You just have to give it up to Tripadvisor. This is by far the coolest FB app I’ve come across in so long – the concept/idea is simple but the execution is just phenomenal.
The entire process from start to finish, including adding the pictures, selecting the music (with some really intuitively selected recommended music) to motivating sharing – all done so smoothly, it’s 100% painless.
P.S. Mizaan Lokhandwala, we totally killed it on this one =)
With an increasing number of businesses today investing in building an active social media presence - be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. the way businesses build their websites is changing.
Increasingly, you'll go to a company website and find a Facebook widget, showing you how many of your friends like the company's FB page, or a Twitter widget, showing you some of the company's most recent tweets. There are a whole bunch of reasons why it makes sense to do this. Some of these include ensuring better ROI on SMM efforts, enabling people to connect with companies on an individual level and have conversations with them, building a long-term relationship with website visitors and others. Many sites/portals even allow you to create accounts using your Social Network profiles and that even helps companies pull more information about users than is normally available to them besides making creating accounts easier for users.
Clearly, the elements that make up a good company website are changing. But is this change limited to e-commerce/retail and general B2C websites? What about B2B websites - is there a way for B2B company to make their sites more Social - while ensuring that it maintains its corporate B2B demeanor?
Well, that's exactly what I'd been assigned to do last month. I was to work on completely revamping the website of one of company's divisions - the one that I primarily work with. This particular division focuses on Consulting and Technology and is purely B2B in its business model.
The current website, which (and there's no easy way to say this) is far from perfect has remained unchanged since 2006. Understandably, when it was built, it wasn't geared for Social Media. This time around though, it's was different story.
There was a whole list of changes that I'd suggested for the new website that I thought could apply to a lot of B2B websites out there that I wanted to share through this post, but before I do that, here are 2 important guidelines that I kept in mind for the entire exercise:
· Take stock of what Social Media Properties that business has established, which it wants to leverage through its website. In my case it was Twitter & Facebook, but it can be LinkedIn or some other network as well.
· It's critical to the website's ability to succeed in its purpose if the traffic isn't distracted from the main call-to-action. In my case, it was all about generating leads (main goal = Contact Us form) and so I didn't want to give too many opportunities for visitors to leave the site
And here are my list of elements from the obvious ones (like the Contact Us page) to the not-so-obvious ones (like About us ((it's different from Contact Us)):
Following the success of its Write The Future campaign (32 million views digitally since its launch less than a month ago), they’ve now launched the "Write The Headline" campaign – an interactive digital communications experience which basically involves a giant LED sign on the Southern Life Center building in Johannesburg.
The ambitious interactive installation allows fans to submit personal messages to inspire their favorite players, and then see their headline transformed into a huge player animation that will tower over the city of Johannesburg (through a giant LED sign on the Southern Life Center building).
Fans can submit a 57 character personal message (in 12 languages) through Facebook.com/nikefootball, Twitter, Facebook, Mxit (South Africa) and QQ (China) to over 50 of Nike’s athletes from around the world. Up to 100 headlines are then selected each night and transformed into digital player animations that are projected across Johannesburg. When a fan’s message is used they receive a personalized notification showing them a picture of the headline and the animation created from it.
Now This is a great campaign.
It'll generate buzz for sure. I can quite literally see this being an actual movie or better yet an MTV reality show/series that generates viewership.
It'll boil down to whether they will deliver quality content that will match up to people's expectations and whether they can ensure that the phone doesn't get Completely sidelined (no obvious plugs either).
I was planning a post about the colossal waste that is the "Save our Tigers" campaign, when I came across this.
Now I'm not surprised that someone else has taken it up already - there are tons of smart people out there. What I was surprised about however is how comprehensive his critique is. He's hit the nail right on it's head and I concur 100%.
So without taking up any more real estate, over to Tantanoo:
‘Save’ is perhaps the noblest of all four letter words that I’ve come across. It doesn’t have the hidden desperation that other four letter words have. ‘Save me’ sounds much better than ‘Love me’, much more earnest in its desperation.
When I first saw the ‘Save our tigers’ ad on teewhee, I rubbished it, you know, like we rubbish everything from Save Haiti to Save Hockey. That way. But having 400 friends on Facebook does have its disadvantages especially when sending invites to stupid clubs is the favourite pastime of some of them. But when some of the ‘sane’ friends also sent me invites to join ‘Stripey the club’, I was sure something was amiss.
It happens so that ‘Stripey’ is an innocent tiger cub whose mom ventures out in the forest and doesn’t return. You know, like women venture out in Goa(or Delhi or Bombay or <insert Indian city>) and don’t return. But let’s not digress. So Stripey’s mom has been killed by some poachers or so the commercial says and it then punches a figure of ‘only 1411 tigers left’ in your face. Very poetic. Figures always move people. You know, when anchors were screaming the number of Swine flu victims on news channels, people were scared shitless. Similarly this 1411 figure brings a sudden horror. Add to it a cute tiger cub and you have a win social initiative. Good job Aircel. Not.
Save the Tiger – www.saveourtigers.com , in my honest and unwanted opinion, is a very poorly executed social initiative. I am not sure if this has brought any mileage to Aircel but apart from creating some buzz, the initiative hardly does anything worthwhile. It lacks the soul and resolve that a social initiative requires. It applies armchair activism to an issue where its effect is debatable
,and the extent of change that can be brought is extremely limited. Let’s do a quick post-mortem of the initiative.
There are recruitment campaigns and there are recruitment campaigns. And then there's the Best Job in the World campaign, which can be described best as the most effective recruitment campaign in a very long time – making for a killer case study.
In fact, I shouldn't even call it a recruitment campaign - this was a lot bigger than that. It transcended mere recruitment to cover brand building, tourism promotion, social media marketing and even reality TV - garnering tremendous exposure for Australia's Great Barrier Reef islands – nothing the ads that the tourism industry normally comes up with could ever achieve.
I won’t even be surprised if I hear that the Australians never really needed an island caretaker and this was all an elaborate way to bringing the focus of the world’s media to the Barrier Reef islands. Money well spent I say, especially when you’re getting:
| Applicants: | 34,683 from 201 countries |
| User generated content: | 610 hours |
| Website visits: | 8 Million (54 million page views) |
| Estimated media coverage: | over US$ 150 million with a CNN live cross & BBC documentary |
| Campaign budget: | US$ 1.2 million |
This case study is a great example of a couple of things that we’ve been talking about for a while now, viz.:
- Marketing is consistently becoming less advertising and more PR and this is a great example of this. Ads are becoming blind spots and you need to create genuine content around something with a unique angle/concept/hook to stand out from the clutter.
- Further, this is yet another example of how Social Media Marketing can propel campaigns to becoming viral movements. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were all perfectly suited to this campaign as the infrastructure needed to help content go viral.
Enuf said, Roll the Case Study video
(Thanks xcruz82)
It’s no surprise that this won 3 lions at Cannes this year.
It’s also interesting that there was another campaign, with a similar concept that wasn’t submitted for consideration for the awards, but achieved great results nonetheless. It was the Professional Fan Job – Case Study below:
(Thanks Daniel)
On a separate note, while the Australian Tourism Board must have surely received hundreds of great applications from several qualified candidates, here's one that I stumbled upon that I think was awesome:
And in case you're wondering who won, it's this guy:
