Cases from web 2.0 expo in San Francisco
Some interesting web marketing cases for showcased during the conference.These are based on various presentations and notes that I made during these presentations.
Case: Ford
BlackMustang club, which is a club for Ford Mustang enthusiasts, created a calendar about Ford Mustangs. Beautiful images of these cars in various places and from various angles. What Ford did on this stage, was the they stopped this club calendar production. Stating that these images belong to Ford and they don't have any rights to utilize these images... This got a lot bad press for Ford and very negative comments in Ford community.
Since then (and perhaps because of this experience) Ford has taken totally new approach. Ford has started publishing Ford images under creative common license and this way allowing sharing and remixing, even for commercial purposes, legally. The have even gone one step forward by offering social media press releases and also offering their own photo stream in Flick. This has been fundamental shift for Ford to open up their communication with their consumers and utilize their enthusiasm of creating addition values. Ford content has been used over 5000 costs since September, 1.2million views in YouTube, 120 000 views in Flickr.
Case: Jones - crowd sourcing for the product package
Jones company that is selling soda in USA. They published 2007 an service, where their bottle label can be modified by their audience. MyJones currently makes 80% of Jones soda's online sales. In 2008 they launched with collaboration of ICHC (ICHC is a website that is about sharing funny images of cats) the competition of which cat images should be shown on the Jones label. Each community member was able to send their cat image to competition. The winner was going to be decided by the community itself. The winning image would go to national distribution. Over 250 000 votes were cast and sales were raised by 172% month-by-month bases.
Case: Wallmart - learning from the mistakes
Wallmart started creating its web presence by creating a teen age focused community, which failed totally. They screened all the content, informed parents when teenagers joined it and disabled the users to email each others. This site was closed down after first three months. The next attempt was a Wallmart "blog", but this got even more negative respond, since it was noticed that the Wallmart paid for PR firm to generate this.
The third attempt however was extremely positive. Wallmart created a community site, Wallmart customers were able to give feedback about products sold in Wallmart. This information was used then by Wallmart buyers. Thisway their buyers were able to get straight feedback on the products that their have purchased for wallmart. For wallmart this was also extremly good marketing since 97% of Walmart consumers are satisfied with products sold in Wallmart.
Case:Dell - turning the wheel
There was some bad experiences with Dell by Jeff Jarvis. Quote from blog that Jeff Jarvis created was called Dell Hell: "Dell sucks Dell lies. Put that in your Google and smoke it Dell". What did the Dell do then? Dell published first "direct2dell" -blog, where people could start talking to Dell about their experiences. Dell also responded to issues rapidly. Dell also enabled that there are several Twitter accounts by real people from Dell. After a while they started the CES-blogger lounge with writings by Michael Dell and finally revolutionary concept Dell Ideastorm. Dell Ideastorm currently has over 11 000 ideas with over 68 000 comments. This definitely has created a advantage over competition for Dell.
Case: HP- utilizing bloggers
31 days of the dragon. HP gave 31 most influencer bloggers a possibility to hand out the HP laptop for their readers in any way that blogger wanted. Each blogger created their own contest specific to the target audience. During the 31 days, each blogger promoted HP and each other bloggers. Blogger received 150% raise of the traffic. 84% increase in sales their website, 14% increase of traffic, and 10% increase in overall sales. Over 380 000 links in Google discussing about the give away. Readers created videos to enter several of these giveaways. These videos were watched more than 10 000 000 consumers in YouTube. Some bloggers even created their own banner ads for giveaways.
Notes from web 2.0 expo in New york
Web2.0 is not about technology. Web 2.0 isn't about products. It’s not about services. It's about your customer. It's about social interaction within customers and with your company. Customer first is truly core subject in Web 2.0. Bring down the shield between your company and your customers. Empower your customers..
This has proven to be successful whether it's about customers helping each other or even the companies to solve their own issues. This happened with Twitter, which wasn't working in T-mobile phones until Twitter users pressed T-mobile to enable Twitter. In web 2.0 companies need to get out of their own comfort zone to approach their customer in their backyard. Such as Comcast, which hired “Comcasters” to find proactively their complaining clients in the web communities and helped proactively with their issues. Similar approach has been adopted for example by Crysler.
The change with the social web has fundamental effect also in marketing. Timbuk2 uses only photographs taken by their customers. Dorritos Superbowl commercial was done by their customers. The benefits are easily measured, with Ebay where people who participate into their community create 50% more sales than other Ebay users. The social web affects truly all the areas of the business. In the product development Web 2.0 enables companies to minimize the noise between customers and company. Dell Ideastorm has over 10 000 ideas for product development. Such as “preinstalled Linux instead of windows” has over 150 000 “thumbs-up”. Similarly Starbucs was asked by the community to "stop cutting trees.. don't give us receipts if the payment is under 2$). It’s like brainpower. You have some, your team has more, with the focus groups it’s getting big, but with your customers it’s huge. The community can be compared to distributed computing.
Don't do it yourself, let your customer do it. The key is to give your passionate customers the possibilities, the tools, the power, the reward (not money.. appreciation..). This is the key for cost-effective and rapid development. The amount of people in Amazon.com is half of the amount of their API (application interface) usage. This is a result of external developers, who have created their own solutions for their own purpose, but leveraging the Amazon data. T
he core is the unique data, which people want to use. These people are your co-developers and co-creators. Waterfall process is dead, be agile in web. You cannot know what the customer really want before the solution is out there. So do not spend time to do extensive amount document defining something that probably in the end needs to be changed anyway. 37 signals doesn’t create requirement definition documents or roadmaps. They do not even know their development plan for next three months. But still they created project management service (Basecamp), which has 1 000 000 users. So keep it simple at first and be agile to scale things up i.e. Meebo which started from 0 users 3 years ago and has now 100 million registered users. It could be that you need to sift the focus completely i.e. Flickr which started as a gaming site and is now world 1. image databank.
Do the development with rapid/agile methodology so you can react and enhance. Create your own sandbox, where failure is ok from which you can learn. Technology is there and it will evolve. So you can use Ruby, Ajax, Flex, Silverlight, Json, Javascript, Python, OpenID (by the way, if you can use 5 or more of these.. please come to talk to SW department.. you are hired). The industry standards are open and will be growing which turns the web one big pile of possibilities to choose from. You literally can develop a piece of application within a day or two and give it to several hundreds of thousand persons. For example like Widgetbox that has served various applications over 450 million times. There are standards just as Google Open Social that enables applications to be used with various communities such as LinkedIn, Myspace, Salesforce, Hi5 etc. The web browser is the future desktop, the capabilities of the web/browser based solutions are growing rapidly (like InstanAction which is purely browser based 3d gaming site).
Web2.0 is not about technology. Web 2.0 isn't about products. It’s not about services. It's about your customer. It's about social interaction within customers and with your company. Customer first is truly core subject in Web 2.0. Bring down the shield between your company and your customers. Empower your customers..
This has proven to be successful whether it's about customers helping each other or even the companies to solve their own issues. This happened with Twitter, which wasn't working in T-mobile phones until Twitter users pressed T-mobile to enable Twitter. In web 2.0 companies need to get out of their own comfort zone to approach their customer in their backyard. Such as Comcast, which hired “Comcasters” to find proactively their complaining clients in the web communities and helped proactively with their issues. Similar approach has been adopted for example by Crysler.
The change with the social web has fundamental effect also in marketing. Timbuk2 uses only photographs taken by their customers. Dorritos Superbowl commercial was done by their customers. The benefits are easily measured, with Ebay where people who participate into their community create 50% more sales than other Ebay users. The social web affects truly all the areas of the business. In the product development Web 2.0 enables companies to minimize the noise between customers and company. Dell Ideastorm has over 10 000 ideas for product development. Such as “preinstalled Linux instead of windows” has over 150 000 “thumbs-up”. Similarly Starbucs was asked by the community to "stop cutting trees.. don't give us receipts if the payment is under 2$). It’s like brainpower. You have some, your team has more, with the focus groups it’s getting big, but with your customers it’s huge. The community can be compared to distributed computing.
Don't do it yourself, let your customer do it. The key is to give your passionate customers the possibilities, the tools, the power, the reward (not money.. appreciation..). This is the key for cost-effective and rapid development. The amount of people in Amazon.com is half of the amount of their API (application interface) usage. This is a result of external developers, who have created their own solutions for their own purpose, but leveraging the Amazon data. T
he core is the unique data, which people want to use. These people are your co-developers and co-creators. Waterfall process is dead, be agile in web. You cannot know what the customer really want before the solution is out there. So do not spend time to do extensive amount document defining something that probably in the end needs to be changed anyway. 37 signals doesn’t create requirement definition documents or roadmaps. They do not even know their development plan for next three months. But still they created project management service (Basecamp), which has 1 000 000 users. So keep it simple at first and be agile to scale things up i.e. Meebo which started from 0 users 3 years ago and has now 100 million registered users. It could be that you need to sift the focus completely i.e. Flickr which started as a gaming site and is now world 1. image databank.
Do the development with rapid/agile methodology so you can react and enhance. Create your own sandbox, where failure is ok from which you can learn. Technology is there and it will evolve. So you can use Ruby, Ajax, Flex, Silverlight, Json, Javascript, Python, OpenID (by the way, if you can use 5 or more of these.. please come to talk to SW department.. you are hired). The industry standards are open and will be growing which turns the web one big pile of possibilities to choose from. You literally can develop a piece of application within a day or two and give it to several hundreds of thousand persons. For example like Widgetbox that has served various applications over 450 million times. There are standards just as Google Open Social that enables applications to be used with various communities such as LinkedIn, Myspace, Salesforce, Hi5 etc. The web browser is the future desktop, the capabilities of the web/browser based solutions are growing rapidly (like InstanAction which is purely browser based 3d gaming site).
Monitor you presence in social web
There is so much discussion going on in social sites.. It's seems that there is no way, that you could monitor what is really happening out there. Luckily there are several tools that can be used for monitoring these social sites. These help you to react and respond rapidly. Here are few, that I use in my daily work.
Web searches
Google trends offers great statistics for specific search words. This is more high level trending for you site/product/area of interest. It also aims to connect specific news or happenings, that may have had effect on the search amounts. Use as you like check this trend examples: facebook (quite nice hockey stick curve:) and compared to Ipod.
Facebook trend
Other service offered by google is even more detailed: Google Insights for search example of Ipod
Flickr
For Flickr I'm using iGoogle gadget that shows all the images that have been tagged with the specific word I'm interested of following. I'm using two different RSS feeds. One for listing the most popular images in Flickr (with specific tag) and the other on for listing the latest additions of images in Flickr (with spefific tag). You can generate the required RSS feed with Flickr RSS Feed generator
After you have generated the RSS feed, just go to iGoogle and and the new feed as a gadget. Everytime you log in to iGoogle you are able to check if there are new images created with tags you are interested of..
Youtube
Similarly as for Flickr, For Youtube I'm using iGoogle gadget that shows all the videos that have been tagged with the specific word I'm interested of following. iGoogle gadget is based on the Youtube RSS feed, which shows all the videos broadcasted with the specific tag. You can generate the required RSS feed with RSS generator.
Social Bookmarking sites
Digg & Delicious
I'm using the same principle as with youtube and flickr with services such as Digg and Delicious. Both offer the possibility to get the RSS feeds. In delicious you just need to search the bookmarks with specific word. Then on lower part of the page, you can find the RSS feed for the results. In Digg you can find the RSS feed on the righ side of the page. Use these as iGoogle (or other RSS feed reader) gadget. I'm using these to check, if there is any new bookmarks done related to the specific product/service I'm interested of. For example these are the latest diggs for iPod and same as RSS feed. One important point. When you search the Digg with specific word and then choose sorting "Newest first", this doesn't affect the RSS feed. When you click the RSS feed, you need to manually add "&sort=newest" at the end of the RSS feed URL.
For Digg there has been created a trend analysis tool, which you can utilise to monitor the hottest topics in Digg. Check it out: Digg Trends
Twitter
Tweetag is a great tool for checking out what is happening with your product, company etc. in Twitter. You can easily see who is talking about this, when and why.. For example I have been taking part of web 2.0 expo for last two years. So if I would be interested of checking out what people are saying about this, I can just go to Tweetag: Tweetag about web 2.0 expo
TwitterStreamGraph is very cool tool to check what is happening in twitter. It graphs the "A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word." For example if you are working with a product name x, you can checkout how and what people are talking about this in graphical format. You need to see it yourself: Me in Twitter
Few other interesting statistical services.
Alexa
Alexa is website ranking service. It offers statistics on sites that people are mainly visiting. The statistics are based on Alexa toolbar that is part of the browser (if you have taken it to use). It's not the fact, but seem to offer quite good estimate on number of visits in various sites. Here is an example comparison between myspace, facebook and twitter.
Toolbars as part of content broadcasting
In web 2.0 expo in San Francisco, I talked with the guys from Besttoolbars. These guys have created a platform,/development tools which you can utlise to create functionality as browser toolbar. The toolbar can have for example your news published. Pretty interesting. Check out : Best toolbar
Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra - webcast of future vision
Just wathced the webcast of Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, about vision of finland in web. Here is the address: http://ping.fm/B95Fm
Quite abstract discussion, where was nothing fundamentally innovative. But it's great to see that there are concerns on how Finish goverment should be digitized. We were few years ago top of the world, when talking about IT/mobile industry etc. But unfortunately this isn't a fact anymore. We all know that the digital services can create efficiency and offer totally new benefits for every citizen.. but unfortunate the development process for these services seem to take way more time in public than in private sector.
Just wathced the webcast of Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, about vision of finland in web. Here is the address: http://ping.fm/B95Fm
Quite abstract discussion, where was nothing fundamentally innovative. But it's great to see that there are concerns on how Finish goverment should be digitized. We were few years ago top of the world, when talking about IT/mobile industry etc. But unfortunately this isn't a fact anymore. We all know that the digital services can create efficiency and offer totally new benefits for every citizen.. but unfortunate the development process for these services seem to take way more time in public than in private sector.
This on so funny. In the old good days, you was busted for drafting in the triathlon races. I must admit that this has happened twice for me, but nowdays this has changed. There are some videos on youtube, where you can check some pretty illegal drafting going on in various races. So you might not get busted during the race, but beware of these videos afterwards :)
Check yourself:
BTW. for people who are not aware of triathlon regulations: In majority of the triathlon races are the drafting is illegal. This means that person behind you cannot ride closer than 10meters (can vary country by country). This is measured from front wheel of the guy riding behind to back wheel of the guy riding in the front.
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