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Developed for McGraw Hill Higher Education Education UK, PRACTICE Marketing is a 3D turn-based Serious Game intended to teach college kids the principles of product marketing and competition. In the game, players are able to fully experience the seven underlying principles upon which to base marketing strategy and efforts: Image, Differentiation, Repeat Business, Ease of Doing Business, Networking, Likeability, and Emotion. Gameplay You’ve been selected to manage a company’s new entry into the backpack market. Your first step in the game is to create a strong product that appeals to a specific market segment and price it appropriately.

You are upfront presented with the info you need to analyze the market, provided by market research, who has narrowed the backpack market down to five potential segments for you to consider targeting, selecting the one that looks the most promising.

Once you have selected a target market, you can use the backpack builder to design a pack that meets the needs of its particular demographic.

Customer support rules are rapidly changing, as unprecedented numbers of customers use social media channels to express options, seek assistance and purchase products. Customers have quickly adopted Facebook, Twitter and Google, as their primary means for gathering information regarding a company’s products and services. In many cases social media customers receive support from multiple departments within a company but are isolated from the contact center. This is because the traditional contact center is generally not ready for reaching out to the social customer or will only provide secondary support when its telephone agents are free. Regardless of how companies choose to market and support their social media customers, they should apply the same basic procedures found in contact centers to positively engage their customers

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The future of marketing is "organic marketing", replaces interruptive tactics with customer focused ones.

The further disconnection from the desktop and being mobile - using mobile and cloud marketing!

Joint essentially turns any Twitter hashtag into an IRC (Internet Relay Channel)-like chat room, which is integrated with a realtime hashtag stream from Twitter.

you’re trying to engage in a conversation with someone on Twitter that goes beyond a few “@ replies”, you’re either forced to DM or take the conversation elsewhere. Joint allows users to easily join a group chat, as well as discuss notable or popular hashtags. For instance, of late “#irene” has become a much-used hashtag, as Hurricane Irene is poised to hit the East Coast. Joint could become a very useful resource for people looking to easily congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or events, live, from any location.

because tweeting with hashtags means that your tweets get archived and live forever on search engines, etc., many people feel uncomfortable about having public conversations (about more private issues, especially) on Twitter.

It may be difficult to describe what exactly the phrase “an internet of things” means, but the pieces of the puzzle that are required for that to develop are all here today, ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco. Those puzzle pieces include ubiquitous network connectivity, cloud-based services, cheap assembly of electronics, social design, open collaboration tools and low-volume sales channels. When put together, Kuniavsky said, they create an “innovation ecosystem” that is the foundation for an internet of things.

HP and Shell are working on a Mega Channel Seismic Survey System that will wirelessly connect millions of sensors ten meters apart from one another for oil and gas exploration. The system promises a highly detailed 4D image of oil and gas reservoirs below the earth’s surface.

UW researchers say this new type of transistor could one day understand or even control body functions.

Materials scientists are looking at these proton-based microscopic transistors for future advances in prosthetics and biological sensing.

In the body, protons activate “on” and “off” switches and are key players in biological energy transfer. Ions open and close channels in the cell membrane to pump things in and out of the cell. Animals, including humans, use ions to flex their muscles and transmit brain signals. A machine that was compatible with a living system in this way could, in the short term, monitor such processes. Someday it could generate proton currents to control certain functions directly.

Governance can mean a lot of different things. In this context, it needs to be the foundation of the content plan. Not in terms of content creation but in terms of standards and processes for expanding into a certain market. For example, Company A wants to launch a Facebook page and Twitter channel in Latin America to support its operations into that region. A governance model will ensure that the regional marketing team has the following lined up before launch: A content plan to include frequency and context of Tweets, Facebook Updates, blog posts (or whatever relevant tools/platforms are used in that region) An established moderation policy A crisis communication plan An understanding and “buy in” of the measurement philosophy (everyone in the organization SHOULD be measuring social media the same way)

Content Library If it’s one thing that marketing teams in other regions lack, it’s content. The reality is that most brands do have really good content. It’s just scattered all across the internet, various internal portals and even within employees’ inboxes. Content can include videos, PDFs, spec sheets, FAQ, blog posts, infographics and the list goes on.

Community Management Without an active community manager, a content marketing plan will fail. A community manager will not only be responsible for actively posting and aggregating content; but he/she is essentially the face of the brand and should be sanctioned to solve customer problems. A proficient community manager will answer questions and provide real and “tangible” solutions to disgruntled customers. Additionally, he/she should have the authority to provide rewards to random customers simply for being customers.

Can the UK overcome sector fragmentation to build an ‘Internet of things’ industry? The European Commission recently approved a plan to encourage farmers to use electronic tagging to identify cattle. This, regulators believe, will help make rearing cattle more efficient, cut fraud, and help stem the spread of diseases.

revealing new patterns of interconnectedness in the physical world.

A broad term (even by the standards of ‘cloud computing’ and ‘big data’), it was first coined by British-born MIT researcher Kevin Ashton in 1999. Its approximate meaning today is a system for integrating the data produced by devices such as RFID tags or sensors in order to monitor, measure, manage and enhance physical objects.

Linking the data together is proving to be one of the sticking points for the Internet of things, according to Maurizio Pilu, lead technologist at the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB). The TSB recently held an over-subscribed workshop to discuss the possibilities and challenges facing the ‘Internet of things’. “The feeling was that applications and services that could make money, and that could change our lives, are not emerging fast enough,” explains Pilu. “And one of the main reasons is that data produced by ‘things’ is not interoperable, due to the fragmentation of the industry.”

Maurizio Pilu believes the UK has three strong advantages when it comes to the Internet of things. “We have world-class communications technology research base; we are strong at data analytics; and we are an early adopter of technologies like this,” he says.

“But there is one big disadvantage,” he says. “This stuff costs money, and like other countries, the UK is going through a period of cautious investment decisions.”

Traditionally, the most valued content was original. This emphasis developed within a content model of constrained distribution and expensive production costs. When there are only a handful of distribution points for content — some magazines, books, a handful of TV station and radio stations — the way to build audience was to deliver original and exclusive content experiences.

Into this explosion of information comes the concept of Curation. Long-time tech journalist Paul Gillen weighed in on the value of taking a curatorial approach to content in a post about the Chile earthquake. No longer is our problem lack of information; it’s that we’re drowning in information. That’s why curation is so important. Trusted curators who point us to the most valuable sources of information for our interests will become the new power brokers.

Gillen points out that the concept of curation shouldn’t be limited to media brands. Marketers should take this trend into account. Creating new content is important, but an equally valuable service is curating content from other sources. This demands a whole different set of skills as well as a new delivery channel. It also means ditching the “not invented here” mindset that prevents content creators from acknowledging other sources.