We all know the famous quote “Content is King”, and it is. But it was coined at a time before social media or mobile. The rise of each of these technologies brought their own King, being Context (in a mobile environment) and Community (on social media).
This sounded like a good starting point to ask ourselves the question: “who actually IS the King?”
For the next Trends Session on 13th of June we lined up 3 speakers with case studies on the topics Content, Community and Context. Evert-Jan De Kort will show the advantage of content for his brand Choqoa, Kurt Pappaert from KBC will share the details on their community efforts and Frederic Herzeele from Belgacom will talk about the importance of context.
Register and join us!
Last week, Tanguy De Lestré, founder of Mobile Monday Brussels visited the Cleverwood offices. During lunch, we took the opportunity to discuss a few applications we discovered lately. An improvised mobile apps lunch indeed! We talked about Recettes 4saisons, BetterStreet, InstaPlace and (of course) the Mobile Monday application. All those applications are free or have a free version.
Recette 4saisons is a food application that provides a lot of information about the vegetable/fruit of the month. Based on this vegetable or fruit of the month, the applications presents you healthy recipes, lets you create shopping lists and encourages you to buy local and seasonal products.
It also has a built in calendar to browse seasonal products month by month and to add these directly to your shopping list. A fine beautiful designed and user friendly little app for healthy inspiration on your daily cooking.
BetterStreet is a citizen application that helps you report problems and suggestions to your town in less than 30 seconds via smartphone.
Take a picture, enter a category, add a comment (optional) and tap ‘Send’. The photo is automatically geo-localized via the GPS of your smartphone and your municipality is notified. Once submitted, the application notifies you of status changes of your request/remark. Nice and easy app to report things to your mayor (not the Foursquare one 
).
Instaplace is a cool application that adds special skins and customized text on your smartphone pictures.
You can share on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, by mail or SMS with various desciptions from the place where your are – on top of your favourite photo that you have just snapped with your iPhone.
Within seconds, this app turns ordinary pictures into colorful postcards, instantly shareable with your network . The skins available on the free version are limited. To get the full version, you’ll have to buy it (it will also remove the ads displayed on top of the app).
Finally, the Mobile Monday Brussels Application promotes the Mobile Mondays organisation and their events. Everything you need to know about the next Mobile Events like Mobile Convention Amsterdam, The Next APIs and Mobile or the next Appsmarathon.eu is listed. You can also subscribe to the newsletter, check pictures or consult slideshare presentations.
What is really interesting is the live U-stream channel feature available during Mobile Mondays events. No worries anymore if you can’t make it to an event, you only have to check the live stream!
To follow them on Twitter: @momobxl & #momobxl
Next time we’ll discuss applications that help you live more healthy. Any suggestion of applications we should take a look at?
If SEO is a fascinating world, SEO for social platforms is definitely one of the most interesting challenges when it comes to strengthen your personal or business brand’s visibility.
Last week during our Friday Session #55 we enjoyed the presentation by Philippe Hoevenaeghel who shared with us some tips&tricks on how to improve your online presences for search engines.
First of all, you have to follow some guidelines to properly optimize your overall social media strategy for search. But how and why does every social signal improve your ranking? And what’s the future for different social signals regarding to SEO?
Philippe guided us through the specific elements of information for certain networks you should supply to your profile in order to optimize them.
And, last but not least, he gave us the most useful tip: as social SEO is not an exact science, what really matters is who’s between the keyboard and the chair… that’s you!
“Get me out of my comfort zone” I asked the Cleverwood team when joining them last month. And that’s what they did! I got the opportunity to be one of the speakers for this year’s edition of the Shoppersday, one of the leading events when it comes to retail in Belgium, with no less than 500 participants.
Speaking of getting out of my comfort zone…
My time was short, the audience was mixed, so I thought they could use a practical presentation. OK, it’s inspiring to see how technology could change the retail but already today there are a lot of challenges.”So let’s focus on tomorrow’s opportunities”, was my advice. So I identified 10 practical and feasible tactics in my presentation.
During the rest of the day it became clear that retail is struggling with digital. And I can surely understand why: compared with the daily footprint of their stores the traffic on the online channels is limited. “But the engagement is high”, was my reply.
And those who are brave and bold and launch a new soft drink (Mountain Dew) which you can purchase exclusively online still are tied to the ‘classical’ order fullfillment (but that’s no excuse to not make your site mobile friendly ).
In any case I’m happy to see new initiatives like Promolife, a 1-stop-shop your e-coupons, with mobile apps on their way.
And in the end it is coming down to the customer: focus on the benefits, give value not technology. Spot the opportunities, not the obstacles.
But, dear retail sector, if the study you conducted for the Shoppersday shows that word-of-mouth triggers 39% of the Belgian consumers to try a new product, the future is already here, no?
In a recent article (Feb. 17th), Lara Van Dievoet from Trends Tendances Magazine interviewed Cleverwood consultants Caroline Maerten, Candice Vanhacht and Pelle Craen about best practices to keep a community engaged on social media channels.
The social presence of a brand is important but is only the first step to social media marketing. The main challenge for brands is to establish a strong relationship with fans and followers and keep their community alive. Below we summarize the nine key takeaways. The full article (in French) can be read here.
1. A brand needs to know and understand its fans for better conversation and interaction. The tone of voice on social media is more direct and personal than in traditional media and allows brands to develop a closer relationship with its customers.
2. To establish a good relationship with its customers, a brand has to know where, when and how people talk about it on social networks. Hence the importance to monitor online channels on the brand’s name, the brand’s products and brand’s related keywords.
3. For an efficient customer relationship it is important to align the customer service of a company to its social media management.
4. Whatever the messages a brand receives on its social channels, the answer has to be efficient and polite.
5. More than answering questions, a brand has to post continuos relevant and attractive content to build and maintain a strong relationship with its fans/followers.
6. Post quality content by asking two questions: Why would people be interested in this? Why would they share it with their friends?
7. Social media are different from traditional media: people who follow a brand don’t want to be harassed by advertisement and pushed content. They prefer something which reflects who they are and make them feel involved.
8. A day-to-day communication turns the dialogue with fans more dynamic and less intrusive.
9. The number of fans is not the best KPI to measure the impact of a Facebook fan page. It is essential for a brand to understand its community by keeping the conversation ongoing. Focus on measuring interactions and engagement to define impact.