Though in this instance, we’re talking about the website, rather than the rainforest. Or the Gladiator.
Seller of books, purveyor of electronic items, collator of near forgotten DVD box sets. The website that made us all fall in love with oversized brown cardboard packaging. And, the site currently at the centre of a scandal.
It emerged this weekend, that Orlando Figes, historian and writer, had been using profiles on the website to leave comments about both his own books, and those of his rivals. As you can imagine, the thoughts on his own works were a mite more positive than those of his peers. When I say a mite of course, I mean alot.
Good old Amazon. Giving even highly educated academics a forum to play with that most mighty of forms, the online review.
Sadly, Figes’ attempt – even with the ongoing scandal and heartache – doesn’t make my top 3 of best uses for Amazon’s review feature:
1. Take the wonderful reviews of the humble Bic biro for example. There’s currently 195 reviews, and they expose every strength and weakness of the world’s favourite writing implement under such illuminating titles as ‘My poetry got worse with this pen’.
3. Finally, I do enjoy browsing for 1 and 2 star reviews of the creative arts that are generally considered pretty decent. You know, little known works such as Hamlet or Sergeant Pepper. Sheer brilliance.
Just goes to show that no matter how simple the element seems, you can always do something different.
1000heads are delighted to announce our latest client, Skins, world famous creators of recovery compression sports clothing and leaders in their industry.
We relish the opportunity to work long-term with the Skins team to put WOM at the heart of everything they do, particularly because their approach is already rooted in ‘substance over image’. As they say themselves:
“Good news travels fast.
Word got out that there were these things called SKINS that improved your power, speed, stamina and recovery. Pro athletes were the first to start wearing them – normally sneaking them under their sponsored kit. Before long, amateur athletes joined the party.
SKINS are now sold in over 30 countries. We’ve got over 160 products and manufacture more than 100,000 units a month. And counting.
We never stop pushing. Never stop trying to improve – to give you even more of a competitive edge. That’s why we put all our money back into research.”
A company which has evolved from grassroots support, not to mention which helps people become extraordinary and harness their talents to the full, is a pretty great start.
Our first project with Skins will be focused on the Tour de France – its mixture of passion and pain, athletes and ordinary people, on and offline engagement and global interest makes it ripe for some truly mindblowing word of mouth action. We’ll update you as it all unfolds.
Of course, we’re also feeling a bit inadequate about our efforts at Tuesday football, looking at all the incredible athletes who endorse Skins. But we do reckon a few of these would increase our skills by about 1000%. Maybe.
Yesterday, I was more than a little impressed by the deep blue shirt that James (our Engagement Strategy Director) had on. A good hue, and a nice collar. I’m a simple man to please.
“Why the snazzy shirt James?” I enquired.
“Because I’m going to launch of this year’s PR Week Power Book”
Yesterday, I was more than a little impressed by the deep blue shirt that James (our Engagement Strategy Director) had on. A good hue, and a nice collar. I’m a simple man to please.
“Why the snazzy shirt James?” I enquired.
“Because I’m going to launch of this year’s PR Week Power Book”
Following on from our first forays into Twestival love from just over a year ago. This year we’re helping out again by supplying the cakes for all and sundry that are attending and helping raise money for this year’s cause, Concern.
Thanks to the lovely guys and girls at Crumbs and Doilies we’re bringing along 42 dozen (yes, that’s 504 for the quick-minded of you) vanilla flavoured frosted cupcakes to share with you all.
“We like people, we like talking to people, we like eating cakes with people. Nuff said.”
Alas I don’t have any photos of the three lovely gentlemen who we’re sending along to assist in the giving out of said sumptuous delights so instead you’ll have to settle with this picture of the cakes themselves…
Yesterday, Molly wrote about the pros and cons of having and implementing a set of social media guidelines into your company. While this kind of policy is virtually essential to any modern day brand, the problems that arise more often than not spring out of employee reluctance to take part.
What we don’t tend to talk about is what drives this activation.
That’s where our word of mouth tracking comes into it. ‘WOMTrak‘ is a whole suite of products originally designed to provide insights and analysis to inform our ongoing activation ideas. Like I said to a number of people at Likeminds on Friday, there really is no point coming up with an amazing idea if you have no information or insights to base it on.
With all of our clients, old or new, we always advise a period of listening first. Obviously with some of our more long standing accounts, this system is already in place; constantly defining and refining our creative as well as our engagement strategies moving forward. Building in reactive and creative strategies that we can execute on a six-pence.
It’s a fantastic resource to have.
Coming back from both the Likeminds conference and the subsequent summit at Bovey Castle, I feel inspired and invigorated. Each and every practitioner we met spoke of the importance of listening first, then engaging. Be that through using something as simple as a Google Alert or a fully fledged monitoring program from a specialist system like WOMTrak; make sure you listen.
Listening will provide a mean of what your people already think of you. Once you have that, you can start researching and discovering insights… and once you have that, you can start educating your staff and your stakeholders about why this is important. Sell that in and you’re on course to begin creating informed strategies that provide useful, engaging content that will not only improve your bottom line but ultimately, improve the experience of your end user.
So remember, when it comes to WOM, if you do only one thing -
Yes indeed – we’re offering you a way to get a piece of beautiful original artwork and feel good about yourself (oh, yeah, and help other people. That too).
We launched our 1000heads Justgiving page for Haiti at Tuttle a couple of weeks ago, and although we’ve had many kind donations, we’re still eager to hit our £500 target (and possibly more…) In this spirit, artist and Tuttle regular Vince has donated two of his unique pieces, ‘The Battery Charger’ and ‘Joggling the Planet Juggler’, to the cause.
The Battery Charger and Joggling the Planet Juggler
Everyone who donates on our page will be put into a draw and the lucky winners selected randomly. It’s the kind of thing we love – collaborative social philanthropy, with a dash of creativity thrown in – so a big thanks to Vince and please head over to donate.
If you’re not yet familiar with Google’s next next-big-thing, Google Buzz, then have a quick look at the official vid below to get up to speed – or click through to one of the news, mobile and business sites which have been buzzing about Buzz for a while.
It all looks pretty exciting, but this new frontier of conversational integration is causing no end of controversy. There’s the obvious concern that it’s just a souped-up repeat of the Wave experiment, which rather failed to capture the public’s heart, and not such a great one at that; James has been blogging about the fact that the Silicon Valley-centric company have only integrated it with Android 2.0+ and the iPhone, leaving the rest of us mobile users unsupported.
But the main concern revolves around Google trying to ‘own’ online conversation by routing it through their own property. Now, we can’t be too idealistic about this. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, even the most obscure cabbage-soup-diet forum – these may be perceived as ‘independent’ social venues, but they’re business ventures, concerned with money and market share as much as the big G.
However, whatever the reality, it feels different when you venture out into individual, dedicated spaces, rather than filtering everything you do through one Gmail homepage. People are forever theorising about how to create the perfect single social aggregator, but there is real pleasure and profit in going out to others’ spaces to share rather than dragging everything back into your own. It’s an act of travel that helps us to move beyond our own mental hearths.
And it has become so easy to like, recommend and comment that it’s ever more difficult to filter the quality from the crap. Perhaps a slight element of effort is actually useful, ensuring that we really do want to highlight that bit of content, really do intend to buy that product, really do feel some emotional connection with that brand. As for our increasingly shaky online mental health, a bit of compartmentalisation can be a good thing. When you email, email. When you read, read. When you carefully choose that something is worth recommending, go for it – and therefore know that that recommendation has real weight.
Moreover, the likes of Twitter actively send us away into new spaces via outlinks, helping us collide with truly unexpected discoveries (not the inevitably irrelevant automated ‘recommendations’ Buzz offers from our friends); by posting up the videos and posts linked to in the same window, Buzz discourages us from investigating the original source.
In a similar vein, the option to only share things with selected friends will surely decrease our discoveries through people joined to us by random chance or weak links. Dunbar may tell us we can only maintain 150 ‘stable’ friends, but it has been shown that the unstable ones are the most valuable in widely spreading influential WOM. So Buzz is taking one of the most challenging attributes of Facebook for brands – it’s closed, inward-looking silos – and building them right into the fabric of the platform.
The irony, of course, is that I’ll probably spend much of the week playing with Buzz and pumping lots of social content out there into my network. Google, once again, have done the one thing that most businesses wish they could – stamped some ownership on the way people influence each other and are influenced.
However, this somewhat dystopian vision of Google nailing the model for the single open social network founders on the concept of openness. Google Buzz may look like it’s opening us all up to new WOM, but it it is in danger of locking us into a cycle of existing networks and second-hand discoveries, like stale air conditioning pumping through a password protected room.
Lunchtimes sometimes fly by round here. You devour a burrito and the front page of the BBC website and before you know it you’re back into the wonderful world of WOM. Today however, we thought we’d make something more of the midday break and give it some occasion. So we launched a new website design. What do you think?
Over the coming weeks (and beyond, no doubt) we’ve some other choice updates we’ll be making, so keep an eye out for those. In the mean time, let us know what you’d like to see on here and we’ll see if we can accommodate. We see this as something that should always be evolving as we do new and exciting things, with new and exciting people.
We’re still making a few tiny tweaks, but if you notice anything amiss do let us know.
If you’re across the channel this Thursday 4th Feb be sure to drop into the first ever Tuttle Paris – that’s an informal social media meetup for the uninitiated.
Our resident French ‘head Lilian Mahoukou is organising the relaxed networking event at Au Pere Tranquille, 16, rue Pierre Lescot,from 6.30 – 8.30pm, so it’s easy to drop in after work. Lilian tells me a diverse group of attendees have already confirmed, with specialists in SEO, Gen Y, coaching, e-business, and corporate and personal branding coming along, as well as the usual mix of bloggers, citizen journalists and just plain interesting people, so it should be a great couple of hours.
Our resident French ‘head 