-in data from each location.   Until now, consideration of geo-location platforms has tended to be an ‘either/or’ choice, with Facebook understandably winning the toss in most cases due to its huge user-base. Geotoko has just made it a lot easier for brands to launch integrated, multi-platform campaigns that can be evaluated effectively.

As an extension to the "light painting" adverts that were aired on Canadian TV earlier in the year, Volkswagen launched "Art Heist", an ambient campaign that has also driven conversation online.  Long-exposure photographs, featuring the Volkswagen Jetta GLI creating "light paintings", were framed and hung in various locations around the country.  Anyone who walked past these pop-up galleries was free to take a framed photo home.  This is nice, but nothing special.  What if we also revealed that each photograph was one of a kind and hand numbered. This transformed the campaign and it quickly gathered pace online as the news spread.  Soon hundreds of people were speculating, through social media channels, as to where the next pop gallery would appear and triumphant photos were posted of successful photo hunters and their #VWartheist bounty. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snKPFltLVRA

Ariel recently launched this great stunt in Stockholm to promote the effectiveness of its washing powder.  Ariel Fashion Shoot worked by presenting a novel way to show the effectiveness of the washing powder alongside social media interaction in a real world environment.  A glass box, at Stockholm Central Station, housed a robot arm that was designed specifically to fire liquids at white clothing that hung on a fast moving conveyor belt. Instead of being controlled by people at the station, the robot was instead operated through a special link on Ariel's Facebook page. If a participant managed to shoot and stain one of the garments it was promptly removed and washed in front of the crowd.  The online player was then sent the item as a prize! We think the interplay between social media and real world is great.  Will we see more of these installations in the future? httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly5cdIRzYD4  

Clicking through your Facebook photos is the modern equivalent of sitting on a sofa and leafing through a heavy photograph album.  So what is the next step?  Intel have created "Museum of Me"; an app which hauls data from Facebook and packages it into an interesting tour of you online presence.  The app displays your pictures as if you were wandering through a museum and it also goes further and displays your likes,  friends and videos giving a rounded snapshop of the person you are on Facebook. It's certainly not clunky, it's visually interesting and smoothly executed. It is clear that Intel wanted to make this an experience rather than just a tool to view your data.  But does it also raise questions about how much data is freely available on sites such as Facebook? Have a go The Museum of Me Source: Simply Zesty