Craig Ritchie is on a mission to Humanize Brands, Build Communities, Focus On The Customer, Unleash Experiences and Create Magic.
Craig Ritchie is a Senior Strategist at Organic, making Exceptional Experiences for world-class brands.
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Build Something Great, Drive Traffic, Grow Community, Repeat.
Craig Ritchie is a Strategist focused on the new paradigms of the web.
Growing community around brands, products and ideas requires strategies built upon these 10 pillars:
| Ideas | Sales & Education | Business | Communities | Information Architecture | Design | Development | Tools | Measurement | Futurism |
Apparently, API stands for All Projects are Implemented, according to some agencies. Marketers are trying to find their way in the Times-Square madness of the Social Media space, but when someone is asking for directions, they don’t really want every street on the whole map.
With Twitter, for example, it’s still important for strategy to drive decisions on tactics. An open API seems to be a maddening siren’s call for agencies and developers, causing them to lose all sense and launch campaigns just for the sake of integrating Twitter.
Let’s learn from these campaigns and stop all the gimmickry.
Skittles
If you haven’t heard of the Skittles.com debacle (which they continue to host), welcome to the Internet. Kidding aside, this web site has thrown away caution and its brand, allowing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to define its message and its value. Upon launch of this “strategy,” users gamed the sites, associating swear words, offensive posts and negative messaging. Now, weeks later, the aggregate social destination sits passive; the brand message confused and tarnished.
The glass-half-full viewpoint: I should, however, acknowledge the 1 million+ fans subscribed to the Skittles Facebook fan page. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Skittles does with these subscribers.
FixOutlook.org
This recently launched grassroots site hopes to grab the attention of the Windows Beta evaluators, and send a powerful, organized message to Microsoft before they commit to the sin of continuing to use Word to render emails in the 2010 version of Outlook. I admit, it’s a noble cause. But the twitter implementation at the core site is reminiscent of 90s designers using animated gif backgrounds just because they could. It was a terrible idea, and the addition of a Twitter avatar feed doesn’t change this. This is/was a great opportunity to unite these users in a deeper way.
The glass-half-full viewpoint: The people behind this cause did keep it simple, and don’t necessarily have a need for a long-term view. The virulence of the tweets are visible, and I’ve yet (with 17,489 “tweetitioners”) to see any tweets against the campaign.
Terminator Salvation (Resistance 2018)
The film over-promised and under-delivered, so I suppose we could say the Twitter campaign stayed true to the brand. This Twitter game sent Jumbled words to decode and trivia questions to answer to followers who would earn points. It also incorporated some Terminator-world messages, such as, “You have been harvested by the machines, you lose 5 points.” Games on Twitter are starting to multiply, and this one seemed to have good promise, but the challenges became repetitive quickly, and the burning Terminator face rolling by among my smiling happy Twitter friends weakened the impact of the experience. If this is SkyNet, we have nothing to worry about.
The glass-half-full viewpoint: Games on Twitter are still a new concept, and this early attempt did earn some pretty good reach and buzz. It does foreshadow more robust and solid twitter contest and gaming to come.
Polar Ice
The ultimate in Twitter API gimmickry lives at PolarIce.ca. This flash site pulls in what appear to be completely random Tweets, with a muddled interface featuring confusing functionality creating the ultimate why-am-I-here experience for users. It seems Polar Ice just likes Twitter. But what does this have to do with Vodka, or partying?
The glass-half-full viewpoint: If you have a glass half full of Polar Ice, tip it back and Google your way off this site.
Nike’s The Hookup
Nike’s work-in-progress started with a whimper, but is now, it appears, starting to evolve into something a little more useful. The Hookup tweets local shoe drops to followers, and has other functionality pulling key terms for their fashion product/item/lines called “icons.” Fans are starting to use the tag #thehookup, which may connect to this strategy too, but it’s difficult to say.
The glass-half-full viewpoint: There is a lot of activity around these items on Twitter, and this team has a long-term view. A few changes will lead to success for this program.
(Full disclosure: I work for Organic, with Nike Canada as one of our clients. I haven’t, however, worked on The Hookup)
What’s the common thread here? These API implementations are all ideas conceived based on the brand’s needs, instead of the users’.
If instead, one considers the drivers behind users’ behaviours on Twitter and other Social Media, one realizes that these are surface ideas that don’t serve their preferences, desires and needs. Start with user-centric thinking, think long-term, and ease into Social Media with grace and success.
Participants of Camp Organic 14. More on Camp Organic on the AllHands blog. Also, view the documentary
Photo by Dave Sylvestre.
After a few weeks in my new role as a Strategist for Organic, I’m compelled to add a quick post to “reset” my blog and get back to the task of blogging on an ongoing basis.
As the Digital Native demographic ages and press their elders to move beyond their fear of technology; as the heralded “web” comes to be with the explosion of new open platforms and tools; as new world leaders emerge and embrace technology for it’s community-building benefits, many organizations struggle to avoid falling irreconsilably behind the thought leaders and visionaries.
Organic is not one of these organizations. It is a true “digital shop,” at the point of the spear of modern marketing. Managing the evolution of one’s brand and product offering online has become increasingly complex, and it requires a deep understanding and acceptance of the new paradigm to succeed. Clinging to past strategies and processes will lead only to failure.
Organic is “platform agnostic,” which means the teams put strategy and goals first, and doesn’t waste time and energy on hiding ideas from the public, firewalling staff from Facebook and Twitter or lighting candles for push marketing and Microsoft products.
Organic attracts leaders in the industry and promotes idea generation and experimentation.
Organic boasts a proven process, where great minds converge and diverge to generate world-class work for its clients.
And finally (not really, but for the purpose of this post, it’s enough), the ThreeMinds culture permeates the day-to-day work and drives forward the long-term vision, creating a unified passion for quality and creating “Exceptional Experiences.”
It’s been years since I read Good To Great, and I’ve waited a long time to find an organization with such a drive… let’s just say if you see “Organic” on your RFP list, it’s okay to tell the other agencies to turn around and go home.
“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incomptence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.” — Jim Collins, Good To Great
While Seth Godin is questioning the longevity of everyone’s patience for “Green” marketing, Dell has achieved great success in its current campaign, “What does ‘green’ mean to you?” In partnership with and in support of Regeneration.org, Facebookers can use the Graffiti tool to enter their artwork to be voted on by their fellow social networkers.
More than 7,000 entries have been submitted.
The top 150 (yes, One Hundred and Fifty, not top 10 or 20…) are now available for voting, and the quality of art is astonishing. Spend some time in the virtual art show here.
Also notable is the quality of the conversation and virulence of the campaign. The discussion board boasts more than 100 topics, with conversation ranging from Global Warming - Real, or Hoax?” to sub-campaigns started by the participants suggesting that competitors “Rate the Person Above You’s Grafitti!!”
The engagement reaches beyond the page as 1,471 Facebook fans are spreading word of the campaign.
Quite simply put, there is a monumental difference between social media strategies that sputter and die because of lack of knowledge and direction, and successful campaigns like this one that is lead by expertise and focus.
Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang (twitter @jowyang) once again for the link.
Add this post on the Canadian Marketing Blog to the list of articles I think everyone I know should read. In fact, if I work with you on any project, please print this article out and read it before we sit down at a meeting.
Let’s do some things that generate buzz; that catch some users’ and customers’ attention. I’m not talking about setting fire to the brand and chopping down the business, just grabbing some momentum and market share and allowing room for some failures. Let’s set some benchmarks.
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