Artesia Spotlight is a bi-weekly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.
Case Study Spotlight
Zappos.com is a company that clearly demonstrates how a great company culture can be transferred to a successful social media strategy.
Zappos is the biggest online shoes store with a unique customer-focused company culture, which has helped them to attract many passionate users. One of the things that has made Zappos widely known in the business world is the so-called "Zappos Offer". Zappos offers new employees a $1,000 bonus if they quit after completing a four-week training, during which they become familiar with the company's strategy and culture. In this way, they make sure that they only retain employees that are as passionate about the customers as Zappos is. Zappos is also well known for their exemplary use of social media. Zappos employees (including the CEO) are well known to be active users of Twitter (check out the company's Twitter directory), they regularly communicate through their Facebook page, and they also keep several blogs on a variety of topics. Zappos blogs and website often include entertaining employee-made videos, which are also posted on the company's YouTube channel. For some examples of how Zappos communicates, see a post by the Zappos CEO on How Twitter Can Make You A Better (and Happier) Person or watch the video on the Zappos Culture Book.
At the end of last year, the company has decided to offer its expertise in customer service and corporate culture through a subscription service called Zappos Insight. For a monthly fee, companies can access exclusive resources and talk with Zappos management directly, and they also provide some free articles on Zappos' culture.
Zappos' obsession with customers has not only made the company highly profitable, but is also enabling them to monetize their unique business insights and has made Zappos one of the best known successful adopters of social media for customer relations.
Video Spotlight
In today's spotlighted video you can see an exploration of how virtual worlds could be used to improve real live energy efficiency. The exploration was produced as a collaboration between Millions of Us and Stanford University, and provides an interesting example of how we could combine game mechanics, social elements and a virtual world to make a real world difference.
Other news
- Facebook is launching a new advertising option called Polling Engagement Ads, which will enable companies to display interactive polls in their ads
- Social networking site hi5 has added several games, which will be tied with hi5's recently launched virtual currency. Other major social networking sites don't yet provide their own virtual currencies.
- Google has announced a new Google Maps feature called Google Latitude. This feature will enable users to broadcast their current location to their friends based on the mobile phone GPS data. Google has also announced offline browser access for Gmail, which many companies use as their email provider.
- Virtual Worlds Management has released its updated Youth Worlds Analysis report. According to the report, there are now over 200 youth-oriented virtual worlds live, planned or in development.
- Intel has launched ScienceSim, an OpenSim based virtual world, which can be used for data visualization and control for various science experiments.
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