Check out this page. It’s content right? This is the Election ‘08 page on Facebook.
It’s got your voting booth location mash-up powered by Google Maps, some info graphics and even a gift/badge for you to wear your colors–Red or Blue. It showed volumes in real-time as people clicked the “I voted” link on their Facebook profile page after visiting the polls. I tweeted about the page in the morning of election day when 1.1 million people had already been counted and watched the numbers swell each hour until the polls closed. Nearly 5.5 million acted making it one of the highest daily-use apps to date (think about how few YouTube videos get that much play in a single day, let alone month for comparison).
The genius is in the Ben & Jerry’s map/application integration. This is content, but it’s also a delivery mechanism for the advertising sponsorship by Ben & Jerry. Simple. Natural (as in additive and not interruptive). Brilliant.
In this case you were able to find the local Ben & Jerry’s store to get the free icecream cone they were offering for those that voted IRL and in the integrated link you could also send a “vote cone” virtual gift to your friends in Facebook.
For Ben & Jerry’s it’s a win across the board. The association is perfect for a brand that has in its roots social change and political activision. That future analysis will likely attribute SocialMedia and Facebook’s influence on 14mm new young voters heavily skewed to Obama as a determing factor in the race can’t hurt the brand. And the message was party-neutral regardless of the results. These are the kind of brand-fit filters every connection planner should find: Content, Context and mission.
As a campaign tracking mechanism, free cone redemptions will be an easy metric. Virtual gift talleys will also be telling as will traffic to the Election ‘08 page. Without a doubt, Buzzmetrics and other influence trackers will be tallying total blog mentions and related viewership. And, I’d love to see the total impressions this campaign earned from the SocialGraph as well. We’ll reach out to Facebook, the brand and related agencies to see if we can get the numbers. And, if you’re related to the brand and know, feel free to share below.
Ben & Jerry’s won big on this campaign–even before all the numbers are in–by hitting the right tone of placement and pitch. I learned about new retail locations in a relevant way. I also didn’t feel like they were selling me. In fact, they were offering a number of value-exchanges I couldn’t get without them entering my social interactions on Facebook. Consider how different this is from the “Market Stall” approach of fast and casual food retail where the strategy based on ad spend (shout louder, sooner and with a better offer than your competitors) dominates their consumer communications. The Market Stall has 90%+ of ad spend concentrated on TV and traditional media in a cluttered, interruptive market place. Ben & Jerry’s essentially opened a new market away from the noise, clutter and lack of relevance of the traditional approach.
Every brand marketer should be asking themselves and their agencies: What’s our occasion(s) that should be so integrated with Facebook? And then buy the date to lock out your competition and outplay them.
Radiohead has received a lot of attention and press as a result of their forward-thinking approach to consumer engagement, marketing and sales in the digital channel and age. Last year, the band gave away their music for a limited time with mixed results based on who you heard it from. Clearly these guys aren’t one-hit-wonders in music or in marketing innovation. In a “make tech cool in a popular culture sense” move, Radiohead and Google are partnering on data visualizationas you can see in the House of Cards video below. Data geeks can download the inputs, create their own versions and post to the Radiohead YouTube site. The partnership also includes an iGoogle homepage themeand embeddable gadget for the video. Pretty simple, but effective stuff, especially when backed by the distribution of Google. This video has already earned over 2mm views as of this posting.
How can this approach work for digital marketers in other product categories? Consider the ways innovation can create a halo effect for your brand and seek out those innovations that tie closest to your brand values. Many brands require repositioning or reappraisal, and your marketing message and approach can be as talkable as any singular message crafted. In this case, the marketing is the message.
Share your thoughts or ways you’ve used marketing innovation to earn reconsideration below.
In a follow-up to my April 8 post about the Google/Salesforce combination–the best example of many we’ll soon see–Paul Helmick tweeted a link to this video today:
The big news around the Real Branding water coolers and wikis is Adobe and Google’s announcement about searchable Flash. The subhead is that all text within your Flash files will now be read by Search–it doesn’t currently include images, flash videos or fed content such as xml files, but may soon enough. I don’t use this space often to geek out about platform applications, but this is huge news.
For years we’ve had to manually insert tactics to inform the search cloud what we were doing in our Flash engagements and elements to prove relevance and earn natural placement. Think of Search like army ants scouring the land for food, devouring all living organisms in its path. To the search ants, Flash was pretty much dead, at best something to explore on its surface.
When you combine the richness of Flash communications with the reference ability of search and the sharing influence of widgets and applications to be shared you change the potential reach of your message.
We’ll watch closely to see how Search absorbs and prioritizes all this new content and different behaviors. We may be closer to a concrete engagement measure than ever to evaluate the benefit of engagement on desired actions and goals. I think we’ll find both influence and amplification for services, brands and entertainment the outcome of these announcements. To learn more about what’s in and out in Google’s crawling activity, check out this Q&A with their software engineers.
VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra delivered an Android demonstration during his keynote at Google I/O conference today at the SF Moscone Convention Center. There’s a fair amount of flattery to the Apple iPhone/iTouch user interface and definitely signals progress for handset makers, content providers/media and perhaps carriers. My verdict’s out on the carriers as their data plans make little sense to the consumer, add little value (not much benefit over wifi) and feel short-term–lots of dislocation potential within these technologies demonstrated today.
And a quick demo of “streets” view–check out what happens when he flips it into compass mode. Location based content gets a big boost when this becomes the expected consumer outcome.
Don’t know if you caught Google.com homepage today. They turned it black to bring awareness to Earth Hour, an initiative for “lights out” from 8-9pm on 3/29/08 in honor of energy conservation. Couple of thoughts on this: 1) causes are the new black for brands; 2) changing the background on web pages has worked since 1994; more should try this sparingly when right–easy hack and says more than a headline; 3) Google has a call for action to submit your cause for their homepage… international causes should get crackin’.
If you have an hour, check out this presentation on the Google campus from One Lap Top Per Child (OLCP). Between the geek speak you’ll hear some radical change at work. Not just on the laptop design, but on the entire global educational system. Not from the outside, but from within through charitable contributions. It’s a lot more than a laptop or cause. This is simply radical change.
On June 22nd Google presented to the top digital marketing agencies their strategy for Widgets. While there, I posted a life-blogging experiment which they promptly requested I remove as the information was a little ahead of the international roll-out and communication plan. As a good partner, we complied quickly but promised to share a bit more when it was ready for primetime. Last week, they let loose their announcement. You may have read Battelle’s account. And below are my notes from the presentation. (more…)
Steve Rubel posted a stimulating threadon his Micro Persuasion blog about Google’s new feature for commenting on news stories. It’s not a pure Wiki or commenting function–still involves editorial vetting–but it’s pretty revolutionary. Don’t like the reporter’s license with your quote? Give it more context or bring the nuance back into the piece. There’s a great thread to the post with some back-and-forth about if reporters should be allowed to comment to the comments, etc.
What’s brilliant about this IMHO is the natural progression of 2.0 commenting/participation/reviewing to any content–not just merchandise or expert matter–even the news. It’s like an extension of Metcalfe’s law that the network grows more valuable with participation (n2): now, is it the content, the commenter or the publisher that grows more valuable with participation? This is getting interesting.
30-min video on YouTube featuring Google’s Eric Schmidt with his iPhone. It’s good to be the king. You get access to the coolest tools and tech ahead of the market and you can post videos three times longer than that regulated on your platform. Discussing this weekend with my brother, he suggested that it’s another strategic reason for Google to acquire Apple: free of OS conflict, could clear way for Google to become its own carrier.
Check out this page. It’s content right? This is the Election ‘08 page on Facebook.
Steve Rubel posted a stimulating thread
Discussing this weekend with my brother, he suggested that it’s another strategic reason for Google to acquire Apple: free of OS conflict, could clear way for Google to become its own carrier.
