CEM Organization: why internet marketing

Matthew Latkiewicz works at Zendesk.com, customer support software. He writes for and edits Zengage, Zendesk’s blog about customer engagement. He also writes about wine for McSweeney’s and imagines stuff at his own website, youwillnotbelieve.us.

Just as early television shows were essentially radio plays shot on film, the earliest attempts by online marketers mimicked the worlds of television and print. While banner ads and pre-roll commercials are still with us, of course, a new generation of marketing professionals and companies are exploring techniques more native to the web: multi-platform marketing campaigns that encourage interactivity.

Marketers who take advantage of the Internet’s unique capabilities have the potential to build increasingly engaged customer communities. Here’s a look at three major trends.

1. User-Generated Content Contests

Doritos hosted its first Crash the Superbowl campaign in 2007. Like a lot of big companies, Doritos bought a commercial slot for the Superbowl, but instead of hiring a production company to make a 30-second spot, Doritos turned to its consumers. “Grab your camera and create your Doritos commercial,” the company advertised. Anyone could create and submit a spot. These spots were put to a vote online, and the finalists received $10,000 and the winning spot ran in the very expensive Superbowl slot.

More than 1,000 people submitted videos, and Doritos generated a lot of attention for the campaign, ranking high in a number of surveys that tracked buzz and impact of the Super Bowl commercials.

These kinds of campaigns are very popular on the Internet at the moment and they range in scale. SolidWorks, makers of computer-aided design (CAD) software, worked with the design firm Small Army to build a campaign that involved its very active community. Christine Washburn, VP of marketing at SolidWorks, says, “We wanted to do something that would involve them and be very visible for new potential members of the community.”

Small Army came up with Let’s Go Design, an interactive web series. Users submit design ideas in response to challenges proposed by the show. Ideas are voted on and ultimately incorporated.

What works: Activity and participation around the brand.

If users get involved, they can win. And the voting structure generates even more activity. Washburn reports that SolidWorks’ “web traffic is up by a factor of four in comparison to previous campaigns.”

When this doesn’t work: Your brand doesn’t carry either the same kind of mass appeal as Doritos or the committed fandom of SolidWorks.

Branding consultant Lisa Merriam wrote a case study of a failed contest campaign by a company called Levia. It tried a campaign similar to Doritos, asking consumers to submit a video about the healing power of light.

Doritos is a mega-brand millions and millions of passionate consumers. And Levia®? You probably never heard of it. Levia® is a device that uses light to treat psoriasis. The set of people who suffer from psoriasis and who have heard of Levia® and who have the technical know-how to produce video and who care enough to come up with winning concepts about light’s power to heal is an infinitesimally small set of people — certainly not a crowd./>

2. Making a Consumer Community

Marketers have jumped on the relatively recent explosion of online communities. If customers have the ability to talk to one another, why not create an incentive and a space for them to talk about your brand?

One way to accomplish this is to offer customers something they might actually do in real life. Marketing agency Movement Strategy, for instance, recently created an online forum for two of its NBA clients, the Denver Nuggets and the New York Knicks. The site — NuggetsVsKnicks.com — operated during an actual game between the Nuggets and the Knicks, giving the fans a place to cheer on their team (and trash talk the other). By integrating with Facebook — users cheered by “Liking” their team — Movement Strategy was able to give a real-world analog to the digital interaction.

What works: Campaigns that encourage community among their customer base can really help to build loyalty.

When this doesn’t work: When the campaigns are lazy.

It’s not fair to say that most company Facebook Pages don’t work, but often the conversations there offer a relatively low level of engagement. Contests, questions and announcements all encourage participation from the customer, but not necessarily participation with each other.

A lot of brands use Twitter contests in a similar way. A few years ago Squarespace, for instance, gave away an iPhone a day to anyone who mentioned Squarespace in a tweet. While this kind of activity can generate a lot of buzz, the actual customer engagement in the brand is low — the equivalent of dropping your business card in a fishbowl.

Even worse is when Facebook and other social network integration is used as a gimmick. Last March, Absolut sponsored a short film by Spike Jonze, the director of Being John Malkovich. The film, titled I’m Here, was designed to be shown on the web. Before watching, the viewer is first walked through an invitation process using Facebook Connect. The friends you invite are cleverly integrated into an introductory cut scene, during which, you “enter” the theater to watch the film. Their photos appear on the VIP passes of other people in the theater. The whole thing works to give you a sense that you are watching this film with people who you know.

Except in this case, the experience stops there. As soon as the film starts, the connection to your community ends. The introduction has nothing to do with the film itself and instead feels tacked on and gimmicky. Absolut hinted at what could be done but didn’t actually do it.

3. Choose Your Own Adventure

Perhaps the most exciting development in multi-platform interactive campaigns is the ability of the customer base to participate in and affect the outcome of a story.

At Blogworld 2010, Ford announced an online marketing campaign to promote its new Focus. The campaign, called Focus Rally, pits six teams against each other in a reality-style adventure game where the viewers make the important calls for the participants.

“It’s a little bit like a choose your own adventure here, but the people at home were choosing the adventure for these players. It’s kind of cool how interactive the show is going to be,” says Focus Rally producer Neal Konstantini.

Specifically, the Focus Rally competitors must rely on the network capabilities of the car and their social networks to solve challenges. “f you’re in Albuquerque and you’re stuck and you run out of gas,” Konstantini explains, “you’re going to have to get on Facebook and tell your network, ‘I’m stuck. I need gas. Help me.’”

What works: When the web is integrated into both a compelling storyline and effective brand messaging.

When this doesn’t work: When you expect interaction to be what solely carries the campaign.

“It’s not enough to be interactive,” says Michal Ann Strahilevitz, associate professor of marketing at Golden Gate University. “It has to be truly compelling, engaging and persuasive to the target market. If you build it, they may or may not come.”

Choose your own adventure campaigns build off the Internet’s potential as a story-telling device. These kinds of campaigns “require the audience’s presence and participation in order to be complete,” says Mike Monello, co-founder and executive director of Campfire, an advertising agency in New York. Monello was one of the creators of The Blair Witch Project and used viral Internet distribution before there was a name for such a thing.

In a recent campaign that Campfire created for the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week programming, the team produced a series of videos about famous shark attacks throughout history. Like Absolut’s promotion of I’m Here, Campfire used Facebook Connect to personalize users’ experience of the site and videos. But whereas Absolut’s choice felt tacked on at the end, Campfire accessed users’ Facebook information to build a personalized shark attack for the visitor. It integrated personalization into the branding and the storytelling.

“Telling stories is one of mankind’s most enduring traditions,” Campfire explains on its website. “Our increased connectedness has only made spreading them faster, more pervasive, and more effective.”

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Ways to Sell Your Expertise Online/> - 4 Misconceptions About Marketing in Social Games/> - Small Biz Checklist: 5 Important Tasks for the End of the Year/> - HOW TO: Boost Holiday Sales With Commonly Overlooked Marketing Strategies/> - Why SMS Marketing Still Makes Sense for Small Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, IvanWuPI

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In this month’s issue of Wired Magazine, writer Ted Greenwald described the trending Silicon Valley meme, “WDYDWYD or Why Do You Do What You Do?” calling it the “hottest team-building meme since Outward Bound.”

The meme originated in 2004 at Burning Man by artist Tony Deifell who posted photos of strangers answering the questions on the Ning social network. The inspiration behind the meme originated with a call he received late one night from a young student working on a school project. She blurted out, “Why do you do what you do?” Deifell was quite taken a back, and like many people faced with the question, he embarked upon an existential meditation.

I couldn’t get the words out in a clear way. I tried to refigure how to make my answer more essential. I realized I needed to be more deliberate in my choices in the world. It haunted me.

Deifell has since carried WDYDWYD from the festival to the Silicon Valley boardrooms of the National Holistic Institute, Google and Twitter. The site, which he describes as an open-sourced art project, is still growing steadily on Ning.

Student Joe Moloughney founded the WDYDWYD Facebook group, calling it a worldwide community art project with 1,500 members. Their Twitter page has over 1,000 followers. Artists like photographer Bill Kennedy, author/cartoonist Hugh MacLeod and French performance artist Séverine Carminati have all got involved.

But this meme is still primarily just on the West Coast. So, what would the East Coast answer? I asked a few prominent East Coasters, “Why do you do what you do?”

Here are their answers:

“To someday be able to answer this question.”

- Ashley Casselman, Senior Associate at the World Economic Forum.

“I am an insecure short girl from Florida. I never considered myself enough.”

-Laurel Touby, Founder and SVP, mediabistro.com

“I do what I do because of the thrill of discovery. And becuase the world is changing at an incredibly rapid rate, and somebody needs to be there to chronicle it.”

- Seth Porges, an Editor at Popular Mechanics

“I love the Internet, sure, but I mostly do what I do because of the people in my industry. It’s a world of movers, shakers, api-makers. Everyone is smart, and on the cutting-edge of what’s next. It’s simply the most exciting industry to work in, and also the most fun.”

-Soraya Darabi, Co-Founder of Foodspotting.

“Because I can’t stop…and I’m not sure I want to.”

- Julia Kaganskiy, Editor of The Creators Project and Founder of the ArtsTech Meetup.

“Because making the world suck less is SO MUCH FUN.”

- Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder of Reddit and Head of Marketing for Hipmunk

“I do what I do because I’m a huge nerd. At RJMetrics, we use technology to solve complex, interesting problems for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. This makes for nerd paradise, and I wouldn’t trade it for any other job.”

-Robert J. Moore, CEO of RJMetrics.

“In my case, the answer comes down to “enlightened self interest”. I am truly focused on the long-term goal of leaving the world a better place than I found it (the wonderful concept of ‘tikun olam’). As a pragmatic capitalist, I believe that can best be done by harnessing the powers of free market forces, and as a believer in democracy, I believe that society then needs to work collectively to tweak the margins to guide humanity in the right direction. As a result, I have created a unique and strange personal world surrounding me…like a high tech PeeWee’s Playhouse. I am an entrepreneur, angel investor, teacher, mentor, speaker, father, futurist and political activist, all of which taken together occupy me 16 hours a day, seven days a week, with an insane work and travel schedule. But I truly believe that I am having more pure fun in life than almost anyone else I know, and this combination of pleasure and purpose is Why I Do What I Do.”

- David S. Rose, Managing Principal of Rose Tech Ventures and founder and Chairman of New York Angels.

What makes our New York answers resemblant of our city? A touch of irony perhaps? A grittier sense of responsibility? A necessity to be edgier?

After asking so many of my peers, I gave it a think. I do what I do because every writer requires inspiration. So my fellow East Coasters, WDYDWYD?

bench craft company scam

Thursday, December 9, 2010

why internet marketing

1. User-Generated Content Contests

2. Making a Consumer Community

3. Choose Your Own Adventure

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