Brand: hyves

Via Laat zien waar je bent lets the Dutch social networking site Hyves, in co-operation with Dutch telecom operator Hi, show where your friends are on a Google map (from am, in Dutch. Hyves facilitates ever better contact between people. Now only for Hi users, but soon for everyone. Although currently via SMS, soon Hyves will always know where you are (and share that with others too, if you want). We are sharing more and more information about ourselves with brands who will handle it sensitively. This development is an example.

Social network Hyves collects several e-mail addresses per member. Sometimes an e-mail address needs to be confirmed explicitly, sometimes a different mechanism is used (hy). Thus brands don’t only remember one e-mail address per individual, but all contact possibilities. Besides, through the brand memory they unlock the collective memories of individual and brand, in which all communication is saved. So that if an e-mail address disappears, the dialogue can still continue.

Social Network Hyves makes it possible for third parties to read profiles. In the test version of so-called People API, other websites gain access to profiles. This is the same one could see in a real-life visit, without being a Hyves member. The amount of information then is limited. However by granting a brand permission, the brand can get access to someone’s friends list (em, Dutch). 
TodaysArt then places your friends on a map. So far for the gimmicks. Now it really will be possible for brands to connect their accounts to Social Networks, to Hyves accounts. With that, it will be possible to see what customers know each other. Then ‘advice’ can go one step further: ‘friends who went to this hotel last year absolutely loved it!’ Then the most powerful medium, word of mouth advertising, will get an extra injection. It is all about to start now.

Social network Hyves wants to (anonymously) sell active brand associations of its members to the respective brands. The most popular brands at Hyves on average have more than 100,000 fans. Fashion brand Björn Borg for example, has 230,000 brand fans. Besides, Hyves knows the other brands to which somebody associates, and how this changes in the course of time (em, Dutch). In a media landscape in which brands have a hard time to reach people through advertising, they will be able to promote their products through brands that do have access to the consumer. In the bi-directional world thus developing, consumer knowledge is the specialty of coaching brands, and transaction brands fully focus on top products. After all, to be recommended to somebody, you need to deliver top products.