We’ve talked about Groupon and Pay With A Tweet a few times as an example of how to harness the power of social buying. This week we saw 2 examples of brands that understand that mechanism really well.

Uniqlo set up a system called Lucky Counter, where, if you tweeted about the product, you could bring down its price. Not just for yourself, but for all other people that took part in the campaign. Obviously there was a minimum price set, but people managed to get the price of a jumper down from £24.99 to £9.99. Not bad value for a Tweet.

Another example that was less publicised was Skoda Belgium who also this week launched Fabia I Like. Their currency of choice was the ‘Facebook Like’: the more you Like, the less you Pay. The difference here is that they only sell 1 car and use an auction system to decide who gets to buy. Less social and more of a PR stunt. But still an interesting example.

Cash location

According to a report from the US based ABI Research, location-based marketing will increase from only about $43 million this year to $1.8 billion by 2015.

Find a good blog

Ever since Technorati shut down its Blogger Index, it’s been quite a hard slog to find large blogs in different categories. Google’s own Blog Search only returned blog posts on particular search terms. But now there’s a new way to search for Blogs on Google. Try it with say, financial services or Wags.

Wave in a box

Sure, Google Wave is dead. But even Google Wave’s biggest detractors thought the tool did explore powerful new ways in which people could collaborate on documents and more. The good news is that Google has announced that they will open-source Wave’s code. They call it Wave in a Box.

Who pays for Social Media?

Companies are waking up to social media. But which department’s responsibility is it? And perhaps more importantly – who pays for it? Brand? PR? Direct Response?

Shag the bear

A neat example of how you can use YouTube in a creative, interactive way from TippEx this week. After watching a short movie where a hunter is about to shoot a bear, you get asked to influence the story. Whatever you put in will load a different movie. And yes, they anticipated that we all would put in ‘made sweet love’.

Creative of the week – Dominic Wilcox

My new project to make a creative thing each day for 30 days. If you would like me to spend a day at your work/home/whereever email me #adf

That was a tweet from Product Designer and all round creative thinker @dominicwilcox a few weeks ago. As part of Anti Design Festival, he’s now doing exactly that: make a new thing each day of the month. See what he can do with one of those pop-up train food tray thingies. And how he turns a bread into a lamp. Hopefully we’ll get him over to RAAK HQ before the end of the month.

Tech insight of the week – Twitter’s new API: prepare to mainline your tweets

The effects that Twitter User Streams and Site Streams are going to have on application user experience is bound to blow the most desensitized, information-soaked mind of even the most hardcore Twitter addict … at least for a while. Read More.

Datasift – Twitter track on steroids

Curation and filtering are becoming increasingly important in today’s data tsunami, especially on a fast-moving and ephemeral medium like Twitter.

Datasift, which was announced yesterday, seems to be a great tool for that. It’s a service from the people behind TweetMeme that allows you to capture tweets based on a wide spectrum of parameters (like location, links,…) and filter them accordingly. Example: you can get all the tweets from each Premiership stadium, filter out swearwords and output it as one stream. It’s open, aimed at developers and works on a graphical interface like Yahoo Pipes. So when it launches – within the next month, they say – we’ll soon see some very exciting applications.

Yet again it was the snifferdog that is Robert Scoble that brought it to our attention with a video interview. And as he says around 08:32, “Thaat’s reaaally cooool!”.

The Ad Clash of the Titans

Apple is set to launch its iAds platform for the iPhone and iPad in the UK this September. Something Google will definitely love. Reports the UK Guardian:

“Separately, Google has adopted what its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, calls a “mobile first” approach, prioritising investment in a medium that has become “fundamental to everything we do”. With the iPhone moving into mass market territory and the iPad selling 200,000 units a week, Apple’s decision to start selling mobile advertising seems likely to concentrate a few media minds.”

They continue:

“There are early signs that mobile advertising, like everything else touched by Cupertino’s genius, will turn to gold. During the eight weeks leading up to the presentation in San Francisco, Apple sold $60m-worth of iAds to the likes of Unilever and Disney. This compares with the $250m mobile online display revenue generated across the whole of 2009 in the US.”

But the Guardian points out that like with Google, Apple’s ad service is not necessarily good news for the traditional media owners.

1 in every 10 phones an iPhone

So how mass market is the iPhone really? In a seperate report, MobileSquared says that by the end of this year Apple’s share of the handset market will rise to 7.9% to 6.4 million users, up 195% from the 2.17 million at the end of 2009. And by 2012 one in every 10 phones in the UK will be an iPhone.

The MTV TJ – Twitter kills the video star

If you’re your company’s Social Media Administrator, it’s time to start arguing for a pay-rise. Because MTV have just put a rather high value on ‘the person-that-tweets’.

This week the tv network hired the first ever Twitter Jockey. In true reality tv style, they ran a competition and picked @gabifresh, a ‘plus-size fashion blogger’, to be their official Twitter voice and face. Value of the job: a whopping $100,000!

Search like a man – the Real Old Spice numbers

W + K, the agency behind the spectacular Old Spice campaign, took down a video case study with a blow by blow account of how they managed to increase sales. But US marketing man Bud Caddell hunted it down (without breaking a sweat, naturally – nudge nudge wink wink). Here’s an interesting stat from that.

“More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech.”

Google Wave gets killed

Not for the first time Google has pulled a high profile product of theirs after it failed to perform as expected. Wessel opined on our blog about the difference between Google and Facebook, and their respective engineering, social & media nous.

“On all accounts Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is very smart. But it’s an open question whether he has the mathematical wherewithal to build something as complex as the Google algorithm. Lucky for him he did not start university in 1995 when the web could not support a Facebook and needed a Google Search.”

Foursquare visualisation

In the section ‘not everything needs to have a function’, comes WeePlaces, a service that visualises your Foursquare check-ins on a timeline. in a beautiful way. So go back in time, see where you hang and re-trace your steps in style.

Creative of the week – Luciana Haill

The other day we saw musical chameleon Matthew Herbert do some amazing things with live sampling at the East London Field Day festival.

But taking live electronic music one step further is Luciana Haill, who creates music based on brainwaves. Using EEG she scans her or the audience’s brain activity and translates that live into both visuals as well as soundscapes.

Tech insight of the week – the art of designing Error Messages

Progressively more money and effort is being thrown into beautiful, usable and mind blowing web sites. Too often, however, the critical task of writing and designing error messages are left to the developer to improvise. This is a huge mistake. So Adriaan wrote a great blogpost about it.

In spite of boasting hundreds of members of staff with PHDs, Google has not launched any product nearly as successful as their first one: Search.

Lest we forget, they bought Blogger, they bought YouTube after the failure of Google Video. Buzz and Wave has been spectacular failures, Latitude has not nearly been as big as it should have been. Google Maps is good, but it has a limited scope. I love Gmail, but some of my friends don’t like the way it deals with conversations.

Google Search could not be more simple from a user point of view. The real magic – the ranking of links – was conjured by PageRank, the basis of which was Google founders Brin & Page’s academic thesis at Stanford. But it was hidden under the hood of this beguilingly simple interface. Brin & Page were not much concerned with user behaviour. All users had to do is type and hit a button.

On all accounts Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg is very smart. But it’s an open question whether he has the mathematical wherewithal to build something as complex as the Google algorithm. Lucky for him he did not start university in 1995 when the web could not support a Facebook and needed a Google Search.

When Facebook launched almost a decade later  it had no single feature that did not already have a life elsewhere on the web. Picture albums? Flickr. Person-to-person messaging, Profiles, Posts? MySpace, LinkedIn and a plethora of other sites had combinations of these features.

But it was the way Facebook used and combined existing functionality that made it new, exciting & appealing to masses of users. Especially the realisation that real identities actually matter deeply to users was monumental.

And Zuckerburg has proven over and over that this street-wise savviness was not a fluke. An Application platform and the Personal Activity feed that brought the news from your crowd were added later. And both were strokes of genius.

But neither of them are amazing feats of programming. Especially the Activity Feed. Since then many other platforms, from Ning to BuddyPress to one we have built – the Guided Platform -, incorporates a feed of activities of a users’ contacts.

Facebook has also made some difficult but smart moves in response to the threat from Twitter. And Facebook Connect and the Opengraph API has been a huge success.

All of these moves did not require doctorates in engineering. What it did require is an understanding of technology and more importantly of media, how people interact with media and what they want from media.

The internet was born out of the convergence of the telecommunications, computing and media industries. Early in the net’s history engineers reigned surpreme. They still are key. But the environment is increasingly also requiring the soft skills of the media type.

The time where killer apps and services were mostly amazing feats of engineering is coming to an end. See Wolfram Alpha. Going forward it will be those that can also identify what motivates & animates people successfully that will have the real competitive advantage.

Below an interesting discussion – between Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, Search Engine Expert Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble and Steve Gillmor on the Gillmor Gang on why Google Wave failed, Flipboard, Location (amongst other things).

It was an amazing app for collaboration, and between me and the people I worked with over long distances, we managed to create a level of being there on it, almost as if we were in the same room. The fact that you could see participants type text while they typed it made the chat experience revolutionary, and real-time, almost like a real conversation.

Then, today, I saw that it was killed.

At first, I was filled with a feeling of great loss. One of my most favorite apps, one that I have evangelized endlessly at parties, screaming over very loud music to very drunk, exceedingly disinterested friends. One that I thought would revolutionize the internet, again … and then it struck me:

I haven’t used Google Wave even once in the last two months. Maybe even longer. Why? Because there was no-one there. Why didn’t users warm up to it?

Too much platform, too little function

As a platform Google Wave was extremely strong, and there was nothing you couldn’t build on it. Despite this, however, it came out with no form of notification system. Long after a notification robot surfaced from the user community, Wave added it as built in functionality.

Too radical

The shift users were supposed to make from existing communication protocols (email, chat, voip) to a communications platform (anything can be built) was too big. This is a difficult one for me. It was revolutionary; and well thought out. It was truly useful. But it was too much, too soon. Do we really live in a world where only incremental changes are tolerated?

The optimistic truth is, considering everything, Google Wave could have been a success if someone depended on it to be successful. If it was the property of a startup, with lots of Venture Capital who believed in the product, it would have worked, given enough time, effort and patience. Google is not a startup anymore. They don’t want to nurture ideas to fruition anymore. They’ve done that, bought the T-shirt, and worn it to bits. They have their products, and they’ll only add products that work instantly.

So … will someone buy Wave from Google? Will they even be interested in selling it? Probably not, but I can only hope …

Twitter is like riding a bike – you can explain the action, but not the motion.

Well, I suspect the other 96.5 % of what Google Wave is will only become apparent after we have used it.

And like Evan Williams found with Twitter, not even Google knows how it will end up being used, or indeed whether it will take off. Having said that here is a another video by the makers of Google Wave on its action.