Category — Interactive Marketing

After a six week teaser campaign on facebook soliciting entries and proposals from BC based artists for a $120,000 local arts competition, we launched Absolutvancouver.ca which we also used as our platform to the world to announce the introduction of a limited edition ABSOLUT® Vancouver bottle.

The ABSOLUT® Vancouver bottle label was created by celebrated BC artist Douglas Fraser with the process facilitated by BSTREET.  Once the 60,000 bottles are only available in BC and once they are sold it will mark the end of an era with ABSOLUT® as they will no longer be commissioning or allowing their bottle to be modified for campaigns around the World.

Although we will continue to support the 1,600+ fans on facebook with content updates, the microsite becomes the focus over the next 3 months as we solicit consumer feedback on each artist submission through an online voting system we created.

Efforts to engage, educate, and amplify the bottle and the arts competition have also extended to twitter @AbsolutCanada where we’ve been asked to manage that account while ensuring integration of message and content with other digital channels.

I wanted to thank my digital Absolut team for another great job; Michael Palmer (CD), Daniell Hill (AD), Jason Jang & Hal Wong (developers), and Lauren Davis who has been our community manager for all 3 digital channels.

Today onedegree.ca has declared that they will no longer be publishing on their website. There are of course a variety of reasons, and I encourage you to go to their site to get the full 411.

I wanted to thank Kate Trgovac and her team for their contributions to the Canadian digital ecosystem over the last few years and for giving me an opportunity to add my voice on occasion to their site.  Although the site will be missed, I’m looking forward to seeing where their energy will be focused on next.

Is this another sign that blogs are dead or dying?

It seems that twitter, facebook and linkedin are replacing the need to even have a blog these days – except of course for those who still want to aggregate their voice as an extension of their personal or company brand.

With that said, should we take Steve Rubel’s lead and change the format of the blog to a lifestream channel instead? This is something I’ll be considering over the coming months as this blog naturally evolves from it’s current platform.

Reflecting the pace of growth and evolution online, the fourth version of the famous “did you know 2.0″ video has been remixed as part of the third annual media convergence forum.

Like the others, many of the stats are very American-centric – although still very relevant for the rest of us.

There are some smart integrations of new data around twitter and social media, some sound bites have been retired from previous versions and mostly importantly mobile has finally made the cut as an integral part of marketing communications – both now and later.

One stat that didn’t make it into the final cut is the fact that facebook announced last week that they hit a few milestones:

• 300 Million users now globally
• 100 million are accessing facebook through mobile (up over 300% since January)
• They are finally profitable – meaning they make more than they spend

Last week’s Pop-up event by Absolut vodka was a great success. Justin Broadbent transformed the unused 3rd level at the Bay TTC subway station into a multi-media installation that created a great constrast to the usual subway station environment. By day the venue was a multi-media art exhibit and by night the venue became one of the hotest VIP parties in Toronto!

Check out this great video produced by I love T.O. that captures the essence of the event:

Although the event was anchored in retail and supported heavily by PR, the integrated agency team (Harbinger for PR, Vision for event management, BSTREET for digital & retail) decided to also leverage social media and bluetooth to drive event awareness and participation.

Pre-event awareness was created through a twitter account (@absolutcanada), a facebook public profile page (which also auto-published tweets to the wall), Justin’s blog, and through the Absolut Canada website. As this was an exclusive VIP event with a strict guest list capacity, event-goers were driven to the facebook page to sign up for the guest list.

We had reached capacity on the guest list within 48 hours of launching & announcing this feature and had to update our digital communications to focus primarily on the daytime event.

The day of the event we also leveraged the downtown Toronto bluetooth network (with 25 transmitters) to push messages to devices that were bluetooth enabled. We also setup a one-off mini-network near the venue itself and overall we had 7% opt-in to our messages. Compared to traditional or online media rates, 7% was a great number.

Check out some great pictures here. We’re looking forward to the next opportunity to help Absolut vodka create a pop-up world of opportunity.

Last month ZoomPass launched in Canada giving Canadians the ability to send and receive money through a new mobile enabled service. Here’s how they describe their new service:

Zoompass is a unique mobile payment service that offers a new way for you to send, receive, and request money quickly and securely, using a mobile device operating on the Bell, Fido, PC Mobile, Rogers, Solo, or TELUS network. With a mobile application that can be downloaded onto your mobile phone and synchronized with your phone’s contact list, you can use Zoompass anytime, anywhere while on the go.

Zoompass funds are held in a stored value account that is linked to your personal bank account or credit card, which makes loading your Zoompass account and transferring money simple and convenient. You can also use the optional Zoompass Prepaid MasterCard® card with PayPass™, linked to your Zoompass account, to make purchases in-store and online or withdraw cash from an ATM.

Think of it as paypal for Canadians that is fully supported and enabled by Canadian carriers.

It’s a great idea that is long overdue for our market.  After receiving an SMS from ZoomPass notifying me that I’ve received $1 from a friend, I decided to register and take this new service for a test drive.

ZoomPass unfortunately was anything but quick or easy.  Here is a summary of my experience:

1. I received an SMS message that $1 had been sent to me. Super!
2. The SMS message contained a registration link. I clicked on it and was brought to a website that was not optimized for mobile as the flash movie showed up as an empty box in my mobile browser. Moving around the broken flash box on,  I found a registration link and began the process. The SMS should have brought me directly to the registration page and that page should have detected I was coming from an iphone and delivered an optimized experience. Many consumers would give up upon seeing a broken / non-optimized page.
3. The registration process was long. I actually abandoned the process and started over again the following day when I had time to go through the entire process. A better practice would be to allow users to stop & save where they are in the process if they need to continue later. Having to start over again will not motivate people to go through the process again… well unless of course there is a ton of  $$$ waiting for them
4. I received another SMS message with a verification code that I was instructed to enter in step 3 of online registration process. I had to then go to my laptop, go to ZoomPass and then enter the verification code received since this simply was not easy / intuitive for me to do on my mobile device.  Ideally when I received the SMS message with the verification key all I would have to do is click on a link that would auto-verify. This would save time, energy and make the experience much better.
5. After successfully registering I realized there were fees attached to actually depositing my $1 into my bank account – which also required extra steps to validate my banking information. At this point I decided to abandon the process

I then read their press release and discovered 2 points of interest:

1. They have a mobile enabled website at zoompass.mobi which I discovered is fully w3c compliant… which means it will work on all mobile devices. Although great,  their mobile website is very basic with little functionality and is designed for the lowest common device denominator.  As very few Canadians on non-smartphones actually surf the mobile web, I think they need to develop a mobile web version that is optimized for today’s devices and should have an auto-detection script enabled on their website that will serve the right version. Having to promote 2 URLs (one for the desktop experience and one for mobile) just doesn’t make sense anymore.  Typing in zoompass.mobi on my laptop should auto-redirect to the desktop version and visa versa when I type in zoompass.com on my mobile device. This is a best practice that is easy to implement.
2. They have a mobile application! I went to the iphone App store and did a search for zoompass and came up with apps for Meteors, Photo Mania, and DinoColor!  I did some further research and discovered that their app is only available for the blackberry storm! Although the storm is a good device, it doesn’t have nearly the market share of the iphone.  Recent industry reports from Admob and others indicate that there are about 2.5 million iphones and itouches in Canada and about 250,000 Storms. Given that the iphone is driving well over 60% of mobile web traffic, it would have made more sense to launch with an iphone App first so that reach & buzz could be maximized. Apparently an iphone app is in the works.

In order for this service to get mass adoption, it needs to be dead simple & easy for the average consumer to find, use, and share with others. It’s still way easier for me to use my paypal account or send an email money transfer (EMT) through my online banking site.

ZoomPass is in beta mode – so I’ll cut them some slack and remain cautiously postive and optimistic about the future of this service.

If they can address some of the usability issues identified above, they will be well on their way to not only being the first multi-carrier supported mobile payment system, but the defacto standard in Canada.

Just a week after self-congratulating our team for being  the first in our client’s brand category for integrating facebook connect into a website, I discovered how incredibly easy it is to add the same functionality with Wordpress – the content management system (CMS) used to run this blog.

Within 15 minutes of finding this plug-in, I had converted this entire site to use this new application that will allow you to sign in using your twitter or facebook ID when making comments on any of my posts.

The benefit for you is that it becomes quicker to post comments. The benefit for me is that your comments can be shared with your own social graph on twitter or facebook – which will increase word of mouth on articles that you deem worthy of sharing. Naturally it’s only with your permission that this happens.

It’s truly exciting times to be working in the digital space as we are building sites in less time, for less money and with less people relative to even a year ago for the same robust types of sites.

This means we can focus on bringing great ideas to the table and reserve more of our budget for content and post-launch activities.

I guess this means the days of your I.T. group driving strategy and implementation are over.

I’ll double high five that.

Every few weeks I scan the Ad Age 150 – a comprehensive list of industry blogs indexed based on popularity and relevance.  They index over 1000 blogs, and the top 150 have been published annually in their magazine.

Two things really stuck with me yesterday

1. Seth Godin’s blog had dropped from first to 28th.  His blog ranking has recovered this morning to second spot – but the fact he is no longer on top of the blogsphere is a seismic shift from the last three years
2. The number three blog Micro Persuasion (also consistently in the top 5) has declared his blog dead. He’s walking away from impressive rankings in Alexa, Technorati, Google, Post rank,Yahoo, and Collective Intellect in order to start a new site he’s calling  The Steve Rubel Lifestream – which is really just another blog, but with a new POV that instead of writing long articles supported by several references he will post snack sized bits of information several times a day.
   

Looking at my 300 subscriptions in my RSS feed, nearly half the blogs have either stopped posting or at least reduced their frequency. Although I wrote about 5 reasons why twitter is making many blogs irrelevant here, I think it would be a mistake for people to abandon their blog in favour of a micro-blog such as twitter or a feed aggregator such as friendfeed.

Given that the most important brand you ever work on should be your own, your blog should evolve to be more than an opinion site, but one that aggregates and presents your personal brand. I was speaking to my friend Ted last night about this, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s also something I’ve intuitively done over the last year with this site.

CVs are dead – long live your personal brand aggregator!

Instead of killing your blog in favour of another platform, use your blog as the platform to other branches of your personal brand. Linkedin for business networking, slideshare for presentations, twitter for the in the moment perspectivce, facebook for the more personal connections, and youtube for videos.

While you’re at it, be sure to include a “share this” widget so that others can easily share your awesome content with their network and be sure your blog is mobile friendly – as increasingly your fans or those who stumble upon your site will be accessing it from their smartphones.

It would seem that blogs are in fact undead.

Not that any of the clients I’ve ever worked with would ever behave this way, but I’m sure some of you can relate to this

Thanks to Craig Bond for finding & sharing the link from the typophile blog.

Last week we helped Kinder launch a new breed of CPG site at haveyouplayedtoday.ca. Our objective was to create a website experience that balanced the need to bring the brand philosophy of “simple play” to life while creating a platform for in-market promotions.

We picked Joomla as our CMS / community platform as the developer support & modules available aligned well with the information architecture designs we had created. Joomla allowed us for example to enable consumer ratings on articles, RSS feeds for all content pages, and an events module that allowed us to start with a robust community event listing for “playful events near you” – across Canada.

The contest we launched the site with gives consumers the chance to win $5,000 by submitting their stories and ideas around how to ensure there is play time in their kids everyday life. Keeping in the spirit of the site philosophy, top submissions will be published on the site to go with articles re-published from today’s parent and other sources.

“To date, most CPG marketers have been reluctant to move a significant portion of their marketing budgets online because the Internet is not a primary sales channel for their products,” said Carolina Petrini, SVP of consumer packaged goods solutions at comScore. “However, many brands have found success by attracting a wide audience online through effective promotions and site activities that appeal to consumers’ lifestyles.”

“Savvy brand marketers are beginning to understand the importance of the online channel as a means of engaging consumers, which will ultimately lead to offline sales,” she concluded.  (source: comScore)

We’ve given consumers a way to engage with Kinder and we are looking forward to launching phase 2 of the site in about six weeks which will also include extensions into other social media platforms.

This afternoon I decided to follow the live blog from Apple on their new iphone 3.0 software over at CNET.

Here are some highlights:

• Copy & paste functionality is finally coming to the iphone. It will work across the platform – including SMS messages. This has been the longest running complaint since the original 2G version
• Cross-device search feature also arrives – allowing you to search for anything from anywhere – including applications.
• Landscape keyboard now available in all applications – not just web browsing
• New voice memo abilities
• MMS capability – but only for 3G phones
• Expanded software developer kit (SDK) that will allow for subscriptions for applications and increased video and audio streaming abilities
• Expanded bluetooth capabilities – including support for stereo bluetooth (only for 3G). This should be especially exciting for proximity marketers who have not been able to bluecast to iphones until now

Things we were hoping for that didn’t happen:

• Tethering – which would allow your device to act as a wifi hub for your laptop, game machine etc… although they did say the ability to do so was now part of the platform but it would be up to the carriers to enable it on their side
• No multi-tasking / background abilities. This means you can only run one application at a time – unlike the Palm Pre which will allow you to run several background apps. The reason is apparently the need to conserve battery power
• No flash lite support (unlike new Nokia & Palm devices)
• No hardware preview of the next generation iphone

Overall the updates addressed most of the major user complaints about the iphone and positions them well to stay competitive with the Palm Pre.