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Get Out and Play

You probably know these online videos like human tetris. I’m quite sure that one of your colleagues sent this sort of thing to your Inbox.

OK, now tell me what’s wrong with this? Yes, it had more then 7 million views on Youtube and is a spectacular achievement of the human race.

But. A new idea came to my mind while watching the explanation of the NOKIA N-GAGE project. Guys, IT’S NOT INTERACTIVE.

You can only watch, but can NOT PLAY. So today I’m learning from NOKIA who looked forward. To promote their NOKIA N-GAGE video games for the mobile phone, they launched a website you’ve probably already seen – “Get Out And Play”. Yes, the same that won Cannes Lions Silver and Gold at London International. At the site you can not only watch those human tetris/snakes videos but also play.

Results

News about the website spread fast. Starting with the geek blogs ending with popular design and culture sites. On Youtube the video from the site received more the 1 million views. The campaign details are presented at the Farfar site.

So?

OK, now you played the game twice and ask me what’s the point? The point is I remembered my forgotten way of creating ideas. The problem is we sometimes come up with the ideas that look to be so great, but it’s like people were interested in Chuck Norris jokes 5 years ago. So. Just look what’s popular and look forward then. You can call it trends/mega-trends/tendencies/fashion whatever. Just find what’s hot and improve that. Make it not 2, but 5,10 or 100 times better. Don’t only look at Youtube hits. Google Trends, Google Blogs, Twitter Search, Friend Feed are your friends as well. Now it’s all about your inner child.

Let The Crowd show you The Way

You have surely seen a rock star jumping off the stage onto the hands of the euphoric crowd to float on the surface of this pleasing sea of hands. Your company can also do that. Instead of crowdsurfing it should tackle crowdsourcing.
When Jeff Howe first mentioned crowsourcing in Wired magazine, everyone started chattering about it. A couple of days ago even The Economist published an article about it. Indulge yourself to the crowd, let it develop, change and even create your product, let it comment on it and on your services, ask the crowd for suggestions the best of which you can implement in practice. After all this is the main idea of crowdsourcing: consumers themselves tell you how to make your business better.
Everyone knows the best examples of crowsourcing: Wikipedia, which runs up to the 8th place in the world’s most visited 500 websites list according to Alexa. For another example you have Zagat, a crowdsourcing dinosaur since 1979, which is valued for its food, accomodation and entertainment in opinion of some 350,000. Or iStockwith 180,000-200,000 people buying things like a photograph, and where a new file is uploaded within 3 seconds.
What about the grand brands?
Would you like to create your own coffee drink and find it in Starbucks menu the next day? Company’s website www.mystarbucksidea.comwas a shot to the bull’s eye since it was launched in March: there everyone can offer his or her coffee recipe, comment on service, assess others’ offers, and decide which ones should be brought into the menu. Thanks to this website Starbucks customers get free coffees for birthdays, vegan menu was expanded, and the ones who bring their own cups pay less. The website was highly popular from the beginning and collected 130,000 original ideas in six months.
But what do you do with a cup of coffee on the table if your computer goes out? www.dellideastorm.com suggests to report them the problem to them and wait for the solution. The initial idea of this website was to help Linux users who make the majority of the website’s visitors up to this day. Eventhough Dellideastorm is a bit geekish, they received more than 10,000 ideas within a year.
You know that even the devil wears Prada, so you have to be really original to stick out. To do this visit www.threadless.com. Each one can offer a T-shirt design here, or select the best one from the already submitted and order a T-shirt with it. Threadless gets about a thousand designs weekly from its community of 600,000.
Doritos is giving away a million dollars for the best advertising idea, Beastie Boys put video cameras in their fans’ hands during concerts and shook cinemas with their film…
What will you suggest?
 
When you start to crowdsource you usually become concerned with how to avoid the fate of a lousy singer, when the crowd steps aside and he crashes his face to the ground. There is no need to be afraid of the so called YouTube effect. Yes, some 80% of the ideas will be trash, but the remaining 20% will be worth gold. You can use special websites to generate ideas or use your imagination and let your customers show you the way.
Will it work? Depends on how much effort you put in it and how much people like you. For your inspiration, a former cheer leader with her website www.sciencecheerleader.com drew at least a few of her friends to… scientifical research!
You cannot crowdsource cash from peoples’ pockets, but the crowd can offer you a very good bait.

Social media in (re-)action?

It seems that social media is the new king for brand communication. You can see a number of examples how brands use social media to embrace engagement. Yes, this sounds even better than conversation. Lately, I’ve stumbled upon a number of lists of what brands do on different social networks/platforms.
Here go my favorite:
From socialbrandindex – Brands at Twitter
All those are great. But what became clear after monitoring those is that only a small part of the brands listed here benefit and achieve ROI. Actually, most corporate blogs are dying with zero comments, similar results with the other initiatives.
SO:
  1. Don’t worry if you aren’t succeeding. At least you don’t have a flop such as Motrin.
  2. Consider becoming one of those zero-commented upon blogs before starting.
  3. Think of all the social stuff as experimenting. Maybe some small budget could be allocated for your teams to learn about doing social things.
  4. Think of who your Target Audience is. Two examples:
-          Adobe at delicious
-          Jeep at flickr
At one point the TA is tech people/geeks, on the other there are some guys who like to show off with their cars I believe. Both brands are doing nice on those social pages – they have  an evident number of followers and discussions. And you know that Delicious/Flickr are not as common for brands as Facebook/Twitter. We need to find our niches.
  1. The social train is just leaving. Open the lists and see what companies from your industry, companies at social nets you are planning to go to or already are there (e.g. Twitter). These are vast resources for learning. Learning. Learning. The real game with brands on social nets hasn’t started. So sit at the table and learn to do that, it’s not too late. The ones that learn faster, achieve their ROI faster and get everything (look at the results of Southwest or Dell for inspiration), the others… At least you’ll have to buy all that knowledge for a very high price.
 
For inspiration. How is your social conversation working?
P.S.:
If you somehow missed all the buzz while watching TV, see the video social media in Plain English. That’s like “Windows for Dummies”, but much more engaging and worth digging. ;)
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