Archive for September, 2011
Facebook gets a facelift
In last month’s Word-of-Mouth Newsletter (sorry all you non-swedish speakers) we commented on some new features on Facebook, but with the social networks’ latest updates, we feel it merits a blog post to boot.
Since the arrival of Google+, the team behind Facebook have not been idle; the new features are undeniably “Google+ -ish” and serve to make the established social network even more user friendly. “Subscriptions” let users subscribe to- and follow updates from non-friends – a feature recognizable from both Google+ and Twitter – and the new “Lists”-system allows one to organize and tailor which updates are shown in the news feed.
As marketers, we now need to reflect on how (and if) this changes the way Facebook is used as a marketing tool. For example: now that anyone can subscribe to a person’s updates, that person’s individual’s posts can be used to communicate with an entirely new audience – an audience that is not centered around a fan page or common interest, making it a potentially attractive and diverse target group.
Read more about these latest Facebook updates here.
“There’s an app for that!” is a phrase we hear more and more often, but sometimes the app in question is more innovative than others. One such example is What Do You See? by Malmö-based duo Blixt & Dunder. What Do You See? lets the user see the world through the eyes of an infant, based on medical research on vision development. The utility of the app is undoubtedly somewhat unclear, but what does that matter when it’s both interesting and fun?
Download What Do You See? here, and see the world with – quite literally! – new eyes.
As Swedish streaming phenomenon Spotify conquers America (as usual, through effective word-of-mouth), more and more services are incorporating its technology in their own. One example of this is Spotalike, a service that generates Spotify playlists based on the song you enter on their website. The underlying data is gathered from Last.fm.
Although this in itself is nothing new – Pandora and iTunes’ Genius service are two examples of similar technology – we like the simplicity and tongue-in-cheek attitude of Spotalike. Check it out for yourself here.
