Ian Leslie, the man behind the influential political Marbury blog, and author of To Be President, Quest For The Whitehouse 2008, spoke at the IPA Chairman’s reception on Monday night. He drew some interesting conclusions about what brand marketers could learn from the Obama campaign.
A couple of strands really caught my imagination.
Firstly that Obama became more than a candidate, he was a cause. He and his team made their play for the presidency on the back of the insight that this wasn’t just another 4 yearly, mechanical replacement of the occupier of the Whitehouse. Satisfaction levels with the political process and America’s standing in the world were at alarming low points. The American electorate was ready for major change. They saw what the others didn’t. The data added weight to a strong gut feel for the mood of the nation. And this insight translated into a compelling “brand” vision.
Secondly that the celebrated and ground-breaking online marketing campaign was not an end in its own right. It was a means to the end of getting people to do useful stuff in “the real world”. Ian described in fascinating detail the sophisticated techniques used to harness the latent potential of the 13 million strong database that they created and turn it into millions of individual actions.
This perhaps was the biggest achievement of the Obama campaign. To convince a highly cynical, disillusioned electorate that collectively and individually they could be a force for change.
Clearly Obama was also an exceptional candidate in many ways. The piece of film embedded below shows the genius of the man as he develops the theme of how a single voice can make a big difference. Few people, if any, in the audience had seen this before and it is intensely moving even allowing for the OTT tendencies of our cousins across the water. It’s 8 minutes long but well worth the time. The one voice theme starts about 2 minutes in.
Breakin’ Convention is an (they would say THE) International Festival of Hip Hop Dance Theatre. We’re also working with them to create a global community of hip hop artists.
At the time of writing, however, this post is less about knowledge sharing and more about bragging rights.
At some point in the not too distant future one of my colleagues in our London office (at the moment variously poorly, on paternity leave or incredibly busy because of the illness and paternity leave of others) will edit the post to describe in more detail the primary research into the social technographics of the hip hop set that underpinned the strategy, and the social aspects of the project.
For now though content yourself with the fact that “we did this”.
Here at Blonde we’re speculating that Partick’s table-topping performance and the fact that the club has one of our Score widgets embedded prominently in its homepage may not be entirely coincidental…
With just over three weeks to go, they’re currently looking good for the £7,000 prize for youth development at the club.
I met Les and Paul, aka The Shower Guys, when I presented to eBusiness West Lothian. They are a small family business, but they are also social media naturals. They make friends wherever they go and they’re clever with content. I’m delighted that they agreed to write the first guest post on the Blonde blog.
Why did the Showerguys choose Twitter?
Since first being introduced to twitter only three short months ago, our business has connected to a whole new group of people, some local, some afar. In the past our fellow Twitterers would have been referred to as customers, targets, prospects or something equally offensive. What they are to us, however, are real people who have chosen to make an investment of their time in a community that wants to talk.
Its easy to forget that the current culture of chat and friendship in social media is very new. About 15 years ago, I remember attending a seminar on security at the NEC, sitting amongst a bewildering arrary of technical, electronic devices designed to isolate their owners from the hoards of the great unwashed who were by all accounts set to rampage through the nation destroying the delicate fabric of our society. “There was” the speaker commented in a knowlegeable manner, “a move in society towards ‘cocooning’ “.
This unstoppable trend was to present great opportunities for the security industry as society was set to built high fences around itself and arm itself with every electronic weapon the technogadgeteers could invent.
I remember being shocked by this notion of a faceless society without community. There was a developing mantra; isolate and protect yourself, trust no-one - a mantra that placed self protection, personal gain and greed at the core of things. Fortunately, online Social Media applications are helping to change these outdated notions very quickly, and whilst some will be resistant to change, I considered it vital that our business embraced these new methods if we were to survive through the recession and be in a good position to grow thereafter.
Trading as The Shower Shop (www.theshowershop.org), our business as Bathroom Fitters would not seem to lend itself easily to the required change, there are no computers involved, our skills are very traditional and easily understood by everyone. However by adopting a slight change in the way we were representing ourselves, we created an online persona that was wholly in line with our real selves and so The Showerguys concept was born.
We ‘Twitter’ as Showerguys on a daily basis to communicate our thoughts and ideas to our approx. 900 followers. Some of our tweets are aimed at attracting visitors to our blog where passing visitors and commenters assist in the construction of our Google Rank. To encourage this we regularly employ one or two response mechanisms, including ‘WHAT’S MY TOOL?’ and ‘WHERE’S LES SITTING?’ both of which feature a touch of classic Carry-On humour mixed with tongue in cheek competition. We even give out with small prizes for guessing what Paul’s tool is called, or for identifying where Les is sitting this week.
In order to build closer relationships with Twitterers in our immediate vacinity, we invest considerable time in talking directly to people about anything and everything. People instinctively know we are a business, they know what we do, but we never try to sell to them or directly advertise the installation of bathrooms. We consider the ‘elephant-in-the-parlour’ approach to be more agreeable.. For people who don’t know us yet, our Twitter bio sets the tone from the start and the response has been very positive. A successful commercial outcome is for The Showerguys to be considered the number one Bathroom Fitter in our Twitter community.
Many people are surprised when we tell them of the effectiveness of Twitter as a ‘face to face’ networking tool. Let me explain, Imagine a room full of strangers, people who have never met, they do however, share one thing in common, Twitter. Welcome to the world of the TweetUp!
They Twitter all day and now they have got together in a pub via the power of twtvite.com to put the faces to the avatars they have been speaking with for the last few weeks. Polite certainly, a little shy at first maybe, but give it a few minutes and it’s amazing, you can’t stop them talking! After restricting themselves to 140 characters for so long, it is as if they are set to burst, quite simply the best free networking you’ll ever find in my opinion.
Very early in our Twitter ‘career’ we were approached to produce an interview for Tweetabix.com, a site devoted to people who Twitter, responding to several questions about Twitter and our use of it. In order to make it more appealing we made it on video. Constructed during the course of one working day, it reveals our thoughts on Twitter at the time, see what you think.
Only time will tell if we were right to make the change, but one thing is for sure The Shower Shop web site will never again feature unmemorable, unreadable tosh aimed at presenting the false and misguided impression of a large corporate organisation. Mission statements, ISO9000 and ‘fake-it-till-you-make-it’ marketing deceptions have officially been banned by order of ‘The Showerguys’.
We’ve been members of CreativeBrief* for a while now, but yesterday we finally got round to publishing our agency showcase on the CreativeBrief site. Apparently this should significantly increase the number of potential clients that have a gander at us. Here’s hoping.
The main navigation for these showcases is fixed for all agencies, and they act as a sort of hybrid between a website and a credentials presentation.
We’re collating initial feedback at the moment so treat this as a public beta test at the moment.
*CreativeBrief may not describe themselves like this, but to us they’re a new business referral agency. Clients use them to condense and keep confidential the process of drawing up shortlists of suppliers for the provision of a range of marketing services.
As part of its ongoing sponsorship of the Scottish Football League (SFL), IRN-BRU has just launched a new £70,000 fund to help with youth development at the 30 SFL clubs, and a promotion mechanic that will allow the fans to determine how that fund is allocated.
The promotion is called Score With IRN-BRU. It is an SMS text based promotion that is being prominently featured on a number of pack variants. Participants text “Score” plus the division and first 4 letters of their club to the promotion number.
You can win for yourself, in that all participants (over the age of 16) are entered into a draw for one of five home cinema systems.
And you can win for your club, in that all texts feed into a series of league tables hosted on the Phenomenal Footy website. The higher the position of your club when the competition closes on 28th May, the more money it will get for youth development.
To allow ardent fans the opportunity to keep a close eye on league table movements, we’ve developed widgets for desktop and social media. These give real time updates on the progress of your team. These will no doubt become increasingly useful as the competition progresses to its climax at the end of May. The promotion is only a few days old but there is already a healthy level of activity. If this competition is anything like the Real WAGS competition we ran last year, then things will hot up in the final furlongs. Over 47,000 Real WAG votes were cast in the last 15 days of that competition.
The Score With IRN-BRU promotion is another example of the brand’s “Real Football” approach to its sponsorship of the SFL. This marries the strong grass-roots community presence of the brand with the strong, grass-roots community passion that characterises the support for SFL teams.
This week we were delighted to be involved in the launch of the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival with the design and build of their new look website. The website showcases the ‘Enlightenment’ programme of events from 14 Aug – 06 Sep. It also showcases the new EIF brand and the newly commissioned (and slightly controversial) Edinburgh Toile by our friends in Glasgow, Timorous Beasties. (Not the Edinburgh Toilet as one of our developers mistakenly called it throughout production!)
Having worked closely with EIF for the 2008 Festival, we were keen to improve the usability of the site and make searching for events totally intuitive with both a general search and search using a diary mechanism.
The initial response to the new website has been fantastic and we’ve already got our eyes on events for when tickets go on sale on 04 Apr.
Our “IMMORTALising Grolsch” paper has been shortlisted as a finalist in the Online Excellence category of the Marketing Society Star Awards. Woot!
It’s a tale of dynamic content, brand development and rigorous return on investment analysis.
Fingers crossed for May 29th.
UPDATE 1st APRIL
Just heard that the paper has now been shortlisted in the Digitally Led Marketing category at the national Marketing Society Golden Jubilee Awards. Double woot!
I was invited to contribute to a feature on Radio 4’s Click On show about Sponsored Conversations (aka paid blogging). It can be heard here for the next six days at the time of writing (about 10 mins 20 seconds in).
The conversation was interesting as far as it went but, let’s be honest, the detailed mechanics of paid-for blogging aren’t a specific area of expertise for me. There were other questions on the topic guide that we discussed before the recording that I wish I had been asked. Particularly the issue of why paid-for blogging is so emotive and controversial. This is something that is close to my heart because it relates to some of the reasons why I find working in digital so rewarding.
So, Phil, why do you think this area of sponsored conversation is so controversial?
Two reasons. One broadly relating to the general idea of what the internet is for. The second relating more specifically to the “fragile ecology” of social media.
A cynical view of advertisers (and the majority of people that advise them) is that they cynically view any medium or communication channel as having been created with the sole purpose of delivering an audience that can be bought. That simply isn’t true of the internet. It’s a fabulous interactive communal resource that allows human beings to achieve a variety of goals - few of which have anything to do with the world of marketing.
I’ve met a lot of people in digital agencies who, having been involved with the internet since its inception, are very much in the “helping people to achieve their goals” camp rather than the “marketing” camp. It is entirely unsurprising therefore that the idea of advertisers buying a blogger’s audience raises the hackles for a large proportion of the digital community.
Looking more specifically at social media, perhaps the biggest implication of the growth of dialogue and peer to peer communication has been the devolution of influence away from the organisation to the individual. And, what’s more, this devolution has not led to anarchy. In fact quite the opposite. These networks and communities are driven by a generosity of spirit, and are self-regulated by good manners. Social media exponents can be rightly proud of what has been achieved.
Again, in this context, it is only natural that some (many) should resist the notion of the advertisers wading back in to “pure” spaces where their influence has thus far been diminished.
The worry, clearly, is that advertisers will view social media in much the same way that palm oil producers view the rainforest; a resource to be harvested with not much concern for the sustainability of the whole operation.
At Blonde we talk a lot about “elegant reconciliation”. How can we elegantly reconcile the goals of human beings with the objectives of our clients. By and large this entails a new definition of what “advertising” means in digital spaces to avoid some of the pifalls described above.
Thanks to crustmania from whom I “borrowed” the image. They kindly made it available under the terms of a creative commons licence.
The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.
That was the theory…
In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success - well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.
What worked
Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.
What could have been better
Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.
Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.
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Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival - http://bit.ly/yblG3
