Another first for the blog to see us into the bank holiday weekend – this time we welcome Julian Schollmeyer, our Client Services Manager based out of Berlin, with the salutary story of a German social campaign… ^MF
It started out as just another social media crowdsourcing campaign along the lines of Walkers’ ‘Do Us A Flavour‘ and Mountain Dew’s DEWmocracy.
“Pril”, the well-known brand of washing-up liquid from German FMCG company Henkel, was due for a makeover. Henkel launched a campaign on the net where users could design their own ‘individual’ bottle using a tool set with mostly predefined graphics (i.e. colourful flowers, birds etc) to stamp on the virtual label. The two designs with the most votes would then hit the shelves in October. So far, so predictable.
However, having users stamp pre-defined flowers on a label and then hailing it as a crowdsourcing campaign struck copywriter Peter Breuer as, frankly, lame. So he chose the pen from the tool menu as his weapon of choice and produced a more, well, unique design – then asked his followers on Twitter to vote for it:
His idea? Chicken flavoured Pril!
His design quickly went up to number one and blogs as well as news magazines were quick to cover the story, resulting in even more votes.
Looking at this, I’d say Henkel had it coming, but maybe they had a premonition that something like this might happen, as they built in insurance: the fact that an internal jury would choose two designs from the top ten. Surely there’d be two designs in there containing only those lovely flowers and birds!? Well, there are, but Peter’s Chicken flavoured Pril inspired a lot of people to upload their weirdest ideas and see if they can steal one of the top positions; at the time of writing this is the leader.
As the story unfolded, blogs and online magazines discussed the bigger issue here: what does a crowdsourcing campaign need to look like if it wants to be taken seriously, and how could the Pril campaign have been better designed?
In the meantime, Peter Breuer stated on Facebook that he in no way intended to protest against Henkel or its brand Pril and that he never imagined that his doodle of a chicken would cause such broad repercussions. However, he was pleased to see that bloggers and media alike posed the question whether a campaign like this can actually be classified as being an effective marketing tool. He adds that he would like to see social media being used more for benevolent and socially beneficial purposes instead.
I’m confident that the next German crowdsourcing campaigns will look very different, and that this will mainly be thanks to the learnings from the Pril campaign.
A big welcome on the blog to our brand new Strategy Exec Josh Bourne. Today he continues our theme of the month, retail, with a look at how the big F is dominating social commerce… ^MF
Let’s go back to the Harvard dorm room days of Mark Zuckerberg. Besides spending hours and hours typing code and designing the look for what was then known as The Facebook, Zuckerberg needed to think hard about why people like you and me would want to log onto his site on a repeated basis.
Fast forward to today, and online publication Social Commerce Today attempts to explain that motivation by looking at seven core Facebook uses and activities. These unsurprisingly include connecting with people; sharing; updating statuses; and investigating people (or “social surveillance”).
But what’s most interesting is that buying from brands and connecting with brands is not included.
Did Mark Zuckerberg realise in his dorm room that The Facebook could be so much more than just a place to connect? That it could, indeed, be a place to buy?
Retailers are realising that making products available to buy for followers of their Facebook pages is a great way to increase awareness of their brand while also earning additional profit; Social Commerce Today also posted an article last month of their top 50 Facebook stores and the top 20 store solutions used to power them.
Take the Facebook page of the movie Batman: The Dark Knight:
Facebook gives users the option of purchasing credits which can be used to buy a variety of products, and The Dark Knight’s social media team takes advantage of this by conveniently allowing followers of the movie to use these credits to watch the movie.
Of course, different stores are used in different ways as different brands offer different kinds of products for purchase…
Here is the facebook store of musician Jason Mraz:
With more than 7.6 million likes, Jason Mraz (and his social media team) used the Bravado store solution to integrate merchandise into his Facebook profile which fans can view and then buy after two clicks.
When Facebook followers engage in social commerce and use Facebook as a means to purchase products from brands they love, success doesn’t go unnoticed.
A New York Times article states that clothing retailer American Eagle has been able to quantify Facebook, or at least show that referred facebook page followers to their website produces measurable results:
“American Eagle saw users referred by Facebook spend 57 percent more than average on the site.”
So the Facebook store examples above provide a glimpse into how companies can use social commerce differently: they can allow users to browse products and then head to the parent website to make a purchase; or customers can buy a product by using facebook credits instead of pounds, euros or any other currency. There are some companies that allow users to purchase products without ever leaving the social networking site, but tit may take a while for others to get comfortable with using their online payment processing systems.
From a word of mouth perspective, companies allowing its customers to purchase their products on a journey that starts with Facebook has big advanatges: it gets your fan base talking about products, recommending them, and connecting with other people in the process, which is where the real ‘ripple effect’ kicks in.
So what do you think? As a business owner or knowing someone with a business, would you recommend using Facebook as a social commerce tool?
There was a great story on the radio the other morning about the Serendipity Awards. These are given to researchers who have spotted and seized unexpected opportunities for economic and/or societal impact arising from research.
The story went as follows. It was an open day at the University of Nottingham and a group of researchers in body representation were showcasing their latest MIRAGE technology which creates body distortion illusions. Apparently the technology takes a real-time video capture image of a hand and then fools the brain into believing the hand is stretching or shrinking.
One of the people visiting the University that day was the grandmother of a prospective student. She suffered from osteoarthritis in her finger. Being inquisitive and open to new ideas, she requested a demonstration of the technology.
Amazingly, during the demonstration the grandmother realised that her fingerdidn’t hurt anymore. The illusion of her finger being distorted triggered something in her brain that meant she no longer felt the pain.
This led the researchers to contact experts in arthristis to notify them of their discovery. They then tested this technology on a number of volunteers diagnosed with arthritic pain in their hands. The results showed a notable reduction in pain, on average halving the discomfort for 85% of volunteers. This obviously has huge potential and further research is now being conducted by both the Nottingham team and by specialists in arthritis.
Independent of anything else, I just love this story.
However, it does also make me think a little bit about what we do.
Most clients are now doing some form of ‘buzz monitoring’ either in-house or with an agency. I wonder, however, how many are actually doing it in a way that would allow them to uncover unexpected opportunities like the above. My suspicion from the conversations I have had is that too many are being too prescriptive or metrics led with what they are looking at – they are looking to prove what they already know, rather than allowing room for surprising discoveries that might disrupt the status quo.
What isn’t happening? Where else is interesting stuff going on? What are the anomalies, the bits that don’t fit?
For me, as opposed to focusing too hard on the what, the how much and the who, we should all be using conversations to uncover the what ifs.
That’s what will drive great insights, and lead to true progress.
I’m a fan of objects being used in interesting ways.
There’s something about the subtle re-imagining of an otherwise familiar object that makes me smile. And, more pertinently, surfaces a hitherto unrealised emotional bond to that object.
This is a great example. The Ghost towel. I’ve never liked a towel before. But now I love towels. I want to hug a towel. This towel in particular, but hey any towel will do.
If things are getting tired with a product or service, what can be done to set it apart? It could be a wallet. Or given the weather here in London, it could even be a barbecue grill. Give it a twist and see what happens. See how much better it makes people feel when you turn things on their head. Just don’t do a handstand in a towel.
This month’s blog theme at 1000heads is retail, and no examination of how social is transforming shopping would be complete without a peek at Walmart.
The US-based retail giant, which Forbes ranked last year as the world’s largest public corporation by revenue, was early to get in on the social act but with infamously varied success – including a networking community called Hub they shut down after 10 weeks and fake blogs created with their agency Edelman.
However, by 2009 Forrester social guru Josh Bernoff seemed to think that they were finally heading in the right direction with a range of effective initiatives including elevenmoms.com, the promotion of on-site recommendations and reviews using Bazzarvoice, and, perhaps most importantly, a shift in management attitudes resulting in “a company open and receptive to embracing and empowering its customers and employees online, regardless of what they end up saying.”
And yesterday things got really interesting with the announcement that Walmart have spent $300 million acquiring social media startup Kosmix, creator of the ‘Social Genome’ platform “which filters and organises social network content and creates profiles of users, products and places”.
The aim is to produce an innovation project called@WalmartLabs, as described by Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajarman:
“We are at an inflection point in the development of ecommerce. The first generation of ecommerce was about bringing the store to the web. The next generation will be about building integrated experiences that leverage the store, the web, and mobile, with social identity being the glue that binds the experience. Walmart’s enormous global reach and incredible scale of operations — from the United States and Europe to growing markets like China and India — is unprecedented. @WalmartLabs, which combines Walmart’s scale with Kosmix’s social genome platform, is in a unique position to invent and build this future.”
We’ve discussed the development of social commerce manytimesbefore, but it is clear that when companies of this size start investing volumes of money that large on combining social, mobile and retail, the resulting alchemy is going to define the way we shop in a pretty short timescale.
They got stuck into social early and they’ve made lots of mistakes; but they’ve weathered the knocks, learnt from them, and keep pushing forwards with bold initiatives when most retailers still think social commerce means selling your daughter to a duke.
Making money from social media platforms without alienating your audience can be a difficult balancing act.
Last Thursday Spotify announced some pretty big changes to its free account structure, the splashiest news being that free accounts would now be limited to 10 hours per month of music and only 5 plays of each song.
As a business decision I feel this is probably a good move for Spotifty. It is losing 16m Euros a year at the moment and advertising revenue is clearly not covering the costs of all those plays made by free users; indeed I don’t think Spotify advertising has taken off at all (it seems to me, as a regular free user, that most adverts are actually for Spotify itself and they are certainly poorly targeted!).
These changes will have three main effects:
Decrease in costs: Free users will obviously play less music, meaning less billing from record companies
Increased revenue: The limiting factors involved in the new model will (Spotify hopes) better push users into paying for the service = more revenue!
Decreased advertising revenue: With the limits on free accounts and with paid accounts free of advertising Spotify is clearly pushing more into a subscription based revenue model where advertising will have less of a role to play
Unsurprisingly there has been an online backlash. People who have become used to getting something for free don’t like suddenly being told “erm, sorry but now you have to pay.” Social media groups like this are inevitable and I am sure competitors like Grooveshark will get a boost from this move, but Spotify is a business. The company’s freemium model was clearly not sustainable so they adapted quickly; good for them.
However, I do feel that Spotify have missed a trick with this change.
Spotify is, largely, a young person’s tool; the core users are people like my 17 year old sister (one of the first people I saw using the service) and her young friends along with students. Now these young listeners often don’t have debit cards or a regular income to pay for a £10 a month subscription and as avid consumers of music will not submit to 5 plays per track and 10 hours a month of music. Some kids may get Mum or Dad to pay for their subscription, but the rest will just go back to piracy or find another service to use.
Looking at the comments on Spotify’s blog and the above Facebook group you can see the problem; here are some choice grabs:
But what’s strange is there is such an easy way to deal with this problem and turn it into a revenue generator.
These type of iTunes vouchers have been around for years and follow the precedent of PAYG phone cards for “top ups” or old fashioned gift cards / vouchers. All Spotify needs to do is distribute a PAYG Spotify card and Spotify gift cards via popular European retailers, maybe even linked to an iTunes-style online purchase element, and market them properly (for a start, using the free Spotify adverts).
Spotify suddenly goes from losing the youth market to converting them into paying customers. Easy, right?
Of course this needs to happen quickly to work, before they all jump ship, but it seems to me it would make the difference between a mass customer defection or embedding Spotify even further into our culture.
This Friday we bring you the debut blog appearance from our much-loved Account Manager Mr Riccardo Webb… ^MF
Why would a company create an awesome ad that posed a question – a question you’d be tempted to answer – and then forget to give peoplethe platform on which to answer?
Washington Lottery has just released a really cool TVC that depicts what a bunch of guys would do if they won the lottery: Segway jousting. I love this. I’d probably do the same thing. And others loved it too; the ad received coverage on some great sites including Engadget, Crunch Gear and Geekologie.
Washington Lottery stated that:
“The campaign, strapline Play Together, Win Together, aims to position the Lottery as a social experience and encourages friends to play it together to make their dreams come true.”
Great…inspiring, even…so why not celebrate that idea by providing the tools for people to do just that?
The reason I like the ad is not just because it’s pretty damn funny and well shot, but because it exploits the deeply human truth that every one of us has at some point considered what we’d do with a fist-full of cash and our imagination! Social media is the ideal platform where a company can connect in that human way and deliver a little more value to their consumers than a pamphlet under the door which I’ll probably end up using as poo-under-the-shoe scraper.
What Washington Lottery did well
They created an ad with social traction that’s fun to watch, easy to share and raises a question that anyone could answer.
What they didn’t do well
They failed to use their social presences to support what they did; instead they blocked user generated content and interaction with the very people who think they rock for making this ad.
Simple solutions to fixing the problem
Make it easy for people to share and create. Use YouTube features to your advantage (see Molly’s post on Desperados from earlier this week for an example of how to exploit YouTube to the max). Think of descriptions or annotations that could direct people to your Facebook page or simply say “Submit your story to [insert email address here]”.
Go to them, don’t wait for them to come to you. Using Twitter, you could simply search for people talking about the lottery, what they’d do with a winning ticket, people talking about a holiday with their friends, heck, you could even search for people talking about Segway jousting! The idea is to find relevant conversations that are happening online, and to engage with these people like a human being…be fun!
Open the platform, start the conversation. First off, get the Facebook page set up and working properly. Allow people to upload cool photos of what they’d love to do with their winning lottery tickets. You could even start a discussion that allowed people to start the conversation themselves or create a poll to kick it off.
Capitalise on your success. If people are talking about your ad, milk it! Comment on the articles that praise your work. Be the first person in the world to create the Segway jousting society and set up the world’s first jousting event sponsored by Washington Lottery.
The point is this: with social, explore all the ways you can turn a good idea into an big, effective movement. As long as you are consistent, sincere and tell stories that kick ass, you won’t go far wrong. People can smell “corporate” a mile away, which deters some brands from engaging; but don’t abandon them just as you’ve got their attention.
Inside the front hall is a lovely wooden stand (I have no idea why we have something so lovely, I sometimes imagine that a master craftsman lives in the basement). On this stand is all the post for the building.
That’s a bunch of bills, Amazon packages, love letters, flyers, magazines, demands from HMRC, postcards and wonderful news about pre-approved credit cards. It’s fair to say there’s usually a steady pile.
Every day when I leave the building (or when I come back if it’s an early start), I look through the post and pull out what’s for me. In doing so, of course, I leaf through the rest of the building’s post. Which, for the most part, isn’t much fun.
Which is a shame.
Lots of white or brown envelopes that may tease at what’s inside through a logo, or official looking font, but rarely more.
Which is also a shame.
Hidden within those envelopes are a wealth of information about people like me. People who choose to live in the same areas as I do, people who have similar resources to me, and broadly – given the area – are of the same kind of age and background. So wouldn’t it be awesome if that space was used?
Imagine the scenario… I’m a customer of BT Vision (and I am), through which I get my TV including Sky Sports (which I do). But the picture can be a little iffy (which it is). Downstairs lives Dave, he’s a Sky subscriber, and he doesn’t have any problems with his picture. Which means he didn’t miss last season’s Chelsea v Liverpool match (which I did).
So continue to imagine… I’m leafing through the post the day after I’ve missed a big match. I’m grumpy. I’m a bit miffed with BT (Actually, I’m not generally, just for the record). Sky know Dave lives in my building. Sky know BT Vision had problems in that area. Sky may even know that BT customers live in the building. Or at least people considering the purchase. So what if, when leafing through I see a nice blue envelope. It’s addressed to Dave. Inside could be anything, but outside is what’s important. It’s a message:
“Missed the match last night on BT Vision? Dave in Flat 6 didn’t. He’s on SKY. We think you’d love our service, but why not speak to Dave and see what he thinks? Inside this envelope is a voucher for a month free if you decide to switch”
OK, Dave may not want me to speak to him, but that’s to miss the point somewhat.
I’m ready for the message. It’s a moment I’m not expecting to be given such personalised, good news. It’s different. I might even think it’s quite clever.
But instead I get a letter from my bank. And I forget about the football. And I go to work. And I think about my bank.
Which is a shame.
Pick your moments to speak to me. And be clever about how you do it. Then I’m likely to listen. I don’t always like to find a flyer stuffed in my weekend Guardian.
By the way, if there’s any great examples of something along these lines, I’d love to see it, so drop them in the comments!
OK, it’s not rocket science. It’s clichéd, gimmicky, no doubt rather expensive and it’ll be interesting to see the business value it generates.
But it’s fun. It ties into Desperados’ more traditional cinema advertising. And it also shows how quickly social content, and people’s expectations of it, is evolving: everything has to be interactive, everything has to be personalised, everything has to be instantly shareable.
Whether you’re producing some bells-and-whistles social content, or you’re thinking about your shelf space in a retail store, those are three excellent principles to keep in mind.
This morning ‘play theorist’ Pat Kane tweeted, with slight bemusement, about Chromaroma. Looking at the website and a recent Telegraph article, I discovered that it is a new on/offline game ‘that encourages exercise and smarter commuting’:
Of course turning cities into games is old hat, but this is a trend set to grow and grow.
Gamification is one of those words you’re going to hate by the end of the year (especially if, like me, you are a linguistic pedant and simply find it ugly beyond belief. It hurts me, it really does). Regardless, it’s undoubtedly the new darling of the social media echo-chamber, popping up everywhere from Social Media Week to Bloomberg Businessweek.
It’s all very well adding some points to a journey or hiding some easter eggs in a website, but what distinguishes a great game from yet another timewaster is how well powerful, proven psychological drivers are built into the fabric of the game.
One great resource to keep your gaming design on track is SCVNGR’s Game Mechanics Playdeck, which anchors each game element to its behavioural impact, and ensures that you’re covering a good range of motivators.
But what’s your personal take?
If you will, forget for a moment the business implications of ‘gamification’. How do you feel about the trend as it relates to your own life? Will you be embracing Chromaroma with the glee only a terminally bored commuter can generate when given a sense of purpose?
Or, like Paul Carr, do you simply feel the urge to shout ‘NOT EVERYTHING IS A GAME?’
The story went as follows. It was an open day at the University of Nottingham and a group of researchers in body representation were showcasing their latest MIRAGE technology which creates body distortion illusions. Apparently the technology takes a real-time video capture image of a hand and then fools the brain into believing the hand is stretching or shrinking.
