JG etc.

My colleague, Pete Spande(new blog!), passed along this post to me by Michael Learmonth of Silicon Alley Insider. In it Michael interviews Ian Schafer, head of the interactive shop Deep Focus. It is a good post that is worth the read and it got me thinking of the campaign that I am working with some colleagues at FM.

In thinking of Michael’s point around how to leverage/understand social networks(if you can), I wanted to write down how we are trying and I think, succeeding in doing it. The campaign is around ReGeneration, a concept Dell has pioneered around calling on all tech companies to clean up their technology, reduce their carbon footprint, and get feedback from the tech community on ideas they can use to make their company more enviornmentally friendly. The idea of “being green” or “going green” is fairly well saturated in the market right now, but where I like Dell’s angle is in their approach to take a concept and allow the community to build around it. This is not new to Dell. You can look at IdeaStorm, Direct2Dell and many other community projects they run and you quickly get the feeling that Dell is all about creating platforms and then allowing their communities to run them. No dictating of message here, instead, create a platform to foster a conversation and allow the community to own it and distribute it for you.

For ReGeneration, Dell was looking to have a conversation around, “What does green mean to you?” They did this by promoting a larger than life “Graffiti” wall and displayed it at some leading tech conferences(Oracle World & CES) where people could come up and write their thoughts on what green means to them.

We took this idea and wanted to apply it in Facebook with one of the apps that we work with, conveniently called “Graffiti”(over 8.6 million users within Facebook). We decided to use the same tagline and have a Graffiti contest around: “What Does Green Mean to You?” (Pic of the call to action for the contest)

Here was the Graffiti Contest Palette, the RE logo fades out to let artist create their Graffiti on a blank white canvas.

Early Learnings(6 days into it)
There has been a lot to learn from this campaign; the real key has been in utilizing the platform of Graffiti to communicate a message(”What does Green mean to you?”) and allow people to communicate back, via the Facebook Application and also on the ReGeneration.org site.

After the contest is over we are featuring some of the artist’s work in ad units that run on some of our partner sites outside of Facebook and point back to ReGeneration.org. Giving tribute to the artists and the Facebook Community.

The biggest issue I see with most “social network” advertising is the walled garden that the campaign sits behind and the desire for the user to stay behind the walled garden. The ability to communicate inside and outside the walled garden is key and if you can also have users straddle the line, I think there are enormous opportunities to leverage the brand’s properties and some of the amazing applications/communities that reside in a network like Facebook. The other play in this campaign is in giving the Graffiti Artists ownership over this campaign. They decide what “green” means, their ads become the message, they become fans of the contest and write on the contest’s wall and these messages shows up on their profile page and within their friends river of news. This spread of news can then cause a network effect of outreach and engagement. (pic)

Early Results

In the first full 6 days of the campaign we have over 6,000 graffitis drawn, over 900 fans of the contest, and the Regeneration.org site has over 770 ideas published. Dell has also done a great job linking to the contest and providing feedback to the Facebook community. Regeneration.org and Direct2Dell have been involved in the conversation.

We expect there to be well over 1,000,000 votes to be cast once the contest submission period and we open it up to the community to decide the winners. The winners across each category will get a 22″ inch monitor from Dell and the recognition from their millions of peers within Facebook that voted and from people outside the Facebook network that will see their work on websites via Dell/ReGeneration ad units.

Example of Winning Graffiti Ad Execution

First Frame:

Second frame:
Drawing replay of the artist’s work(ad on 43 Folders)

Third Frame:

Here is a YouTube video of the execution, it really doesn’t do the unit justice, but you can get the idea. To see the actual replay of what the ad execution of the graffiti looks like, go here and click replay

Doing this project made me think of Umair Haque’s Media Economics presentation. I would like to think we are getting closer to one day making this slide below come true.