If you missed the announcement today, Spotify is turning itself into a platform. That means that you’ll soon have access to applications that are built with Spotify as the window in which you’ll use them.
While the actual Spotify+Apps release isn’t live just yet, there is a way for you to get your hands onto a preview version. Just head over to this page on the Spotify site and you’ll find all the information that you need.
If you’re concerned at all about the potential privacy implications, Spotify does offer this:
“To make Spotify Apps as personal and social as possible, we’ll give providers of the apps you choose to visit access to your Spotify ID, and limited information about your Spotify use – such as currently playing song, play queue, library and playlists. This will help tailor the apps to your music tastes. App providers will only use this information for the purpose of providing you with their apps.”
There’s also a warning that you might notice a bug or two, but you have to bear in mind that this is a pre-release version of the new Spotify apps platform.
Love it or loathe it, Spotify’s apps are going to be rolling out to everyone soon. So give yourself a head start on finding the best stuff out there and let us know if apps are answering any questions that you might have had.
Spotify AB will begin offering Facebook-style apps that add various features and functions to its popular online-music service, according to people in the music industry, a move that could differentiate the company amid growing competition from Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc.
When it starts on Wednesday, the "app finder" is likely to include reviews from magazines and blogs that allow users to listen to albums as they read reviews, the people say. One app will display lyrics as a song plays, while another will generate a list of upcoming concerts
At Spotify’s first U.S. press conference in New York City, the streaming music service announced its new app platform.
The new version of Spotify will include access to applications built by third parties that take advantage of the Spotify library and community. Spotify Platform launch partners includingRolling Stone, Last.fm, Pitchfork and Billboard.
The apps are built in HTML5, which conceivably means they will be easy to access in Spotify apps across platforms. Spotify says that the apps are available first and foremost for the desktop, but if it is a success, apps will come to other platforms. They’ll be available in the Spotify desktop app and to premium and free users.
Spotify says it is open to all developers, but will still manually approve apps before listing them in the Spotify player. The Spotify desktop app has been updated and apps should appear shortly.
Check out this video the Spotify team put together showing off the new platform:
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The Best in Social Business
Computer Weekly's search for the best use of social media in IT is finally over after hundreds of nominations and thousands of votes we now have the winners and the Social Media Champion - Kate Craig-Wood, of cloud computing firm Memset.
See the full list below and why they deserved their crown.
WinRumors started in October 2010 to bring the best in Microsoft news to the masses. The blog is run Tom Warren and focuses on U.S. and UK Microsoft news. WinRumors now has four million page views each month and was mentioned on stage during Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's talk at BUILD 2011.
AVG has built its community to over 400,000 fans in less than two years, all through online engagement and providing its community with compelling content. AVG's community help them build better products by directly listening and engaging with its key advocates from around the world. They also recognise and reward their "Super Fans" who provide value by helping out others users in the community.
The Met Office has used a range of integrated social media channels and IT to create a social community to help keep people safe and well, informed and educated about the weather across the UK when it matters.
The Met Office utilises Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and its blog to help keep people up to date about the latest weather. Its team of weather experts build engagement with followers, making sure that they know everything from if they can hang their washing out, go walking on the moors or if severe weather is expected.
Tom has been writing for the tech forums for a number of years, mainly for the love of it, recently he turned his focus to Winrumours.com and has built up a popular and impressive website.
Easyfundraising.org.uk is the UK’s leading charity online shopping website. It helps more than 33,000 good causes to raise money when people shop online for everyday items In the past two years social media has become key to Easyfundraising.org.uk’s success by engaging with good causes, online shoppers and retailers. Easyfundraising.org.uk is on target to give away £1m this year to good causes. Since the company was founded, more than £2.6m has been donated to charity.
Capgemini's technology blog, Capping IT Off, is a collective effort from 20 regular contributors, all experts in their own fields. Capgemini says the blog is regularly cited by clients, especially when listing the reasons they chose to work with the firm, or indeed the reasons that they continue to want to collaborate with it. Its bloggers will often be contacted about new work or invitations to present their thinking, and collectively the blog contributes upwards of 60 leads a month.
The blog aims to offer insightful, useful news and opinions on project management – and its continued popularity is reflected in this being the fourth year in a row Elizabeth has won a prize at these awards.
In just two years, the Atos CIO Blog has grown to provide a voice for 100 people in a CIO focused Consulting team. In the last year, the original UK based Atos Origin CIO blog has expanded to become the rebranded, global blogging platform for the Atos 75,000 people strong business, supporting four sub-blogs for CIOs - UK, NL, US and Scientific Community.
Social Media Champion
Based on the most overall votes across all categories.
Kate is an award-winning technology entrepreneur; the co-founder & managing director of Memset, the cloud computing company. Her Kate's Comment blog analyses the latest developments in the world of IT, she is an active social media user and has helped to raise the profile of her company very effectively using social media.
The simple truth is a lot of people read our little blog. This blog which we started a year ago, now gets over 10,000 unique visits per month and since May 2011 continues to grow.
Its a great place to get all the latest social business news from around the web, but we'd also like to have more people contributing directly to our site.
Whatever your background or interest, drop us a line and get in touch at Hello@SocialBusinessToday.net and give us an idea of what you'd like to write about.
See you soon! :)
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The Best in Social Business
We all know the four P’s of traditional marketing: product, price, promotion and place. Of course, the four P’s still hold true, but they come second to a much more imperative agenda. Successful luxury brand marketing demands substantially different considerations, specifically the four E’s: experience, exclusivity, engagement and emotion.
Here’s a closer look at each of them and why they’re important.
1. Experience
During and post-recession, affluent consumers didn’t significantly curb their spending, according to The New York Times. While it’s true that luxury consumers are still buying, they’re also becoming more selective about where they spend. Now, the luxury consumer’s purchase decision boils down to a single, simple question: Is it worth it? The best way luxury brands can tip the scales in their favor is to provide unique, compelling experiences.
Burberry just reported that by switching the majority of its marketing budget to digital experiences, it enjoyed a 29% increase in revenue. And the Cayman Island property of my company’s own client, Ritz-Carlton, quickly became the most exclusive private residence in the Caribbean on the heels of its experiential transmedia campaign. The experience a luxury brand provides is a product unto itself; therefore, that brand must devote as much quality to the experience as to the wares it sells.
2. Exclusivity
The traditional marketing paradigm treats exclusivity as secondary, as a derivative of the second P: price. But to luxury brands, exclusivity is far too dear to be viewed so casually. Exclusivity has forever been a linchpin in luxury brand success, and in this increasingly democratic digital world, no aspect of luxury marketing has been more vehemently protected.
But digital marketing does not inherently mean exposing a luxury brand’s exclusivity to risk. In fact, digital marketing offers perhaps the most elegant opportunity to control and enhance a brand’s exclusivity. It’s what I call “prestige technology.”
From the St. Regis E-Butler app to Chanel’s interactive, gamified Culture microsite, high-tech marketing makes luxury brands appear cutting-edge — a coveted position that leads directly to exclusivity.
3. Engagement
No matter what, engagement relies on one thing: story. Whether a branded video, a website experience or a simple Facebook post, engaging content implies a story — a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. A narrative that makes a participant feel something.
Take Tom Ford’s story, for example: He’s an ordinary man who dislikes being common. He knows it’s his unalienable masculine destiny to achieve, so he chases his destiny. He struggles, but arrives, and in doing so, discovers that true achievement is as much about quiet confidence as it is about wielding great power. Thus, Tom Ford is the label for a triumphant, sexy man who knows that announcing his triumph is best accomplished with many celebratory whispers. Have a look at Tom Ford’s marketing elements and you’ll see, they all tell a story of triumphant masculine destiny.
When it comes to luxury brands, engagement is synonymous with story, and story sells. Tiffany & Co. reported a 20% uptick in sales after the public and press alike lauded the company’s What Makes Love Truemicrosite and Engagement Ring Finder mobile app, two digital marketing elements that communicate Tiffany’s powerful brand story about realizing true love.
In today’s luxury marketplace, convincing consumers to buy isn’t enough. Convincing them to join a brand on a journey is the key, and that’s what stories do.
4. Emotion
The first three E’s combine to form the fourth and final imperative element of luxury marketing: emotion. Without the deliberate, appropriate application of one key emotion among its customers, long-term luxury brand success cannot exist.
The reason is simple. Luxury brands cater to a consumer that can buy almost any material thing he or she wants. A luxury brand’s physical product, therefore, is secondary. Like an experience, an exclusive insider’s view or an engaging story, a particular emotion is what luxury consumers are really after.
Consumers are loyal to Burberry because they want to feel “authentic” and “timeless.” They stay at the Ritz-Carlton to feel “august.” They buy Chanel to feel “triumphant.” They frequent Tiffany’s to feel “love.”
Luxury brands must embrace the fact that their primary products are actually elusive and ephemeral feelings, and that their physical products are mere mediums through which consumers achieve those feelings. Therefore, a luxury brand must determine its emotional value first, and construct its physical and digital manifestations to express and extract that specific emotion.
A more formal police response to intelligence on social media is urgently needed following the August riots, according to Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary.
Addressing members of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, Sir Denis O'Connor asserted that forces are still not fully geared up analysing and responding to information on the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
And he suggested that a national service hub, where expertise could be brought to bear, was needed to address the gap and bring the police up to speed ahead of the Olympics.
Sir Denis said HMIC had looked at a number of communication support and other agencies in the field, adding that there was "a capability for us to harness".
He told MPs: "What we need is some kind of all source hub – we have not got a place where we can crystallise expertise as to what is happening nationally.
"In terms of intelligence, social media is an essential part. The police can be overly focused criminal assessed intelligence but the world is bigger than that."
Sir Denis was satisfied that the most of the Olympic security planning was progressing well. But he added: "This part of the jigsaw does need some work.
"We have already said that social media is a game changer – it allows people to organise themselves and then out-manoeuvre us if they choose to do so."
It was a "blunt fact" that the police were not fully geared up for social media.
Despite his concerns, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector emphasised that some forces were using social media successfully as a communications tool.
He pointed out that Twitter had been deployed in neighbourhood policing teams and in other situations – including public order scenarios –to communicate with people.
Sir Denis went on to voice the view of many colleagues that social media services should not be taken down during unprecedented public order situations.
"I think that trying to ban these things is like standing on the shore waiting for the tide to come in," he added. "We should work with them, understand them and use them."
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The Best in Social Business
London, Nov 25 : In Steven Spielberg's 'Minority Report' a specialized police department, "PreCrime" apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge provided by three psychics called 'precogs.'
Now, a team of scientists has revealed the possibility of a "pre-social" network - a bit like the "Precrime" unit - that would predict where users will go, how long they will stay and who they are likely to meet there.
The team has developed a technology that they believe could spawn a novel form of social network - which tells its users where and when people with similar interests or habits are likely to congregate.
The system, named Jyotish after the Sanskrit term for Hindu astrology, was developed at Boeing's research centre at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
The system was developed to help Boeing predict the movements of work crews in its huge aircraft factories, but Long Vu and Klara Nahrstedt, the system's developers, believe it can do a lot more.
Vu explained Jyotish draws up maps of people's movements by monitoring the connections their smartphones make to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks, which have ranges of 100 and 10 metres respectively - small enough to pin down users' locations and thus who they meet.
Vu tested this by giving 79 volunteers Android smartphones whose Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modems were made trackable.
This detailed log of users' movements and habits can be used to create a mobile version of Facebook that allows people in the same area to create a "hang-out event", Vu said.
"Indeed, this version of Facebook could even recommend that people create a hang-out event because they are likely to be in the same location in the future," New Scientist quoted him as saying.
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The Best in Social Business
It has emerged that several social networking brands posted significant gains for their mobile audiences over the past year as comScore released an overview of mobile social media usage across the five European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK) from the comScore MobiLens service.
The study showed that the audience for mobile social networking in the EU5 region grew 44 percent in the last year with 55.1 million mobile users in the EU5 accessing social networking sites or blogs via their mobile devices during September 2011.
Usage
Approximately 39 million mobile users or 71 percent of the EU5 mobile social networking audience accessed Facebook via a mobile device in September 2011 – the largest mobile audience of any social network – and an increase of 54 percent in the past year.
Nearly 8.6 million mobile users accessed Twitter.com, representing a 115-percent jump from the previous year. LinkedIn grew by a notable 134 percent to 2.2 million unique users, more than doubling its user base during the same time period.
Engagement
In September 2011, nearly 3 in 4 mobile social networking users reported reading posts from people known personally, and more than 60 percent posted status updates on their mobile devices.
Mobile social networking users also engaged with brands on their mobile devices, as 44.3 percent reported reading posts from organisations, brands, or events, and a similar percentage (41.6 percent) reported reading posts from public figures or celebrities.
In addition, more than a quarter (26.7 percent) of mobile social networking users reported receiving coupons, offers, or deals on their phones.
Convergence
The convergence of two technological shifts – with the rise of the smartphone use and the meteoric popularity of social media – has created a seismic shift in consumer behaviour. Now, wielding their GPS-enabled phones, social media users are more comfortable than ever before in sharing information about their lives, and also expect instantaneous access to information and purchasing no matter where they are in the world.
According to EyeforTravel’s Social Media and Mobile Strategies for the Travel Industry 2011 report, to capitalise on the convergence of social and mobile media, marketers must take into account becoming fully accessible to customers on the go, with website content and features, including e-commerce, the mobile web, mobile applications, tablets, social media sites such as Facebook and in-store kiosks. These areas, precisely, are the points at which social media and mobile media converge.
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The Best in Social Business