The Social Bazaar

Screenshot from the Buzzworld app on Facebook

Together with MRM Worldwide we put together this social utility to provide social access to the Mastercard Buzzworld campaign via your Facebook account.

The main campaign takes the “buzz” on top holiday destinations – comments and posts by travellers around the world – and promotes it on the main campaign site: http://www.pricelesstravel.com

The app then extends the campaign into the Facebook social network by adding social features and actions. These included:

• share your upcoming trip with friends
• comment on the holiday plans of friends – for instance giving advice on places to see
• send friends a virtual holiday gift such as a bucket and spade or a virtual cocktail!

Try the app for yourself: http://apps.facebook.com/buzzworld

On my amiando ticket to a techcrunch event on Thursday that I printed from my PC I found there was a funny deranged chess board pattern in top right corner.

Sticking my camera barcode reader onto it I found I could “read” it and discover the underlying number.

Turns out its called a “QR Code” and is a type of mobile phone friendly bar code.

It works by scanning the code into your phone which converts into either a long number, a telephone number or web address.

To try it use the QR Code above:

1. See if your mobile phone supports QR Codes (Nokia N82, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8GB, E66, E71, E90 or 6220 Classic)

2. Go to applications / Barcode

3. Open your camera shutter

4. Point it at the QR code at the top of this post until it registers

5. Go to the URL and see the funny picture.

I tried this for the first time today and it worked fairly well.

I guess this would suit an offline media campaign where you want to direct response to a complex URL.

So say for example say I was advertising Mamma Mia on DVD I could include the following QR Code on the billboard. 

In theory it will let you Pre-order Mamma Mia on DVD for £12.98 and save £9.01.

Unfortunately I found that this particular QR code was too big for my phone to read. It’s also a bit fiddly to get working in real life. Let me know if you have more luck!

However it does save on typing and is faster than typing out a long URL on your mobile phone.

To create  your own QR Code go to http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Apart from a sign at the airport saying “Special Alien Registration” I thought all was ordinary about San Francisco and the home of Facebook. But after a few hours it became clear that there’s a tech excitement in the air that we just don’t get back in London.

Take the border officer stamping my passport who said “Facebook eh? Yes it used to be for school kids but now it’s commercial” or the Bangalore bound microsoft exec who perked up his ears at the words “social media” to grab my card. Pass by the Apple shop and there’s still an iQueue reaching round half the block at five in the afternoon, many days after the iPhone launch.

Then at the adknowledge drinks party I got to meet the co-founder of MySpace, Brett Brewer, who is putting together a dream team for brands wanting to engage with social media. With the purchase of Dwayne Lafleur’s cubics they have a super market share and with John Cole and team, now their presence in London.

Snap of a Wall Street Journal article featuring Zynga 23 july 200

Then, here in my Wall Street Journal, in the technology section a large article on how Zynga is outstripping the others with its known science on building and optimising Facebook social games.

The message is clear – the technorati here in San Francisco are betting with their wallets that social networks are here to stay, have massive commercial potential and legacy brands (which now includes web 1.0 companies) will lose out if they haven’t defined a strategy and invested in their social media presence.

This is Nudge‘s market place – the bridging point between brands and users – by either creating new applications or piggy backing existing ones through deeply integrated advertising, Nudge can ensure our clients get the commercial edge on their laggard competitors.

Roll on the Facebook conference itself. )

That’s the advice I’d give any aspiring web entrepreneur. Take a market, find the niche within in, identify what their itch (the thing that’s annoyinng them) and provide a solution to the itch.

Take three successful web apps:

• Eventbrite helps you manage tickets for your event. The niche is people running small ish events (20 to 100 people) who can’t afford big conferencing systems but don’t want to have to di it manually. Eventbrite charge 50p per ticket (pretty expensive if you’re running a big 1000 people event but for under 100 people it makes it worth it)
• Unfuddle is focusing on computer software developers (a pretty small niche) who need what’s called a “subversion repository” – it’s a place where you can store your computer code so that others can work on it at the same time. Everyone needs a repository like this when programming but they are a hassle to set up. From around $4 a month unfuddle runs it all for you (for 4 projects) as well as project management tools thrown in.
• Freshbooks solves the problem of sending out a regular monthly invoice (by paper or by email) for a set amount. MicroAid’s newsletter tool: Newsletto uses it to great effect, especially when billing schools with www.school-newsletter.com who still need a paper invoice and can’t use credit cards.

In fact school newsletter is a good example of how web apps work best when targeted at specific niches. The MicroAid team in fact gets more interest from users who want the school newsletter than from those who are looking for a generic newsletter tool despite the underlying product being essentially the same.

Too many web entrepreneurs start too general and never find an itch in a niche (try pronouncing it the American way as ‘nitch’) and their web application dies because anyone could use it but there wasn’t a specific set of people who had to use it.