How healthy is your community?

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:

Members
Content
Traffic
Interaction
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.

What to do with campaigns that are too successful?

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, [...]

How to attract 250.000 weekly visitors to your blog

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 [...]

Dreams are worth fighting for

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:

We can’t help you if you…

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 [...]

Sometimes a great execution is already a reason to share

I wish I made this (tackfilm):

Waste isn’t good – it’s non-existent

Watched a video of Chris Anderson talk about free and the future of television this morning. That reminded me that he wrote recently on Wired that in the digital world, waste is not only good, it’s mandatory (the video doesn’t really add anything to the article in case you’re wondering).

This however brought to my mind [...]

Acid testing your digital campaign

In traditional one-way communications, there are many ways to acid test your campaign idea (quickly see if it’s ‘fit for business’). One way of doing this could be:

Is it relevant enough to the target group?
Is it unexpected enough to stand out from the clutter?
Is it memorable enough to inspire purchase behavior?

While all these questions are [...]

Volvo leaps into Facebook age

At a time when Facebook is already a favorite hangaround for the young and influential, Volvo has discovered a nifty way to gain attention for its recently updated S60, which will be unveiled next year in Geneva. The company hired a known artist to paint the car and recently published the piece. The interesting thing [...]

Eight ways to kill an idea

Sent today by a colleague (original work by Scott Campbell):

Brilliant.