Archive for the 'Building community' Category

I’ve brought together the blogs of friends, colleagues, associates and clients of ZenGuide in one place - The ZenGuide Network at www.zenguidenetwork.tumblr.com. I hope you’ll enjoy browsing through this eclectic range of articles and photos - and to read more from each of the contributors, you can always click through from there to the original blogs.

The contributors include:

Bridget Grenvill-Cleave, a management consultant and executive coach at 10 Consulting, who is passionate about the benefits of Positive Psychology. She blogs about the measurable impact of applying positive psychology techniques in the workplace and importance of employee wellbeing in contributing to business success.

Melanie Crowe is a massage therapist whose skills range from relaxation massage to sports and no-hands techniques. She offers tips to deal with stress as well as writing about getting the most out of massage for your wellbeing.

Steven Lee is a Malaysian-born photographer based in London. He offers commercial photography services to private clients as well as to fashion and lifestyle magazines. He is about to launch his second photography book on Malaysian faces. He writes about his photo shoots and gives tips about photography.

Silvia Cambie, a business communications expert, blogs about her cross-cultural experiences in Eastern Europe, Italy, the US and UK as well as on communications issues.

The criteria I have chosen for including these contributors is that I know them personally and they are blogging in the context of their business or profession - and they have great content that’s lively and interesting.

If you enjoy their posts and visit their original blogs, do leave them a comment to let them know that you came via the ZenGuide Network!

You might also like to know something about the application that I’ve used to create the network - Tumblr. You can sign up for a free account within minutes and choose from a selection of customisable templates. You can then aggregate feeds from different sources - eg if you have a Flickr account for your photos, and you “tweet” using Twitter, and you blog etc - as well as adding individual written posts or photos and videos direct onto your Tumblr page. It’s not a blog in that it doesn’t have useful sorting tools like Archives or Categories but it’s a fun way to bring together a range of different web presences all into one place.

Colgate, the toothpaste giant, is going online with a viral marketing campaign to promote good dental health, according to BrandRepublic.com

The viral solution is a send-a-smile generator that allows parents and kids to upload pictures of their kids face and customise the picture with a range of funny and clever accessories under the themes of cowboy, fairy, pirate and princess.

There is a competitive element to the campaign and prizes include kids parties and smile-card packs.

You can check out Colgate Smiles to have some fun for yourself and your kids.

This is a great way of engaging customers - and potential customers. The competitive element with a great prize also draws people into the fun. And fun is the key - it can transform something rather dull and dutiful into an engaging activity that involves everyone in the family.

Staying with the fun and health themes but at a completely different end of the spectrum, in my second post today, we can see how the Department of Health is trying to make safe sex fun…

Photo: thanks to greefus groinks on flickr.com

Last week, I wrote about the Heinz user-generated video campaign that left the company with some egg (or ketchup?) on their face. Today, I’d like to look at the Yahoo! user-generated video campaign that appears to have been more successful.

Nick Chavez, Director of Corporate Marketing in Cool Stuff at Yahoo! explains the idea in this video posted on YouTube:

The key differences for the Yahoo! ad campaign compared with the Heinz ad campaign, I think, are these:

• Yahoo! has a maverick brand image that could comfortably encompass any weird or wacky or irreverent takes on its brand in contrast to Heinz which has a family-oriented “clean” and respectable image. In fact, a large part of the impact of the ads is the suggestive double-meaning around the word “Yahoo!” itself.

• Yahoo! seeded the campaign with an initial competition for videos made by film students, all of whom would have a personal stake in the success of their creations in terms of their career in film and advertising. They then chose the best dozen or so to seed the wider campaign, showing by the standard and quality of those films the high benchmark that others should be striving to better

The take home message from these two ad campaigns is about knowing your audience and your brand and how to leverage those two aspects to work together instead of against each other.

You can check out the various Yahoo! user-generated ads for yourself via the links below:

New Yahoo! Campaign

Videos submitted to the New Yahoo! Campaign site.

The health club student film mentioned by Nick Chavez in the video is shown below:

Here are a few more that particularly caught my eye (ear?):

Mother and daughter talking about “the change”:

What does your Yahoo! look like?

My boyfriend is always playing with his Yahoo!

User-generated content is all the rage at the moment. It’s cheap, and often free, for the average person like you and me to create content eg by blogging, podcasting or uploading videos to YouTube. There is also a social networking element in that others can read/ listen to / view that content and comment or create other content in response. For example, when you watch some YouTube videos, there’s a sidebar on the right where you can see other people’s video responses to that video. On blogs, other bloggers may be inspired to write something on their blog about what you’ve written - and they may agree or disagree with you.

So it seems a great idea for companies to involve their customers and everyone else in creating content relevant for their brand. It creates a buzz around the product or brand. It brings people together around the brand. It taps into people’s creativity and desire to be noticed and rewarded for their endeavours. That’s the theory.

Heinz launched a competition inviting anyone to submit a 30-second video ad for their ketchup. The New York Times reports:

“Heinz has said it will pick five of the entries and show them on television, though it has not committed itself to a channel or a time slot. One winner will get $57,000. But so far it’s safe to say that none of the entries have quite the resonance of, say, the classic Carly Simon “Anticipation” ad where the ketchup creeps oh so slowly out of the bottle.”

So what kind of entries did they get? Some examples given in the New York Time article are:

• a teenage boy cleans his teeth and shaves with ketchup

• another kid rubs ketchup on his face and puts pickles in his eyes

Videos that have been rejected by Heinz have ended up on YouTube anyway.

Heinz have also been criticized for trying to get cheap advertising by looking for user-generated campaign although they say that it has actually been more expensive in terms of managing the process and sifting through all the entries.

There are concerns that the campaign has damaged the Heinz brand by its being associated with “gross-out” video images of its product being used in inappropriate ways - and appearing in cheap, home-produced, badly uncreative images.

You can view the Heinz ad competition and the videos on YouTube for yourself.

Here’s one involving a toilet….

I think that the idea and the intention of looking to the public to create content around a theme relevant to your brand or product is a sound one. The issue here is the management of the particular project or campaign. In the old days, when a company launched a competition eg to choose its new logo or tagline or the image that most represented its brand or some such, it controlled the process entirely and no-one would see the rejected entries. These days, the bad, irrelevant, scurrilous stuff gets circulated anyway by the very tools that makes this new form of advertising possible. It’s worth doing a full risk assessment on any social media project - as in any big project - assuming the worst case scenario in human nature. Perhaps Heinz - naively? - just expected more of the people they were bringing into the video conversation…

But it’s not all doom and gloom. On Monday, I’ll look at a user-generated video campaign that worked.

This is a terrific little video that explains how social networking online works, created by Common Craft.
There’s really nothing more for me to add other than it’s short, too the point and entertaining while being informative.

—

—

At the end of the video, Lee Lefever suggests three social network sites to explore. If you want to check out a few more, take a look at a post I wrote back in April about meeting a new friend on a social network site and listing some other sites to look at.

Continuing the Conversation from the Social Media round table I chaired in Slovenia….

One of the business communicators at our discussion was working with a company who had developed and implemented an internal social network for their research and development teams to innovate new products through facilitating sharing of ideas and communications between the individuals and teams. But not many of these staff were using this tool. My colleague wanted to know how to increase staff take-up of the tool.

The Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, brought us the visionary saying: “if you build it, they will come”. That may have worked in the movie and it may work for some business ventures. In most cases, we all have to be somewhat more pragmatic in adding a few more steps into the process after we present the world with our exciting new baseball pitch or mall or product - or social media tool. And one of those crucial steps is communicating with the people who are ultimately going to use or benefit from that product or tool

So in our discussion, we explored what processes the company had used to encourage the teams to integrate this social network tool into their research and development work. What were they already doing to share ideas and communicate with each other? What activities (eg team and individual meetings, face to face workshops etc) where they involved in as part of their innovation of new products? How were aware were they of the benefits of the tool and how it could increase their communication efficiency?

My colleague came away from this session with a concrete plan to implement training sessions for the relevant teams at her client company so that they could learn the benefits of the tool and how to use it in their work.

A key message here, I think, is to view social media tools as just that: tools. And as with any tools, people need to be trained to use them and also, understand how they can help improve or facilitate the relevant processes.

Photo: thanks to soundtrackcollector.com

prjslv

NOTE: ZenGuide is updated Mondays and Thursdays

Here is a great example of really useful user-generated content. Hotspotr is a directory of WiFi Cafes and Hotspots around the world. All it does is provide an interactive map - it’s up to the likes of you and me to create the directory.

There’s no sign up or login. You just click on Add a Cafe and follow the simple steps to add the name and location of the cafe that has WiFi. There’s also additonal information you can include eg if it’s free, what kind of food is served and any other remarks. You can rate the cafe and indicate whether it’s a good place for working or just surfing.

Typically, US cities predominate but there are a range of international locations. You can navigate via the map but for some reason the map does not show ALL the cities in the listings - for international locations, it’s better to go via the link See All Cities and then click on International Cities.

The people adding locations to Hotspotr aren’t getting paid for what they do. The reward is in taking part and helping to build a useful knowledge base. I added a hotspot in London in that spirit and it only took a couple of minutes. This site is like a wiki (an online encyclopaedia whose content is created and added to by its users) but really easy to use and has the added dimension of the visual map. When my entry was processed, the map zoomed into its exact location, showing the street it was on and local landmarks. It was cool!

How might you add user participation to your website by tapping into the knowledge and community spirit of your stakeholders in a similar way? User-generated content based on participants making videos and the like run the risk of pooling a lot of inappropriate material, some of which may be damaging to your brand. But a knowledge or data focused project that is easy and fun to take part in like a directory of some kind could bring a more satisfying result.

Photo: thanks to nextnature.net

NOTE: ZenGuide is updated Mondays and Thursdays