Street scene in Hamburg
Nokia N-Gage case about word-of-mouth marketing
The conference (6-7 Oct 2005, Hanburg) is organized by Brand Science Institute, which attracted about 70-80 professionals worldwide.
Not surprising to me, many cases about w-o-m marketing had involved blogging or other online publishing tools. These online messages have 'infinite shelf-life' (Fergus Hampton, www.mbprecis.com) and 'know their way to go'. The mobile blogging applications in the market such as Nokia Lifeblog would enable people to express their impulsive feelings or share their thoughts easily from anywhere at any time. It will certainly become an important channel of word-of-mouth marketing.
During the evening cooktail party, I had a conversation about art, life and technology with Eric Paulos, who gave an interesting presentation about Study of Urban Atmospheres, in which they studied varias subjects from 'familiar strangers' around you to the world's most expensive garbage can (Walter Carls has a nice blog about it). I have been wondering
- Does technology bring us more happiness? Or are people nowadays much happier than their ancesters, say, people living 500 years ago? Assuming the basic living conditions are similar (e.g. food, housing, medicine, etc).
- Is technology making us more creative for art? Are we going to have many masterpieces left to our next generations besides silicon chips?
We have no clear answer to those questions. Paulos had an interesting comment that many scientific or technology topics had been studied by artiests from perhaps different angels well before by scientists or engineers.
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