Augmented reality is the ability to create a photo of a real situation and then add something to it, but it still appears to be real. The technology is still nascent, but has shown remarkable improvements over the past few years. Given the improving abilities of mobile devices people can now experience augmented reality as they travel. There are now services willing to help retailers use augmented reality to drive sales and create loyal customers. The social media agency could easily tap into these services or this technology to helps its clients.
GoldRun is a leading service for augmented reality. What is really exciting for the social media agency is GoldRun’s ability to automatically push images from its AR service to a user’s FaceBook wall or Twitter feed. A picture of children playing with a smurf, the smurf added to the picture by the AR service, would make an engaging FaceBook post that could then tie back into a brand’s presence.
Holition is another augmented reality service. While it is not (yet?) optimized for mobile devices, it is effective on desktops to allow users to ‘try on’ virtual luxury items. It will soon offer a sharing function, which will help the digital media agency employ it in creative ways to capture the viral possibilities offered by social networks.
One of the more promising aspects of these augmented reality services is the ability to interact with users differently based upon their locations. Users in San Francisco can receive a different engagement than users in Chicago. This allows scaling, so local businesses can use it as well as large national and international brands. These services can be used to supplement a campaign to create content on a social network that causes a lot of reshares or comments, all the while raising the visibility of a brand and increasing sales.
