Tired of making appointments the old fashioned way?

For the course User Interface Design we had to create a new application.  We came up with the Slice of Clockpie application.

In these modern times students have very busy lives. They have classes, jobs, are involved in a sorority or fraternity, play sports and want to make appointments with their friends. Making appointments can be very difficult. Because students have so many activities it can be hard to find a date or time when they can go to the movies or just have a drink with a friend. Normal agendas and agendas on a phone do not solve these problems. Making appointments often consists of endless comparisons of boring schedules to make an appointment people might not even write down and eventually forget.

To solve these problems we created the Slice of Clockpie application. The objective of this new application is that students can easily make appointments with their friends on their smartphone. The target group consists of students from 18 to 25 years old. They will be able to check their friends’ agenda so that they can see if their friends are available with only one quick glance. Besides that, they are also able to invite their friends for appointments, receive appointments from their friends, plan their own personal appointments and many other possibilities.

We made a prototype of the application in PowerPoint and made a promotional video, which you can watch below. (I know, I am a really bad actress)

Have fun watching the movie!

Can friendships be formed online?

Online friendships are a hot item. Many is written about this subject, but can true friendships be formed online? When Internet was new it seemed impossible to make real friends online. Today, Internet has grown and developed, it offers many options for computer mediated communication. A lot of studies have been done on online friendship, many of these studies show that true friendship can be formed online.

Research indicates that it is possible to form a close friendship through computer mediated communication. However, forming an online friendship will take longer than forming a friendship in real life. The reason that it will take longer to form an online friendship is that impressions and cues (non-verbal communication) take longer to communicate (Walther & Parks, 2002).  Cues that are shared through computer mediated communication are different than the cues that are shared in face-to-face communication. The cues that are shared online are emoticons, avatars, nicknames, abbreviations like LOL, identity markers and multimodality (Skype, webcam conversations). These cues take longer to decode than “normal” non-verbal communication.

Face to face friendships are usually stronger than new online friendships. However, after a year the online friendship will be even strong as a face-to-face friendship. In some cases online friendships (mainly friendships between people with different genders) are even stronger and better than face-to-face friendships.

All and all, there can be concluded that friendships can be formed online. However, I still prefer “old fashioned” face-to-face friendships. What do you prefer?

 

Sources:

Chan, D.K.-S. & Cheng, G.H.-L. (2004). A comparison of offline and online friendship qualities of different stages of relationship development. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. 2004; 21; 305.

Walther, J.B. & Parks, M.R. (2002). Cues filtered out, cues filtered in: Computer-mediated communication and relationships.

Holiday review sites

Almost everybody loves to go on holiday. However, nobody likes to arrive at his or her holiday address and find out that the destination or the accommodation is a disappointment.

Thankfully, nowadays we don’t have to rely on positive descriptions and amazing pictures in holiday brochures. There are many websites where you can read and write reviews of your holiday destination or accommodation. People seem to have more faith in the reviews by other travellers than in the information that is available at the travelling agency. 

 I for instance would never book a holiday without checking the Dutch holiday review site Zoover. And if I am really honest, I usually look at the reviews at Tripadvisor and Holiday Check as well. I guess you could say that I am a bit of a “review junkie”.

But what makes us trust other traveller’s reviews?  I found a very interesting study on this subject. The results show that there are four important factors that influence the choice of source and their perceived trustworthiness. These factors are called the “trust factors”.

The first factor is expertise; this means that the source has to have relevant expertise about a accommodation or destination. The second factor is experience; for instance people who have visited multiple all-inclusive resorts are more reliable sources while reviewing a all-inclusive resort. Affinity is the third factor; this means that people find reviewers more reliable if they have the same characteristics, standards, viewpoints and demands as the review seeker. The last track record is the track record of the reviewers; review seekers find reviewers more trustworthy if the source has previously provided successful reviews to the review seeker.

 

Source: Heath, Mr Tom and Motta, Professor Enrico and Petre, Dr Marian (2006) Person to Person Trust Factors in Word of Mouth Recommendation. In Proceedings CHI2006 Workshop on Reinventing Trust, Collaboration, and Compliance in Social Systems (Reinvent06), Montreal, Canada.

 

Sapph's mistakes

The Dutch lingerie brand Sapph lost the so called “lingerie war”. The brand copied several designs from the famous Dutch lingerie designer Marlies Dekkers. Marlies Dekkers is known for her bras with different kinds of straps above the cups. Sapph copied several design from Marlies Dekkers. Marlies Dekkers decided to sue Sapph and won the case this week. Sapph has to stop selling the lingerie immediately and has to compensate Marlies Dekkers financially.  

 

Marlies Dekkers

Sapph already had to deal with many negative publicity in the past.  Their first campaign became a media hype. There were even questions asked in the Dutch parliament whether the campaign was too sexy. There have been many complaints about the campaigns of Sapph in the last three years. In July of this year people who did not agree with the campaign ruined the billboards of Sapph. Despite of all the complaints, Sapph is still using the same communication strategy. There has been a load of negative publicity about Sapph.

The main cause of all the complaints and negative publicity is that most women cannot relate to the women that Sapph uses in their campaigns. The models they use are not a realistic reflection of normal Dutch women. The models are portrayed as a sex symbol.  Some billboards can even be seen as women unfriendly.  In my opinion Sapph should really think about changing their communication strategy and come up with more original designs and classier campaigns. What do you think about Sapph?

Women unfriendly billboard:

The successful Hi campaign

The Dutch telecom provider that launched their Facebook “like” campaign in March expanded the campaign with guerilla marketing.  The Hi commercial portraits a night out of a couple of friends, the night consists of Facebook updates with pictures of the activities that the friends are doing.

One Facebook update in the commercial is that one of the friends is pretending to ride the bicycle on the symbol of a bicycle that is drawn on the cycle path, while he is lying down on the cycle path. 

Hi commercial

Hi noticed that many people were imitating the part of the commercial with the bicycle on Facebook and Twitter and decided to respond with guerilla marketing. They used environment friendly graffiti that is easy to wash off to draw a person, a Hi logo and a Facebook “like” button on several cycle paths in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Haque. According to the Hi’s spokesperson, Yvonne Prins, it was a spontaneous action. 

The Hi campaign is already a huge (online) success. The Facebookpage of Hi has now 43.000 fans! Before the campaign they only had 1000 fans. Besides that, Hi is also in the top 3 of most liked brands on Facebook. 

Hi really hit the right spot with their target group and sets a very good example of a successful off- and online campaign.

 

Source: http://www.adformatie.nl/nieuws/bericht/hi-kalkt-fietsers-op-fietspaden

5 social media trends for this summer

Almost everybody is aware of the fact that social media are hot. Social media keeps maturing and there are a lot of developments. But what are the upcoming trends and what can we expect this summer?

Tim Gray wrote an article on the website Business2Community with the 5 most important social media trends fort his summer.

Trend 1: Location, location, location

Location based services is an information or entertainment device, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. These services will be a hot item this summer.

Trend 2: It’s a group thing

Several sites such as Groupon offer products or services with an enormous discount.  They have different deals every day. These sites have many followers that buy the deals and tell their friends about them. Companies that offer their services or products via Groupon can be certain that they will have many new clients. This is a trend because “everybody” is joining sites like Groupon! I am already addicted to Groupon. In America the retail chain Walmart even started their own groupsite. 

Trend 3: Swimming in the stream

Companies and brands are overloading the consumers with messages and tweets on social media sites and advertising. Therefore, consumers will forget or not even read their messages. That is why it is important that companies deliver a message inside the target audiences “stream”. If the message of the company is truly attractive for the target group, they will actually read it and even press the “like” button on Facebook or retweet it.

Trend 4: Social search

The opinions of friends are weighed more heavily when search delivers us relevant information. When you use a search engine like Google it will be possible to find opinions/messages on social media sites as well.

Trend 5: Going mobile

Mobile marketing will increase. Because of the Ipad and other tablets there are more possibilities for mobile marketing.  Besides that, it is also easier to shop online with your mobile phone. According to recent comScore research, 65 million Facebook users already use Facebook on their smartphone. These numbers will continue to grow.

Can emotions be expressed online?

 Face-to-face communication contains lots of emotions. The person you are talking to can tell by your body language, voice and facial expressions how you are feeling. But how does this work when you are communicating online through Skype or even through instant messaging or e-mail?

Martijn Goudbeek is a professor at Tilburg University and has done lots of research on emotions.

My teammates and I interviewed him about his work and on online expression of emotions.

You can check out the interview below:

Language use in advertisements

English is one of the most spoken languages in the world. It is also the most frequently used language for marketing and communication campaigns. Everywhere we go we are being confronted with English phrases and slogans. A lot of slogans and text in ads that are being used for the Dutch market are in English as well.

Research by de Boer, Hornikx and van Meurs that was conducted in 2010 shows that the Dutch consumers better appreciate ads with easy to understand English slogans or text than ads with a slogan or text in their own language. Ads with harder to understand English slogans or text are appreciated the same as advertisements with Dutch slogans or text. The research did not focus on different types of product categories; they only used magazine ads for cars.

For the course research practicum BDM that I had to do for my pre-master, my teammates and me did more research on language use in advertising. We chose two different product categories: groceries/ household products and lifestyle products and searched for ads in those categories in both English and Dutch. Students of Tilburg University gave their opinion in a questionnaire on all the slogans and text in the chosen ads.

                                                                                                   

         English

                              

 




  

versus Dutch

 













The results of the research are that the ads with English slogans or text are better appreciated in both categories than the Dutch ads. Does this mean that we like English better than our own language? Maybe a good research subject for my master thesis next year.