It’s been quite incredible living in the Social Media Clubhouse. Not quite unlike living in the “Real World” house or on a movie set. There are many interesting folks, always events going on and cameras to look at (or avoid.)
Our SMC Clubhouse bus is quite the hit downtown taking people to the house in the daytime, and to the parties at night.
As a resident and beneficiary I’d like to thank all our sponsors and everyone who has visited to be part of our panels or part of the greater Social Media Club discussion.
The real value to having the house was as a gathering place for those who work on or support Social Media Club. I’ve met great people from SMC chapters all over the country and some from Europe, and am proud of the enthusiasm and creativity from each of them. We enabled them to share their ideas, network and engage with each other in person, and they can then take their conversations online as our new site goes live. If you are from one of the SMC chapters, write in the comments and tell us what you got out of our SXSW experiment.
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I’m excited to be part of Social Media Club’s Social Media Clubhouse #3, in Austin this week and next, for SouthBy Southwest Interactive and Music. Chris Heuer, Kristie Wells, and the SMC team have been working really hard to get the house sponsored, set up, and ready for the rest of us to arrive, and I give them a huge amount of credit for planning it.
As a board member of Social Media Club, and of the original team behind the group, we always envisioned being able to bring together professionals form important discussions. This is part of what we are chartered to do – “2. Share lessons among practitioners.” At the Social Media Clubhouse, we’ll have summits on Co-Working, Engagement, and the Synaptic Web.
I hope you’ll follow us via our #smch3 hashtag, our Twitter list (forthcoming) and our site. And, if you’ll be Austin, please get in touch – I’d love to meet or catch up with you.
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Tags: smch3, Social Media Club, Social Media Clubhouse, sxsw
This week, Google released its new Social aggregation service (I don’t think that it is a networking service) called Buzz. Jason Calacanis thinks Buzz just ate Facebook’s lunch. I disagree.
Buzz requires connections with people through my personal Gmail account. Unlike Facebook, where I can “unfriend” anyone, and hide them when I don’t want to communicate, tying this account to my personal email means that I have to give out that email to connect with someone. Even though I can block them or stop following them if they’re suddenly undesirable, they still have my email, and can abuse it, publish it, pass it to spammers, etc.
I think this is somewhat shortsighted. Of course, Google wants to drive adoption of Gmail and its’ other services. However, with Wave they created GoogleWave.com addresses, and still pulled in Gmail “buddies.” They could have and should have done the same.
Next, the requirement that I be logged into Gmail to see my Buzz stuff is not appealing. I have many email accounts, and still use various desktop clients to manage them. Call me a luddite, but I have no intention of using Gmail full time, so Buzz is going to be an interrupt – driven activity – I’m already getting emails on Buzz threads where I’ve commented and already contemplating how I’m going to filter them.
Jason, this is not the second coming of Facebook. Buzz is a lot like FriendFeed, which I also don’t use because it is cluttered and takes too much effort for me to organize. I see it as way too geeky. When my brothers and sisters are on Buzz, we’ll talk.
Tags: google buzz
Applet Tablet With iPhone-Like OS Confirmed in TV Interview [VIDEO]
McGraw adds that he thinks the tablet will be “really terrific” for e-books in the higher education and professional markets
He also stated it would run “a Version of the iPhone OS.” As I predicted. We’ll see how close I was at 1pm EST.
Tags: apple tablet
In December I attended the reception* for the Mountain Dew Dewmocracy event, and learned how Mountain Dew was using its fans to help pick a new flavor (or several new flavors) of the beverage. Personally, I love the idea of asking your customers what they want from a product and giving it to them. It is often the way products are made, but in this day of mass market and focus group watering down of the message, I liked that Dew went out to their fans and actually made them work for the product they want – that should ensure good adoption when the release the soda later this year.
The intent from the start was to activate Mountain Dew’s most rabid fans, the people that live the “Mountain Dew lifestyle” all the time, and get them to participate in creating the flavor, color, name, and creative for this drink. Mountain Dew took a flavor sample truck to 17 markets and found fans in those areas to test the 7 sample flavors, make video posts and document their experiences, and invite their friends. 50 fanatics from this process got home tasting kits, invited their friends and documented the experience on an included Flip video camera. Once they got that input, Mountain Dew created their own social network of 4000 core fans, and got them involved teaching them how the flavors were designed, picking the color of the drinks, the names of the drinks and even creating test graphic treatments and advertisements for the drinks, some of which you can see at http://12seconds.tv/campaign/dewmocracy.
Ultimately, it comes down to sales, so in April when the product hits the shelves, the 3 flavor ‘teams’ will get their friends to vote for their favorite, which becomes part of the line with a launch on Labor Day in 2010. The fans will design the launch campaign as well.
While this won’t be the first Social Media Community Designed beverage (that honor seems to go to Vitamin Water Connect), Dew’s effort did more to involve more fans, and had voting or fan participation at every stage, up until the launch.
This campaign has so many good marketing elements to it, so here are some lessons for your future marketing. (There are probably more elements I’m missing.)
Brand Loyalty: Showing fans you care and asking them to tell you the next product generates interest – especially among your most rabid fans.
Social Sharing: Use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and 12 Seconds.TV and more got fans voting and promoting the entire effort.
Word of Mouth: The name contest required votes and followers on Twitter (see http://twitter.com/509Cyclone for an example). Many of these accounts got 500 or more followers in just a few days. These people had to make a little effort to vote, and share with their friends. And the accounts interacted back with their fans.
User Generated Content: The 12 Seconds TV effort generated a number of very clever spots watched by hundreds or thousands of people.
PR: I’m writing about a soda I don’t even drink (since I’m decaffeinated.) They have a good story to tell the press.
Ultimately, though, we’ll see how many sales rack up with the 3 test flavors, and whether “everyone gets a trophy” (they release all 3) or whether they keep one for launch on Labor Day. I’m Interested in knowing how this ends. What else can we learn from efforts like this?
*Disclaimer: I was invited to the reception by Porter Novelli and Pepsico friends, but received no compensation for this blog post (other than a few hors d’oeuvres and some Mountain Dew samples at the reception.)
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- Dew Does The Crowd (wired.com)
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Tags: dewmocracy, facebook, Mountain Dew, twitter, User-generated content
