The Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) is established in collaboration with MIT, with the mission to advance knowledge and nurture technically grounded leaders and innovators to serve societal needs. This will be accomplished, with a focus on Design, through an integrated multi-disciplinary curriculum.

SUTD, the newest University in Singapore had a challenging task of setting up and commencing operations within a year. They were looking for strategic partners who can think on their feet and deliver in a situation that was constantly changing.

Solution

Interakt was chosen as the digital partner and was tasked with implementing solutions across all touch points – web, email, social media and online media. A CMS based on open source technology was implemented that supported their job and admissions portal.

Web – a website framework was developed such that addition of new content could be done in a smooth fashion as and when new content was developed by the university

Email – Interakt deployed its email marketing solution – Resultiks – to support the internal and external communication needs or SUTD. Resultiks’ ability to track respondent’s behaviour was useful in closed-loop-marketing and thus accomplished better a conversion rate.

Social Media – Social media was deployed across platforms like YouTube, Facebook & Flickr. A branded presence was created on these tools that reflected SUTD’s brand positioning. All the tools were integrated with each other and to the website

Online Media – Interakt designed and developed online banner advertisements to promote SUTD among the student cohort applying in this academic year. These banners were run on Google & Yahoo ad networks as well as sites like AsiaOne and ESPN.

In addition, Interakt also developed applications like the admission portal and the RSVP system for event registration.

United Spirits Limited (USL) is the one of the largest liquor giants in the world, with a range of well-recognised brands, across Whiskeys, Vodka, Wines and other spirits. With the launch of ‘Spiritz & More’, a multi-brand retail chain for an array of liquor choices, United Spirits Limited (USL) created a new eco-system for meaningful consumer engagements and a good shopping experience across the Indian market. Going one step further, USL wanted to engage with its large consumer base through popular digital channel, including social media, in order to stay connected with them, meet their growing expectations while offering new experiences as well as accessibility.

Challenge

Given this mandate of transporting the ‘Spiritz & More’ experience and its essence onto the Internet, Interakt was faced with the unique challenge of having to market the brand without explicitly marketing its products, owing to the strict Indian regulations banning the marketing of alcohol.

USL being an organization with multiple business lines, each supporting a different set of marketing initiatives and capitalising on various aspects of Indian interests such as cricket, movies, fashion and so on, care was also required to ensure that the online ‘Spiritz & More’ experience, remained completely aligned to its core focus on glamour and lifestyle.

Interakt Solution

Meeting these challenges head on, Interakt conceptualized and delivered a complete solution called SpiritizandMore.com comprising of a comprehensive portal offering content on latest parties in different towns, USL events, information on spirits, responsible drinking and contests, a community section to encourage user participation through blogs and the creation of social networks, Facebook & Twitter presence with daily updates on events, parties, portal updates and contests.

In order to keep the platform relevant and up-to-date during this long-term engagement, Interakt employed the following channels to derive fresh content

• Charted the schedule of USL sponsored or supported events across the country for every 3-month period
• Planned the type and frequency of content to be sourced based on the types of events and activities
• Mapped the content and events on to the SpiritzandMore.com portal, in a way that would be meaningful and interesting for the users
• Conceptualized campaigns around contests, polls and interesting online activities related to these across the different digital channels such as the portal, Facebook & Twitter
• Planned & leveraged email marketing, mobile channels to create awareness of campaigns
• Sourced and utilized third-party content suitable and pertaining to website visitor interests
• Maintained and monitored the digital channels to ensure all that activity was in line with the SpiritzandMore.com branding

And one of the notable highlights of the entire initiative was the engagement of photobloggers across the country, to cover the USL events and provide ‘real’ content on the different channels like the portal, Facebook and Twitter, besides contributions from fashion designers and professionals, at the event themselves.

Microsoft is spending about US$100million campaigning for Bing and you can watch some of the TVCs (though my personal view is that using the older TVC approach may not be the most effective channel for publicizing one’s online property) @ this youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/bing.

Anyways, so do I think Microsoft will replace Google in the search market? I doubt it, with more than 73% Internet and 93% mobile users using Google for searching online.

As Michael Arrington at TechCrunch states,”Whether Microsoft ultimately succeeds or not in ‘winning’ the search war, the competition is very good for the rest of the Internet. Google needs to be pushed to try innovating new things. And search marketing competition will ensure that Google doesn’t get too greedy. We don’t need Microsoft to win, but we do need to avoid a world with just one search engine that matters. Maybe Microsoft can win that lesser war, at least.”

But, what does the consumer want? We all need the relevant search results from a trusted source. Whether that happens with Google or any other search engine, it looks like we definitely stand to benefit from the spoils of this war.

It’s not difficult to imagine the above scenario. We have seen aspects of it countless times in science-fiction movies. Creativity is the great driver behind all innovations. If more and more people dream about it, whatever we imagine will become a reality, sooner or later. What look like an A4 pad is now a wirelessly connected data screen that can display all kinds of data and documents. It is also possible to have a 3D life-size hologram moving within a live stage. In the 48th annual Grammy awards, Gorillaz (a cartoon band) performed live on stage to spectacular effect with Madonna. New technology such as augmented reality continues to integrate what’s computer-generated into our real-world environment. Coined by one researcher as “the Walkman of the 21st century”, augmented reality superimposes graphics over a real environment in real-time within our field of view. Imagine going into the shopping mall and be presented by real-time graphics and audio each time a product catches our attention.

Technology will continue to surge forward. What we deem as science fiction today is likely to be a reality in tomorrow’s future. As designers at Interakt, we’re fascinated by the advent of new creative technologies; we use them as leverage to create efficient and effective brand communication for our clients. Each platform opens up a new pathway to get inside the target audience and build creative that resonates and drives action. At the end of it all, it’s the thrill of knowing that a great idea, shaped and streamlined through varying vehicles, could go forth and touch another person in a novel way, making a real connection.

As internet era was getting stronger and better, some innovative products and services were created and engaged many users to perform a set of tasks and activities. One among such innovation was YouTube, where the users were allowed to upload videos and share with their friends and network and the other best innovation was slideshare where users upload PowerPoint or Open Office presentation files and share them online through a YouTube-like interface. The objective of their service is to create and share with their friends and network.

Here is what I feel the similarities and uniqueness of slideshare and youtube, Both allows the users to upload the content and share with rest of the world, but slideshare allow users to download the content also restrict at the same time. YouTube doesn’t allow the users to download, but through a third party tool you can extract the video. Both have their own community of people right from kids to people with wrinkles. Categorization is another common feature you can find in both. Both allow the users to advertise, search for content, upload and the list goes on, but there are couple of uniqueness between both is that slideshare allow to embed the youtube videos in the presentation. YouTube allow HD quality videos to upload and user to embed their comments. Now the iPhone are in the hands on many users, youtube made a smart move to develop for iPhone, Slideshare yet to make their mark on iPhone, but they have mobile version as of now.

What more the users are expecting, I read from a blog that YouTube going to be a platform for the movies, another online movie house with HD quality and might give a tough competition for joost.com and hulu.com. I’m sure; slideshare will come up with some cool features, let’s wait and watch. Overall both are great service and I would give them my full marks for their innovation.

More over these days the so called Web 2.0 made the internet surfing much more richer experience like us using any of the desktop applications ie interact & getting the results then & there than loading pages after page to seek information or transactions.

Simply we can say, today the level of Internet usage we experience is mind blowing, both in our personal & professional life. And there comes one intermediatory thing which helps us to use this channel very well, and that is the so-called ‘Browser’. Yes, Browsers play more crucial role in our web experiences today and its going to be the central platform thru which we do things on the web. If the browser has the limitation it will sabotage the overall web experience and the website we surf thru will lag the features & functionalities or it may even tear the pages apart. But the good part is almost or all the popular web browsers are free to download and use for both businesses & consumers.

Okay, then if Browser is that critical and its free too.. then why is that most of us are lazy to upgrade to the latest or near latest version in order to get the rich web experience or surf the web efficiently?

Recently we built some web apps and also some Big consumer facing portals with all the rich experience using Web 2.0 technologies to engage the audience not only to surf the site for information but also to do transactions online. But then the limitation factor came from the client, “Oh! We are using only IE6 in our organization and the new site does not perform well within our company itself”. We were amazed and shocked by the response since we wanted to give the end audience (Consumers) very engaging rich online brand experience and on the other side we saw the organization itself internally not ready for it. If we limit based on the organizations then the end audience or the so called Public / Consumers will not get the actual brand experience thru this online channel and that will push them away coming back to this web portal. Is that what we want? Infact, I scrutinize my engineers to be back ward compatible with old browsers so that we accommodate those users as well who visit these portals so that they will not see anything bizarre. They had done their best “not in their coding. But in the research” to prove to me that how IE6 is so antique and in fact it should be completely killed soon. So below are the facts they presented which I jotted down in bullet format to easily understand why not to use IE6 browser anymore.

1. IE 6 browser was launched in August 2001 and its nothing new but a flavor of Netscape 4 (which was launched in 1998).
2. It does not support Advanced CSS and AJAX controls & XHTML. And there are horror stories in the web industry regarding its major display issues, despite everything looking fine in all other browsers; elements randomly disappearing entirely due to the ‘hasLayout’ bug in IE 6.
3. So many organizations like Apple (Mobile me), Google (Gmail) & Facebook are not supporting IE 6 browser in order to give rich user experience in their portals. Instead, those sites convince the customers to upgrade to the latest version such as IE 7/8 or to other browsers.
4. Moreover, as of January 10, 2009, there were 142 vulnerabilities reported in Internet Explorer 6, and in that 22 are un-patched still, some of which are rated moderately critical in severity. That’s why even in 2006, citing its lack of security, PC World Magazine named Internet Explorer 6 on their list of the “25 worst tech products of all time”

This is not an anti-Microsoft tirade, but this is exactly what Microsoft wants as well. When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, they pushed it out as a recommended security update! That alone tells you how eager they were to get Internet Explorer 6 off the market, and offer end users a more secure Internet experience. They have now released version 8 of Internet Explorer, bringing us two complete version upgrades from the web browser released in 2001.

And that’s the reason when we revamp our interakt website, we couldn’t comply with IE6 and pls use the latest version of any browsers such as IE 7 or 8, Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari etc., to have a good surfing experience of Interaktco.com

Some additional references to read about regd the death march again IE6.

IE6 Death March: http://iedeathmarch.org/

Bring Down IE 6 Campaign: http://www.bringdownie6.com