EC has 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.
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!
Our library of experience enhancing applications (thus called X-Apps) consists of a rapidly growing set of utlities around consumption and sharing of photos, videos and arty text on social media properties.
The current library of x-apps cover:
Photo consumption – cool frames, fun crops, annotate photos, slideshow.
Video consumption – personal TV, Stream TV to desktop, Video commentary
Text consumption – create banners, stickers, posters (multi-lingual)
Commenting utlities– create post-it notes (superscrap)
Applications are best leveraged in existing social networks or high traffic sites. Our X-Apps are easily customizable and portable across multiple social networks like Facebook, Orkut, Bebo etc. The technology of porting applications requires expertise in FBML and OpenSocial coding and EC ensures that the same App can run across multiple networks delivering a common brand experience.
Want to experience an X-App? Click here to load superscrap on Orkut.
The EC social network platform enables brands to rapidly create a social space for their target consumers and plug-in innovative ideas for engagement and interaction. The platform is built ready for extreme customization. We leverage this core platform while building niche communities for brands who want to start a dialogue with their community.
The platform sports the usual features of managing a community and content created by users (text, photo, video etc). The extensible framework allows for community to rate/vote, share, comment, and syndicate content.
Cons
Want to experience the platform in action? Follow a large global brand, that believes in the power of “ideas”. and how it is supporting a community exchanging smart and whacky ‘ideas that click’. If you have a smart idea yourself that you would like to share click here to get started. LAUNCHING SOON!
Smart Gadgets are the cool new way to reach out and connect with audiences on traditional media sites. A gadget lets users engage within a rich media advertisement, without whisking him away from the current site, and yet manages to deliver the message along with a completely immersive and interactive experience.
Gadgets are also available as downloads and reside on user desktops, igoogle or system trays serving different functions like reminders and planning or delivering just fun.
The EC recommendation engine delivers an interactive Q&A based product / content / media recommendation experience to consumers who are bewildered by the choice of content and products on a website. The recommendation engine spurs consumption of long-tail content and uses an interactive approach in contrast to the conventional collaborative filtering approach on conventional websites. This approach is particularly useful on the mobile form-factor.
The interactive approach to recommendation has been adopted recently by brands who have a wide range of products in a single category for discerning audience, and wish to engage their attention while helping them to make the right choice. Other usages of this product are eg. auto-recommended media playlists, book-lists, news worth reading etc.
All our X-Apps are portable to mobile platforms (.mobi) to deliver a fun and interactive brand experience on hand held devices. Of particular interest to many brands exploring mobile space is our Shop24.7 recommendation engine which helps recommend and sell products/services on the mobile web.
The real test for a consumer application online starts when thousands of users hit the service simultaneously and the site is able to serve all users within acceptable performance norms. Realization of innovative product ideas excites the development team, leading to, them focusing on ways and means to woo the user. The attention turns to extreme usability and high visual quality. One of the major things that can keep the user ‘attentive’ is quick sub-second response from the system - else the next service is just a click away.
Generally speaking, handling of such performance issues is kept on hold, till the end of product development process, and the ‘time to deploy live’ pressure pushes this consideration to bottom of the stack.
We, at EC consider this aspect upfront, leading to a design that is ready to be deployed in a distributed setup. Though the deployment scenario varies from service to service, the generic pattern is presented here.
To povide extreme delight on performance front, we use caching of data wherever possible. In many of our projects, we use ‘memcached’ for alleviating database load and ’squid’ for caching frequently used content for faster delivery of content leading to considerably improved performance.
‘Build for performance’ is the dominant trait in EC development genes, and that helps drive our methodologies to create services that transform ‘customer satisfaction’ to ‘customer delight’.
We work with a wide range of brands both in the consumer space and business space along with a handful of pureplay online service providers. Interactive and Social Media is our sandbox, and this is what we do exceedingly well.
At EC we remain connected to our very own user community. Here is a showcase of some user generated content from POSTALZ a digital postcard application, launched recently. We try and refresh our selection as often as possible, but you can always visit the postalz gallery to see the latest and greatest cards created by users.
