Geopepper Ups the Ante: Social Networking Hits the Streets

If you’ve got a PC and a pulse, chances are pretty good that you’ve also befriended Facebook or MySpace, been Linked In, or been known to Flickr, perhaps even Twitter, from time to time.

Social networking may seem ubiquitous these days, but it hasn’t truly been everywhere. There’s always been a physical distance between you and your social networks. Until now.

Imagine if you took them wherever you went. Imagine if you knew when one of your “friends” was just around the corner. Imagine if you were given a heads up when one of your big clients was also at the airport waiting for a flight. Imagine if you were notified when you were passing one of your contacts favourite restaurants or coffee shops.

Sound futuristic? Well, it may be. But it’s also here now. Global communications leader and BSL client Alcatel-Lucent has already developed a solution to make all of this — and much more — possible. Geopepper is their location-based service (LBS), and it’s closing the gap, bringing you and your social networks together with new opportunities to connect like never before.

Let me give you a few examples of what this technology can do:

1) Location-based social networking. You can allow your friends and contacts from your existing social networking sites to ping your mobile device with geographically based messages. These can be personal (Since you’re in the area, check out this fantastic used book store!) or business related (Just arriving? Don’t forget we’re meeting the clients at 3:00).

2) Proximity marketing. Say someone has opted-in to receive marketing messages on their cell phone that fit their interests. When they come within a kilometre of your business, they could be sent a Geographic Messaging Service (GMS) message (Widgets 50% off at 123 Elm Street). Since they’re already in the neighbourhood and have indicated an affinity for widgets, they are much more likely to stop by. The same applies whether we’re talking about coffee or cars. The term “street level advertising” will soon take on a whole new meaning.

3) Travel info and guides. Imagine touring around London and having tourist and/or historical information pushed out to you as you approach points of interest. (Big Ben! Parliament!) It’s like having a tour guide in your pocket, without all the awkwardness that would probably entail.

The possibilities are exciting — and virtually endless. You can learn more in this Geopepper video.

Go Green: At the Office

From the caretaker to the CEO, every employee has a responsibility to work towards greener pastures. And there’s good news! Retrofitting your office helps more than just the environment. It can increase your bottom line and contribute to a healthy, low-impact workspace.

Here are a few tips for 'greening-up' the office:

1) Delete unnecessary text from emails before printing. A long email exchange can lead to several pages, which needlessly wastes paper when all you're trying to print the most recent message.

2) Instead of printing a web page, bookmark it or save the page.

3) Use the size-reduction feature offered on many photocopiers. Two pages of a book can often be copied onto one standard sheet.

4) Photocopy and print double-sided

5) Do less on paper, more online. The greenest paper is no paper at all, so keep things digital and dematerialized whenever possible:
- Keep files on computers
- View documents on-screen rather than printing them out
- Send emails instead of paper letters

6) Printouts destined for the trash (or recycling bin!) may have more life in them. Don’t throw out those messed-up print jobs or obsolete reports – reduce them in half (or quarters) and turn the blank reverse into notepaper.

7) Water is a precious resource. If you have extra drinking water after a meeting and before you go home, use it to water a plant.

8) Turn your computer off when you leave for the day. Otherwise, you're still burning energy even if you're not burning the midnight oil (Check with your IT department to make sure the computer doesn't need to be on to run backups or other maintenance).

9) Use 'screen sleep' or hard drive sleep modes that turn on automatically. Unless you have these energy-saving settings enabled, your computer is consuming higher-than-necessary quantities of electricity when it's not in use (and we're not referring to your screensaver, which protects your screen but does not reduce electricity usage).

10) Use paperclips instead of staples. Staples seem small and insignificant, but attached to discarded reports and printouts, they are ending up in landfills every year, refusing to biodegrade. Paperclips are eminently reusable, and using the dog-ear method may seem kind of juvenile, but it works in a pinch and creates zero waste.

11) Use recycled materials. When using paper is necessary, use recycled paper and envelopes that have been processed and colored using eco-friendly methods. Use pens and pencils made of recycled materials, and refillable pens and markers are preferable to disposable ones. Use biodegradable soaps and recycled paper or cloth towels in the bathroom and kitchen, and provide biodegradable cleaners for the custodial staff. Buy in bulk so that shipping and packaging waste are reduced, and reuse the shipping boxes. Recycling printer cartridges is often free, and recycled replacements are cheaper than new ones.

12) Use dry noodle sticks (like spaghetti cut in half) to stir your coffee instead of using plastic spoons or sticks.

13) Switch your lights. Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) are three to four-times more efficient than standard incandescent bulbs. Also, encourage employees to maximize natural lighting and to turn off lights when leaving a room.

14) Re-use supplies whenever possible. Don’t throw away that file folder if it is still usable!

15) Use an electronic agenda rather than a printed calendar.

These are many great ways for an office to 'Go Green', and we look forward to hearing about what energy-saving and earth-friendly practices your office uses!

Iridium is Officially Everywhere

From a brand perspective, Iridium is very well known all around the world, for two reasons. The first reason is a good one. They are the maker of superior satellite phones – ones featured in movies like James Bond, where our hero is magically connected from the middle of nowhere. The second reason is less complimentary. They have been previously recognized for their audacious vision of global connectivity sending them straight to the brink of financial disaster. But that was then. This is now. Their vision remains audacious. They own the only true global communications network, built from the top down. Their satellites and devices have succeeded brilliantly, serving solutions to maritime and land-based markets all over the world. This is where we come in. Iridium has initiated a strategy to revitalize its brand globally. From the launch of new products to corporate re-branding, Iridium wants the world to know that their highly successful company is poised to become the global leader in providing reliable, critical lifelines. Iridium is indeed everywhere.

Branding and the "R" word

An interesting story in the New York Times today about the 98th annual meeting of the Association of National Advertisers. Some marketers - actually the biggest names in the business - feel a responsibility to help get us through this financial mess.

“The consumer is sitting at the bottom of a bunker with his head in his hands, wondering if it’s safe to come out,” Jez Frampton, global chief executive at Interbrand, an Omnicom Group agency specializing in corporate and brand identity, said during a general session of the conference.

“It’s up to us to stimulate demand in the marketplace again,” he added.

What do you think? Read more Resolved to Keep on Marketing, Even in Tight-Fisted Times

Cooking as Visual Art

“I have invited Ferran Adrià because he has managed to create his own language, something that has turned into a very influential issue on the international scene. This is what I am interested in, I don’t care if people consider it as an art or not. It is very important to mention that the artistic intelligence does not depend on the format; we should not relate art only with photography, sculpture, painting…, neither with cooking in its most strict sense. But under certain circumstances, cooking can also be considered as an art.”
- Roger Buergel, Artistic Director, Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany

Ferran Adrià is the influential chef - some say most influential in the world - from El Bulli restaurant in Cala Montjoi, Catalonia. I urge you to look through the general catalogue of dishes the restaurant has prepared from 1983 to 2005. Interestingly, the introduction to the catalogue begins with a classic information architecture dilemma: how do you categorize things? For El Bulli, food falls into "families" - follies, morphs, tapas/dishes - names almost as poetical as when and how they are served.

Visit the catalogue here

Social Media Site Increases Support for Canada's Wilderness

The Big Wild - an initiative founded by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) and Mountain Equipment Co-op - has been leveraging the viral benefits of online social media in the hopes of growing support for its cause.

The Big Wild refers to the part of Canada that is still in its natural state. And the vision is to keep at least half of Canada's public land and water wild forever. The hope is to achieve this through education, fundraising, and support and encouragement for the public to lobby decision-makers.

The social movement launched this past Spring, with guerrilla marketing stunts in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax and St. John's that introduced Canadians to its social networking site, www.thebigwild.org/

The site allows Canadians not only to learn about Canadian wild spaces in need of protection, but encourages supporters to share stories, videos and photos about their own wilderness experiences. This keeps the site real, personable, and fresh. People can truly feel a part of the project and gain a sense of pride. The prizes available for various ways of getting involved only increase the incentive to participate.

To complement the online components of the campaign and keep the viral message going offline as well, Mountain Equipment Co-op is selling (by small donation only), green Big Wild shoelaces.

Adam's Wallpaper Design Makes the FWA

Adam Hughes - BSL Flash specialist, Artist, and Blogger - recently designed desktop wallpaper that was published on The FWA on Sept 4. For those of you who may not know, The FWA (favorite website awards) is probably the most prestigious award site for flash/graphic design and Flash developers will tell you that it’s definitely worth a daily dose.

Here is the design Adam won for, and you can check out the many other wallpaper designs too.

Click on the “winners” button toward the top left to check out the latest in flash web design aswell. Or just go to their homepage www.thefwa.com/.

F(T) = B+P(1/10T+1/2T2)

This is, according to top PR agent Mark Borkowski, the formula to determine the decline in fame from its peak.

The formula applies to stars-as-brand. This conception has been impressed upon a generation of publicists by the American corporate PR firm, Rogers & Cowan.

Mark Borkowski's came up with his formula (which you can see a fuller explanation of here) by studying famous people, somewhat famous people, and consumer brands like Red Bull, Stella, and Adidas. According to Borkowski, fame is not measured in 15 minutes, as Warhol suggested, but 15 months.

What does this mean for brands? If your brand rises in the public consciousness, you can expect it to stay there for 15 months. If you want to keep it there, you have to remember that people like stories. In a world of PR, these stories are told through events (think of Madonna's enduring fame and the various phases she has gone through).

Read the article and see what you think.

Web 3.0 - The Human Web

Someone with even a limited knowledge of human social behaviour, could postulate that approximately 15 minutes after the term "Web 2.0" was coined, someone attempted to introduce "Web 3.0" into the common lexicon. Given that anticipation seems to be a central notion of Web 3.0, that person would have been right to do so.

Eric Schmidt of Google has claimed that Web 2.0 is a marketing term. Many aspects of Web 2.0 were quickly turned toward direct or indirect business-with-customer applications. Think of the brilliant "Dove" campaign as the former; think of Facebook (because of its ability to focus advertising to the likes and dislikes of the member) as the latter. The possibilities continue to be almost limitless.

So is marketing ready for Web 3.0? Probably more than we realize. Does Web 3.0 exist? I would argue that there are features of it that exist, and that these features help us to anticipate what it will become.

Definitions of Web 3.0 vary greatly. Some of Web 3.0's core concepts pertain to the "semantic web", in which the semantics of various services and content on the web are defined to satisfy the needs of humans and machines to better use web content. A simple way of describing this is: we currently use the web as a vast store of knowledge. If I want to find out the Icelandic term for iceberg, I can do so quickly on the Internet. Adding a notion of semantics to the vast store of knowledge on the web would likely take away the need for me to perform this search. One can envision, for example, typing the term "the Icelandic word for cat" in Blogger, and the word would miraculously appear. (It is "kottur")

Tim Berners Lee describes his vision for the semantic web this way:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

In a sense, Wikipedia anticipates some elements of the semantic Web through the simple hypertexting that automatically occurs within an entry. One can get a basic definition of a concept through an article, one gets a fuller definition by following various hyperlinks, that exist contextually.

Other aspects of Web 3.0 include ubiquitous connectivity (a website can be browsed online, on a mobile device, etc.); distributed databases; and intelligent applications, or the ability of the Web to reason in an almost human fashion. Some people suggest that intelligent applications will emerge in a more organic fashion, such as the way that categorization of photos on Flickr are the result of collaborative filtering that extract meaning and order from the existing Web and how people interact with it.

In short, Web 3.0 is more human in its abilities, scope, responsiveness and modes of operation than the Web we are currently accustomed to. And given that marketing is an intensely human activity combining anticipation, communication and emotion, we have reason to hope that Web 3.0 will be ready for marketing too.

Green-Coloured Glasses: Vol 3

With so many brands trumpeting empty green promises, a collective consumer cynicism has developed to keep companies in check. Websites like www.greenwashindex.com host forums for users to rate various green-toting ads on their level of BS. This site is one of many available for consumers to engage in a dialogue about the latest offenders. Some activists have taken a facetious approach to identifying key players. A company called ‘Corpwatch’ whose mandate is to hold corporations accountable for their operations has created the Greenwashing Academy Awards. These acknowledgments are awarded bimonthly to corporations that put more money, time and energy into slick PR campaigns promoting their eco-friendly image, than they do to actually protecting the environment.

With consumers and environmentalists ready to pounce at the first sight of contradictory claims, many brands are becoming apprehensive to even utter the words ‘environmentally friendly’. And as an agency that prides itself on injecting brands with integrity and intelligence, we would never want to position a company in the line of fire. So how do we know if a client’s request for a green image will help or hinder? Perhaps the 6 Sins of Greenwashing checklist could shed some light on the validity of their claims:

1. What type of claim is being made? Is it specific or broad? Does the value of the single claim outweigh the other aspects of their operation?

2. Is a copy of the environmental standard or testing protocol available? If a manufacturer can’t provide the evidence of their claim, it could be a warning sign.

3. Was the testing protocol developed through a comprehensible, transparent process? If their story checks out, then testing should be able to live up to certain public standards without confusion.

4. Who developed the testing protocol? The most trusted standards are those developed in a consensus-based process by broad stakeholder groups.

5. What process is used to verify that the products meet the standard? There are various procedures to verify, including:

• Self certification;


• Self certification with random audits;


• Independent third party verification;


• Independent third party certification with on-site audits

Even if a company passes this checklist with flying colours, it can still run the risk of a negative perception from the public. Spending too many dollars on a green image ends up looking disingenuous, when the majority of the efforts should be put towards a more grassroots strategy, proving to consumers that environmental change is top priority.

Here are some more efforts worthy of a Greenwash Oscar:
PG&E - Let's Green This City
Walmart - Save and Live Green
BP - Environment and Society