Quoting Umair Haque “Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain ”

So, in the social media world, where consumers are increasingly affected with ADD (attention deficit disorder), how do you buy his attention? Using social currency, of course. “Social currency is like a good joke”, explains Douglas Rushkoff. When a bunch of friends sit around and tell jokes, what are they really doing? Entertaining one another? Sure for a start. But they are also using content — mostly unoriginal content that they have heard somewhere else — in order to lubricate a social occasion. The joke itself is the social currency.

This post is just an example of how I am using social currency (games, widgets and quotes), all unoriginal and for free, to desperately get your attention. Go Fish!

Recent post: Postalz on Masculin.

Earlier post: Postalz on GeekSugar

Earlier post: Postalz on ReadWriteWeb

It is a challenge for digital agencies today, to stay at the cusp of emerging web technologies transforming online marketing. What would you rather do? Focus on your core competencies of creative design and information architecture OR dabble with OpenSocial and FBML?

EC delivers branded entertainment content ‘powered by users’ on most relevant social networks today. In an increasingly glocalized world, media companies are forging alliances (the ‘creative’ meeting the ‘technology’) to deliver solutions that are faster, better and cheaper.

Read a perspective on glocalized digital media on livemint here.

OpenSocial is 74 days old and it already has 10,000,000 daily users. Thats impressive. OpenSocial is also seeing a serious level of commitment from leading social networks including mySpace,Orkut,Hi5 and Ning.Read more here…

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What we found also interesting was commitment to OpenSocial shown by leading business network LinkedIn.Please see below excerpt from official LinkedIn blog…

“….our philosophy at LinkedIn is a bit different when it comes to OpenSocial and social networking in general. We serve a community of professionals who want productivity apps and tools to assist in their professional lives. This is quite a bit different from other containers where entertainment and socializing are the focus of most third-party apps. Our OpenSocial Platform is built on Shindig (currently spec level 0.7) and it leverages existing LinkedIn RESTful APIs as well as supports RESTful server-to-server calls. We will have a sandbox available to partners this quarter and hope to publicly launch it next quarter….”

Can OpenSocial now claim to be the standard SNOS (Social Network Operating System) and BNOS (Business Network Operating System) ?

Designing a smart consumer application is as much about the ‘right’ brain as it is about the ‘left’. The EC design team is best known for a judicious mix of both, while creating sophisticated apps that hit the market on-time. To make such applications a success, one needs equal parts of ‘COOL’ and ‘SIMPLICITY’. Unlike TV commercials or print AD which is more about creativity and less about technology, online marketing (using social apps and other) are more about serious engineering in addition to creativity. A cool functional application that can delight and serve millions of users without a hiccup takes time to build, test and deploy. The EC recipe to crunch the time to market a cool application is simple. Parallel everything!

Signing up users to try a new web service or application is a huge challenge today. Users have burnt-out trying dozens of new services, ending up with clogged mail boxes filled with useless notification messages and spam. Viral invites from friends are also viewed with suspicion, as application designers trick unsuspecting new users into spamming their friends, as soon as they instal and try a new application.

Trying to sign-up and filling yet another long form and a profile page is a sure turn-off. What works now is the art of seduction. If you are staring at 50% + bounce rates on your home page, try engaging users to start using your application and use persuasive communication to acquire the minimal sign-up information. Once in through the gates, the user is likely to be more engaged and just may give your application some serious consideration.

Application Ideators need to test clarity of purpose before casting their product requirements to engineering. An application is best designed to either cater to a single user or to a group, delivering fun OR serving some utility. Try a mix of purposes and your application will most often fall in the clouded middle (of the grid shown below) and fail to get adopted.

At EC we always design Apps for the extremeties.

EC jas a simplified world view of the social engagement models for brands online. While “exposure” is the primary goal of any brand advertising online, social media offers the possibilities for deeper engagement, delivering either ‘fun’ or ‘utility’ or supporting a communication channel between members of a community. There are different tools available for a brand once it has decided on the primary goal for engagement.