If Likes don’t matter, what does?

Nick Woods

Stefan Olander is Nike’s VP of digital sport, and he has a new book out called Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital. At its launch yesterday, Olander had quite a few stand-up-and-cheer revelations to share about social media in 2012, saying “a whole industry is stuck on trying to force old metrics on to new channels.” It’s a new way to beat a dead horse: The size of the audience matters, but size is for naught if you can’t engage.

Nike of course launched the Nike+ FuelBand a few weeks ago, technology integrated with their products that makes it easier for users to keep track of activity using a smartphone. And more recently, the brand launched an initiative allowing customers to bid on products using their logged activity. The point of these efforts, Olander says, isn’t to advertise, but to add value to something people already do. “Once you have established a direct relationship with a consumer, you don’t need to advertise to them,” he says.

Sephora’s Social Media Makeover

Nick Woods

Though I can’t speak from experience, female acquaintances have made it clear that picking out the right shade of foundation, blush, and eye shadow isn’t a task easily undertaken on Amazon.com – Which is why the experience of trying on makeup has fueled brick-and-mortar cosmetics shops for decades. So as shopping from home has become a near-ubiquitous practice, retailers in the business of making people look beautiful have struggled to keep up.

As of this morning, they at least have a good case study to follow. Sephora has rolled out a new Web site featuring 25 tags for each of its 15,000 products, full integration with Pinterest and a native iPhone app, and synched shopping lists that let you pick out your regular purchases on your way to the store. That gives customers more ways to share what they like, and more time to spend shopping around for new favorites, helping to turn loyalty into community.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Nick Woods

Here’s a video Wired posted this morning, covering the first annual Love Competition held at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging. Contestants were placed inside of an MRI machine, and told to love as hard as they could while the scan was being conducted. Those who exhibited the highest levels of activity in their nucleus accumbens, and throughout their serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin/vasopressin pathways (I know what all of that means) were declared the winners. So we’ve turned love into a contest now too. Happy Valentine’s Day.

#CES – Day 0 (Hi-Tech Weight Loss Edition)

Nick Woods

If there’s one thing the annual International Consumer Electronics show is good for, it’s showing off all of the cockamamy gadgets that’ll be taking up space in our junk drawers once the vast majority of us forget about our New Years’ resolutions.

LG’s making their contribution tough to forget though. The company debuted a new line of smart appliances at CES yesterday that make it easier to control stuff like your oven, laundry machines, and vacuums with your phone, while networking everything together to automate everyday tasks. Its refrigerator got most of the buzz though – That’s because it keeps track of what food you have left at home, what the rest of the family likes, and what kind of nutritional requirements aren’t being met by your shopping list, all on your smartphone. It’s one less excuse for you to buy four pounds of bacon for the week, because it’s super-funny to tell everyone you ate four pounds of bacon in a week.

It’s OK To Come Out of the Basement

Jon Grider

Ping-pong popularity is on the rise. Thanks to hip clubs like Spin (Milwaukee, New York, St. Pete and Toronto), all levels of table tennis players are coming out of the woodwork (most likely musty, knotty pine woodwork) – me included. Competitive exercise, rewarded with a well-crafted brew in a state-of-the-art space with good tunes and good people is a good thing. The US is still no match for China (or Germany, or Japan, or India, or Korea, etc.) when it comes to ping-pong proficiency and popularity. In fact, we pretty much bring up the rear in the world table tennis standings. But when you consider our ability to have fun, the US kicks @#%! Get your pong on, people!