Whilst this technology is very much in its infancy, there is some amazing work being undertaken – and this is a video from Lee Felarca showing what is possible.

What does the future hold?

Augmented Reality Texture Extraction Experiment from Lee Felarca on Vimeo.

Rod Geoghegan is Marketing Director at Wax COmmunications

The ISP have written about the win for Wax Communications at the MAA Globes Awards 2009, picking up two ‘Orders of Merit’ for Waterstone’s ‘The Big Book Bank’campaign.

The win by Wax Communications of two ‘Orders of Merit’ for our CSR campaign for Waterstones – ‘The Big Book Bank’ has been featured by Creative Matc.

Wax Communications has won two Orders of Merit at the MAA Globes 2009 awards – for Waterstone’s ‘The Big Book Bank’ campaign.

Congratulations!

The first Order of Merit is for Best Digital Communications Campaign (awarded to the campaign that uses Internet, Mobile Phones or other forms of digital interactive communication to effectively market a product or service) and the second for Best Trade Marketing Or Account

Specific Campaign (awarded to the campaign that does the most to maximise the impact of a product or service within the retail trade or channel, and/or to Client sales forces, includes Key Account activities).

The awards ceremony will be held on October 22, in Boston.

The awards come hot on the heels of the MCCA awards which the campaign also won, including the MCCA Grand Prix.

A colleague across the Media Square group noticed these. Have a look at the following two executions and spot the similarity.

Well, there may well be an original idea.

Work by Kihwan Kim, Dr. Sangmin-Oh, Jeonggyu Lee and Professor Dr. Irfan Essa whom are working on Augmented Reality have created a mash-up of Goodle Earth, Microsoft Visual Earth and user generated video to demonstrate how we may, in the future, be able to interact online with the real world.

Rod Geoghegan is Marketing Director at Wax Communciations.

I’ve been doing some thinking this weekend.

The question in my head has been – should we treat customers that complain online, on forums and such like any differently to those that complain directly? (I should add that’s not all I’ve been thinking about!)

In this time of forums and the ability to anonymously whinge about everything and everybody, there is understandable reticence for brands to enter a dialogue with the range of forum monkeys.

Just pop onto a fanboy site and experience the flaming you’ll get for simply suggesting that their ‘thing’ of choice isn’t perfect and you’ll see what I mean.

But is this the right approach? It’s long been considered by both customer care and direct marketing that a complaining customer is an opportunity to put things right and maybe even create a new brand advocate.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced poor service at some point, it’s a fact of life, however it’s not the poor service that’s the problem it’s what happens next.

Just watch Watchdog, by far and away the complaints are about customer service after an issue, if it’s all sorted then no problem, however if it takes months/years and still its a problem then that’s different.

Fixing something is also a brilliant way of creating that Holy Grail of marketing – word of mouth – just stop and think about it, the last time you had an issue with a company and they fixed it how many people did you tell? And the last time you didn’t have an issue – how many people did you tell then?

We’ve all got the chance to go out there and interact directly with our/ our brands / our clients customers – even if it’s scary sometimes, isn’t this something we should take advantage of?

One word of warning though, make sure you respond in a timely manner.

If you sit on your hands thinking about it for too long all you’ll do is re-open a discussion that’s probably dead. But if you get in on time, rise above the flaming and hold your head high, I’m convinced you’ll win in the end.

iPhone apps of the week

Bump – it’s on the latest Apple TV ad, it’s an app that lets you transfer your contact info from one iPhone to another by simply Bumping you’re hands together. Nice.

Fuel Prices UK- nice little app that searches your location and lets you know the cheapest place to fill up your fuel based mode of transport.

It costs £4.99 but it’s an app that might just pay for itself – for example, at the moment up near Chalk Farm it tells me there are 2 garages very close together – 1 at 108p/l the other at 106p/l.

On a 20l weekly fill that’s 40p a week – or £21 a year. Bargain, and of course. Genius.

Toot, toot.

Craig

Wax has entered The Big Book Bank campaign for  Waterstone’s into the European IMC and Interbnational Globes awards.

The multi-award winning campaign was devised by Wax and recently picked up the Grand Priz at the ISP  Awards 2009.

We’ll update you on our pogress! And good luck to all the teams here and at Watertone’s involved in the campaign.

Whilst digital natives are immersed in the digital space, digital immigrants are still coming to terms with opportunities (and also the technologies).

To this end, Mickey Rooney talks to Ben Stiller about Twitter.

Brilliant.

Rod Geoghegan is Marketing Director of Wax Communciations

Be careful what you tweet.

Well, if you want to be taken seriously that is.Research undertaken by Pear Analytics (Twitter Study, August 2009) has concluded that 41% of tweets are ‘pointless babble’.

That said, 1% of the (addicted) users create 35% of the content (Source: Quantcast.com)

So is there is a role for micro-blogging within the context of a social media plan? Well, yes, there is – though it is about creating relevant and engaging content (and interesting comments, opinions, tip-offs) that ensure you are on the TweetDeck

Be it a brand or an individual tweeting, do you want the tweet to be ‘ interesting’ and read or ‘pointless’ and ignored? And when you create pointless content, the second thing you do is damage the reputation of the sender.

Rod Geoghegan is Marketing Director at Wax Communications

A lot has been written about how social media is changing the way we communicate. From a world with television, radio and print to one where if Facebook was a country, it would be the 4th largest in the world.

Eric Qualman, author of ‘Socionomics’ writes about his  take on how this is impacting on brands and in his promotional video.