Google recently announced the launch of Chromebox for Meetings, a videoconferencing service that provides “speed, simplicity, and security.” Hardware includes the Intel-based Chromebox unit, a high-definition camera, a combined microphone and speaker unit, and a remote control. As many as 15 participants can join the video meeting from other conference rooms or their laptops, tablets, or smartphones. One click of the remote starts the meeting without the need for access codes. The system operates similar to Google Hangouts and is integrated with Google Apps, so invitations can be sent directly through Google Calendar. Chromebox is currently available from Asus, but both HP and Dell will offer it in the near future.
On Location Engagements is a location-based content delivery system for events. The company provides small beacons that use low-energy Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to communicate with attendees’ smartphones, both iOS and Android. Planners upload their floor plans into an online system and designate where they will place the beacons. Then they assign content such as maps, product information, videos, surveys, and sponsor materials to each beacon. Attendees either download the system's app, or it can be embedded into the event’s existing app. When attendees are within a designated range of the beacon—which can be anywhere from 5 to 30 feet—the content automatically appears on their devices. After the event, planners receive analytics such interactions per beacon, length of stay at each beacon, and traffic patterns at the venue.
Catchbox is a wireless microphone to pass—or even throw—among speakers or audience members. The device consists of a microphone capsule secured with a magnet inside a soft, seven-inch cube that comes in blue, orange, green, or magenta. Catchbox communicates with an included receiver that can be connected to any sound system. To avoid unwanted noises, internal sensors turn the audio off when the cube is in motion. The company says the product is intended for smaller groups of as many as 100, and it provides the best-quality audio when no obstacles block the line of sight between the Catchbox and the receiver, which should be within 100 feet. As many as four of the units can be used at one time in a room. Catchbox is accepting preorders, with shipping scheduled for June.
Tangible Interaction will unveil its new LCD graffiti product at South by Southwest in March. In contrast to the company’s existing rear-projection digital graffiti wall, the new system takes up much less space and can be used outside in daylight. Planners provide the LCD screen, which can reach 70 inches, and Tangible Interaction provides the sensing system and two digital graffiti spray cans. The look of the graffiti wall is customizable with logos and backgrounds, and clients select colors, nozzle widths, stencils, and other features. After guests create their artwork, they can share the images on Facebook and Twitter or via email.
Using 3-D technology, Oreo set up a vending machine that customized Oreo cookies, including the color and patterns of the cream, based on Twitter trends and the consumers’ preferences. There was also a milk bar with a variety of milk options.
3M encouraged attendees to contribute ideas using the hashtag #3MIdeaExchange. With each tweet, a balloon filled with a little bit of air. The person whose tweet caused the balloon to pop won $500.
Hulu premiered Deadbeat, an original TV series, at SXSW this year and, to further promote the show, allowed attendees to interact with holographic ghosts. The activation was designed by NVE: The Experience Agency, using the same technology as Coachella’s Tupac hologram.
Visitors to Spotify House were able to create personalized digital mosaics using albums covers from their top listening habits at the photo booth, designed by Brigade.
To promote its new music-streaming radio station, MixRadio, Nokia brought an on-site musicologist to Spin magazine's Day Party. The musicologist asked users questions about their musical tastes and then prescribed a playlist, which was shared through an N.F.C. tag.
Guests will be more inclined to snap selfies if they feel they're looking their best—so events are coupling beauty treatments with other encouragement. At the Colgate Optic White beauty bar ahead of the Golden Globes in Los Angeles earlier this year, decals bearing the appropriate handles and hashtags decked mirrors near the beauty stations where guests were captive during hair and makeup services.
At the BMF Music Lounge during Coachella, sponsor Tide gave guests all the elements needed to take a selfie and easily share it. In a poolside suite at Palm Springs's Ingleside Inn, the brand decked out a mirror with floral appliques as well as the appropriate hashtag #TidePlus.
Event Farm and HyperVocal hosted the "2.0: The New Media Party" at the Carnegie Library last weekend during the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. At the event, the "Selfie Squad" sponsored by Microsoft facilitated quality selfies with guests, decor, the band, and other details of the party. The team then immediately posted the snaps to social sites using the hashtag #NewMediaParty.
During the holidays, fashion brand Ted Baker used the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe to encourage selfies that promoted the brand. At the Ted Baker Fifth Avenue store in New York, Kin Design created a 20- by 20-foot aluminum sculpture to serve as a modern twist on mistletoe, and guests shared kiss pics on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #KissTed. With the help of a specially designed app, photos then fed two 90-inch monitors inside the store’s front windows for passing shoppers to see. On Christmas Eve, the brand selected one participant to receive a free four-night stay for two at the St. Regis Hotel in Abu Dhabi.
Online magazine xoJane hosted a party at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, this year that rewarded guests with fame at the event for snapping selfies. In an upstairs portion of the party space, guests were encouraged to take selfies with mirrors. The shots were then printed to add onto the "Shameless Selfie" wall and were projected in the event's main space, where MKG used neon masking tape and ultraviolet lighting for pops of bright color. The event promoted the pub's "Shameless Celebrity" list.
OtterBox gave out its new Symmetry Series phone case to guests at the Kari Feinstein Style Lounge at Coachella. But the free stuff came with a not-so-gentle reminder to help proliferate the brand’s message on social media: A dedicated mirrored “selfie station" allowed guests to share their snaps (with their phones clearly pictured, of course) using the appropriate hashtags.
Offering guests extra props or backdrops to inspire selfies can sometimes seal the deal. During a holiday event, the W Fort Lauderdale placed mirrors in nine spots throughout the property, each embedded in elf-theme vignettes. After snapping their festive shots, guests could then upload the images to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter using the hashtags #WFortLauderdale and #BringtheBright.
Not all selfies are spontaneous; offering a reward can incentivize guests to take and post them. The New York International Auto Show gave out free tickets to opening night to the first 100 people who posted a selfie with a show poster, found in New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
Retailer South Moon Under partnered with Rock the Vote for its inaugural Summer Spin Pool Party August 3 at the Embassy Row Hotel rooftop. To expand the reach of the intentionally intimate pool soiree beyond its 100 invite-only guests, event planner Jessica Hoy of NeuProfile put a social media spin on a familiar item: the gift bag. Converse, Lacoste, Stila, Kate Somerville cosmetics, and others contributed beach-related products like towels, sunglasses, and sunscreen to the gift bags. Hoy set up stations for each of the 11 sponsors with tent cards of the hosting brands’ Twitter handles and event hashtags. Bloggers and other partygoers took photos of the tables and wrote about the products individually rather than just collectively in a single story. Guests then showed a staffer their tweets on the way out to receive a bag.
As the sun went down in Cannes, France, June 17, Twitter fired up a 40,000-lumens Barco projector mounted on a roof 150 feet across a street from the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès. The venue was the site of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, a weeklong award program to recognize creative excellence in advertising and communications. For the next several hours, a 3-D projection of tweets using the official event hashtag, #CannesLions, appeared on a 35- by 65-foot billboard located 30 feet above the venue’s entrance. The digital activation, created by Incredible Machines, ran for five hours that night and for the next three nights, while during the day the billboard showed a static image of the hashtag printed on canvas. The top tweets with the hashtag were projected onto the billboard at night, and the display also included live tweets from specific users that were selected by Twitter. The projection was a success, garnering substantial interest from the festival’s 12,000 attendees and contributing to more than 91,000 tweets using #CannesLions. That’s a 51 percent increase compared to 2012 and translated to a total reach of 542 million people, according to Buzz Radar. To generate excitement the first night, Twitter hosted a gathering in a penthouse across the street from the billboard right before the projector turned on.
Godiva Chocolatier designed part of a new product launch to promote social sharing. The Godiva Truffle Takeoff Tour introduced truffle flights, which package six truffles along a similar theme, arranged by intensity, like wine or beer flights. At the New York kickoff September 17 at Gansevoort Plaza, passersby could sample truffles and pose for photos in front of six tableaux. Playing off of the campaign tagline of “every truffle tells a story,” the tongue-in-cheek scenes included the tiramisu truffle's “Tiara Miss-U Pageant,” where people could wear tiaras and sashes on a stagelike setting, a “Take Flight” scene in which people stood in front of wings created from frilly feathers, and a sports-theme “It's Crunch Time” scene in which people could lift dumbbells that had giant nut truffles in place of weights. Large screens displayed social posts that used the #TruffleTakeoff hashtag.
For a highly visual—and Instagram-friendly—photo opp, social media prompts served as props against a grassy wall decorated with Veuve bottles at the fourth annual Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic at Will Rogers State Historic Park in Los Angeles on October 5. Working with Veuve director of communications Christine Kaculis, BrownHot Events produced the event once again with the chic, subtly branded details that characterize the annual sporting event.
Ben & Jerry’s dished out about 16,000 cups of free Bonnaroo Buzz, Late Night Snack, and other flavors of its ice cream—and gained more than 2,000 new Twitter followers—during its Summer Scoop Truck Tour in Miami in 2011. The program, managed by Gigunda Group, invited the brand’s fans on Twitter and Facebook to help determine where the truck would stop each day, with the goal of raising the brand’s profile in the Miami market and attracting new customers.
Wine tastings typically stick to a format that involves stations, swirling, and sipping, but a recent event in Toronto broke free of any staid formulas. Underscoring its company name, Open Wine hosted an event at 2nd Floor in April that had a “Be Open” theme, and guests were encouraged to open themselves up to more than just new types of vino. Plenty of the host company's product was on hand, but tasting the wine was just a jumping-off point for a night that included ping-pong tournaments, liquid-nitrogen doughnuts, temporary tattoos, and lots of tweeting. Guests placed R.F.I.D.-enabled wine glasses down on the so-called “Bird Box,” which was created for the event and pre-programmed with action tweets, which encouraged guests to participate in various activations at the event. The tweets from @Open_Wines included: "Hey @[user], Damn, you look great. Find our photog @textstyles + pose for a photo so we can remember this FOREVER. #BeOPENparty."
In an effort to find an innovative way to encourage tweeting at AT&T-sponsored events, Team Epic worked with Brightline Interactive to develop what it calls a “Twitter balloon”: a balloon six feet in diameter connected to an air compressor that is activated by tweets with a particular hashtag. “There are a lot of Twitter walls that show tweets as they come in, but this performs a physical action and it happens within less than a second,” said Andrew Knutson, manager for Team Epic. “As soon as you tweet, you hear the air going to the balloon, which is pretty cool. You’ll see crowds forming, especially as the balloon gets bigger.” AT&T unveiled the balloon at the N.C.A.A. Final Four men's basketball championship last spring and has since used it at events such as the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco, the College World Series in Omaha, CMA Music Festival in Nashville, and Music Midtown in Atlanta. Signage at the events encourages attendees to tweet with a particular hashtag. Each tweet triggers a burst of air into the balloon, and the person whose tweet causes the balloon to pop wins a prize such as an AT&T phone.
As the 80,000 attendees at last year’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival celebrated on a Tennessee farm, news of their daily activities was posting to Facebook, creating nearly 1.5 million social impressions. But the attendees weren’t pulling out their smartphones to connect to Facebook; instead they were swiping wristbands with R.F.I.D. technology at one of 20 check-in portals around the 700-acre venue.
At London Fashion Week in September, Topshop tested a new app that allowed it to transmit photos, Web links, and other content to mobile devices using sound. The mobile app Chirp, available as a free download, shares data via a 1.8-second series of notes that sound similar to birdsong. The “chirps” played on speakers at the show in Regent’s Park and also in Topshop’s Oxford Circus store, where the retailer created what it called a “digital garden” with monitors suspended from trees like birdhouses. Folks within earshot of the speakers who had the app open on their phones instantly received the content, which included runway images, photos of the clothes being made, backstage activities, and hair and makeup preparations. Recipients could tap on the images to receive additional information, and they could also share the images via Twitter, Facebook, and email.
Magic, the massive fashion trade event in Las Vegas, wants to be a 365-day-a-year platform that lives far beyond its venues’ walls. To that end, Magic tapped more than 50 official bloggers to curate content throughout the 2011 show. The selection was based on the quality of bloggers' content, unique points of view, and their understanding of the business of fashion.
To get a treat from a Polaroid vending machine at Ocean Drive's Sun Covered pool party as part of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Swim in Miami, guests had to tweet a code that would activate the machine.
