Dove Campaign for Beauty – a 59’ Slide Cast

As a part of the course, I was working on a 59 second podcast on a successful Viral Marketing Campaign. Chose the Dove Campaign for Beauty.

Some of the things that struck me about this “Successful” campaign:

• Very High views for videos over 2 million per video but fewer ratings, only around 0.1% of viewers rated the videos
• Youtube videos were not managed by the unilever team!
• No Social media connect at all
• Loads of sporadic groups not maintained properly in Facebook,
• The green peace organization video was simple awesome, think this was more successful – it got Unilever to take action in April 2008 on the palm oil usage by the company

Dove Onslaught by Green Peace Organization

Well, I thought using the Slidecast feature in Slideshare would be a good idea, and yes it indeed was.

Here is my first Slidecast:

Viral Marketing Campaigns

View more OpenOffice presentations from Rahul Nambiar.

Everyone should try the slide cast feature, it is fun and easy.

PS:Did not spend a lot of time on synchronization but the tool works really well. Wish I had a better Microphone to record, may be next time 🙂

Customer Involvement Management

What do most of the brands actually want?

A. $$. Engagement. Loyalty.

Now when we have so many tools and way to reach the customers are they really leveraging them properly. May be some of the marketers are trying but most of them are just blank!

So, What is Customer Involvement Management?

You might remember that I was talking a lot about prosumer and stuff on my first post Digital Marketing and Long Tail Businesses and if you are thinking how that correlates with Involvement Management here is how we can look at defining it – CIM is about involving the customers in your business and product development process such as design,marketing, sales, customer service etc. Imagine what it can do to your process if you get your own customers answering to customer services queries?Now, How much does that change the way you do business? How much does that reduce the cost of a company?

I know its easy to say but what are the steps which a company can take to start off-

• Grouping of your customer base is the key, try to identify who are the loyal guys out there who just are dying to use your product. Get a complete profiling of these guys and try to get them to advocate you online( more like your moles online, so feed them)
• Run 1-to-1 programs on this base because as we all know, these guys actually form the short head in the long tail so attack them to the core
• Empower them with power to your communities, try to let them manage your communities under your invisible supervision
• Create Product Development forums, give out hints regarding future products and you never know what’s the kind of product ideas these people are gonna come up with. Nike has good case study on how it has worked for the company. Check out NikeID
• Engaging your own employees with the customers online is a great way to look ahead

I am waiting for some good Indian Case studies for this, Indian Marketers should look at leveraging the following for getting great customer involvement case studies

• Intelligent 1-to-1 programs through Email
• Drive traffic to Communities(FB, Orkut) through these 1-to-1 programs
• One strong online property run by your customers managed by you

Most of the Marketers will now say “Ya, rite”.. But if you guys do not open up fast to these concepts and ideas. Most companies are just getting into the Customer Relationship Management mode, Involvement Management is the next step for me and its happening and tools are readily available for all that, all you need is some minds leveraging the power. For me these are the game changing as far as marketing is concerned and $$ will definitely come in.

PS: Beginning another hectic week, thinking about concepts to cover in the next post

The Magical Square of the Prosumer!

I have been talking a lot about the prosumer and how they are changing the way marketers need to look at selling. But what is the magic formula to get to your prosumer and move him towards what we always call the “moment of truth”. I do not know if it makes sense, but I would call it the “Magical Square”- The digital campaigns need to be in the magical square to get your consumers notice you and buy you.

Here is my Magical Square:

As you will see it, the magical square( as I call it) has four key components and any digital marketing initiative which comes in the centre should ideally work unless the product itself is a dud :).

Most of us understand the terms here, My view is that a digital campaign can be success if we are able to get into this magical square. The question obviously is How?

• How do we know where your prosumers are, to run multidirectional campaigns?
• How do you know where to ask for permission and avoid pop up banners kinda stuff( but again some of them even like that)?
• How do you know what is the experience your prosumer is looking for?
• How do you get into their context?

Ans- Market Research – Do your study and know where your target is and then take the leap into a campaign. Try to make the table and see if your campaign can get into this square, or at least try to find out how you an get in there.

Simple things which can ensure you to get somewhere in the square

• Please don’t spam, know how, when and whom to send SMS and Email messages
• Web is about interaction, so creative’s also need to be interactive and not stuff that explodes on you
• Add some relevance to where Ad’s are placed- Check out the ad’s in this website http://indiavoting.com/ , you will know what I am talking about
• Used Opt in lists for emailing- and opt in does not mean that “ Ya, the person gave me the email id during registration”
• There are so many more..

Atleast rate your digital marketing initiatives based on this so that you will know where you went wrong. For eg. if I look at the recent Skittles campaign, the key reason for failure is definitely the fact that people found it annoying and intruding into their online behaviour and hence all the negative conversations on twitter( This is a personal thought, I also have some more thoughts on this but Marketing Mag has a decent write up on the campaign http://www.marketingmag.com.au/blogs/view/a-closer-look-at-the-twitter-skittles-campaign-1103)

Looking for your comments. I think I will put in an analysis of a campaign based on these things sometime during my course(I have many of those to be done, so will post some of them for sure)