« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
My colleague, Alison Byrne Fields, has a great post on our group blog. She interviews Chris Jordan, an exceptional mom blogger. She talks about getting fed up with clumsy pitches and her experiences being a popular momblogger.
I love Pandora. I kinow many people do. It is one of those brands that engender grass roots support. Not least of which they seem to be the underdog in the chaotic melee of traditional(?) radio, music publishers, satellite radio, not to mention the taxaholics.
They are also a little disorganized which tells me they are human. They have been running an interesting crowd-sourcing poster contest in league with GlobalGiving, an online clearing house of social good issues. The organization was started by ex-World bank staffers and connects donors more directly with causes. The implication is that more money will get to where it is needed. (They could use a statement about how much, if any, money GlobalGiving takes for this matchmaking service).
They received 750 entries and have closed submissions. Now they - we - vote on the top 10. You can see my vote above - with a caveat. This is where the charming clumsiness of Pandora comes into play.
Pandora's contribution to the whle promotion is really unclear. there is nothing suggesting they will donate money nor even cover the cost of the poster. (The winning poster will become a donor premium for GlobalGiving). That leaves promotion. Well, I am an avid Pandora user (and fan - did I say that already?). But I learned about it via Kristen Nicole's article on Mashable.
Pandora is doing something interesting and good. But they may not be making the most out of it either for them or for GlobalGiving. It is hard to find mention of it within the service. It is mentioned in their blog, but I had to do some digging to actually get to the Votigo voting site.
The posters are great - really some nice designs. I am not sure how they narrowed 750 to 10 - that would be good to know. It also might be interesting to maintain the galleries of those that didn't make it. If nothing else it would give some pride of ownership to those that entered (generating word of mouth) and populate some additional search engine results.
They could have been clearer about the content fo the posters. Many promote Pandora when I believe the real goal is to spread the word about GlobalGiving's efforts and focus. GG actually made it easy on their pages to download logo artwork but judging from the top 10, many thought the goal was to make a Pandora poster. Perhaps that can be tweaked once a winner is chosen.
I have learned to trust Pandora. Therefore I assume these little things are just that - little things, coming from an organization that saw a neat, simple way to help out.
I actually like positive energy productivity guides and coaches. I believe that work - at least the kind I do - has changed dramatically over the past decade. Any inspiration, insight or actionable idea that I can grasp onto to help get stuff done while not losing my mind is deeply appreciated. I am a big fan of David Allen. His system has worked well for me. I reman drawn to others who are trying to put ideas out there that might help the rest of us get things done (GTD - that's Davidco. lingo; kind of like Elvis's TCB)
There are constantly new approaches out there and two blogs have become tags for me:
Behance has another system for sale, so-to-speak. They were smart to create a little physical productivity widget that users can integrate into their lovable Moleskines. Regardless of the system (I remain loyal to D. Allen - mostly because I have made so much progress that I am afraid to try something different), Behance has a good Web site full of productivity tips.
Life Remix is an aggregation of bloggers who "who enrich people's lives through blogging". Most are productivity focused or some type of enrichment. One of the founders Greg Stansbury writes the Life Dev blog. The Life Remix aggregator features the work of several bloggers including Tim Ferriss who wrote the 4-Hour Workweek. His blog has a great post on the recipe he has discovered to "be" creative (and productive).
Life is hard. I need all the help and positive vibe-age I can get.
"Get me a viral video that's as popular as Dove Evolution (7+m views) or Free Hugs (17m views)." Which is kind of up there with the start-up that intends to launch a new social network and uses MySpace as their competitive barometer. It's not simply that it's hard to reach these goals. We do "hard" every day. It's that the goals and tactics demand re-examination.
Myth 1
The fist myth of commercial use of viral video, is that video online is the natural replacement for television. While runaway hits like Dove Evolution can rack up millions of views and lots of related word of mouth (WOM), these are the exception, not the rule. Television remains the great 'reach' medium. The Internet is the great 'engagement' medium. Trying to use the internet simply to raise awareness via a reach strategy ignores it's basic value. Online video offers a gateway to enagement one-click away. The statistics on video usage and sharing online do make clear it's potential. Ben McDonnell has a great post that sums up the stats from Pew (e.g. 57 million Americans watch online video content every day - 19% of American adult Internet users). Which brings us to the second myth.
Myth 2
A viral video is a digital strategy. That's the myth. A viral video is a video that you hope will grab people's attention to the point that they will tell their friends about it. It is something that must be remarkeable (literally), surprising, insightful or otherwise engaging. It may last as much as a few minutes. And then it is done. Where do our users, customers, people go? Out to buy the product? Ready to fill out a survey with all sorts of warm and fuzzies about the brand?
We have an opportunity to really get involved with customers online. We can get their input, their ideas. We can demonstrate that we really care about them and their business. Providing them with a LOL video (we could only hope for laughter) is certainly one way to provide value - entertainment value. But it is a shallow short-lived way. What can we drive them to do? Create their own video(s)? Appear on our "show"? Write the script or create story ideas? Email or hold a blog conversation with someone featured in our show? All of these convert the video idea into so much more than an awareness blip in a equally cluttered horizen.
Myth Part 3
Plopping a video on YouTube is a digital strategy. That's the third part of the myth. It says that something that is worth talking about will find its own audience organically (i.e. with no marketing effort) and will gain viral velocity until it reaches millions. Duncan Watts would point out that most 'viral' things die off before reaching what anyone would claim is a tipping point of volume. If part of a digital strategy includes video(s) that will grab people's attention then we need to support them with smart, authentic promotion. Viral videos go better with outreach and advertising. This seems couterintuitive if you as a marketer are using video to raise awareness of some engagement opportunity with your brand online. Now we want you to promote the promotion? If you are designing a truly engaging experience for your users than this will make sense. If you want to use video as your entire strategy, then it may not make sense.
How can you tell if something will go viral? Do you try different things and see what works (This is a basic tenant of Popular Media's approach - one that I admire)? Or do you find discrete ways to test? Nigel Hollis at Millward Brown (another WPP company) had a great post about this. here is an excerpt:
"To close, there is one point made in the Ad Age article with which I cannot agree. It states,
“In Mr. Watts’ chaotic conception of the world, you might as well try to plan for a terrorist attack or some other random event….’We cannot predict what is going to happen,’ [Duncan] said. ‘Things happen randomly. You want strategies that don’t depend on being right, but do depend on being able to measure things very well. You throw things out there, with as low cost as you can manage and with as great a diversity as you can stand and then you see what gets taken up.’”
Things happen randomly if you do not plan and test, and throwing things out there risks a potential backfire. The one factor that is not considered by Duncan’s analysis is the “stickiness” of the idea behind a viral campaign, and that is certainly not immune to testing. There is no reason why you cannot pre-test a viral campaign. The objective would be to ascertain the likelihood that people would share the ad with others and it would reduce the chances of failure by ensuring people did find the content relevant, compelling and worth sharing."
Myth 4
Bloggers and message board posters are just waiting to talk about marketers mediocre videos. That's is the myth about outreach. "Can't you just tell bloggers about the video and they will chatter about it on their blog?" Even if a traditional mareketer doesn't utter these exact words, it is often in their head. Paid media is one thing. But to engage people in word of mouth the "it" must pass the "who cares" test. If so, then you have earned their coverage. Yes, this is the fundamentals of 'earned media.' Can we get people to talk enthusiastically about something that doesn't measure up? Sadly, no. What we are good at is creating compelling experiences that engage people genuinely. Videos can be a part of that but are rarely the centerpiece.
Here's another good summary of some of the stumbling blocks for successful use of viral videos in marketing strategy from Kevin Nalts, Will Video for Food.
We are always concerned when a client begins a conversation about digital influence with viral video. It's just that we want to create a strategy first. There are plenty of good uses of remarkable video. They can serve reach goals and they can sometimes serve engagement goals.
I wanted to take a look at individual videos that are being shared out there. Some I have discovered through my seemingly endless reading (ok, scanning), some came from my very smart students at Johns Hopkins, some from colleagues. This is a simple round up of what works (beyond the obvious grand slam of our Toronto group's success with Dove Evolution).
Entertainment
Getting a talent like Christopher Guest to direct a 2:33 music video - or a couple of them - is a great move. He obviously has a draw amongst a smart, well-educated audience and he embraces the geek in all of us through every movie he has done. This particular video for Intel (a client but we had nothing to do with this) is great - it's funny, dense-enough that you may watch it a few times, lives up to what I expect from Christopher Guest, and it associates Intel with someone/something that is uncharateristically cool. It's at almost 25K views over 3-4 weeks which is not huge. But it is very B2B and huge numbers aren't necessarily the endgame. There are lots of B2B videos out there with tech companies, specifically trying to have fun. Branded entertainment isn't as it easy as it looks. And Christopher Guest is 'A' - level talent.
Good for: Reach & Awareness (not much about it leads to engagement - there is no click-through call-to-action)
How-it-works
I am a big fan of white board How-to's and How-it-works and this one about social networks is particularly good. This format is deceptively simple-looking yet it relies heavily on the "presenter" - either by being compelling or being a great counterpart to the visual story. The visual story is tightly choreographed. I would be surpised to discover that this was not painstakingly rehearsed. This is part of the "in Plain English" series that also includes "Wikis in Plain English."
Here's one from another source that has been around about a year (610K views) and outlines the marketing potential of SecondLife
Good for: Engagement, Thought Leadership
Futurecasting
There have been a lot of compelling videos that portray a vision of the future. This one was shared by Steven Feld, one of my graduate students (and smart guy). Called Prometeus - The Media Revolution (Prometheus?) it paints a picture of the future with enough sprinklings of present fact to be super compelling. And the Italian accent doesn't hurt either. Intel has one called the Intel UMPC Vision Video (again client but not involved in this one)
I am a sucker for future visions. We used to do these regularly at ATT&Viacom back in the early nineties to vision out what ITV might become.
Good for: Engagement, Thought Leadership
Interviews & Notable Presentations
Hearing from someone you admire or who interests you is "of-use." This goes beyond entertainment by offering access to a thoughtleader's POV that you might not normally have access to. Google has an internal series, Authors@Google, which is pretty much what it sounds like. this one features David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous and the Cluetrain Manifesto (co-author). So, Google has these on-campus events for the sake of employees and then posts the videos for the sake of everyone. Great move. I have seen David speak and know he is insightful and inspirational. This is a series which features many authors including Christopher Hitchens and Floyd Landis.
Good for: Awareness, Engagement, Thought Leadership ( I have added 'awareness' here as the authors or notables will draw their own viewers thus introducing fans of the author to the sponsoring company.)
Facebook has been all over the trades and the consumer press these pas few weeks. AdAge runs a story about the marketers rushing to create their own profiles (which is ultimately a good thing). Newsweek runs a story about the phenomena teased by the Web 1.0 story hook: the 23 year-old founder.
A lot of the interest is probably driven by the grassroots interest demonstrated by 300% growth over the past year (vs. 72% for MySpace). Only Bebo comes close with 308% growth and most of their users are in the European market.
Ergonomic Marketing?
I am not referring to my Think chair from Herman Miller nor the kitchen utensils designed for my big hands - I love them both. I am talking about being user-centric and being of-use to people who are trying to get something done (not waste time on an ad with no redeeming value). Ergonomic is designed around the needs and the form of the user first. (yes, technically it takes into account the physical form factor of the person)
In MySpace, marketing experiments abound - character pages for brands, brand pages for brands, and more. It's kind of junked up in there right now.
It's harder to do that in Facebook. There are two great ways to market and both require an "ergonomic" approach. The first is to create groups formed around some genuinely appealing affinity. people join by attraction not because they were tricked into it. Those who start groups are obligated to stay true to their implied charter.
The other way is to build useful (could be entertaining) applications on the Facebook Platform. Here are two great resources to learn more about what is how people are marketing in Facebook:
Dosh Dosh: Facebook Marketing - Maki writes a great summary of other resources out there talking about using Facebook in many ways. Nice job.
The Best of Facebook - You can keep up with some of the latest applications and other features inside Facebook and vote on your favorites (and see what others feel is popular)
The rise of MySpace and Facebook and their head-of-the-tail brothers and sisters around the globe (e.g. Mixi, Bebo, others) as well as the splintering of niche networks from Eons to Gather to Habbo have left marketers eagerly exploring how to use them without spoiling the experience.
Bands and brands have become commonplace throughout MySpace. Many establish a presence yet many of those fall short of getting meaningfully involved in community.
Some brands start their own social networks like Barbie and Pontiac Firebird (Pontiac Underground done with Yahoo, of all people). With 3 million members in the first few months, Barbie Girls seems to demonstrate that brands can pull that off. But the trick may be to stay somewhat humble and focused and offer a social experience that is smaller and closer to the brand.
Today, Reuters features a story on Wal-Mart's use of Facebook to market in relation to back to school. Instead of "owning" the social network, they settle to play nice and try to get involved in a way that doesn't overpower the community. Here's the brief description:
"The world's largest retailer on Wednesday is launching the "Roommate Style Match" group on Facebook, a social networking site that has millions of college-age users, in the hopes of grabbing a larger chunk of back-to-school shopping dollars.
Facebook users who join the Wal-Mart group will be able to take a quiz to determine their decorating style and get a list of "recommended products" they can buy at Wal-Mart to mesh their style with their roommate's.
Students can also download a shopping list of dorm room items sold at Wal-Mart, link to Wal-Mart's Web site promoting "earth-friendly" products, or click on Soundcheck, Wal-Mart's Web site showing musical performances by singers like Bon Jovi and Mandy Moore."
Is that a good practice or a bad one? It seems that Wal-Mart is at least trying to play by the rules and be of-use to the 12 million-or-so college student members of Facebook.
A Man With Experience
The story made me think of what Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy (also PodTech) shared about his own use of Facebook. He created a group around "web strategy" and it quickly grew to 1000 people. Now he uses that group to push out information on his topic and even to float jobs and such.
I asked him what he thought of Wal-Mart's play here:
"Walmart's direction to join an existing community and harness the power of distributed widgets is a sound web strategy. Previously, Walmart created a MySpace-ish on their own domain, a ghost town that was closed after a short 10 weeks. Why didn't anyone show up to this MySpace-ish clone? Because MySpace already existed. Will it work? Success will depend limiting the advertising and marketing components, the value should focus on the user benefit. Here's good wishes to Walmart on Round 2 --Let go to gain more."
Remember when Wal-Mart tried to launch the MySpace-killer, the Hub? But today's approach is much different.
One thing I have to hand to Wal-Mart - they take a licking but they keep on ticking. They keep experiementing and haven't been disuaded by the mistakes made or bumps in the road. More brands should jump in. So long as you do it respectfully and with some humility.
I am having my class at Johns Hopkins read Wikinomics. Some like it, many are underwhelmed. It may be the repetitive nature of the book and I hope and pray it's not a "ho-hum' reaction to co-creation and crowdsourcing.
Asking people to contribute good ideas that can help society is a great way to engage people in something with relevance. Not everyone can host a crowdsourcing contest that awards a cash prize or other support to making that idea come true. This is a great idea for corporate CSR programs. Currently American Express is winding down it's heavily advertised Member's Project which awarded $2m to the Children's Safe Drinking Water project yesterday (apparently from a P&G employee). They got some heat on the blogs but they generated some solid coverage as well. (disclosure: American Express is a long-time client of Ogilvy's but I don't currently work on that business).
Now, the Dutch Postcode Lottery and Picnic have teamed up to create the Picnic Green Challenge which awards 500K Euro to the winning idea to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and then helps bring that idea to market. Here's their challenge:
"Your idea:
- Should have the potential to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by an amount you can roughly estimate;
- Should be developed enough to execute;
- Should be realisable as a usable product or service within the next two years.
You should:
- Be willing to bring your idea to market yourself, and to commit to working with all organisations necessary to develop the product and/or implement the service;
- Carefully answer all the questions on the entry form, and be available to answer supplementary questions from the jury between 1 and 29 September 2007;
- Be willing to present your idea in Amsterdam on 29 September 2007, if you are one of the finalists. Failure to appear will render your entry invalid"
Within the site, there is an interesting interview with Emily Farnworth of The Climate Group. She essentially endorses the challenge. (You should check out The Climate Group as they seem to be doing some interesting partnerships with corporations and government to respond to climate change.)
Back to the Challenge: Sir Richard Branson will chair the jury which has green heavyweights like Greenpeace alongside corporate wanna-do-gooders like Tommy Hilfiger Inc. Corporations have money to support causes. Why shoudln't they ask the "community" at large for their thinking and in this case fund an innovation that emerges from the crowd?
How many walk-a-thons are there out there? Is it a tried-and-true model for community participation in a good cause or tired-and-tame based upon over-use and lack of imagination? Does it pull in the same walkers or draw new crowds.
Our good friend, Wikipedia defines walkathons(walk-a-thons) as:
"A walkathon (walk-a-thon), or walking marathon is a type of community or school fundraiser where participants raise money by collecting donations or pledges for walking a predetermined distance or course."
And the most notable examples include:
There are, of course, all sorts of other marathons, bike-a-thons, etc.. Walk-a-thons are great because they are accessible to most people. If I can walk, I can make a difference. Even if I cannot walk, I can sponsor someone who can. But there are too many of them.
Bring on the Flash
But it is tired. If I do not have a personal connection to the issue, I overlook the same-same posters promoting something-a-thon on Saturday morning somewhere in America.
What if the next walk-a-thon took a page from Converse.com (their ConverseOne design-your-shoe app) and Poject Runway (their make fashion fun and shareable)? What if participants were invited to customize their sneakers with the grandest of "flash" - you know, homemade sparkly, colorful, wild stuff? Not only would participants do the walk-a-thon thing but they could also participate in a wild and weird fashion show of homemade good and bad taste combined.
Local merchants could sponsor a Friday night event leading up to the Saturday event. Kids could create clubs at school to compete. Those who shun exercise but love showing off would get motivated. We would create Flickr galleries of shoe entries and extend the voting online creating a whole dimansion of engagement that doesn't exist right now. And fresh, new life would breathe nto a tired-yet-true model. (And new money would come in)
Walk-a-thon-a-lulu - that's what I would call it. And I promise not to copyright it or buy the url. Another IdeaBar there for the taking.
(get some ideas here at the Solepedia: encyclopedia of sneakers)
(And check out Rohit's latest IdeaBar on Magazie Subscription Coupons)
ComScore has released some data on global usage of the top social networks.
The first table talks about overall share while the second breaks them down by region. It looks like Friendter continues to be dominated by the Phillipine user base that landed there a few years back.
Also interesting:
What's missing from the numbers:
Worldwide Daily Visitation of Selected Social Networking Sites June 2007 vs. June 2006 Total Worldwide Home/Work Locations Among Internet Users Age 15+ Source: comScore World Metrix | |||
Social Networking Site |
Average Daily Visitors (000) | ||
Jun-06 |
Jun-07 |
% Change | |
MySpace |
16,764 |
28,786 |
72 |
3,742 |
14,917 |
299 | |
Hi5 |
2,873 |
4,727 |
65 |
Friendster |
3,037 |
5,966 |
96 |
Orkut |
5,488 |
9,628 |
75 |
Bebo |
1,188 |
4,833 |
307 |
Tagged |
202 |
983 |
386 |
Visitation to Selected Social Networking Sites by Worldwide Region June 2007 Total Worldwide Home/Work Locations Among Internet Users Age 15+ Source: comScore World Metrix | ||||||
Social Networking Site |
Share (%) of Unique Visitors | |||||
Worldwide |
North America |
Latin America |
Europe |
Middle East-Africa |
Asia | |
MySpace |
100.0% |
62.1% |
3.8% |
24.7% |
1.3% |
8.1% |
100.0% |
68.4% |
2.0% |
16.8% |
5.7% |
7.1% | |
Hi5 |
100.0% |
15.3% |
24.1% |
31.0% |
8.7% |
20.8% |
Friendster |
100.0% |
7.7% |
0.4% |
2.5% |
0.8% |
88.7% |
Orkut |
100.0% |
2.9% |
48.9% |
4.6% |
0.6% |
43.0% |
Bebo |
100.0% |
21.8% |
0.5% |
62.5% |
1.3% |
13.9% |
Tagged |
100.0% |
22.7% |
14.6% |
23.4% |
10.0% |
29.2% |
Recent Comments