Wispa Thank you press ad
Someone else who’s saying thank you in an interesting way at the moment is Wispa. They are running a series of press ads which thank their audience for getting involved and buying Wispa over the past year.
I think this is really interesting. Wispa was brought back to the life after a ground swell of activity on the social web. They’re now recognising this love in a national press campaign.
Saying thank you is really important and it’s something brands don’t do enough of. Especially those “prom king” brands that can engage and motivate people to go the extra mile – like Wispa. If more brands took the time to build relationships in this way then many would find themselves in a stronger position.
Should charities be worried? If Wispa are taking more time over the stewardship of their relationships and brand capital charities are going to be increasingly compared to these big players. With an increasingly fickle audience more focused around experience coming along people are going to want to spend more time with those brands that recognise their investment of time, money and interest and make them feel valued. If this is a chocolate bar then charities are going to find it more difficult to engage.
Charities need to get their stewardship programmes in order now to prevent this from happening.
Picture from Nick Butcher.
The first of two posts about great thank yous I’ve seen recently.
I really like this thank you by the Canadian blood donation service. Called “thank your donor” it is a way for people who have received blood transfusions, bone marrow, or steam cells to thank the anonamous donors who gave their blood and therefore gave the recipient the opportunity for life.
We all know how important saying thank you is, but so often this is from the charity. A middle man saying thank you on someone else’s behalf. Connecting the beneficiary and the donor so that the thanks can be heartfelt, genuine and direct makes the thank you that much more powerful. This is surely going to get repeat donations from current donors.
And doing it in a public way, like the Canadian Blood Service has done is a great way to motivate a cold audience to action. After reading the stories, who cannot understand, in a real and human way, how important blood donation is?
Even though we’re talking about blood here, the principles still hold true for charities (and brands) as a whole. The web allows us to connect donor and beneficiary and is ideal for people seperated by space and time. I’m sure most charities could find a way to apply this principle to their activities.
Image of superman by Adrià garcía
A bit of a shameless plug for ActionAid’s Mega Mouth campaign. Go and get involved!
But not too much of a shameless plug, because it’s really good.
A real life super hero, Mega Mouth, is walking around London in the run up to the G20, gathering messages that he is then going to shout out at the Put People First rally this weekend.
People can submit messages for him to shout on the ActionAid website or via Twitter. The Twitter campaign is really good – there’s an almost constant stream of updates as Mega Mouth walks about and they make a real point in following everyone who follows them and sending them a message encouraging them to get involved.
What’s even better is the use of Qik to show Mega Mouth’s progress around London – live! Qik is a video broadcast service that lets broadcast, in real time, footage you shoot on your mobile phone.
I’ve had a play around with it and it’s really good. Only problem I found was that it did take a while to stream and it kept having to buffer the content that I was viewing, but I’m sure they’ll get this sorted.
It really opens up a lot of opportunities – especially for citizen journalism and the ability for people to publish their own content. The boundaries between traditional broadcast media and the “new” communications tools are being broken down even further.
zoho welcome email 23-03-09
Got an excellent welcome email from Zoho this morning.
Here’s the accessibility-friendly copy:
Hello,
Thank you for signing up with Zoho Projects! I just wanted to drop you a note to see if everything’s fine and if you have any questions about how Zoho Projects works. I will be happy to assist you with our service. If you want to get in touch with me in any regard, kindly do mail me at psvijay@zohocorp.com.
You can also reach my team at the following Toll Free Number: +1 (888) 900-9646. You can use our forums and blogs to keep in touch with us and our community.
Best Wishes,
P.S.Vijayakumar
Product Manager – Zoho Projects
I think it’s excellent for five reasons:
- From a named individual: sent by P. S. Vijakumar, from his email address, with his email address given in the body for you to reply to with any quesitons. This doesn’t feel like a big corporation or a faceless company.
- Timing: I signed up on Friday and got the email Monday morning. This didn’t make it feel like it was automatically generated (though it almost certainly was)
- Tone: chatty and conversational tone – very accessible
- Length: nice and short. Didn’t feel like I was reading a novel. It has one coms message and it gets it across clearly, namely “if you need help, here’s how you can get in touch”.
- Subtly introduces the wider organisation: at the very end there’s a soft ask to get involved in the Zoho community. Prominent enough for interested people to get involved but not too strong that it makes them come across as a high-pressure organisations.
I think there’s so much that charities and other brands can learn from this. It’s an example of an excellent communication which is a great way to start building a relationship. How many charities feel that they have to cram all of their key messages and mission statements into their first welcome? How many even bother to send a welcome email?
Good article by Nicolas Kristof in the New York Times (hat tip to Alan Wolk). He says that, with the unlimited choice made available by the internet, people naturally gravitate towards ideas and behaviour that reinforces existingly held beliefs. People claim that they prefer open and challenging debate, but when choosing to seek out debate and information they go to those spaces/ideas that mirror their current thinking.
This set me off thinking about The Long Tail. In the book of the same name, Chris Anderson argues that the infite space and advanced filtering (search, user recommendations, dynamic recommendation engines etc) that the internet brings is allowing people to connect and explore niches and break the monopoly of a corporation-determined hit machine.
What Anderson argues is that The Long Tail allows us to easily find and indulge in those things that really interest us, in all the myriad ways that human beings are interested in different things.
If Kristof is right in his view on human behaviour, and The Long Tail reaches the logical conclusion of Anderson’s argument, then we’re in for some very different times. People will be able to completely satisfy their own diverse interests and will then be engaged in a positive feedback loop where their interests are mutually reinforced. If people move away from “real” life then they will miss interaction with views and opinions that contradict their own.
What will we see? Increased cultural and social fragmentation with universal social mores and cultural norms finding it increasingly difficult to take hold.
So what’s the implication for charity marketing?
Well, I think charities (over the next 10 to 20 years) will find it increasingly difficult to build a national “hit”. But, smaller charities and niche interests will find that their support grows as people find it easier to filter and discover those causes that resonate.
But if it’s easier to find a cause, it’ll be easier to find another one that better meets your interests. Charities, bigger ones especially, must start being more and more tailored to people’s interests. They have to stretch themselves down the long tail to survive in the fragmenting world. If they don’t, they’ll be beaten by small charities or those charities that do react to the changing landscape.
The good news is that the technology is there to allow this. The bad news is that this will require internal investment from charities in that technology and in content creation. Those that do invest will reap the rewards.
Great content from Rubber Republic for the Today programme. Almost the definition of content that makes a good viral.
Facebook have announced changes to their fan pages, which essentially mean that they increasingly become more like friends. Ian Schafe explains in more detail what the changes are on his blog.
As Alan Wolk says on his blog, this will be of limited use to most brands. Those brands that customers only have a limited relationship with, like most FMCG and service brands, will probably struggle to make this work in a meaningful way without annoying those people that they’re trying to make a relationship with. Do you really want your toilet roll popping up in your home page feed all the time? Probably not.
However, as Alan notes, there are a limited number of brands that can make this work. He calls these “prom king brands” – those brands that people do have a real connection with. Luckily, I think charities can fit into this category. Charities – because of the nature of our work and the connection we can make with people’s values as a result – do have the possibility to make a meaningful connection in social spaces.
The move by Facebook can only be a good thing for charities, as it gives so much more scoping for developing meaningful relationships on the platform.
They may be disgusting balls of sugar and food colouring but Skittles have really embraced social media with their US site.
The home page is a twitter fall-type page which shows real-time comments from people about Skittles. The product listings page takes you to the Skittles Wikipedia entry. Videos takes you Skittles on You Tube. Photos takes you to Skittles on Flickr. Click on “friends” and it takes you to the Skittles Facebook fan page.
This is simultaneously innovative and boring.
It is innovative because it relies on minimal marketing spin and really puts social media at the heart of the campaign. It leaves no where to hide and puts users at the forefront of the experience – their comments, input and connections are truely driving this campaign.
However, coming to this cold, I find the lack of narrative a bit of an issue. Without any thing driving a story it just seems to be a collection of different bits of the internet being dragged into one place without a purpose. It’s not pushing me further along a narrative with Skittles, it’s just like a directory listing.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. I haven’t seen the offline campaign so don’t know how this site fits in. Also, FMCG always find it difficult to offer added value online. Their online campaigns normally stretch to a flash-heavy site with some sort of mini-game. If this is just a small part of a big ATL campaign then this might work well – encouraging people to simply talk about/interact with the campaign and the brand to multiple the offline impact. If this is the case then it might work well. However, I do think that Creme Egg have done digital cross platform campaigns better in the past (though this year’s campaign is looking a bit lack luster).
Congratulations must go to Skittles though for having the confidence to do this.
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March 30, 2009 6:33 pm | 
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