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A creative and well-rounded viral marketing campaign: The Fun Theory

November 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

From time to time, there are a few marketing campaigns that is just so creative that you have trouble getting them out of your mind. One of the latest brilliant ideas is “The fun theory” an initiative by Volkswagen. Though it is not obviously connected to the cars they sell, or marketed in the old fashion way, this is a campaign that will be stuck in my mind for a long time.

It’s fun, it proves a point both while being produced and when later shown, and you get a few fun statistics to share with your friends after watching them.

The videos that went viral

It all got started when Volkswagen published three videos, the piano staircase, the bottle bank arcade and the world’s deepest bin.

Here are links to the other two:
The bottle arcade & the world’s deepest bin.

About the project

“The fun theory award recognizes those thoughts, ideas and inventions that help prove the fun theory. That fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better…” (From the fun theory website)

The whole project is based on a competition that gives people a chance to send in their fun theories and compete for a price of 2500 EUR. You can still send in your contribution as a written presentation with a visual picture of the idea. The later could be a sketch, a photo, or a film of a prototype. The competition is open until December 15, and then they will select 10 finalists that will be presented in front of a jury. Here you can see a few of the entries.

Multiple level marketing both viral and creative

This well rounded marketing campaign plays on so many levels:

  1. When they did the videos, it most likely created a buzz from the people who tried the different theories.
  2. First off all it is fun and visual, and easy to share.
  3. The fact that it is a competition where money is at stake, means that many people take it with them after they leave their computer to discuss possible contributions to the competition.
  4. As they keep posting new entries to the competition, people keep coming back to the website to check out other fun theories.
  5. You can find the campaign in many places; their website, a Facebook group, twitter buzz and a youtube channel.

Volkswagens role

When you watch the movies, the Volkswagen logo only comes up on the last picture in the movie. Thus, they have chosen to not over use their logo in the campaign, which I think it an interesting move. As most brand do not seem to be able to create anything without their logo being on display.

While watching the movies, most people will wonder who made them, because they are done professionally.  I think that people will unconsciously appreciate that there is not brand name embedded in the movie.

Volkswagen is not flaunting their brand and let the brand “the fun theory” with logo be in the spotlight, and I think that this could increase the amount of people who will actually remember that Volkswagen was the initiators.

Filed Under: Musings, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

A closer look on the synchronization of LinkedIn & Twitter

November 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The benefits of the cooperation

Two days ago, LinkedIn and Twitter announced their new cooperation; LinkedIn and Twitter go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Surely, I can see a lot of potential with this new cooperation. First, you remove the double work with posting the same information in both places. Second, while LinkedIn might be a more obvious place to announce work opportunities etc, the connection to twitter will send the request to more people.

The main thing about the cooperation I think lies in the party’s individual benefit from it. LinkedIn will most likely become more active from this cooperation and get significant increase in status updates. Twitter might get both more users from LinkedIn by people who just create an account to connect the two, since it now will not take any extra time to produce tweets. Since people tweet about all sort of things, Twitter might also increase the amount of tweets regarding business and professions. I cannot stop than wondering if an increased amount of tweets on these subjects would somehow be good for their financial growth.

The features of the synchronization

Anyway, even though there are benefits for both twitter and LinkedIn users. As well as for the two companies, still worry about what disadvantages that comes from this cooperation. Look at this for example:

share-settings

As you can see, you can chose to share only some tweets or to share all of them. Setting that are made from the LinkedIn website but affects your status updates coming from twitter. While LinkedIn you have to check the square by the twitter logo to get your updates forwarded to Twitter.

linkedin

It would be one thing if they only had the option to choose to connect the status updates on both networks for each post, like you can if you only share tweets with #in. However, as you can choice to have all tweets published on both networks I am worried that the increase number of updates on LinkedIn may be too much. People might become “spammed” on LinkedIn by others frequent twitter updates.

Changing the identity of the networks

From my point of view, the constant flow of twitter is what I expect from the network. The tweets I follow contain anything from links, to questions, to actions and of course answers of the questions “what are you doing right now?.” On LinkedIn, I do not expect this constant flow of updates, I expect people to update their statuses once or twice daily often less than that. The updates are more thought trough and gets to stay there status for a while. I have many contacts that overlap these networks and therefore expect my contact to use them differently. Thus depending on what I want to know about my contacts I chose which network to look up them on.

These identifying functions of networks it one of the reasons why I am on both of them, I have different expectations from them, and look for different things on them. If LinkedIn starts to become too much like twitter, why should I be on both networks?

Individual selection of the features

When people began synchronizing their twitter updates with their Facebook updates I found their updates to be more generic than the updates that they actually posted on Facebook. Thus, they changed the expectation of the Facebook update. Therefore, the possibility to hide particular updates solved this issue. Since, you no longer had to receive the synchronized posts, even though you might miss other updates then. A similar solution on LinkedIn would be very useful.

All in all, If LinkedIn gives us a possibility to hide the synchronized updates, I so far have nothing critical to say about the cooperation.

What do you think? Do you see more advantages? Or perhaps you have already seen threats? How has the cooperation affected you so far?

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

A closer look on the synchronization of LinkedIn & Twitter

November 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The benefits of the cooperation

Two days ago, LinkedIn and Twitter announced their new cooperation; LinkedIn and Twitter go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Surely, I can see a lot of potential with this new cooperation. First, you remove the double work with posting the same information in both places. Second, while LinkedIn might be a more obvious place to announce work opportunities etc, the connection to twitter will send the request to more people.

The main thing about the cooperation I think lies in the party’s individual benefit from it. LinkedIn will most likely become more active from this cooperation and get significant increase in status updates. Twitter might get both more users from LinkedIn by people who just create an account to connect the two, since it now will not take any extra time to produce tweets. Since people tweet about all sort of things, Twitter might also increase the amount of tweets regarding business and professions. I cannot stop than wondering if an increased amount of tweets on these subjects would somehow be good for their financial growth.

The features of the synchronization

Anyway, even though there are benefits for both twitter and LinkedIn users. As well as for the two companies, still worry about what disadvantages that comes from this cooperation. Look at this for example:

share-settings

As you can see, you can chose to share only some tweets or to share all of them. Setting that are made from the LinkedIn website but affects your status updates coming from twitter. While LinkedIn you have to check the square by the twitter logo to get your updates forwarded to Twitter.

linkedin

It would be one thing if they only had the option to choose to connect the status updates on both networks for each post, like you can if you only share tweets with #in. However, as you can choice to have all tweets published on both networks I am worried that the increase number of updates on LinkedIn may be too much. People might become “spammed” on LinkedIn by others frequent twitter updates.

Changing the identity of the networks

From my point of view, the constant flow of twitter is what I expect from the network. The tweets I follow contain anything from links, to questions, to actions and of course answers of the questions “what are you doing right now?.” On LinkedIn, I do not expect this constant flow of updates, I expect people to update their statuses once or twice daily often less than that. The updates are more thought trough and gets to stay there status for a while. I have many contacts that overlap these networks and therefore expect my contact to use them differently. Thus depending on what I want to know about my contacts I chose which network to look up them on.

These identifying functions of networks it one of the reasons why I am on both of them, I have different expectations from them, and look for different things on them. If LinkedIn starts to become too much like twitter, why should I be on both networks?

Individual selection of the features

When people began synchronizing their twitter updates with their Facebook updates I found their updates to be more generic than the updates that they actually posted on Facebook. Thus, they changed the expectation of the Facebook update. Therefore, the possibility to hide particular updates solved this issue. Since, you no longer had to receive the synchronized posts, even though you might miss other updates then. A similar solution on LinkedIn would be very useful.

All in all, If LinkedIn gives us a possibility to hide the synchronized updates, I so far have nothing critical to say about the cooperation.

What do you think? Do you see more advantages? Or perhaps you have already seen threats? How has the cooperation affected you so far?

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

How To: Tweet to make an impression and make sure that people recieve it

August 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Ok, so honestly this post was supposed to be about why we tweet but instead it turned into a lesson in making your tweets the most desirable to read.


twitter


Jason Pullock asked his followers this question today and I responding saying “To share some of the interesting stuff that I find and to get access information and knowledge that other share with me, you?”Which is true, but how much do we really read other stuff?

I have been going true the stats for the links that I have been sharing over the last couple of days. The results varied a bit depending on the subject and how the tweets was written, but I had only between 3-34 click per link, which is very low considering that I have over 1,800 followers. So why is that?

Well first of all we have to consider that not everyone checks their twitter every day, and most of us see far from all the twitters that the people we follow put up each day. This means that only a small portion of the people following me actually saw the tweets when they came up. Still the number is very small.

If others use twitter in the same way as me, this is how they go about it. You log onto twitter and begin by checking the wall and what people are saying. While scanning trough the current tweets you choose one maybe two tweets with links that you want to follow and click on them. Anything else that might be on that wall you forget instantly and go on to checking replies, DMs and send a tweet yourself.

Knowing this, how do you write tweets that matter? That other people will actually read? There is not only one way, but now when you know what you are trying to do, here are a few tips.

  1. Tweets with links to lists are always popular “ten ways to..” etc.
  2. If you are referring to a blog or article with a title that is boring or does not describe the post well, don´t use it in your tweet, come up with something yourself instead.
  3. Somewhere in the tweet tell people what you are linking to [video] etc.
  4. Do not only post title and link <- add why they should read it or why you read it!

There are other a lot of other tips on how you increase your followers and stuff, but I didn´t want to share that, instead I hope that you think more about how you can impact your current followers.

That is why I tweet: to make an impression by sharing stuff that can affect people or teach people something and I read tweets in hope to get the same in return.

Remember – Quality before quantity!

What do you think? Any Tips that you want to add to the list?

Filed Under: How To, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

What do you do when you read a RT Tweet?

July 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

From a marketing perspective you can see a RT on Twitter as spreading the word mouth to mouth. So if many people does it, I becomes a bit of a viral campaign that is growing by other peoples work.

What I’m wondering is if the text in the Tweet is that get the attention, what is it spreading, or if the person actually tweeting get’s in on the marketing campaign too. (If I may call it that)

Let’s say that you see a Tweet marked RT.

• Do you pay any attention to the Twitterer who sent if originally and consider following this person?

• Or do you only think that this have to be a good tweet and if there is a link is probably worth following?

Please share your thought about this, I’m curious, am I missing something?

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

My peers are not on Twitter, so who are?

March 28, 2009 By 7 Comments

Yesterday, during a seminar with my fellow students in D.C, I was asked to explain what Twitter was. As chocking as it might seem most of my peers have heard about the site but neither of them had used it. To be honest I have not been a frequent user of Twitter myself until recently, but not because I did not knew what it what, but because I was Twittering so much for clients that I felt that I did not have time to Twitter for my self. That might sound ironic considering that it does not take to much time so send away a Tweet.

Anyway, I began by explaining that Twitter was a micro blog that allows you to post messages of 140 characters etc. Apparently, explaining what is was, and the technique with followers and following was not enough. The questions continued; what do you write about? Who do you follow? Why do you follow them? Why don’t you just use Facebook?

I was a bit overwhelmed by all questions, so I began by telling them that people use Twitter for different reasons. To me it is a way to share information about social media and my other interests, while receiving a constant information flow about the same subjects from others. I told them that I do follow many of my friends and colleagues. But it is also a great way to stay updated with information from industry leaders. People that can share a lot of knowledge from their experiences to others.

Though I have a very clear picture of why I use Twitter and have convinced many others to start using Twitter, many of my peers continued to be critical. Some of them feel a bit “old fashion” as they see Twitter primarily as a playground and not “real” work. That might be true, but as long as we share information and learn from our “playtime” why not take advantage from the benefits that Twitter gives us?

Perhaps I’m biased considering the fact that I work with Social Media and therefore of course most of the people in my industry is on Twitter. However, a few hours ago I had a conversation with my friend @HaileyBranson (of course I need to promote her on Twitter) a journalist for multiple newspapers around the country. She told me that many congress employees are following her on Twitter to stay updates with the news she share. She has also spread the word about the advantages of Twitter to her co-workers around the country whom are now also beginning to use Twitter as a communication tool. So after all, Twitter might be something for everyone.

This has made me thinking about who is online where and for what reason? My friends seem to think that Twitter is for teenagers that are bored while I mostly communicate with the opposite, older businesswomen and men with successful careers. How do we know before we try?

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,
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