While reading up on the original premise of this blog – brands, I came across a couple of interesting articles that spanned both my interest areas – brands and social media. The first was on Brand Accretion. Accretion is defined as “An increase by natural growth or addition”. Now, in this instant age, this would be considered a ridiculous thought. But to me, I’d prefer to take it as one more argument against the ‘only large campaigns’ approach that I see many brands take. You can read an earlier rant here. A couple of tangential by products of an accretion approach could be brands being able to tackle the long tail more effectively, and being able to espouse causes with a long term vision, like environment-conscious efforts for example; in essence, a flexibility to scale up based on a dynamic business environment, and one that would help brands deliver their promise better, which will be critical, as we go along.
The other interesting post I read was one that distinguished between new and social media. Now, quite honestly, they were very interchangeable terms to me, but I tend to agree with the post, and the way it distinguishes the two. The simple example would be this – a blog is new media, it becomes a social medium when there are comments and conversations that happen around a post.
Both new and social media bring out a lot of creativity, simply because of the innumerable sources it throws up. It acts as a perfect background to riff. Here are a few interesting ones I saw recently.
This one, by Idea is about a month old, and is here in case anyone missed it. Its called Rapchick Mumbaiyya test, and was a smart way to connect to the city, during the brand launch.
Google did a cool marketing activity to to takeover the Email and chat infrastructure of various education institutes in India. Read about it here.
Warner Bros has been doing some interesting stuff too – their ad-supported video on demand online network site “features full episodes of defunct series that gained cult status over the last decade. The WB.com is a new digital destination built from the ground up for the same 16- to 34-year-old audience that embraced the WB when it was a television phenomenon”. It has Buffy, roswell etc, but the bad news is that its only available in the US. And i thought the web has no boundaries. 🙁
And if Medianama’s thread of thought is accurate, they might be doing some very cool stuff on Twitter, by creating The Joker there. But I’m not very sure of that one, since I also have the Riddler, Two Face and even Rachel Dawes following me now!!!
The last one is from NIIT (via Alootechie) , which has created a character called Preeti Technani, who has an Orkut profile, a wordpress blog, who is positioned as a mentor, but manages to plug NIIT in between 😉 Lastly, here’s a clue on how not to use social media.
While on the context of social media, here are two great reads – one is on getting people who don’t use social media to use it, and the other is on agencies of the future.
until next time, be social