Spotted this earlier this week over at Mashable.

It’s long, take your time

Being successful and innovative with crowd sourcing (and digital marketing for that matter) is the holy grail of ad agencies, working tirelessly in an effort to nail what works, and what’s not. Old Spice is probably my favorite example of all times, T-Mobile’s Dance and Welcome are another example, Coca Cola Village too, from an Israeli perspective.

Now I can also add Firefox to that list, with their Firefox 4 Twitter Party, which introduced the latest browser version to the world, using a beautiful visualization to encourage people to join. Every tweet which included the #fx4 hashtag was automatically added to the party, creating the FF logo, made of people’s faces. Hover over a pixel and the tweet pops out.

Should be interesting to see Firefox’s stats, analyze the numbers. I used Firefox for 5-6 years (mid 2000), up until Chrome came to (a stable) life 3 years ago. The party actually triggered an action for me – gonna download, give it another try.

Definitely worth visiting Firefox 4 Twitter Party site to see the logo growing.

Update [March 24]: Firefox 4 just passed 14,000,000 downloads, according to http://glow.mozilla.org/.

Came across this hilarious ad for VW New Passat 2012 last week on facebook (which became a primary source for tracking interesting stories), and immediately found its way to my tumblr. And now my blog. Last week the count was 7 million, today it’s over 11 million. The force is strong with this one..
Who ever thought of this ad, wrote its storyboard, is a genius!

Enjoy !

On the last day of February I’ll be attending FONSI – The Future of Nonprofit Summit Israel conference, at Nalaga’at Center, Jaffa port. The Future of Nonprofit Summit Israel [FONSI] is designed to showcase the best tools, latest trends, and best practices in order to advance the third sector in Israel.

I’ll be on the ‘Is Social Media Overrated‘ panel (scheduled for 16:30 – so please stay , along with Olivier, Kfir, Hadassah and Florence, speaking about the status of social media, specifically how (and if) nonprofits can leverage the tools and services to their advantage. Will share best practices from my own experience, like Alfa Romeo, Nokia World 2010, and others.

Register here, sponsors here. See you Feb. 28th !

If you’re reading my blog long enough you know I have a soft spot for crowdsourcing/digital and how brands are leveraging these technologies and platforms to boost sales, strengthen customer loyalty or create demand.

T-Mobile UK is one of the companies who are doing an excellent work online, and in my opinion can be credited with the flash mob phenomenon.

At the end of October they shot another flash mob video, this time at Heathrow Airport, International Arrivals Terminal 5. Watch and learn.

Back in July I wrote here about the 1st foursquare campaign in Israel, Club Seat, a bold activity at the time, and even now. 4 months later, and thanks to Lindsay for reminding me, here is best practices for launching a foursquare campaign post. The post is based on data I collected on facebook and foursquare, along with personal insights, from my experience and my understanding of the digital marketing space in Israel. The charts comparing the ‘official’ venue vs. Club Seat venue are a visual aid, based on actual foursquare data collected October 26th.

1. Confusing rules

I’ll start at the end of the contest, a status update (see screenshot below) from a participant wondering why he hasn’t won 1st prize. Before you say anything (sour looser, etc) – the dude has a valid point: the winner should be the Mayor of the venue (Galina) that received the most check-ins during the contest. The response from Club Seat, although agreeing with the participant, doesn’t help clear the air (4th comment in the screenshot below): “The club that had the most check-ins by August 31st was Gazoz, 2nd was Galina, 3rd was Sublet. OK, say we believe it (stats anyone?). But wait, it gets better: The Mayor at both Gazoz and Galina, as of August 31st was Michal Y., who declined accepting the prize. Hence, the Mayor of the 3rd venue, Sublet, is the winner”. WTF?!?! How did they deduce that?? Who is Michal Y. and why did she decline a flight+vacation to Ibiza? Where are the check-in stats for August 31st to support the decision? But the most awkward thing is the logic they used for picking an alternate winner. Just so we’re clear, Runner-up refers to an actual human. Not venue. Confusing, but even more, something’s fishy. And that’s not a term one wants associated with one’s brand.

Club Seat post-contest discussion

2. Duplicate venues

Google’s mission is to ‘Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful‘. Foursquare, as any other User-Generated-Content service (youtube, twitter, go-walla, facebook places, etc) are working hard on eliminating duplicate and triple content, in order to minimize storage space – and make it easier for us, consumers, to find what we need. I understand it was important ‘branding’ the club with ‘Club Seat‘, making it unique to the contest – but I think that’s wrong. There are plenty of methods to measure traffic and check-ins to existing venues, no need to create duplicates. Plus, by using the existing venue already on foursquare (Gazoz, Galina and Sublet) you give incentive to the current Mayor to ‘keep his chair’, by increasing his/her visits – basically ‘using’ the Mayor’s own need to remain, well, the Mayor.

Foursquare stats: Galina vs. Galina Club Seat

3. Leverage evangelists

As I wrote back in July, this campaign will be interesting to watch, as foursquare is considered early-early stage in Israel, around 1,000 active users (who checked-in in the past 30 days) in my opinion. Any digital marketing campaign must include early adopters of the technology in question and community hubs – people that have 1000+ facebook friends, 2000+ twitter followers, 300+ foursquare friends – that will act as a powerful magnet, bringing more traffic, making some noise. Maybe Grey Interactive had such evangelists, but even if they had, I haven’t heard about it – and I’m pretty out there, socially speaking.

4. People, not venue, oriented

CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CIOs – it’s all about the consumer. When doing a location based contest, people count, because tracking their movement and analyzing the data will bring you added value. Premiere value. To strengthen my first point (confusing rules), when the winner (Mayor) of a venue declines a free vacation to Ibiza, give it to the person Runner-up, not the venue. Now, the charts – although Gazoz and Galina (Club Seat) have more check-ins than the official venue, people-wise – they loose. Twice. Because those 114 and 203 people (respectively) could have joined the contest, boosting all metrics, simply by seeing all those other Seat clubbers checking-in.

Foursquare stats: Gazoz vs. Gazoz Club Seat

5. Bring the business on-board

In my opinion, the #1 reason this campaign didn’t go as planned – minimal business involvement. There are hundreds of clubs/bars in Tel Aviv, all striving to survive, 60% will close within 24 months (actual stat). If Club Seat would have worked with Galina, Gazoz and Sublet, offering an incentive to those checking-in (free keg to parties of 4+, 1st beer on the house, etc), this contest could have taken another route altogether, increasing awareness, boosting sales and helping both Seat and the clubs win the crowd.

Foursquare stats: Sublet vs. Sublet Club Seat

Couple of months ago I wrote here about FIFA World Cup 2010, pointing out the digital campaigns of the major sponsors. Last week, the translated version was published in issue 7 of Marketing Now, a quarterly newsletter by The College of Management, School of Marketing & Advertising. You can read the online version here (Hebrew, IE only) or download the PDF (again, in Hebrew).

Disclosure: I work as assistant lecturer at The College of Management, and also completed my B.A. in Finance and Marketing at the institute.

The Coca-Cola Village is an Israeli summer tradition.

Every year, in July-August, thousands of kids in their summer break attend ‘The Village’, a 5-day camp, organized by Coca-Cola Israel, with fun activities, pool, social games and Coca Cola drinks of course. This year, e-dologic, the interactive agency working with Coca-Cola Israel, has developed a very cool solution for connecting the offline world with the online – facebook.

The real life life button - coca-cola village

Each kid upon entering the village received an RFID bracelet, with his/her facebook profile saved, securely, in that chip. In turn, the kid was able to ‘Like’ each activity he/she performed at the village, showing up on their facebook profile as a 15sec video, outlining the activity, which was pre-recorded.

The ‘Real life facebook like button’ was a huge success (Hebrew), with tens of thousands #LIKES, for a total of under 1,000 participants! Facebook sent over Mark Cowan, VP Operationsת Europe, to visit the village and experience ‘The Like Machine‘ first-hand, after Mark Zukerberg heard about it at Cannes Lions by Enon Landenberg, e-dologic CEO.

Update on privacy: in a related post (Hebrew) by Jonathan Klinger, it was suggested that the RFID tag stores the username and password details of each participant, thus making it easy to steal the credentials using a simple RFID reader (or in the event of lost/stolen tag). I double-checked with e-dologic the info I had: The RFID tag only stores a unique id number, worthless on its own. When a participant moves his hand near the RFID reader in the village, the on-site server (protected both physically and virtually) receives the participant location and unique id number, to match against its own DB. Every cycle (Coca-Cola Village has 5-7 cycles, each one 3 days) the DB is formatted, for security reasons. On top of that, participants pay a 15US$ fee to receive the RFID tag, refundable upon return of the tag.

The Real Life LIKE Butoon – Case Study – Coca-Cola Village:

Following the phenomenal success of Old Spice ‘Response’ campaign, it was only a matter of time until we’ll start seeing some numbers. As with any marketing activity, it’s all about generating sales, and I believe Old Spice met their target. Obviously the buzz generated by the campaign is priceless, and will be taught in business/marketing courses for years to come.

But enough talking, time to listen: Old Spice Social Media Marketing Campaign Case Study, by W+K (Old Spice’s agency). Enjoy!

Had an interesting discussion this week at Globes event with Ahuvah, a very wise and internet-savvy friend, about foursquare. She asked me – Why? A simple question, complicated answer. Once, not so long ago, people were asking the same WH-question about Twitter, and look were we are now.

But back to me. I check-in at places of interest, usually business-oriented – meaning if I’m at a the Finance District of Tel Aviv, or the Hi-Tech district – where I’m more likely to meet people. But so far, as Ahuvah was clever to ask, those check-ins resulted in fewer random meetings than I expected. So again, Why? I guess convenience has something to do with it, meaning a proper application – Gravity. I’ve previewed Gravity before, saying it’s the main reason for my increased use of foursquare – a flick of the navbar, and I’m Here! Nevertheless, I believe foursquare is much more than just a contest for who’s got more Mayorships. It’s a valuable database of knowledge about people habitts – and knowledge is power. Much like twitter that crossed the chasm, foursquare too needs the same things: celebrity, business, media coverage.

Club Seat - 1st Israeli foursquare-based campaign

Celebrity we have (not many though), media coverage still lagging, but now we have a business. Seat become the 1st business in Israel (Hebrew) to use foursquare in a digital campaign (Hebrew, again), Club Seat, along with 3 known clubs in Tel Aviv – Gazoz, Galina, and Sublet. People are encouraged to create an account in foursqaure, download the app of their choice and visit the clubs. The campaign is three-fold:

• The club that receives the most entries by August 30th (end of summer break) is crowned ‘Best Club in Town’;
• Top 20 people with the  highest number of check-ins at any of the 3 clubs will receive concert tickets;
• The mayor of each club will receive a plane ticket (round trip I hope)

Personally I was hoping the 1st business will originate from the restaurant/cafe/bar industry, much like Starbucks is doing in the US, or FT.com’s deal to attract youngsters in London. Seat, along with Grey Interactive, have taken a leap into un-charted waters in Israeli advertising, as foursquare is still in early-early adopter stage here. Facebook has transformed the digital space in Israel – more than 3 million people connected (about 60% of internet-connected homes), #2 fastest growing country in the Middle East (7%, monthly), top 10 countries in terms of average time spent (globally!), and more. No campaign is complete here without a facebook presence. Twitter and foursquare are still considered ‘geek-only territory‘, although twitter is gaining momentum in celebrities and media.

Club Seat was only launched this week, so the stats are obviously low (Gazoz 9 check-ins, Galina 3 check-ins, and Sublet 4 check-ins), but it will be interesting to see how this pilot evolves and what impact will it have on the advertising industry. Stay tuned.

I’ll start with the bottomline of this post (aka The Title): Where can I buy Old Spice?

In a marketing space, driven by numbers, ROI and sales graphs, I imagine the Old Spice (twitter/facebook/youtube) finance people will be interested to know they’ve gained at least 1 new customer. Me. It doesn’t matter how it smells, will I like it or not, who uses it, how much it costs – really, I just want one, to be like Isaiah Mustafa (aka Old Spice guy/dude/man). So, where can I get Old Spice in Israel? Don’t know, will find out. A friend visiting Israel already said he’ll bring me his – thanks Dovid!

Plenty of words have been written about Old Spice campaign, as the 2nd phase broke previous records and defined new rules for brands’ engagement in social media (aka digital marketing). I will link to three posts by marketing professionals I trust – Lior Zoref (Digital Marketing Consultant, ex VP Marketing for Microsoft Israel; post in Hebrew), Lisa Barone (Chief Branding Officer at Outspoken Media), and Hillel Fuld (Tech blogger, marketer, twitterer, writer). All three, specifically Lisa and Hillel, have analyzed Old Spice campaign, and produced a must-read list for marketers.

The tweet that started it all

And BTW – don’t forget to create a personalized voicemail and download the screensaver, wallpaper or ringtone. It is truly, as I wrote in a comment to Lisa Barone’s post, a campaign that will be taught in business schools for years to come. Enough talk, let’s watch some videos. More (about 120 of them) are available on Old Spice Youtube channel.

Looking forward to the Globes event on Monday, hear what influence this campaign will have on the lectures and the theme of the event.

UPDATE: How the Old Spice videos are being made (ReadWriteWeb)

Original video – The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

Old Spice 2nd Phase – Questions

Re: @jsbeals | Old Spice – Marriage Proposal

Re: Gay Kawasaki | Old Spice

Re: @Orli | Old Spice

Re: GQ | Old Spice

Re: @GizModo | Old Spice

Re: @TheEllenShow | Old Spice

Re: Lisa Barone | Old Spice – $$$

Re: @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) | Old Spice

Re: 12755JDH | Old Spice – probably a robot

Re: Everyone | Old Spice – The End

We knew some of the new features back in April, but still, iPhone 4 (aka HD) is a big step forward. And also, another proof that Jobs is a genius in marketing and setting consumer trends. Video calls have been around for couple of years, but FaceTime makes you wanna STOP making regular calls and do only video.

Oh, and I’m seriously thinking of buying one.

Update [April 27th, 5pm GMT+3]:

Thank you all for commenting and participating. The winners have been notified by email an hour ago. Hope to see you all Sunday.

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TheMarker Com.Vention is the prominent internet event in Israel, with known figures from the SU, VC, Marketing, Content and TV, Advertising and Internet industries (local and global) – and I have 10 complimentary tickets (worth ~$100 each) to share with you!

In the spirit of networking and sharing, I’ve decided to do a ‘Pay It Forward‘ kind of thing, and give each ‘winner’ 2 tickets: one for you and the other for someone from your network, whom you met via a social network (facebook/twitter/LinkedIn/Foursquare/etc), that haven’t attended Com.Vention before. So basically, you get to pick a ticket winner.

Here’s what you need to do in order to win a ticket to TheMarker Com.Vention:

1. Explore your wall/stream and find someone that hasn’t attended Com.Vention yet.
2. Post a comment to this post (name, email – not public, website), with your name, your friend-from-the-web name and the social match-maker name.
3. That’s it!

Then, I will cross-reference the names with TheMarker (to verify your friend-from-the-web didn’t attend previously) and research the social network in question (to assess the relationship). First 5 ‘couples’ that will get it right – met via a social network and friend-from-the-web hasn’t attended before, will receive the tickets. Last date to submit entries is Thursday, April 29th at 18:00 Israel time (GMT+3). Winners will be announced here and contacted via email for the logistics, so please watch your typing.

This year there are very interesting panels and sessions: ‘Mobile Internet – Who’s going to benefit most from the boom?’, ‘Life on demand – how consumers are changing the life of E-commerce’, ‘Who will control the content’ and more. Full agenda is available here, speakers list here, twitter tag is #com2010, and facebook page.

See you Sunday!