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!

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.

Do you really have nothing to hide in your closet? Are you a straight-up say-what-you-mean mean-what-you-say kind of person? Take this polygraph test with your friends and find out how you fare on the respectmeter and truthmeter.

Miller “Genuine” Draft invites you to play the game here.

EC conceptualized and developed a FACEBOOK application for Kodak. We worked with Microsoft, India to launch this application in a very short time, a week to be precise. Thanks to our agile development and leveraging the postalz technology platform, ‘You and Katrina’ application was launched on time.

The initial response that we have received from users is great. There were more then 35 fans within hours of launch. See below some screen shots of application adoption.

and here is how you frame yourself with beautiful Katrina.

A fitting proof of Brand adoption of Social media in India. The interaction done with brand is lingering, far more then banner advertisements, any day. Try You,Katrina and Kodak now

Indian marketers read this article written by Rajeev 9 months ago but still relevant.

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.

• Offered as a managed service for BRANDS – no need to buy anything
• Flexibility allows complete customization to meet design goals
• Fastest time to market – project is up and running in few weeks.
  

Cons

• Not available as a software-in-a-box (sorry you can’t buy it for $199)

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!

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.