Uniqlo does it again with Lucky Counter campaign. The fashion retailer asks people to promote their favorite Uniqlo items via Twitter against price reduction for the said item of – estimating from my experience – 0,01% per tweet.

This inspired me to a small calculation: if one tweeting Briton has 126 followers on average, and we assume that any given tweet is seen by 1/10 of followers = 13 followers on average, we can derive that 77 tweets are needed for 1000 people to see the message. As a result, Twitter’s CPM in this campaign e.g. for the jacket in picture (originally 59,99€) sets to 59,99€ x 0,01% x 77 = 0,46€ per jacket sold. This last point is crucial: if no jackets are sold, the CPM will not be realized and the marketer won’t pay a penny for media – not even if 1.000.000 people tweeted about the jacket. If 100 jackets are sold, Twitter’s direct CPM sets to 46€, which is not dirt cheap compared to traditional pricing. However we need to bear in mind that

a) this campaign generates buzz also outside Twitter (this blog for example)

b) you’re paying the price only if you sell the jackets, and

c) the value of the message is enhanced by the fact that people get it from other people they deem interesting.

If there’s any readers of this blog still doing marketing comms budgeting the old way (25% planning & production, 75% paid media), now’s the time to wake up!

Sign of times (old but didn’t stumble upon this until now)

THE OLD VERSION (Peter Steiner, New Yorker, 1993)

THE NEW VERSION (Rob Cottingham, Noise to Signal, 2010)

Location. The most hyped of the final frontiers. Google finds over 40 thousand hits for the word combination “location based advertising”, but I have yet to see one location-based mobile app that would be widely applicable, well functioning and above all beneficial to the user (Yelp gets close but is no use in Finland). As a result location marketing at least here in Europe has remained a curiosity and a future promise.

This may change this year – again.

Naturally the march of user friendly mobile devices that are usable for more than voice and SMS is one key factor that has opened up the opportunity over the last couple of years. But what’s really been lacking is a service concept that would be highly engaging to the users. The U.S. based Foursquare has however caught my attention for five reasons:

Easy (at least via iPhone): Fire up the application and you’re instantly displayed by a few understandable options to choose from: check in to a lcoation, find places and services nearby, check out the tips in the area, shout like Twitter, or see what your friends are doing.

Social: More interesting to you than what you’re doing is what your friends are doing and where. Foursquare lets you see your friends locations, their tips, their statuses etc. The ultimate point is of course the ability to boost your own ego with stuff you do that’s visible to them – social media being very self-centered in the end.

Game: Expose people to supervision and watch their behavior change. The supervision with Foursquare is positive and game-like in nature. You get points for visiting places, adding content, and other activities, which swell your status and gain you badges. Badges are awarded for a constantly increasing array of categories, so ultimately any individual interest has the potential to earn a badge. This guarantees a constantly developing and enriching game content.

Rewarding: Content and promotion partnerships aim to offer Foursquare users something very tangible and beneficial to work with.A very intriguing detail is the Mayor status. Visit some place more than anyone else and you become a mayor in that location, and will receive more incentives to visit, such as VIP invites or promotions to deal to friends. I envision a future where there is a furious competition for Mayor statuses in e.g. nightclubs and fashion stores.

Facebook Connect: No more signing on to yeat another useless community. Your Facebook account handles this so you can focus on the content.

I’m sure that the recent surge in traffic is at least partly thanks to some or all of these features

We’ll shortly see if 2010 finally is the year of the location. Or will we say these words again next year.

During the servicization-bound times we’re heading, the following presentation hits the right nerve. According to the thesis, marketers should look at all marketing as service marketing:

This reminds me about earlier work on service logic in marketing as written by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch, who break down borders between marketing goods and services (and on whose work the above presentation is also based). One of the their most compact sets are e.g. the four myths – a quick summary below:

1) THE INTANGIBILITY-MYTH:

Services lack the tactile quality of goods.

The Truth:

Services ofen have tangible results and products are bought for their intangible benefits. In the end people always buy services –be it produced with or without physical products.

Implication for marketers:

If tangibility doesn’t bring any significant benefits, it should be diminished or eliminated. An example of this is iTunes or Spotify: who needs physical records anymore (no, not even the DJ’s)?

2) THE HETEROGENEITY-MYTH:

Unlike goods, services can not be standardized.

The Truth:

Also physical goods are often heterogeneic and all the more as personalization and customization become more common. Many services are also already very standardized. In the end the customer always experiences even the standardized products in a unique way every time.

Implications for marketers:

Marketers should focus on personalization and customization, not standardization. As an example, there are over 20 elements on any Amazon page that vary according to who’s on the page. In other words, almost the only element that doesn’t change is the Amazon logo.

3) THE INSEPARABILITY-MYTH:

Unlike goods, products are produced and consumed simultaneously.

The Truth:

The customer is always involved in the value creation process.

Implications for marketers:

Marketing should maximize customer involvement in value creation and support and leverage on this.. An example is the Finnish Demi magazine, whose customers produce 95% of the content on the web site and also supervise on the content themselves.

4) THE PERISHABILITY-MYTH:

Unlike goods, services can’t be produced beforehand and inventoried.

The Truth:

Also goods perish and services often create very long-term benefits. Nowadays also intangible capabilities can be inventoried. In the end value is never created in the ware house but during consumption.

Implications for marketers:

Marketing should focus on minimizing inventories and maximizing service flows between the marketer and the customers, but also amongst customers and the marketers’ partners. An example is the iPhone, which comes in one version at a time, but whose value is largely based on countless and cheap software applications, which can be used to personalize any handset in infinite ways.

To think: how do the abovementioned myths and truths affect your business? How deep are you on the way to servicizing your business? What more could you do?

With Lithium’s latest paper this question becomes a no-brainer: the health of the community equals

where CHI, the community health index is determined by five prime factors:

1. Members
2. Content
3. Traffic
4. Interaction
5. Liveliness

Let us remember though, that social media is a human business, and success in it can never be simplified to one mathematical formula – however tempting that might be.

You didn’t think you’d ever have to consider this right? We’ve never quite had to face a situation where people get mad at you for discontinuing a successful marketing campaign. With communities taking over brands however, this can indeed become a relevant issue, as campaigns themselves become social phenomena. Batman: The Dark Knight campaign was, as most of us already know, a thrilling campaign of unparalleled success. The game gathered millions of enthusiasts around their screens (computer, not tv) and also thousands on the street to play, interact with and collaborate around the world’s most extensive online-offline alternate reality game (read more here). The extent and depth of the game leaves me to think: it must have left the fans feeling a little empty after a one year plus of gaming, when eventually the stream of promotion material from Harvey Dent’s office ceased and the Joker stopped sending them vandalized versions of the Gotham Times with embedded secret messages anymore.

While the Batman campaign gathered mostly praise, Disney had it a bit more rough, as they decided (on schedule and according to initial plan) to close Virtual Magic Kingdom, their 18-month campaign. During this time, the community had gathered over a million users, who in addition were also the best possible candidates to be Mickey Mouse’s own brand ambassadors. Closing down the community understandably inspired some grumbles, as people suddenly lost a place they had built with significant invested time and passion. Even protest sites and petitions were created.

Hasbro now is facing the same situation with their Monopoly brand. In order to promote Monopoly City, the new edition of the board game, Tribal DDB created a campaign called Monopoly City Streets, where the player can buy virtually any street in the world and start building an empire. The mash-up utilizes Google Maps and overlays the buildings and street ownership information on top of Google’s street maps. I also bought my own street and noticed to my surprise that almost every street on my neighbourhood had already been bought. The game has an issue in that it’s growing too big to be stopped now that Hasbro has gotten the message through. There are over 1,5 million players online and pageviews amount to a whopping 15 billion per month. Closing down that amount of activity poses a huge image risk to a company that is all about inspiring to play with its products. The last I heard, Hasbro is now considering expanding the online campaign to a stand-alone product, a wise move and something that can in fact become one of their biggest successes by any measure.

Looking at this in the perspective of modern marketing creates an interesting paradox. On the other hand there is the argument that we no longer can plan our campaigns the way we used to, locking messages, budgets and media types into place a year beforehand. We’re supposed to be able to react more nimbly to what’s happening around us. On the other hand anyway, there is a faction that insists on long term view (as e.g. Anders Gustafsson of Crispin Porter Bogusky Europe recently did) – that we need to create things that inspire our customers for years, not weeks or months. Or is there a paradox at all? Are we really talking about the same thing?

A very cool week for an occasional blogger: during the last six days close to 250.000 people have visited my blog to see my 8 ways to kill an idea post. As you’re one of them, I’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks – nothing cheers you up in the middle of Finnish winter than an unprecedented spike of audience on your personal blog. Although the content isn’t originally mine (thanks again to the amazing artist Scott Campbell) this is a big event, for the content is in line with what I usually rave & rant about (marketing, creativity, technology), so some of you might actually stick around (for example, the same can’t be really be said about another of my ‘hits’, the now infamous kebab animal). A few key learnings for fellow bloggers:

• We don’t know what sticks. It’s true. We live in the age of chaos and randomness. That’s why it pays to write often and on a broad scale – while naturally keeping focus. Of course when something does stick, randomness moves aside as the network and herd effects takes charge.
• Speed counts. And I don’t mean blogging about stuff faster than the others. I mean blogging about stuff before your defenses set in. At the age of speed too much of a reflection kills you. React fast to topics that occur to you so you don’t overanalyze and suffocate your stream of thought. If I would’ve started to pin the drawing to a philosophical framework the post would at best have been delayed and at worst dropped altogether.
• Re-use with generosity. We live in the age of the remix. Everything you publish doesn’t have to be your own. The ‘8 ways’ pic was sent to me via email by a colleague. He found it from a discussion forum. Attribution and credit are always required, of course.
• Titles make a difference. The age of juxtapositioning is not over. It’s rather ironic that the most spread idea ever on my blog is about killing ideas. Provocation and turning things upside down surprisingly often helps.
• Show, don’t tell. The very core of contemporary culture is visual. Except for the picture, there were three sentences on my blog: a reference to the mail that I got the picture from; a reference to the original artist’s site; my own assessment of the piece (Brilliant.) A picture simply tells more.

The mentioned points fit well to other forms of web marketing as well. How would you apply this to e.g. the marketing efforts of a big corporation?

A light one for the weekend: one of my favorite short animated films of all time:

And because this is a blog on mass participation, a remixed version:

Want to make your brand more human – but won’t commit any human resources to the task

Want to achieve something outstanding and out of this world – but require us to fit it into traditional formats

Want creative media usage – but cast media budgets and types in stone a year earlier

Want to create discussion and interest – but abandon anything emotionally charged

Want to get people participating – but prohibit participation that might ‘harm’ your brand

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Of course, in reality there are always many ways to help you. It’s just that tackling the aforementioned will get us to better results.

I wish I made this (tackfilm):