Tag Archives: linqia

Jul201006

bsamii

0

The Power of Online Communities for Consumer Brands

Online communities are increasing becoming a powerful source of word-of-mouth marketing and building long-lasting awareness for consumer brands. The following questions were posed to Maria Sipka, an expert on the subject and CEO/Founder of Linqia – a startup connecting brands, agencies and consumers.
Q: Why should brands engage online communities as part of their marketing efforts?
The simple answer is to get closer to their customers. Close to 1 billion people are engaging in online communities globally and spending a considerable amount of time connecting, sharing, discussing and learning. Mark Zukerberg recently said that “Communities already exist. Think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do”.
Q: What types of approaches do you think work best?
The first approach is to understand clearly what the objectives the brand wants to achieve. Does the brand want to create awareness around a new product? Conduct market research? Increase their sales? The [...]

Jul200811

bsamii

7

Will Barcelona be the "Palo Alto of The Mediterranean"?

I popped over to ifest 2008 the other day and sat in on a few interesting talks regarding business and innovation and the entrepreneurial scene in Europe. Both Herve Lebret and Nick Leon touched on the theme of innovation within societies and contrasted the U.S. (primarily Silicon Valley and Boston) with Europe, and tried to draw some conclusions why Europe always seems to be one step behind. Herve’s presentation went into this theme in great detail and he has also published a book on this subject (Herve, when do I get a copy?).
Nick’s talk also touched on this as he asserted that a city needs an ecosystem of innovation to align the talents and resources they have in order to build a successful innovation juggernaut (like SF and Beantown). To this end, he made a point that Barcelona could very well be positioned to be the next great city of [...]