Since the World Cup kicked off on Friday, we’ve been exposed to a lot aspects of the South African culture; dances, songs, traditional clothes, etc… and among all of this, one thing is arguably more remarkable than everything else: vuvuzelas. If you’re unsure of what we mean, see our little chap above.
He’s not on his own either. Every supporter seems to have one in the stadiums across South Africa and – for them at least – it’s just another way to express enthusiasm for their teams.
However, looking at what’s been tweeted so far about these noise-machines, the nations’ fans are split. Local supporters seem to have gone mad for them. Others around the globe are not so positive.
Whatever you think, it’s clear the vuvuzela is conversational. Whether you’re for or against seems much to do with whether you’re blowing one at the top of your lungs from a SA stadium or listening to a 50,000 strong vuvuzela cacophony from your couch. Context is king.
Since the World Cup kicked off on Friday, we’ve been exposed to a lot aspects of the South African culture; dances, songs, traditional clothes, etc… and among all of this, one thing is arguably more remarkable than everything else: vuvuzelas. If you’re unsure of what we mean, see our little chap above.
He’s not on his own either. Every supporter seems to have one in the stadiums across South Africa and – for them at least – it’s just another way to express enthusiasm for their teams.
However, looking at what’s been tweeted so far about these noise-machines, the nations’ fans are split. Local supporters seem to have gone mad for them. Others around the globe are not so positive.
Whatever you think, it’s clear the vuvuzela is conversational. Whether you’re for or against seems much to do with whether you’re blowing one at the top of your lungs from a SA stadium or listening to a 50,000 strong vuvuzela cacophony from your couch. Context is king.
… and you’ve got the ingredients for an amazing experience which showcases the very best of Nokia’s navigation tools and accessories, and drives awesome amounts of passionate word of mouth: on and offline, in the mobile tech community and far beyond. Ladies and gentleman, we give you #nokianav.
I won’t run you through the bells and whistles here as the video speaks for itself. We’ll post up a full case study soon, with a more detailed breakdown of our tactics along with stats and results, but for now, we just want to share the story.
It’s one of our lovely Engagement Director James Whatley‘s favourite mantras: be personal, not personalised.
We recently received a bit of word of mouth that demonstrates the difference perfectly. Having been invited to our Gumtree meetup to feedback on the new face of the site, blogger Basheera Khan wrote a post about the experience – and an “entirely unexpected” touch that “totally made my day”.
A hand-written note, and a bar of gluten-free chocolate.
Read Basheera’s post to understand the context, but the message here is: you don’t need extravagant surprises, or slick presents, or URLs printed on VIP invites, to connect with people. That’s being personalised. What you need is a little something that has taken listening, thoughtfulness and actual human input. That’s personal.
It’s a subtle difference, but an essential one. Got any good examples yourself?
We’re always banging on about how word of mouth affects every area of a business: from TV advertising to customer service, packaging design to internal comms, retail stores to social media presences.
Brands should even be asking how they can make their billing conversational. Don’t believe us? Watch this lovely bit of work around drink driving from OgilvyBrazil, and you might realise you’re missing a trick.
Ready to disrupt, delight and open a dialogue with your customers at every touchpoint you have? Give us a call, send an email or a tweet, or just drop in.
Heads up to on-the-ball ‘Head Riccardo Webb for spotting the video.
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Physical Digital conference, organised by Audiences Central and attended by arts organisations big and small from the Midlands, including two where I used to study/work/play – Warwick Arts Centre and the RSC. Now this was my kind of crowd.
I’m always fascinated by how this industry is approaching word of mouth. In my presentation I highlighted lots of the great work going on around the world, such as Flickr’s The Commons, the Coffs Harbour Voice of Time podcast archive, the National Museums Online Learning Project, and the ongoing brilliance of Brooklyn Museum with their hugely engaged blog, 1st fans Twitter art, mobile apps and more.
However, much of this activity is focused on digitising content rather than finding creative ways to get people to love the venues themselves.
Making the experience of a real life visit conversational is essential for the survival of arts venues.
With the Museum of Online Museums proving that you can create and disseminate as much niche content as you like but someone will always have a Fried Chicken Pantheon to lure your online visitors away, museums need to remember their original role as vibrant social spaces where people have thrilling shared experiences.
We need to look to the past as much as the future and bring a bit of Great Exhibition spirit back.
My suggestions on how to do this?
Personalise, disrupt and react.
In practice, this might range from an anti-social exhibition (where visitors are stripped of all digital devices and individually admitted to a room which holds only one object, with no explanation or context), to listening out online for people planning to visit your gallery and giving them a VIP welcome and voucher for a member of their community when they arrive.
For something a bit different, take a look work we did for The V&A’s Cold War Modern exhibition – a little teaser of which is below (get in touch if you’d like us to talk you through).
It was a day full of great inspiration, and I was particularly impressed with Toby Welch from Company Pictures and the work he’s doing with the Channel 4 drama Skins; Charles Hunter from Mudlark, creator of the Such Tweet Sorrow project; and Nic Millington from The Rural Media Company, who talked about using digital media to strengthen rural communities (something I’ve touched on before here).
So join the discussion: what are your top examples of WOM in the cultural space?
The iPad furore has pretty much washed over my head. I’ll eventually get version 2 or 3, minus the glitches and the early adopter price. But today I did see something on my Facebook wall that made me want to buy one, right now.
I know, it’s not exactly original, right? Just a less impressive version of the barber shop quartet who pop out when you finish the supersize ribs?
But this is clever because of the context.
It wouldn’t work for everyone. My sister would be mortified if someone applauded her for buying yoghurt in her local shop. But it most probably works for the sort of self-appointed trend-leaders likely to want an iPad in its first week of release.
They’ve done it before: applauding the first customers into the Manchester Apple store, via -nathan
Apple don’t usually bother actively seeking WOM – they let the products speak for themselves. But maybe they’re realising that nowadays people are expecting brands to go to a bit of extra effort to make them feel loved (they’ve also been distributing Krispy Kremes to queuers in the US).
The Apple store is somewhere people go to see and be seen, to feel special, to broadcast their devotion to the Jobs empire. The place where being marked out as a brand lover is odds on a very good thing.
So this works because it’s relevant to the customers, the setting, and indeed because it feels authentic to the brand, with its Americanised smiling service ethic and slightly cheesy edge. Try applauding a customer buying a handset in Carphone Warehouse, and they’d probably think you were taking the piss.
Moreover, as my mate Kenny’s update attests, it’s the kind of tactic that spreads online instantly, and it produces the sort of WOM that really grabs your attention, amongst all the anguished thought-pieces and partisan reviews.
Emotion rules. Good on the Apple crew for cutting through the mountains of techie iPad WOM and bringing the sheer joy of the purchase experience to the fore.
As the resident French ‘Head, I’ve been busy travelling across Paris over the past few days with the opportunity to attend two interesting meetups on geolocation services – a growth area causing a lot of buzz over here.
Among all these conversations, Foursquare seems to be the most talked about; but there was a definite sense of ‘how the heck can we take advantage of this?’
Over at AdAge, Dave Curry has written an insightful piece about the dangers of brands piling on geo-location apps indiscriminately, and how they could approach them in a more inspiring way.
At the moment, the most common use appears to be local businesses offering coupons to users checking into their venues – but this is a pretty basic transactional use of the opportunities. Some organisations such as Harvard are getting more experiential and imaginative, but this may be a step too far for smaller companies. So I’d suggest that brands ask themselves two basic questions integral to these apps:
How cool is our venue? and
How do our employees interact with people ?
These questions gets us focused on the priority of remarkable service and experience first.
Moving beyond the basics, geolocation services are great when used to identify brand ambassadors and to engage them; to nurture deep relationships; and to inspire positive word-of-mouth and attract new customers. But businesses should start by making the basic in-app experience around their venue as human, helpful and rich as possible.
Last Friday I got to combine my lit-geek and WOM-geek selves at Digital Storytelling 2010, “an afternoon of inspirational speakers and events for journalists, academics, entrepreneurs, digital experts and students” created by not on the wires and the BBC College of Journalism.
1000heads were very proud to be Headline Sponsors of such an eclectic and intelligent event. Sadly I couldn’t stay for long, but I did catch Ben Chesterton‘s moving presentation of the work he’s doing with Duckrabbit, mashing up audio and photography in the Condition Critical slideshows for Médecins Sans Frontières, which tell some pretty important and powerful tales.
For my braindump I chose to look at how – and if – social media is changing the way we tell our own stories, brands tell their stories, and how the two collide. I hooked my thoughts on four key themes; here’s a quick précis.
1. Comics
I’m a comic geek, and I’ve written before at the Guardian about how I think social media encourages a architectural, multi-media way of storytelling similar to graphic novelists. I find this most powerful when fewer words are used (we’re all fighting for space and attention in the online world, after all), but they are deepened and complexified by their link-rich context. The next level of this 3D storytelling will be mobile-driven augmented reality – the real world glossed with information, irony, images and opinion.
2. Heroes
In social media, we’re all the heroes of our own stories, and we’re uploading fragments of our stories all the time. That’s why gaming is such a natural fit for the space,; the newly released Heavy Rain is the first in a new generation of games where our own decisions and characters determine the plot. Brands are recognising this shift from consumers to creators, from personalising their offerings to put our preferences at the core (from Nike to Mountain Dew) to, in the words of Chris Brogan, ‘making your audience feel like a superhero.’
3. Symbols
Time was, it felt naff to see specific brand names used in a story; a sell-out of the grander symbolism, somehow, But truly the evil queen’s red apple has become the Apple; the purity of the lily has become use of Crème de la Mer; Penelope’s tapestry has become a Moleskine. We constantly and shamelessly use brands to express our identity online – the general has become the specific.
4. Myths
When we don’t have face to face instincts to rely on when building trust, only digital words and images, what do we rely on to capture our attention or empathy? Stories. Brands are realising the importance of building and sharing their own creation and evolution myths, and making sure they feel authentic to consumers. Moreover, they are starting to appropriate our myths – to include our stories in their own, by listening to us and engaging us to join their journey.
A nice example which ties these themes together is that of Isobella Jade, a New York model who tweeted me a couple of weeks ago.
Isobella had read a couple of my online articles, felt a connection, and offered to share her own story, a memoir she wrote on the free computers in the Apple store, and which became a cult success after they invited her to give a public reading in the store and the press picked up on it. We had a digital conversation, and last Tuesday she sent me a copy, alongside clippings and a card – which I duly talked about on Friday.
This little encounter exemplifies ‘the social media tale’. Isobella is the hero of her own grassroots story. The book is written in graphic, scenic chunks. She connected with me through my stories. She uses brands like Apple and Walmart and Vogue throughout the book to define what she is and isn’t; and Apple in turn uses her to reinforce its myth as an inclusive, empowering company. And that story, inherently conversational and emotive, spreads.
There’s so much here to dig into and discuss – there were some great questions on the day we barely got a chance to get into – but I just wanted to throw some conversation starters out there. These kinds of insights are central to 1000heads’ tactics in helping brands to share stories and become part of the stories their consumers share.
The first event was organized by 
