Guest post by Katharina Wilhelm, account executive, WE Munich, and Manuel Huttl, general manager and vice president, WE Munich
The German Waggener Edstrom team used the digital playground for a new approach to producing marketing material: In the era of 3-D cinema and 3-D to come on every home screen, the team developed a digital animated-image movie for client Canadian Solar. The renewable energies company is very open-minded about digital approaches to communication. Canadian Solar wanted a movie that combined its Canadian heritage and its ice hockey sponsorship, and that could be used for international trade shows.
WE launched the video at a time when everybody was talking about the Olympic Games starting in Vancouver. Now, it is one thing to shoot the necessary material in a single day and develop Canadian mountains on a German screen; it is quite another thing to make a behind-the-scenes video about it. The movie brought more than 2,000 views on YouTube in the first four days, plus sales requests for the solar modules. The movie is now going to be the starting point of a worldwide campaign.
You should watch the “making of” video first:
And then have a look at the original video.
Can you tell which mountains are real and which are of digital origin?
To follow up on yesterday’s post I wanted to try my best to help those people who will refuse to heed my advice. Here is a recommended list of Zombie Media books. Conversely, if you don’t want to end up with zombie media, I highly recommend the non-zombie versions of these books.
- Naked Conversations About Zombies – How zombies are changing the way businesses talk with customers.
- The Zombie Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by zombie technologies.
- Zombies Engage – The complete guide for zombies to build, cultivate and measure success on the Web. Foreword by Zombie Kutcher.
- The Purple Zombie – Transform your business by being a zombie.
- Zombieville – How businesses can thrive in the new zombie neighborhoods.
- Zombie Agents – Using zombies to build influence, improve reputation and earn trust.
- Z 2.0 – New collaborative tools for your organization’s toughest zombies.
- Creating Zombie Evangelists – How zombie evangelists become a voluntary sales force.
- Here Come the Zombies
- Twitter Marketing for Zombies
- Use Twitter to communicate with your zombies
- Use zombies to maximize your presence on Twitter
- Build and use your network to spread the zombie virus
- Measure the success of your zombies
Do you have a favorite zombie media book?
Bonus points if you can name all the real books and their authors.
Tac Anderson passed along a very good postby Hutch Carpenter on the ethics of crowdsourced design a la 99designs, crowdSPRING and others. Many designers have eloquently stated how these services devalue design and encourage theft and plagiarism, and I won’t be using this space to throw another explanation on the pile. What I can lend to the conversation are my personal experiences, having been burned by these so-called “opportunities” many years ago.
I wrote and published my first Web page when I was 10 years old. I began freelancing as a designer and cartoonist three years later. When I was 15, I apprenticed in a design program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and later that year began my first regular job designing CD-ROMs that shipped with certain Intel server products.
As a young, impressionable designer hungry for growth and attention, I was a textbook victim of crowdsourcing (or, more appropriately, “spec” work). I clearly remember being enticed by the prospect of “beefing up my portfolio” or gaining “exposure.” I saw firsthand how these companies take advantage of a designer’s time, energy and talent for little-to-no compensation, and often fewer rights. I saw my work taken from me, altered and ultimately discarded. I watched my competitors reap greater rewards by submitting plagiarized design.
These experiences occurred without the aid of focused, online services that make soliciting “spec” a quicker (and potentially more thoughtless) process. I can only begin to imagine the increased discouragement young artists will have as a result.
If you or your organization are interested in exploring crowdsourcing in a community-focused way, I offer two suggestions:
- Engage with a professional design team, but outline a plan for structured community involvement in the design process. I employed this strategy for the CyborgCamp logo, and Happy Cog solicited user feedback while redesigning elements of Mozilla’s Web presence. Costly review and research processes are democratized while maintaining the expertise and advisory only seasoned designers can provide.
- Hold a contest for an event identity (or something similarly finite), targeting an audience that has more than a monetary investment in its success. For example, if your company is sponsoring an outreach event for local schools, open a design contest for students in the area.
If your impetus for crowdsourcing is merely to save a buck (remember, “you get what you pay for”), why not sidestep the pitfalls of contest Web sites entirely and seek out an ambitious nephew or family friend with an eye for design? The family association will keep both of you relatively honest and ethical, and it may have a real impact on his or her college applications and fledgling freelance prospects.
I encourage all professionals (design or not) to join me in saying “no” to spec work.
I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the coming wave of zombie media.
Now that companies are starting to show results with social media, the rest of the early majority and late majority adopters are going to continue to pile on. They’re going to try and strap on social media to their existing efforts and realize that they can’t sustain these efforts. Worse yet, they’ll launch these efforts with no thought to what to do with their new fans, friends and followers (assuming they get any to begin with).
We will continue to see a plague of abandoned Twitter accounts, outdated blogs and neglected Facebook pages. These are the social media equivalent of zombies.
Unsupported, non-strategic, tactically driven efforts have no ROI and accrue to no larger business objective.
What are the signs of the coming wave of zombie media? They’re everywhere if you look.
Screenshot: timeinc.net
If you trust someone — or a publication or an institution — are you also influenced by that person, outlet or article?
There’s been a great deal of dialogue lately in traditional and social media about trust and influence. Many marketers believe that if you trust a third-party spokesperson, or even a celebrity in an ad, you’ll be influenced to make a particular choice regarding a product, or service. The marketing theory behind it is that you listen to people you trust, be they journalists, academics, celebrities or friends/family, and you generally follow their advice and recommendations (influence).
So Much to Say, But Who Exactly Are They?
With the explosion of social media where people have hundreds of “friends” in Facebook and thousands of LinkedIn “colleagues” and Twitter followers, the question has been raised: How trustworthy are all these people and how influential are they? And, given the often anonymous nature of social media, who are these people?
At the outset of social media fever, Universal McCann published research entitled “Since When Did We Start Trusting Strangers? ” At the time, the study reported that social media was having an outsized influence on product purchasing behavior.
Trust Is Local and Global — and Perplexing
Recent research on trust, specifically Edelman’s Trust Barometer, reports that global trust in business is up while trust in friend input on a company, product or service is down by nearly half from 45% in 2009 to 25% in 2010. While I was surprised that trust in business was up (hmmmmm … like Wall Street business?), I read with interest as I thought the “Great Social Media Backlash” was beginning. OMG!!!
But then I realized there’s always an online backlash and social media is here to stay. I mean, come on, if Martha Stewart is constantly chattering about Twitter, it’s not going anywhere but up. Trust me.
… But It’s Not the Same as Influence
This brings me back to the original question of the relationship between trust and influence. While I don’t exactly trust Martha Stewart, she definitely has an influence on me and millions of other people (she influences my wife and my wife’s sister and I trust their lifestyle radar). And, BTW, my lack of trust in Martha has nothing to do with her financial behavior. I don’t trust Drudge, Fox, HuffPost and Truth-Out either, but I am indeed influenced by them.
Waggener Edstrom’s recent research (yeah, here’s the sell) called Moments of Influence confirms the relationship between our Influence Channel Index and trust. In fact, friends were considered the most influential and trustworthy people/channel when purchasing a video game — even more influential than family and advertising (it is, after all, gaming not climate change). In addition, the research identified a sub-segment of people who are hyper-connected and hyper-influential. We call this segment Influence Multipliers.
First Impressions Last
Influence Multipliers (my wife and sister-in-law) are the “go to” people we all turn to in society for advice on everything from fashion, lifestyle, new products and services. We all “have a guy or a girl” and they’re the early adopters and social trendsetters. But, today, the big difference is that Influence Multipliers now have a powerful broadcast medium at their disposal: social media.
Do we necessarily trust Influence Multipliers? Maybe not. Does it matter? Do we follow what Influence Multipliers do and say? I’d say yes. Why? Because it’s an aspirational thing: We want to be in the know and on top of things and have “exclusive” access to data.
Similar, But Different
From our research, we learned that reach doesn’t necessarily mean influential, and influential doesn’t necessarily mean trustworthy. Apparently, people discriminate between influence and trust. You may trust an academic on climate change, but you may not be influenced by what he/she says when it comes to buying a car, or the latest gadget.
So, while there’s a relationship between trust and influence, what matters more? Trust or influence? I’d argue that influence trumps trust.
Today, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide is officially predicting which film will win the best picture Oscar. Based on data culled from two twendz pro™ “Try it Now” dashboards, created to monitor the Twitter conversation surrounding the two frontrunners (“Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker”), Waggener Edstrom Worldwide is predicting the Oscar will go to … “The Hurt Locker”!
In the spirit of transparency, let me explain the methodology used to come up with this prediction. Waggener Edstrom Insight and Analytics team members spent some time reviewing both dashboards. Using only original tweets with a stated, definitive pick for the Academy Award for best picture, each “vote” was tabulated. In order to provide the most accurate results, ambiguous tweets (those that could not be discerned one way or the other but seemed to be voting) were excluded from the tally and factored into an error margin. Following this methodology, our review found “The Hurt Locker” to be the clear winner by a margin of 260 votes. This is in spite of the fact that “Avatar” had almost 1,200 more original tweets than “The Hurt Locker.”
From the WE release, here are some cool supporting tidbits found from twendz pro:
• Many of the supporting tweets for “Avatar” as best picture referenced its budget and sales.
• The average number of followers for an “Avatar” Twitter voter was over 110.
• Those supporting “The Hurt Locker” focused on its plot, characters and director Kathy Bigelow’s directing capabilities.
• The average number of followers for a “Hurt Locker” Twitter voter was over 220.
Twitter conversation aside, there are some compelling statistics, not to mention influential industry pundits, in agreement with our prediction. Roger Ebert calls “The Hurt Locker” the “current favorite” despite a “rule-breaking” producer (more on that later) and says if one of the other films wins, he will be “very surprised.” “The Hurt Locker” has also won multiple industry awards that are often considered predictors of the best picture Oscar. This includes the Director’s Guild Award for outstanding direction of a feature film; only six times in 60 years has the DGA winner NOT won the Oscar for best picture. Further, according to TIME, in addition to the Director’s Guild, “the producers’, writers’ and editors’ groups all chose ‘The Hurt Locker’ over ‘Avatar.’ No film in Oscar history has won all those guild awards and then lost Best Picture.”
Statistics aside, make no mistake: There is substantial politicking that occurs behind the scenes to encourage Academy members to vote for various films. In fact, the Associated Press reported yesterday that a producer of “The Hurt Locker” had been banned from attending the Oscars due to e-mails he sent to the Academy urging members to vote for “The Hurt Locker” and “not a $500 million film.” The Academy concluded that producer Nicolas Chartier violated Oscar rules, which “prohibit mailings promoting a film and disparaging another.” Nevertheless, the promotion continues – on all sides. James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana, and others from “Avatar” have been making the rounds for weeks, from “Saturday Night Live” (Sigourney Weaver) to “The Late Show With David Letterman” (James Cameron) to publicity in various weeklies (Zoe Saldana).
And what about the other nominees? “Precious” … “The Blind Side” … “Inglorious Basterds?” Will there be an upset? Probably not. As someone who makes a living reviewing and analyzing data, my money is on “The Hurt Locker.” Having seen it, I get it. Do I agree with it? Well, that’s another post.
To get a better understanding of where we are today we often need to look to the past. In a recent MediaShift blog post Craig Silverman shares insight about what was happening (or more accurately what wasn’t) in Turino, Italy, during the 20th Winter Olympics in 2006.
Graeme Menzies (formerly worked for Microsoft), now director of online communications, publications and editorial services for the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) noticed how much buzz YouTube was getting, yet it was not being utilized at the Turino games.
The social media landscape in 2006 wasn’t what it is today.
“The website is the mother ship,” Menzies said. 60 million site visitors over the period of the Games and somewhere near a 1.5 billion and 1.6 billion page views — and humbly admits they can’t possibly create it all and engagement with audience is a large focus.
Each medium has its place. The fans own the Facebook conversation. He Compares Twitter to a telegram and reminds us after a few minutes content may not be relevant. YouTube continues to be a huge draw.
They’ve also released a free mobile app, provides as much content as the Online Spectators Guide, Cultural Olympiad, news and up-to-date images from the web-site.
“We’re done at end of March, so our goal is to be in the moment…being ahead of the pack is just as bad as being behind. We don’t want to be on the bleeding edge or behind the times. We want to be in the moment.” Of course this will change by 2012 for the next round of Olympics…..
This is a great example (imho) of learning from the past, moving forward with a strategic media plan (which includes traditional mediums not discussed in depth here) and using current digital media tools to reach specific audiences and engaging with different demographics in campaign with a short time span.
Yes, the action is right in our backyard but the passion surrounding this Winter Olympics seems to be at crazed level this round, eh? How are you following the 2010 Winter Olympics events? What do you think we’ll see change as we move forward in 2012? Sadly, I know I just have a few more days “to be in the moment.”
My father passed away unexpectedly on January 31st, 2010. In the time since he slipped away, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of things – work, family, life, etc. I am still processing what has happened, and I’m not sure how long it will take before I understand the full impact this change has had on me, or even if I ever will. One thing I appreciated about my dad was his life experiences and what they meant to me growing up. I thought I’d take an opportunity to share a few “life lessons” from those experiences:
1. My dad loved photography. He had an old Olympus OM-2 film camera he used while I was growing up. He had a lot of slides… probably thousands. Vacations, random shots of people, conferences he attended and cool experiments like double exposures and fast shutter times to stop motion. He had gotten into digital cameras over the last few years and carried on shooting with a nice prosumer Fuji.
Recently, he had poured a lot of effort into digitizing the old slides and cleaning them up to preserve them. As I was going through them, I found a lot of pictures I had forgotten. My dad was usually the one behind the camera, but in probably 80% or more of the photos in which he appeared, he was holding a fish or was in the process of fishing.
The lesson: Take a lot of pictures. If you’re in them, smile. This is how people will remember/see you when you’re gone.
2. My dad liked to write and speak. He led a lot of technical sessions throughout his career and loved teaching people new things. I remember once when I was in 3rd grade he came and spoke to my classroom. Here’s a guy teaching mainframe computing and timesharing to a bunch of 3rd graders, and the class was eating it up. He also brought swag — he knew his audience.
While I was helping to clean up his office I found a lot of his notebooks. Some were very old, from when he was a teen. Some were very recent. All of them contained ideas. Ideas for books, ideas for businesses, ideas for people.
The lesson: Write. People who didn’t know you closely will feel close to you when they know your thoughts.
3. My dad had an interest in flying. He loved to fly, even if it was for work. He decided to get his private pilot’s license in the early 80s. After he got it, I went up with him a few times in both a Cessna 152 and 172. He used to love to tell a story about when he was flying with an instructor and was first learning how to land — he brought the plane in smoothly, and the wheels “kissed the runway.” As they taxied back, the instructor yelled at him — he had come in too fast, wrong angle, etc.
The lesson: You might think the lesson here is that any landing you can walk away from would be considered a good one, but I think it’s more than that. Good landings are a matter of perspective, and they are what you make them — be prepared, and your wheels will almost always kiss the runway.
4. My dad had an incredible sense of humor. He could find something funny in almost any situation. I remember sitting around the dinner table once with my dad and two sisters while he told a joke. It was a joke that was clearly not entirely intended for kids, but nothing too far out of bounds. My dad built up the joke, and delivered the punch line. He laughed and laughed. My sisters and I stared at each other trying to figure out what was so funny.
The lesson: Seems obvious, but has to be said. Laugh. We’ve told so many stories about my dad and had those same laughing fits because that’s how he was, and that’s what he would have wanted. Laugh a lot so people can laugh with you after you’re gone.
5. One thing my dad was always good at was brightening somebody’s day. Whether it’s a joke, sharing a story, listening, etc., you could count on that time and it would make things a little better. After he passed away, I was talking to one of his neighbors, who told me he thought my dad was a good guy. My dad was outside one day and saw the neighbor’s son outside. He knew that the kid rode a dirt bike, so he went over there, gave him $20 and told him to get gas and take the bike for a spin. I’ve heard a lot of stories like this over the past few weeks, from different people.
The lesson: It’s the little things. Take care of the people around you — little things mean a lot to a lot of people.
6. As I alluded to earlier, my dad loved to fish. I took him on a sturgeon charter out in Astoria, Oregon, one time, and he snapped a rod in half on a fish. To hear him tell the story, you’d have thought he had hooked Moby Dick.
One thing he used to do was take a week off and go fishing up in Canada with a bunch of “the guys.” They went to a place called Jim’s Caviar Camp. They would go out with a guide during the day but were allowed to use the boats to go back out after dinner. My dad hopped in a boat one evening after dinner and headed out to catch a few more fish. He wasn’t paying attention to the time, and suddenly realized it was dark and that there was no hope of finding his way back to camp. He found a clearing and pulled the boat ashore. He prepared himself to spend the night — a burlap sack for a blanket and fillet knife by his side in case a bear decided to make an appearance (he wasn’t going to go down without a fight). He lay on the shore as the Northern Lights danced over head.
In the distance, he heard the faint sound of a motorboat — they had come looking for him. He looked for something with which to signal, and found the only thing he had — his Bic lighter. He held it up and lit it, and was immediately seen by the search party in the boat. They said that in the darkness, it looked like the island was on fire.
After that, my dad always carried a lighter in his tackle box. He quit smoking over 20 years ago and still carried a lighter.
The lesson: Find your lighter. Who or whatever it may be. You never know when you’ll be unexpectedly surrounded by darkness.
My dad was mine.
I know my friend, Brian Sollom, is nodding his head and Mike “foleymo” Foley has probably already signed up. The Next Web is reporting about a new app that allows you to take a picture of someone and pull up all of their recent social activity. It’s not hard to let your imagination go from there.
Stalk a Stranger. Point Your Phone At Their Face.
Recognizr works when the user points the camera at another person. Inbuilt face recognition software maps a 3D model of the subject and transmits the information to a remote server where it is matched with an identity already present in the database. This information is then sent back to the handset along with any relevant social networking information associated to that person, conveniently displayed above the persons head using little social icons.
The service is opt-in only (right now), but face recognition technology exists from companies like HP and Microsoft. There are even free versions out there. It’s only a matter of time before this capability is available without having to opt in.
This will scare the crap out of a large number of people. I understand but there’s no turning back.You can either try, unsuccessfully, to hide from it or you can take control of it and manage it.
Here are my 3 big takeaways for you:
- There are no back channels. Do not say anything on the Web you wouldn’t want everyone and anyone to see.
- Understand how to use the tools. Facebook and Google don’t make it easy to control your privacy (it’s in their best interest when more data is public), but understand how to use the privacy settings and use them as you see appropriate.
- There is no difference between online, offline and mobile realities.
I’ve long claimed that ther is no difference between online and offline. Augmented reality apps are another example of this.
As marketers we need to quit talking about online versus offline versus mobile. The form factor and user interface may be different, but all three coexist and we need to be thinking about and using all three. We also need to act responsibly with customers’ best interest in mind.
Don’t sacrifice customer privacy and comfort for monetary gain. There is a backlash coming, it won’t be pretty and you don’t want to be on the wrong side of that fire storm.
This post was cross posted on New Comm Biz
“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy…”
These opening lyrics from Eminem’s hit song “Lose Yourself” talk about fear of rapping in front of an audience. He knows his lyrics are good. He knows his style is good. But in front of an audience, well … “He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out … He’s choking how, everybody’s joking now.”
And that’s how a lot of us feel about blogging. As our own Tac Anderson pointed out at a team off-site yesterday, the word “blogging” generates almost the same reaction in people as “public speaking.” I can relate. As I sit trying to write this the anxiety is there – I know my idea is interesting (or is it?) but do I really need to share it with the world?!
Yes, I do.
For a communications professional it is as important a skill as knowing how to write a press release or messaging document. It is something I counsel clients to do, so I need to know how to do it. I need to know what the experience is like and what types of information and content are needed. This knowledge gain won’t happen magically, so it’s important to stop stressing and start doing.
So where to start? Here are some ideas for dipping your toes into the blogging waters.
- Read other blogs regularly. Just as with anything you want to be good at, you have to study and be receptive to new ideas.
- Find a subject that interests you and write about it on a personal blog. This is a great way to get comfortable with the sound of your digital voice.
- Look for inspiration everywhere. My idea for this post came out of a nine-hour meeting! (Granted, I was surrounded by smart people so I was jotting down ideas all day.)
- Celebrate your own voice. The Internet is a melting pot of ideas and interests. No one is right and no one is wrong – it is just happening and you can should be part of it.
- Accept that you won’t instantly have readers or people commenting on what you write.
- Don’t over-engineer it. Just get your thoughts down, check your spelling and publish.
- Have fun. I’m not kidding. As I near the end of this post I’m smiling. I did it. Phew.
What keeps you up at night about blogging? If you are a reluctant blogger, how did you get over your fear?
Photo from EW.com