Digital Stuffing

Metrodeco, a furniture and tea shop in Brighton, is using Foursquare to offer its customers something different. Not content with just offering specials for customers who check-in, last week they ran a special event in an attempt to get themselves and their customers the Foursquare Swarm badge, This only gets unlocked when you have over 50 people check-in in an hour. The time (and money) spent promoting the event obviously paid off, with the badge being unlocked and the takings doubling for the day. As they say in the Metrodeco press release

“Foursquare has been brilliant for our business because we’ve used it to engage with customers in a whole new way and to offer them a better service.
“There’s a growing excitement about it in the UK because of the power it gives people to share their views and tips on bars, restaurants, airports, public buildings and many other locations. Social media means businesses are now forced to do their customer service in public and the best businesses will embrace this fact, rather than fear it.”

It’s not the first UK swarm, it’s been done at sports events and conferences, but they’re claiming the first deliberately planned business event that reached those numbers. The owners are busy leveraging all the tools at their service to drive traffic to their business and doing it well. Here’s one clear case of digital/social media leading to direct sales.

So if you’re going to try this, what needs to be thought about:

• Consider your audience; they have to be checking into the location for any promotion to have an imapct. So sign up to the service and see who checks-in
• Claim your business on the service and get the description, address and geo-tags set up correctly
• Make sure the offer is relevant and obtainable. Setting out something just for the mayor is great, unless your staff claim mayorship, or the title never changes. Metrodeco have a simple offer (free tea or coffee at lunch) for everyone who checks in
• Make sure your staff are aware of the offer. In a single location like this, it’s simple. Larger promotions by companies such as Gap and Starbuck have had bad press as staff were just not aware of the deals.

Remember to have some fun as well; it’s a new tool to play with, be creative and you may be surprised. Next up for Metrodeco? It has to be the Superswarm for 250 people.

Spec Saver Goal Line Technology

Timely. Simple. Good. I like. (via Chris Hambly)

Social media marketing can be agile, it’s easy to create new elements, just post to your Facebook page, your twitter feed and you have a new offer or idea out there. So Henry Dimbleby of Leon Restaurants tries something new on the day of England’s crunch match in the World Cup first round.

Leon World Cup Offer

I’m just glad they’re not asking you to sing. Contextual, timely, appropriate, a good example of using the media.

First of all, I have to say that the site of Best Buy ads in UK papers is slightly disconcerting; having lived in the States and used Best Buy a lot – all my US electronics were bought there – suddenly seeing them logo here makes me want to go back.

To promote themselves in the new market and as a tie-in with the World Cup, Best Buy are running a pretty cool contest to win everything in their ‘man-cave’. Although focused on the male football fan, the prizes on offer would be great for anyone, including 2 Samsung TVs, a HTC Desire phone, a netbook and plenty of beer and pizza. All you have to do to enter is add a comment to the video, saying what else you think needs to go into the room. Simple contest, great, great prize.

The last few years, Orange have been running (through) a ‘Spot the Bull‘ contest – pick where the bull is going to be in a field, get it right and be entered into a draw for tickets to Glastonbury. This year, there’s still a contest, but it looks like it’s changed. There’s no bull, no random chances, no hitech tracking and video from a field, just an image photoshopped with a little orange welly – Where’s My Welly. Find it, click on it and you’re entered in the draw.

Orange Spot the Welly for Glastonbury (screenshot from site)

As well as the contest, if you already have tickets, you can take advantage of their GlastoNav an augmented reality app, which will display events and locations on the site. It’s definitely available for the iPhone and probably for other smartphones, but they’ve not yet confirmed listings. They’re providing charging stations on site as well.

So it’s a mixture of a digital contest, mobile app and on-site experiential offering, there’s going to be a blog at some point; there’s no facebook page except for the ‘Like’ button. There’s also no mobile version of the site, nor embeddable widget, so it’s been slimmed down a lot since last year. Another area that’s been changed is the promotion. Last year, personal email, this year, an impersonal press release from M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment. Still a good contest, it just feels a lot less friendly and quirky than last year, the brand putting up shutters.

Update: I’ve received an email from the team apologising for the lack of contact; they’re working their way through emails at the moment and not got to me yet. Having had to do this in the past, I can understand the time taken to do a good job with outreach. So, they are being personal still which is great, far better to do this than stick with press release language.

Last week, at a seminar run by FreshNetworks, I heard a case study of how they had run a promotion with Jimmy Choo, using Foursquare. In essence, it was a London wide treasure hunt, where they checked in on the service at various places and stayed for a few minutes. If you caught them, you’d win the pair of Jimmy Choo trainers they were promoting.

This week, Domino’s announce their own Foursquare promotion in the UK. Slightly less glamorous than designer shoes, NMA are reporting that mayors of their restaurants can get free pizza once a week; if you’re just a member of Foursquare, you can get a free side dish. I wish I knew more, but the Domino’s site has no information visible.

Regardless of the lack of promotion anywhere I can find, I like this idea. In the US, locations like Starbucks are already awarding regular users via Foursquare and it’s no surprise the idea is spreading to the UK.

Microsoft have been pushing a new campaign recently, The New Busy, to promote their webmail, Hotmail. I’ll have to admit the print ads completely confuse me, but the website, for an information driven site, is quite sweet, with its gamelike moving blocks you can re-arrange.

As part of the campaign, Microsoft are running 3 days of events in London (on 26, 27 and 28 May at Golden Square, Canary Wharf and Broadgate), where you can go outside and do something more interesting instead. At least, that’s what I think the message is, with all the time the new tools in Hotmail give you, you get chance to try something different

The World of New Busy events will host a chill out and viewing area, Hotmail showcase, Health Farm where guests can learn Morris dancing, hula hooping and iconic dance moves, and Frivolity Fields where people can learn knitting, hand massage, throat singing and have a nap in the sleep pod. There will also be a unique photo opportunity in front of the green screen.

Apparently it’s a ‘quirky experiential campaign’ running across the summer, promoting the new version that launches later this year. They’ve got the obligatory Facebook page and Twitter feed, although something tells me the people running the profiles are not quite comfortable with the language yet, as a contest on Facebook to win a skydive asks you to ‘logon’ to their Twitter account (sure, give me the password then!) and then the tweet tells you to go to Facebook. I think they need to do a little bit more sorting out still

Overall, I think there’s some good bits here, they’ll get the city people coming and taking a look at what they are offering and hopefully they’ll remember Hotmail. But it feels not quite there yet.

Knitting with The New Busy (image provided by 3-monkeys Microsoft agency)

The Pitch

I got an email asking me if I wanted an email about it; polite, but far too easy to ignore usually, I prefer just getting the stuff and then deciding what to do with it. I then got an email with an attached .docx (again, another barrier, not everyone can open these) which was a duplicate of the text in the email (so why bother with the attachment). A few hours later, I then got the same email, non-personalised which had obviously been sent out to a large list. As with the campaign social media, I think the pitch is not quite there yet.

Update: A big marketing push started on Wednesday, with Hotmail taking over the Metro to advertise the events

Update: BBH or Johnnie Walker are idiots. This is a brilliant film, but they’ve put a copyright claim in and pulled the YouTube versions without providing alternatives. There are a LOT of blogs that have embedded this. Idiots.

I’ve seen this a few times in my feed and finally got to watch it. I love it, brilliantly done and bang on message. Keep Walking is one of those great brand taglines that is global is usage and here’s a perfect example of it’s use. I’d love to know how many rehearsals there were to get every single cue correct. (It’s just a pity Diageo want to close the Kilmarnock plant now and lose the relationship)

Nice little video from The Viral Factory to support the Samsung Jet, funny idea which really demonstrate a key benefit of the phone, its camera speed. I like it when there’s such a clear link as it’s not always found when creating this distributed content.

I’ve long been a fan of Doritos and their continued innovation in the online marketing space. From Crash the Superbowl, to design an XBox game and a lot more too. Their latest (in the UK) is an interactive film/game called iD3.

Doritos iD3 (screenshot from site)

The Plot

Set in the near future, it’s all about identify theft. You’ve been ‘recruited’ as a mole for the Serious Fraud Squad and have to try and get access to the boss. It’s in 3 chapters being released over the next few weeks, so you have to wait and remember to come back for the next episode.

The Interaction and Gameplay

It’s all shot in the first person, so you are the hero in this story. You get to upload your image which appears in various places, id cards etc throughout the story. There’s a further level of connection if you decide to use Facebook as your login, where it will pull information from your profile and insert into the narrative. I;ve tried this before with Prototype Experience (blog post and it added little given my paucity of information).

However, I was underwhelmed by the gameplay. There are a number of points where you have to make a choice to drive the plot, go one way or the other, but most of the time I’m just watching a film. Maybe I just chose the ones that had the straightest path through the story, but I did not feel I added a lot. I wasn’t doing anything, just watching with the occasional click. I though there was no personal involvement. I’m hoping this will get better and they’ll be asking more of me. They’ve had to balance accessibility and ease of play and it looks like they’ve chosen the easiest route – no puzzles, little thinking required, just sit back and watch.

To play the game, you have to have bought a bag of Doritos and enter the code from the bag. There’s obviously peril involved, as you are given 6 lives per Dorito code; to get more lives you have to buy more snacks. That’s the better deal than the ones where you have to enter a code from every single time you enter; at least you get the chance to survive throughout and win a variety of prizes.

The Competition

It’s complicated. The main contest seems to need you to guess the name of a mystery flavour, an option that is provided right up front, so it appears to be a wild guess with no clues. If you do, you get the chance to win £20k. Everyone who does enter gets added into a separate draw. Then there are prizes awarded whilst playing the game, which are just awarded randomly. Doritos have partnered with O2 for some of these prizes. There’s a final contest for those who complete the 3 episodes, where a draw picks someone who then gets to pick a mystery envelope form a range containing various amounts of money.

The Branding and Production

Absolutely superb. The site is high quality, the story line is good, the filming looks excellent. The Doritos brand is embedded throughout the story, from subtle touches of having bags of the crisps being eaten by characters. The bags – and the competition – are a key plot story so it’s completely integrated. I’m slightly surprised that they allowed the brand to be so integral in a story about illegal activities (based on some recent experience) but feel that’s the only way to get it into the story without it feeling shoe-horned in, so well done that brand manager.

The Pitch

An lovely email (from someone I know) which has obviously gone through the marketing review given some of the slightly over the top hyperbole presented. The best touch though is that the team involved has obviously thought about digital outreach from the start. I’m provided with a PR code to play the game; on entering I’m told I’m not eligible for prizes. It’s been coded in from the start, which is impressive.

Summary

A high-production value movie, with interesting touches and a strongly integrated brand. overall, I liking it a lot.