Influential Marketing Blog

Audubon Society Promotes Happy Bird Watching, Not Angry Bird Tossing

Imagine you're the marketing team at the Audubon Society, a group that has been around for nearly a century and your mission for that time has been to promote better man-bird relations -- how would you respond to a internationally addictive game which has been downloaded more than 400 million times that portrays your heroes as "angry" and encourages people to toss them into stuff for prizes?

The question probably isn't a fair one, as I imagine the Audubon Society probably hasn't lost much sleep over how the wildly popular Angry Birds mobile game has portrayed birds ... but it does bring birds and the pasttime of "birding" some long overdue attention.

Birding, as I once learned from one of my professors of English who was addicted to the activity, usually involves heading out to the forest and looking through binoculars and cameras with zoom lenses for different types of birds. Once seen, a bird is typically logged into a birding journal or documented via a photograph, and birders spend their time collecting long lists of exotic or rare birds that they have seen (the rarest of which are called "life birds") and compare lists with one another. 

Earlier this month, The Audubon Society launched what is quickly becoming another addictive bird-focused game online called "Birding The Net." Tying into the upcoming Hollywood movie release of The Big Year - an upcoming Hollywood film featuring Steve Martin and Jack Black where characters compete to see the most North American birds in one year - the game is built on Facebook and offers a virtual version of bird watching where participants are challenged to find birds spread across the Internet and collect the most in order to win prizes.  

As David Yarnold, President and CEO of Audubon describes, “birds are the best possible ambassadors for the environment, and this will help people see them in a whole new way. This is about fun – but it’s also about getting more people involved in taking action to protect birds and the planet we share with them. And with this unprecedented use of social media and the web, we’re also making it clear that this is not your grandmother’s Audubon.”

The game, which you can get a taste of on this blog for a week by clicking one of the birds above, will run through November 7th and I predict it will succeed brilliantly as a marketing strategy for Audubon Society. Spending some time looking, it offers at least five good lessons for marketers:

1. Timing/Hollywood Tie-in - With the link to the upcoming Hollywood film, the Audubon Society will get infinitely more eyeballs to this campaign and lots more funding and support. Chances are the beautiful visual design of this campaign was due in no small part to 20th Century Fox’s ability to fund the agency (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) behind this.
2. Recreates A Real Life Experience - The act of surfing online to various sites and hoping to see birds perfectly recreates what the experience of birding in real life is. You never know what you'll see, you are sometimes disappointed, but you get that flash of excitement when you do see a bird and it's one you haven't seen before.
3. Uses Behavioural Economics - When you first register, you have a clean slate of grayed out cards ... which you immediately want to start collecting. "Earning" the first several are easy - you get one just for starting and there are another 3 or 4 easily available on obvious sites like www.audubonguides.com, but then it gets tougher. Once you have started, though, you can't help wanting to collect more.
4. Engagement Through Design - Though this would be hard to prove, my bet is that they will get much higher engagement with this effort as a result of a very strong creative execution. Put simply, the app and individual bird cards are beautifully designed. Looking at them online, you almost wish they would produce them in print too just so you could hold them in your hands. 
5. Built-in Shareability - There is lots of great shareability built into this campaign, from the ability to embed your own birdhouse on your blog or website to leaderboards and sharing through Facebook. The campaign has a strong understanding of why and how people share at its heart and makes it easy to do so. 
6. Bird Personality - A visit to the Twitter account for one of the birds, the Rufous Hummingbird (@RufHummingbird) yields this bio: "Tireless traveler and flower enthusiast on a mission of nectar discovery." All the other bird Twitter accounts feature similar personality and a bit of good natured rivalry between them. It makes it fun to engage with the birds and adds an important element of, well, humanity to the campaign.
7. Curiosity and Discovery - Perhaps the most important element that makes this fun is the fact that you need to make new discoveries of where the birds are, and they have engaged your curiosity to see where they turn up next. It is an essential element of gaming, and one that Angry Birds (coincidentally) makes excellent use of. 

Ultimately, Birding The Net stands is one of the most original uses of social media and gaming I've seen lately to achieve the dual purpose of promoting an upcoming movie as well as reminding people that a pasttime which has been around for centuries can still offer a thrill not only in the virtual world ... but if you shut off the technology and head out into the real world as well. 

Video Introduction To Birding The Net:

A Guide To Geolocation & Geosocial Marketing In 2011

One of the topics that has gotten a lot of attention from forward thinking marketers in the last year is the potential for geolocation and geosocial marketing. This year, there will be more devices with built in GPS and the ability to geotag content you create with the location where you created it than ever before. Location Based Services (LBS) like FourSquare and Gowalla are increasing their number of users who use the services to "check in" to locations like hotels and restaurants. Even the backend technology of the Internet is cooperating, as marketers have access to originating IP addresses and access points to understand where a web browser is sitting physically.

Whether this locational information is user contributed or automatically generated, the fact is that many feel 2011 will be the year that geolocation finally emerges as an opportunity that anyone in marketing won't be able to ignore. Whether you have already tried some marketing efforts in this space, or whether you are considering it in the near future - this post rounds up some of the biggest opportunities when it comes to geolocation and offers a few ideas for how you might get started.

1. Creating Geotagged Content Mashups
One of the biggest concerns with geolocation marketing is always around the privacy of consumers and the potential for brands to be seen as "cyber stalkers" for pushing messages that chase consumers around. The nice thing about geotagging, however, is that there are millions of pieces of content online right now which feature geolocation information attached to them. Images are tagged with the exact GPS coordinates of where they were taken. Video can be linked to specific dates and events based on the meta data uploaded. This is offering a great curation opportunity for brands who take this content and create interesting visualizations around it.

Example: Grey Canada's recently released "Global Mood Clock"

2. Offering Exclusive Experiences & Discounts Via Location Based Services
Foursquare and Gowalla are both actively courting businesses to advertise with them. Gowalla recently created a partnership with Disney Theme Parks and Foursquare had a highly debated large promotion with McDonald's as well as an interesting promotion in the UK with Domino's. Each were examples of these Location Based Services using their platforms to offer a layer for brands to buy into for the purpose of promoting special or exclusive offers to those customers who willingly broadcast their locations to their social networks. Moving forward, new services like SCVNGR which focus more on the gaming appeal of checking into locations are starting to offer another way for brands to reach niche audiences of LBS users.

Example: Foursquare with Domino's in the UK.



3. Serving IP-Based Location-Specific Content & Advertising
If there were an "old school" aspect to geolocation marketing, this would be it. For many years now, brands have had the ability to target people based on the location of the IP address from which they were accessing the Internet. Combined with user generated data such as users sharing their location on social networks or adding location details to their personal profiles, this is opening up opportunities for brands to share specific content and advertising messages with people based just on where they happen to be at any particular time.

4. Augmenting Live Events
This may be the most obvious yet clearly underutilized opportunity for geolocation marketing. Whether looking at a large scale sporting event in a big stadium, or a company sponsored customer conference, there are potential ways for geolocation marketing to be used at the event. This could include special offers for individuals who visit a trade show booth or promoting future events to current attendees based on the assumption that people who attend one event may be more likely to consider attending another. Add in the potential for people to connect with others in their social network who happen to be at the same event, and the benefits of encouraging people to create and share content from events to promote the event to those who are not in attendance and you begin to see the potential here.

Example: New Jersey Nets Gowalla Partnership



5. Organizing Change & Social Good
In the social realm, we have already seen the power of geolocation in revolutionary situations such as the recent events in Tunisia where citizens have used the power of geolocation to organize together to promote a shared point of view. Outside of politics, geolocation can be used to find green businesses through apps like Greenopia and also to join social movements and real events organized to promote specific causes. One service, CauseWorld, is creating an entire model based on geolocation for you to generate positive results based on socially motivated behaviours.

Example: CauseWorld



List Of Additional Useful Articles About Geolocation:

• 10 Ways Geolocation Is Changing The World -
• Geolocation Marketing For Small Businesses -
• The Rules Of Geolocation Marketing -
• The Future Of Geolocation Marketing -
• Early Proof That Geolocation Marketing Will Succeed
• The Dangers And Downside Of Geolocation

Can Jumo Solve The NonProfit World's Biggest Marketing Problem?

Today marks the launch of Jumo, the new long awaited social networking platform from Facebook co-Founder Chris Hughes. In a recent interview with the Huffington Post published today, Hughes described the mission of the site this way:

Most every site that's out there focuses on donations. And, don't get me wrong, donating to organizations, especially right now, is really important. But Jumo is taking a very different approach. It's not just about how much money are donating to this or that group. It's about what kind of relationship you are building with that organization.

As anyone who has ever worked on a nonprofit communications or marketing plan will tell you, the single biggest challenge when it comes to cause related marketing is motivating people to act on what they feel. You might hear about underpriveleged youth or dwindling trees in the rainforest and most of us will have an instinctual emotional reaction that these things are terrible and we should do something to help. The problem is that this emotion is tough to turn into real action - whether that action involves donating money or offering time.

Some have argued that this difficulty is leading nonprofits into a wrongheaded attempt to make supporting a cause nothing more than a click (mockingly called "slacktivism") - which devalues the importance of real contribution via time or money, and offers people a chance at "moral self licensing" where they feel they have done their good deed and therefore stop trying to do more.

Jumo's big insight, as Hughes shares in his launch blog post, is that there can be multiple levels of engagement and if a social network can make it easy to do everything from support a cause you care about simply by clicking a "like" button - to actually donating money or agreeing to volunteer, then that is a big win for the entire nonprofit community. On Jumo, I can support causes as much or as little as I like, and find all of them in one place. The mission of the site is clear, and it's promise is huge.

The most powerful part of this idea, however, may be its directory aspect that first launched early Internet superstar sites like Craigslist and Yahoo. In a world where we have far too much noise and demands on our attention - something like Jumo could offer a one-stop shop for anything related to doing good by supporting a cause related organization. At least in part it is based on the assumption that there is a large population of Internet-savvy people who would do more if it were just easier. Whether you think Jumo can succeed at its mission or not, it's hard to argue with that.

How A Curated Competition Helped Find A New Logo For DC

If you come to Washington DC as a tourist at any time of year, chances are you will spend at least a part of your trip visiting some of the most iconic museums and national buildings in the city. Outside of most of them are a collection of street vendors selling an assortment of life-sized cardboard cutouts of Obama and tacky shot glasses with the Presidential Seal on them.

One of their best selling icons is a t-shirt which is a simple copy of New York's well known logo - "I Love New York" - with the city name replaced. It is just one symbol of what I have seen spending most of my childhood growing up in DC area: that it can be a difficult city to adopt as your own. Many people live in neighboring Maryland or Virginia, the vibe of the city can shift based on who gains political power and there has always been a large expat population working 2-5 year stints at NGOs or embassies locally.

Back in August of this year, at the start of the Fall tourism season for Washington DC, two young D.C.-based artists Brandon Bloch and Justin Young thought the city needed a stronger identity, and felt that the solution to this challenge could be design based. So they invited their design friends to participate in a "curated competition" to create a logo that could better represent the city.

The competition resulted in several designs, and the winner was a designer named Alex Slater who had a simple but elegant design that felt uniquely right for DC. They have been sharing this logo at local events throughout the fall and have been featured in media both locally and nationally. While many of these "crowdsourced logo competitions" awaken the ire of designers for their focus on getting design thinking for free ... the DC Love Project was different because it was a curated competition. All the designs were shown at a public event and the voting element offered a real time feedback method to help select one design to focus on promoting.

This campaign certainly helped to start defining a logo identity for the city that all of us locals would love to see ... but the bigger idea to take away is that sometimes crowdsourcing misses the chance to really value every contribution you get - a curated competition might inspire much more passion among those who participate, as well as those who will see the final result.

How Political Advertising Is Killing Marketing (And How To Fight Back)

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left.
                - David Ogilvy

If marketing were a person, political advertising would be its cancer. I work in marketing and have never worked on a political campaign, so despite my choice to live in Washington DC - my perspective is not one of a political insider. Instead, I am a marketer and voting American who sees with increasing frequency TV spots, radio ads, print advertising and online banners designed to instill fear, spread lies and intentionally confuse people. To some degree, the "Rally to Restore Sanity" this past weekend in DC was inspired by this advertising.

Yet this is not a partisan problem limited to one side or the other. The central problem with political advertising in the US is that it is has become more important to fabricate a list of negative things that your opponent stands for instead of having to stand for something yourself. Instead of electing people based on their ideas and qualifications, this advertising tries to motivate us to vote for someone based on a fear that the other guy (or girl) might win.

Aside from the politics of it, though, as marketers we need to care about this because it is destroying the credibility of our profession. When people see advertising as manipulating them with half-truths, this perception extends far beyond politics. The next time you are trying to promote a product or service, you have to do it to the same cynical public that has become wary of marketing messages due in large part to unethical and misleading forms of marketing such as political advertising.

Though this may seem like a big problem, I believe the solution is actually quite simple. Political advertising should have to follow the same parameters as any other kind of marketing. Coke cannot create and run a marketing campaign solely talking about the 12 ways that Pepsi could kill you, steal your school's funding and pull the plug on your sick grandma. Why is this acceptable in political advertising?

Right now, there are vague rules around "misrepresentation" - but most competent communicators can find a source for just about any statement. The rule needs to be stronger. After the election tomorrow, we need new legislation that makes it illegal for political ads to talk about opponents instead of themselves. These so-called "attack ads" are at the heart of the problem.

If you want to run a marketing message on behalf of a candidate for public office, it should be about what he or she stands for and what they will do if elected. When more of this marketing focuses on positive messages instead of negative, then we all win. As marketers and business people with products and services to promote, we all need to stand up and lead this call - because it is in our best interests as well. Not just as professionals, but as citizens.

The Five Branches Of Government 2.0

Earlier this week I had the privilege of moderating at panel at the Ogilvy offices in Washington DC all about defining and exploring Government 2.0 (watch the livestream archive online). The panelists featured several visionary minds and leading thinkings in the world of Government 2.0, including:

- Alex Howard, O’Reilly Media
- Gwynne Kostin, U.S. General Services Administration
- Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum
- Ari Melber, The Nation
- Mark Murray, NBC News

In our conversation, the topics ranged from defining the buzzword of "Gov2.0" to some leading case studies today of how social media and the web is being used by government agencies, to the potential risks and complications of all this evolution from a privacy or accessibility point of view. One of the biggest visions ifor what Government 2.0 could be has come from Tim O'Reilly who shared his ideas of "government as a platform" - but one of the most considered definitions of Government 2.0 I uncovered comes from a dedicated discussion thread on the popular social network GovLoop for those interested in the evolution of Government*:

"Government 2.0 is the socialization and commoditization of government processes, services and data."

Through our panel discussion, the big theme that came through for me was that the government workers, contractors and thought leaders who live and breathe in this world of Government 2.0 every day are often tackling very different categories of issues.

As I took notes from the conversation and spoke to some of the attendees afterwards, I started thinking in terms of the different emerging "branches" on this tree of Government 2.0 - and how they might be defined based on the examples that people spoke about as well as what I have seen in my work with clients in this area. This post is an attempt to share how I thought about that framework, and I'm interested to hear your thoughts (particularly if you work in the sector) on whether this works or feels too simplistic or incomplete. 

1. Campaigning 2.0 - With an election looming, it sometimes may feel that this category gets the most attention. Campaigning 2.0 is about using social media and online collaborative tools to organize people around a campaign to get someone into an elected position. The Obama campaign turned many people's heads in terms of how to build a brand and use these tools effectively around something as pivotal as an election for the US President, and today we see new stories every day about how other candidates are using tools like Meetup, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook and others to motivate their supporters and try to win elections.
2. Open Data 2.0 - Moving from campaigning to actually governing, this is the category of work that Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra often speaks about - relating to the big challenges of getting various government agencies to begin to have their huge databases share information with one another, as well as publishing government data on open standards so that third parties and the private sector can start to build useful applications and tools on top of this data. This category captures the millions of dollars of investment on the IT infrastructure and the cloud that are being made to improve these systems and increase their efficiency and utility. More and more this focus will allow for innovative sites and tools like Pillbox from the NIH which help anyone to identify unknown pills.
3. Collaboration 2.0 - Some (including myself) could argue that this aspect of Government 2.0 has the most potential to have a big impact in terms of creating cultural change within America. GovLoop currently allows government employees to have conversations with others in the government outside of their agencies and fields of expertise. NASA is one agency that has used social tools to allow a highly engaged citizen population to do everything from experience missions in real time to aid the underlying mission of the agency by sharing their computer processing power. As platforms become open and people use them to share their knowledge, this collaboration will lead to greater and greater innovation and engagement from the citizenry of the country with government in all the areas they are most passionate about.
4. Services 2.0 - Alternately described as the "e-government" or "ecommerce" aspect of Government 2.0, this category would describe all the initiatives to let people complete the logistical tasks that they need to engage with government on in an easier and more interactive way. This is everything from e-filing your taxes to renewing your driver's license online. These services are a vital part of what government offers to citizens, and are often the most visible area to the average citizen of how Gov 2.0 can affect their daily life.
5. Security 2.0 - Though some see this category as opposite to opening up data (#2), there is no denying that there is and will continue to be a huge focus in Government 2.0 on using technology to improve our nation's security, whether through highly debated "big brother" style monitoring or new platforms and tools to handle legal and illegal immigration issues.  Broadly speaking, some of the innovative use of these tools by the US Military that we know about (such as the DoD Social Media Hub), as well as what we don't yet know about could fit into this category as well.

In putting this list together, I was tempted to note down entire categories for industries such as Healthcare or Education. Upon further thought, I think that each of these industries will have (and has already had) innovation in several of the areas I shared above, so I resisted creating entire categories for them. What do you think of this structure? Does it help to describe and explain the state of work in Government 2.0 today, or just introduce another layer of buzzwords to an already confusing category? Let me know what you think or suggest another link that covers this question and I'll add it to the list below.

*Note: Thanks to Adriel Hampton for pointing out in a comment that this definition of Gov 2.0 originally came from a Gartner report by Andrea DiMaio.

Related Articles & Additional Thinking 

• Kety Esquivel: Gov 2.0 at Ogilvy DC (huffingtonpost.com)
• Alex Howard: Making sense of Gov2.0, Open Government and We Government at Ogilvy (gov20.govfresh.com)

How A Portuguese Singer Got 20 Million Views On YouTube

Ana Free is a singer and songwriter from Portugal who started her career with a simple idea. For the past three years she has been recording herself in locations ranging from her bedroom to regional concert stages singing cover versions of popular songs and her own original compositions accompanied by just her guitar and posting those videos on YouTube. Alone, that doesn't seem like anything countless other singers might have tried to do, right?

The difference is that this collection of simple videos on YouTube has gathered more than 20 million views and brought this relatively unknown singer fans from around the world - including more than 20,000 on Facebook. She was recently featured in a music video from the band Hands On Approach and self released her own album last year on CD Baby.

In a world where the music industry seems to face a new struggle almost every month and many in the music industry fear that the next generation of consumers are growing up with a perception that music is something that they should not have to pay for - what could Ana Free teach us about marketing, engagement and the potential future for up and coming musicians around the world? Here are a few lessons:

1. Share your beginnings. One of the most powerful things about Ana's story is that you can see the whole history of it on YouTube. All of her videos (including her first video) are available on her channel and watching them gives you the sense that you are seeing a talented musician mature with each video - and offers a personal connection to her story because you get to see it evolve.
2. Be authentic. A common theme in her videos is the authenticity with which they are recorded. She sings to her cat, shows outtakes from recording sessions and sometimes forgets the words to songs. All of these pieces are captured on video and give the viewer a sense that they are seeing some real and unscripted - a welcome change to all the overly produced and narcissistically perfected music videos available online today.
3. Use a common language. By starting with doing cover songs that people would recognize, Ana uses the common language of popular songs to introduce herself and her style to her audience. While she does have original songs, if she only had those, her views and audience would likely be far smaller. Singing songs from other artists is a simple way to reduce the barriers that may exist for people to engage with her music.
4. Find complimentary partners. At several points, Ana partners with other musicians who themselves have large and active YouTube audiences like Maria Zouroudis. These duets allow her to engage another audience outside of her own and introduce herself to music fans who will likely enjoy her music as well because it is a similar style to the other musicians who she partners with.
5. Ask for help from your community. When Ana finally released her own album, all the videos in her channel used tagging and links to drive viewers of any video to listen to her music and get a copy of it. She also posted a video asking for help in promoting the album and spreading the world. By integrating this promotion with all her existing videos and directly asking for help, she is engaging the community which has supported her over 3 years and asks them to take the next step by talking about her new album and recommending it to others.

How Algorithms Could Finally Revolutionize Social Media Marketing

It is nearly the anniversary of the closing of a 3 year quest you may have heard of. The Netflix Prize was a $1m contest launched by the popular video rental service to improve their movie recommendation engine by a specific algorithmic percentage. The challenge was open to any and all mathematics and University teams and was finally awarded on September 21, 2009 to a team that submitted their winning entry just 24 minutes before the closing of the contest.

What does a prize to solve a longstanding mathematical challenge mean for the future of marketing? More than you might think. Algorithms are at the heart of something that has long been promised by the social web but never quite delivered ... a truly personalized online experience. A social network, for example, that can learn your likes and dislikes so well that it can predict what you will want before you even look for it. Such a system and experience has long been visualized in science fiction, but our reality has been 20 million search results for any search and illogically served banner advertising that promises deals on airfare to Turkey when you actually just want a Thanksgiving recipe.

The solution to this challenge was always to build smarter algorithms, and one way to do that is by having learning systems where they get better and smarter the more you train them through your behaviours. Of course, this requires users to spend some time inputting data in order to make the systems better. Time was the barrier. Luckily, there are a few models for getting users past this barrier which mean that these algorithms now may finally be able to achieve what people have hoped they might for years:

1. Integration with existing behaviours and platforms. If you are a Gmail user, you may have noticed their new Beta feature of the "Priority Inbox" which promises to help organize your inbox by learning which emails you might consider a priority. Using simple logic like highlighting those emails which you open and respond to most frequently, the system will learn over time based only on your hitting a button next to emails to indicate whether others like them should or should not be considered priorities. By integrating with a utility that a large number of people user already, this system makes it more likely that you will take the time to train the system to get usage out of it.
2. Using gaming techniques to encourage engagement. Hunch is one of several increasingly popular sites that helps to personalize recommendations on things you may like. By having people answer questions in a quiz-like format, they create an engaging way for you to train the system through an activity that feels more like a game than a cold form that you check boxes in to describe yourself and your views. Then product recommendations with links are shared alongside your content and you can choose to click on them and follow through to purchase something.

When you have systems like this that make it acceptable and even commonplace for users to take the time to train their algorithms about themselves and their behaviours, then you start to see the vast possibilities for targeting and serving more relevant marketing to people online. This is not about finding your target audience for a product or service message. This is about being able to finally customize a message to what someone may want or respond to before they even click a link or type a term into a search engine.

5 Marketing Lessons From Fast Company's Influencer Project

Who is the most influential person online? That is the tantalizing question behind the Influencer Project, a brilliantly conceived marketing campaign from Fast Company magazine dedicated to getting people to engage with the idea of online influence and pass along their participation to their entire social networks. The Influencer Project is a simple site that gets you to register with a few details, include your photo and then spits out a custom URL for you to use in all your influential efforts online. The more people you get to click on your URL, the more influence scores you can generate for yourself. (Note - the link above is to my personal URL)

The payoff, as with many of these types of campaigns, is personal reputation and bragging rights - but for the growing ranks of people for whom social media offers an additional limb upon which to balance their virtual identities this reputation is more important than money. It could be considered a simple journalistic effort to do this, but if you look at how the project has been executed, it offered a great case study on how to use the power of the Internet to engage people and build an audience online.

1. Have a strategic message behind your campaign. The idea of seeking the most influential person online could have been done by any publication, but the fact that Fast Company has chosen to do it sends a strong message about how they want to be perceived: as the magazine that people who are highly influential online read. There are plenty of choices to fit this category, but Fast Company has long been one of my favourite printed publications that I actually subscribe to in print format and read every copy of cover to cover because of their dedication to merging the worlds of online and offline together to paint a picture of the future of business. It is why I have written for them before and why I often recommend the magazine to colleagues.
2. Make it easy to spread the word. Core to this idea is the fact that every participant gets a shortened URL to use for their own bio. This URL is what anyone can use to pass along the promotion to their social network and is also the primary way that the site can measure your influence. You can also integrate your Twitter and Facebook profiles, but unlike other promotions that can turn into popularity contests through the number of friends and followers you have - the Influencer Project is focused on actual action. The more clicks you generate, the higher your influence score.
3. Support your promotion with your core business. In the case of Fast Company, their business is producing editorial content. Instead of just sticking a banner on their site and sending out some emails to their subscribers, they are also integrating the Influencer Project into their editorial by releasing a series of interviews with influential people online. The first was with Gary Vaynerchuck and presumably the others they do will help add more context to the idea of influence online and take advantage of Fast Company's editorial voice as a way to bring more people into the Influencer Project.
4. Have multiple payoffs to attract more participants. The ultimate payoff, as I noted above, is the ego stroke that having your photo appear larger will give and that will likely drive many people to participate. Fast Company will also publish a large photo in their magazine with a spread of all the participants as well - which adds a dimension to the reason for participating and likely will attract people for whom the online credit may not be enough.
5. Integrate long term brand assets with a short term campaign. One mistake many marketers make is to drive a lot of attention and engagement around a short term effort without generating any longer term value for their brand. Fast Company has the Influencer Project, which will have a definitive start and finish, but they also integrate it with their branded Facebook and Twitter pages, which are longer term assets for the brand. By doing so, they can use the spike in activity around the Influence Project as a way to build greater long term value for their brand and a bigger base of engaged people that they will be able to promote content and activities to in the future.

Rohit's Custom URL for the Influencer Project: http://fcinf.com/v/a7en

Update 07/07/10 - For more context on this campaign and how it attempts to track influence, check out Amber Naslund's great post countering Fast Company on how they are confusing ego with influence. She has a great point about how this is an overly simplistic and ego driven way to track whether people have influence online. Though I agree it is an incomplete metric in terms of influence, I still think there are many marketing lessons you could take from this effort as I talked about in my post - but I found her alternate take on the campaign made me think more deeply about it and I highly recommend you read her post and decide how you land on this campaign for yourself.

How To Salvage Your Brand On Facebook: Lessons For Nestle

If you haven't seen it by now, the Nestle brand* has run into a bit of a brand crisis on Facebook thanks to a combination of a coordinated attack from Greenpeace and missteps from the brand in communicating with consumers through the social media environment (for a good recap of the situation and analysis, read Jeremiah's post here). The negativity is piling on at the moment and the brand is likely getting advice from many different places about what to do next and how to react. Along with this, their following on Facebook is exploding and is now close to 100,000 fans. In my mind, this is another great example of the type of crisis that we have seen in many companies that ultimately helps to awaken their entire teams to the power of social media and how it may require a different type of thinking.

Dell reinvented their social media efforts after a negative experience with a blogger. Comcast did something similar after a negative video. Nestle's current situation may also provide a similar incentive for the brand to start using social media more actively as well. It is easy to pile on to the negativity because no one is yet answering the deluge of comments on behalf of the brand, but from a marketing point of view the approach they should take seems relatively straightforward. If I were trying to help them turn their Facebook fortunes around, here are some initial efforts I would suggest to focus on:

1. Apologize and change their tone. Interestingly, much of the negativity in this case came not from any business practice or specific thing Nestle said, but rather HOW they said it through their Facebook account. Just as emails are open to misinterpretation, many consumers interpreted the written status updates on the Nestle page as rude and confrontational. Thus the uproar about the brand page ensued. To correct this, the brand needs to apologize and change the tone of the page (presumably by putting a different team member in charge of it). In my last post I talked about the importance of the Community Manager. This is the missing link that Nestle needs to find someone to fill.
2. Use employees for more than just HR. There are some great stories from real employees of Nestle about why they work at the brand and how much they love it. The problem is, these stories are currently buried on an HR and recruiting focused tab on the Nestle USA page. This content goes a long way to humanizing the brand of Nestle as a real company with real people working there and is underutilized. One thing they could consider is turning this into a more vocal group of employees and perhaps even having them contribute to the Facebook conversation. Nothing helps to change perception as much as putting a real face behind a faceless corporation.
3. Share positive stories more transparently. You may be surprised to hear this, but Nestle has many great programs they do to help people in need, save the environment and move the overall industry they are part of toward the future. These are great stories that are not being told in a way that people can find or know about. Social media is a great way to tell these stories more powerfully, and using it across the board to become better storytellers could help to counter some of the negativity and (more importantly) give their advocates something positive to talk about.
4. Consolidate branded Facebook efforts. There are multiple Facebook pages for the brand resulting in some confusion from consumers about which is which - particularly when it comes to the brand voice in the USA versus that in Europe. They don't necessarily need to combine all the accounts, but the conversation strategy across the accounts needs to be more coordinated so they can build off one another and send people to the most relevant place for information and to engage.
5. Find and encourage more advocates. Ironically, this dialogue on Facebook has also brought out previously silent brand advocates for Nestle. There are dozens of people commenting about how they like Nestle products, how Nestle is being unfairly blasted, and even that Nestle is better than other companies who are staying under the radar and therefore not seeing as much negative publicity. Whether or not you agree with these people, the point is that there ARE advocates out there and Nestle will need to find a way to identify them and thank them for their support. Long term, it is connecting with these people that will truly help Nestle to turn their reputation around on Facebook and beyond in social media.

* Full Disclaimer: For the record, I am not a Nestle hater and have had the chance to meet several members of Nestle's marketing team in the past year. Though I do not currently work with them [nor have I ever in the past], I do have a more personal experience as I know some of their communications team members personally. I'm not receiving any compensation for this post and no one has asked me to share this opinion - this is my personal take on Nestle's current situation and what a solution to it may be.