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January 17, 2012 Transcript of CommsChat with James Whatley

On Monday 16 January, we were joined by James Whatley for a #CommsChat discussing engagement currency – a subject of a recent post over at James’ blog: http://whatleydude.com/2012/01/engagement-currency/

To kick-start the discussion, we asked how engagement currency can be defined, and we took a look at Heineken’s recent experiment with QR codes at the Open’er Music Festival.

James Whatley has just left word of mouth marketing agency, 1000heads. After two years of building award-winning social media and community campaigns for multiple different clients around the globe, he’s joining Ogilvy PR on Jan 23rd as senior associate director, 360 influence.

It was a lively CommsChat, resulting in 27 pages of transcript which can be accessed via the link below. We’ve also pulled out a few of our favourite tweets from the course of the hour.

@jgombita I’m wondering  if engagement currency is that different than “social capital?”

@GemmaWent When stripped back, isn’t engagement currency simply something (anything) that facilitates engagement or conversation

@AudiencesEurope  Flags at Festivals is a genius example of engagement currency. I love this idea

@haylo_PR  QR codes only work if ur audience understand and engage in them as a tool.

@HewstoneW I’m not in comms but have experience of county-wide campaigns aimed at young people. For teenagers, I can tell you QRs are ideal.
@Whatleydude I think the *point* is being open to a community’s already established method of communicating

@alistairbeech  Toyota’s ToyoTag is a decent QR code case study: http://t.co/tc6F9DZQ

@AdamAzor Everyone talks QR… the real mobile innovation for the future is image recognition. That’s when brands will become always on

@mynewsdesk_uk In B2B, brands need engagement currency to stand out at events and trade fairs

@AdamAzor  I think when we have mass NFC adoption for handsets, it will a massive gamechanger for our industry
You can read the transcript here, transcript January 16 with James Whatley

: #CommsChat, Brand experience, engagement currency, January, Transcript