Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
You may remember that to celebrate our birthday last month we pulled together this rather tasty ‘What is WOM?’ infographic -
You might also remember that we also promised posters to anyone who wanted one too…
Well, they’re here.
If you want one (and are yet to sign up) please go right ahead and leave a comment on this post and we’ll add your name to the list
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
You may remember that to celebrate our birthday last month we pulled together this rather tasty ‘What is WOM?’ infographic -
You might also remember that we also promised posters to anyone who wanted one too…
Well, they’re here.
If you want one (and are yet to sign up) please go right ahead and leave a comment on this post and we’ll add your name to the list
Friday, July 30th, 2010
Today we decided to take a step back from the wonders of the WWW and get out to meet neighbours and passers by. All afternoon we’ve been out in Soho Square, Piccadilly Circus, Golden Square and wandering the streets of Soho with hundreds (and I mean hundreds) of celebratory balloons and cupcakes. Friends were made. Cake was eaten. Balloons were blown up and popped in a 10 gun salute to Friday, WOM, and the last day of our birthday celebrations. It’s been emotional. We’re off to the pub!
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
We love to blog. Of course we do. You know that.
But today we thought we’d take a step back from the limelight and show off some of the blogs that we’ve discovered through our engagement with different passion leaders for our various clients. From beauty to travel, photography to motherhood, we think they exemplify the sort of independent, heartfelt WOM brands should be listening to.
Firstly, everyone’s favourite girl-geek Belinda Parmar shows us that we don’t have to leave it to the guys to keep us in the know about technology. We love her. Have a read at LadyGeeks.
Next up, he calls himself a Psychotechnologist, but we like to call him Benjamin Ellis. He’s dazzled us with his photography skills at our Canon events, and been an all-round lovely chap at our Gumtree events. Read his blog here.
Onto our foodies. It’s never a dull moment around Ailbhe. We first met her eight months ago at a Miele event, and have enjoyed every meeting since. She blogs about food and design, and we think all her creations are Simply Splendiferous.
Traveller Chris Stevens is a long serving explorer, who regularly shares his travel exploits down under. He also demonstrates his awesome photography skills and just happens to be a mean surfer…
Beauty blogger Jenny Hayden aka The Style PA has been one of our Aussie Angels right from the beginning. She runs three fabulous blogs that are all worth a read.
Mobile Tech-addict Jay has been part of our Nokia and 1000heads community since 2006, and has joined us for events in Las Vegas, London and Amsterdam. He is always enthusiastic and friendly, but most importantly, he makes us cakes!
And last but not least, we first spoke to mummy blogger Karin Joyce when she recently trialled a Three In Car Wi-Fi kit. On her blog, Café Bebe, she shares the trials and tribulations of being a mummy, and we love reading her very honest, sometimes funny and often heart-warming tales of parent life.
As much as we’d like to mention all the blogs we think are fantastic, and potentially break the record for the longest blog post ever, we’re going to keep it short and sweet this time. However, we’d love to hear about your favourite reads so please let us know in the comments, and spread the love!
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
1000heads have been running successful events for over 6 years. One of the first we coordinated was back in 2006 in New York. It was at a time when many brands weren’t thinking about involving the community of users in their event plans. We went one better and had the community launch the product to their networks. They were first to touch, play and review. They were first to share.
With most WOM happening offline, much of 1000heads’ work happens in the real world (yes, there is life beyond social media!). Events are important. They bring people together. Tickling the team for their faves, some notable outings include CRUK’s Race For Life, the Tampax Pearl Swishing Party, Aussie’s Angel Miracle Moist events and Sainsbury’s FreeFrom blogger dinner parties. You might also have seen us at SXSW, Mile High Music in Denver or the Tribeca Film Festival. The list goes on…
Here’s our Flickr stream of some of the more memorable pics. Enjoy!
Monday, July 26th, 2010
Yesterday I returned home to London from a month long trip to Canada to support the launch of the Nokia N97 mini. 28 days on the road and 366 planted trees later I started to think about all the projects I’ve worked on as Relationships Director here at 1000heads, and all the people around the globe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.
Relationships are the heart of everything we do at 1000heads. The last time I counted we were communicating on a daily basis with bloggers, community members, tweeters and passionistas (yes, I think I just made a new word) from over 65 countries around the world. We’ve talked to foodies, ninjas, mummies, travelers, magicians and tech-heads to name just a few. We’re also constantly seeking out and saying hello to new and interesting people almost every day. Whether we’re loaning our office space to a rambling restaurant here in London, hosting gaming geek nights for the community at large, running simultaneous virtual events across 16 European markets, helping food bloggers cook with world class chefs, or planning a photo shoot for the Aussie Angels; we believe in building experiences people want to participate in and share. And we’re lucky to have some amazing clients whom we work with to develop ways they can join the conversation meaningfully to help build those relationships.
To do this, we need a strong team. First there’s Lauren, our Relationships Manager (and my left arm). We also have our brilliant Community team in Nicola, Emma, Jayne, Matt, Michelle, Katie, Lydia, Paul, James, Riccardo, Rhiannon, Robin, Chris, Tom & Joel -
In this, our final week of 10th birthday celebrations, it seems fitting to start the week with massive thank you to all who have collaborated with us on the projects we’ve created, events we’ve managed or adventures we’ve devised.
We’ll be digging down into the highlights over the next week so stay tuned…
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
We’ve looked at what we’ve done in the past for our clients, and what we love about our current clients, but what does the future hold? I’ve been having a little wonder…
* * * * *
There are two or three exits from Piccadilly Circus which people can use to get to and from the office.
Having walked to the tube with various colleagues it is fair to say there is a healthy split between the people who go down each route.
That’s fair and natural enough I suppose.
However, what is unhealthy, is people’s support and passion for their route.
‘This way is definitely quickest’, ‘Why do you go that way, look at the amount of people’, ‘Don’t go that way it must stink down there’ etc…They care about this. Deeply.
When I ask each person why they choose their particular route however, their answer is pretty universal: ‘Ummm, I’ve always gone this way‘.
At a recent IAB event a bunch of us agency folk and media owners were talking about the #fail culture that exists within social media and word of mouth. People are very quick to criticise other people’s approaches or feel like the industry is not delivering what it should.
As with the analogy above, they have chosen their route and their approach and won’t let any others in.
They deride those that go a different way even if they aren’t willing to try something else.
For me, this stems from the fact that too many individuals and agencies have an irrational support for the way they do things. More often than not this is for selfish reasons. They desperately want to prove to clients that they can do this type of work and, more worryingly, that they don’t want the budget to go to another agency.
Not enough people have walked enough routes. There is not enough evidence of people actually having done something. People are talking a lot but doing very little.
As we move forward, this needs to change.
From an agency perspective this is poisonous. Client budget spend in our area is, on the whole, minuscule in comparison to other disciplines. So for people not to evolve what they are doing, or not to offer support for other people or not learn from others mistakes is self-defeating.
At 1000heads we of course have an approach. This is always evolving though. It isn’t rigid. We aren’t blindly stubborn. We learn and borrow from others mistakes or successes. Having been doing word of mouth for 10 years we know a lot of stuff that works and doesn’t work in particular areas so we apply that to our work for our clients.
So I guess this is a call to arms moving forward.
When an agency wows you by talking a good game, find out what they have done in practice.
When a colleague tells you that they have tried it but it didn’t work, find out why it didn’t work.
When the client gives you a brief you know is wrong, tell them why it is wrong and how you can make it right.
No matter how much you need the work be honest and fair with your pricing.
When you know the brief is more suited to someone else, recommend them.
If we start doing this today, tomorrow those that should benefit, will.
And that makes for a rosy future.
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Continuing our third week of 10th birthday joy, we turn to our clients and, more specifically, why we love them. Because we do.
Today, I collared each of our lovely Account Directors (that’s our own diamonds Thom, Frank and Katy there below – just look at those smiles) and asked them one simple question:
“Why do you love working with your clients?”
Here are the highlights…
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Aussie “They’re always ready to try new things and they really know their audience…” |
| Nokia
“When a company’s gone from making welly boots to putting technology in the hands of a billion people on every continent, that’s an amazing achievement, and one it’s great to be involved with every day!” |
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Three
“They put the consumer at the heart of what they do, and make real decisions based on that” |
| SKINS “…are the perfect word-of-mouth brand; brilliant products that they’re not afraid to shout (loudly) about and a willingness to push the boundaries in the way they tell their story.” |
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WYGU “It’s great to be working with a team at the start of a great project they really believe in, and one we really believe in too!” |
| Miele “Forever Better pretty much sums Miele up – a pursuit of perfection that everyone who experiences their products is taken by.” |
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Cancer Research UK “Their mission reads: ‘Together we will beat Cancer…‘ – need I say more?” |
| STA Travel
“A great understanding that knowledge and advocacy starts internally, with their people” |
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So, to echo Molly’s words from earlier in the week, thank you to the clients.
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
As part of our thank you clients birthday week, we’d like to give a special shout-out to those clients who took the leap ten years ago and invested in word of mouth long before Twitter was even a flicker in Jack Dorsey‘s eye.
It’s a great reminder that WOM is so much more than Facebook or YouTube.
Everything started with listening.
Our CEO and MD Mike R and Mike D had developed an early version of WOMTrak, our proprietary listening and analysis software, and they built a specialist team of young analysts immersed in social platforms around that. WOMTrak has evolved massively, but from the start it was designed with the belief that conversation is useless without insight.
Any engagement came from those listening insights. There were fledgling forums and communities out there – mainly gamers and niche passion-based fan groups – that we reached out to. But with the online space still taking its first tentative steps into 2.0, much of our work also involved looking at how offline WOM could be mined and harnessed, and how and why it was starting to seep into this new peer-led online space.
As for the early adopters?
Tescos was one of the first, intrigued by what they could learn from customer conversation, as were Red Bull, KFC and Toshiba, for whom we developed a particularly successful reactive strategy for laptop owners with broken machines.
Nokia have been with us from the start – they instantly understood the importance of a WOM approach for a company that makes connecting people its philosophy – and we collaborated on many great early projects such as the Jealous Computers campaign.
Miele have worked with us for several years and really invested in the food, fashion and family communities that rely on their brand; Canon did the same in the creative and photographic communities; STA Travel weren’t far behind, determined to promote the voice of independent travellers. And a couple of years ago The V&A were setting an example to slow-evolving arts organisations with our Cold War Modern campaign.
Over the past ten years we’ve worked with fantastic brands, blue-chip and niche, across all industries – from Lloyds to LocateTV. But it also took real foresight and guts to be one of the first to engage in the raw landscape of on and offline WOM.
Hats off to the early birds. You helped kick-start an incredible industry.
Monday, July 19th, 2010
It’s easy to give brands a bad rap.
In our warm and fuzzy social world, corporate has pretty much become a dirty word.
Scan social media on any given day and you’ll encounter a raft of articles called things like ‘how to become a business that cares’, ‘the latest social media fail’ and ‘dealing with detractors’ (yes, a few of them might be by us) that suggest brands are big, bad and struggling to engage with people on and offline.
But they’re what makes all this possible.
Someone has to finance social media, however much we like to think of it as a God-given free-for-all. The investmen from businesses and brands who truly believe that peer to peer conversation is the way forward is what keeps word of mouth innovating and developing to improve things for both consumers and companies.
In our experience, companies are filled with passionate, socially savvy folk who really want to put WOM at the heart of what they do. Yes, it can be damn hard to find a way to integrate that passion throughout a big business so that it brings measurable results, but it’s perfectly possible.
For all the evangelism of the consultants and agencies, the staff of these companies are the guys who are starting to execute people-focused tactics in their jobs every day.
The Sainsbury’s team sharing their passion at our freefrom dinner party
So all this week, the third of our 10th birthday extravaganza, we want to say:
First and foremost, of course, thank you to ours; from Sainsbury’s to Nokia, Universal to P&G, STA Travel to SKINS, they show that industry and size of company is no discriminator when it comes to embracing WOM. All it takes is bravery and an intrinsic belief that consumers should be at the heart of everything they do.
But also thank you to all those businesses out there who are putting the theory into practice and PROVING that this stuff works.
Not to mention, you keep us in cake
What businesses out there do you think are doing an excellent WOM job?
