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.