Had the pleasure of meeting Orli this afternoon at Caffe Henrietta, one of the many coffee houses in Tel Aviv area. Shortly before arriving I saw the picture Orli took (embed below), which I believe is the 1st long-term partnership a local business is doing with Foursquare (correct me if I’m wrong).

Caffe Henrietta and Foursquare: Join our social club (credit: Orli Yakuel)

The first 5 minutes of the meeting both Orli and I spent facing our iPad/iPhone, respectively, registering for the partnership, at Caffe Henrietta’s website (He). The process is fairly simple, 3-4 steps, to connect you to Caffe Henrietta’s social club (facebook, foursquare, cellphone). Shortly after we received 3 text messages – including a free drink coupon for the current visit!

The text messages I received from Caffe Henrietta

I’m happy to see location based services (He) are kicking off in Israel, with various models in place – campaign based, specials, partnerships, exploring what works and what not. Although Caffe Henrietta saw only $5 from the 3 of us (+ tip), the long term exposure and buzz is much bigger, not to mention customer loyalty – next time I’m meeting someone in that area, it will probably be at Henrietta.

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

Dorkly.com has re-enacted the 1st Star Wars movie as a facebook conversation, comprised of 63 comments. Long, but definitely shorter than watching the entire movie.

See the original at Dorkly.com.

And thanks to Erez Ronen over at Holes in the Net for sharing!

One of the applications that were officially introduced to the Symbian platform during Nokia World 2010 is PixelPipe, a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text, photo, video and audio files once through various ‘Pipes‘, across over 100 social networks, including twitter, facebook, linkedin, youtube, blip.fm, twitpic, yfrog, dropbox, Google Buzz, Google Docs, and many-many more.

I first heard of PixelPipe at the #NokiaMeet gathering organized by Micky Fin at 1000Heads HQ in London. The next day, between the keynote lectures, business sessions, round table sessions and interview, I got a chance to chat with PixelPipe stuff at their booth (embedded video – RSS readers click here).

The feature I love about PixelPipe is the facebook Pipe of course – using the E72 I still haven’t found the application that allows me to share pictures to my wall. True, I often use the #fb hashtag in my twitpic uploads, but it shows the link, not the picture itself. So PixelPipe just became one of my favorite apps! You can download it from Ovi Store, free of course.

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

I remember reading a tweet the other day, which I actually agree with (can’t remember the author though), saying ‘social services like facebook, twitter, myspace, come and go. Flickr has been here since 2004 (!), and is here to stay’. The same goes, in my opinion, to blogs. Other sharing services will come and go, but the web-log, is here to stay.

It’s been 3 weeks since I started working at Inkod-Hypera, and almost 2 weeks since my last post. True, there’s facebook, and twitter, and LinkedIn, and other social services that I update on a daily basis, but those micro-updates cannot be compared to a blog post. Same audience perhaps, different format. And no limit on words!!

Ilan (creative director) and Assaf (VP products) are testing the new helicopter model

Being recognized for your work is always a good thing, and makes one feel good about the things one does. In the 3 weeks I’m here we’ve received dozens of ‘thank you’ emails from customers, the best incentive for any employee. One of our customers, Sparkeo, is a winner at mini Seedcamp Tel Aviv [English post], and are waiting for the Seedcamp results. We’ve been published [Hebrew] in a local news website, and are gaining momentum in the social scene (you’re welcome to join us).

On the work/life balance, we’re doing ok – working hard all day long, finding some time to unwind and always remembering to keep the customer in the center of our business.

But seriously now, we do amazing things here around UI and design. More to come, stay tuned.

By the time my loyal RSS readers will see this, I’ll be on my way to meeting Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, visiting Israel for a quick 24 hours, keynoting The NETWorking event, the Alumni event of The College of Management (where I did my BA). Although Israel is A Start-Up Nation, it’s not often we get the chance to meet in person (along with 1,200 people) a founder of a service that changed the way we communicate with each other.

Since its creation in 2006, twitter has become a force in the digital world, influencing every industry – from IT, to entertainment and film, sports and news. With Oprah, Ashton and CNN twitter hit mainstream pretty fast, growing at an astonishing rate of 1,400% a year (!). However, 2010 will be a pivotal year in twitter’s life, as the micro-blogging service is trying to monetize on the vast amounts of data it holds, trying to prove that unlike facebook or YouTube – twitter can make money (and much more than $4m).

Biz is holding a closed breakfast for CEOs, graduates of The College of management, followed by a press conference, that should start at 10:45am IST (Israel, GMT+2). The main event will be at the evening, at Hangar 11 in Tel Aviv Harbor, as Biz will be the keynote speaker at the NETWorking event. TheMarker Editor-in-Chief will do a one-on-one interview with Biz afterwards, and a stand-up show with Adir Miller will wrap-up Biz’s 24 hours in Israel.

#bizil is the hashtag for keeping track of Biz’s day in Israel.

My bottom-line of the Nokia N97 review I posted last month was:

The N97 is a big leap for Nokia, but a small step compared to the mobile scene and the market’s expectations of the device. I can only hope Nokia will accept my feedback, because I believe the N98 can lead the pack, instead of merely joining it.

I’m glad to see Nokia has adopted some of my feedback, and although not introducing N98, they made some noise in Stuttgart this past week.

And allow me to amend my bottom-line: scratch the N98, give me the new Nokia X6. With the X6 Nokia introduced a phone that can truly lead the pack instead of just catching up. Although the X6 is officially the XpressMusic 5800 successor, its looks and specs are right at the top:

• the screen is capatitive (like the iPhone)
• keyboard is gone
• technical specs are roughly the same as the N97′s (with that huge 32GB of storage space)
• its thinner, and BEAUTIFUL!

My only complaint still pertains to the CPU, which at 434MHz and 128MB I doubt it can match the iPhone’s 600MHz with 256MB (3Gs). Why not use the 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU deployed at the new N900? Not clear. And that is really a shame because Nokia has taken a big step with the X6 and introduced a phone that in my opinion can become a true iPhone Killer.

Mornings are an excellent time to read, write and share. Shortly after the morning coffee and toast I head over to my GReader and start browsing the feeds, in a pre-defined order.
Ahuvah Berger recently joined the Blonde 2.0 team, which means we get to enjoy her super writing skills at least once a week (hopefully more dear.. . After her last week’s post on Engaging the Masses comes this post, continuing where she left off, and linking to a wonderful deck at slideshare by Marta Kagan, What the F**K is Social Media. One Year After. In a long (83p) yet light presentation Marta goes over the basics of SM, adding some cool pictures and stats to back her points and strengthening her bottomline (p 53):
SO PLEASE, STOP F**KING AROUND AND GET SERIOUS ABOUT HARNESSING THE POWER OF THIS THING.

Slide 44 onwards highlights some business insights that are relevant to any company, like ’93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media’ and ’85% of social media users believe that a company should go further than just having a presence and actually interact with its customers’. Innovative approaches, I know..

The entire deck is hilarious (although the language might not appeal to everyone) and the 83 slides are going fast, but all convey an important message, and I only hope that a fraction of the 128,000 views this deck received were made by corporations and business executives and not just by us marketers – we’re already advocating this F**King thing too..
[RSS subcribers: Please read this post at my blog to view the embed deck]

If someone needed a solid proof that new media is the king, Econsultancy gathered more statistics about social media services. The fact that facebook is the 4th largest country in the world is already known, but I was blown away from the fact #5:

It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people… In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.

Image via CrunchBase

Just 4 years to reach 50,000,000 users (now there are some 1,200,000,000 global users), and in only 9 months facebook rounded up 100,000,000 new users. Unbelievable numbers!

Between those public stats lie some corporate stats as well, that emphasis the importance of new media and the impact it has on businesses, regardless of industry:

80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching their 45-millionth membership.

So yes, if you just landed on Earth, don’t waste your time and money buying 50″ LCD – get a laptop or netbook and start working the web.

Link:
Econsultancy – 20+ more mind-blowing social media statistics
Brian Solis – Everything you never knew about facebook

Run into this survey at eMarketer.com in one of my Google Alerts the other day. With all the plethora of information sources, I find it more difficult to focus on topics and trends that interest me, as well as joining in on conversations, so it’s good to know GAlerts still has some benefits..

The survey in hand was conducted between some 1,800 social media marketers in the US, asking them about the effectiveness of their practices – meaning which tactics they used, how effective those tactics were and how accurately can they measure such tactics. The results are not that surprising, but I would like to focus on next steps – how can we make those practices more effective and measured more accurately.

The first issue we’re seeing is the negative correlation between a tactic’s effectiveness vs. our ability to measure it accurately (graph below). The 3 most effective tactics are User reviews or ratings (47%), Blogger or online journalist relations (46%) and Forums or discussion groups (42%). When looking at the ‘Very accurately measured’ column, those tactics are ranked 3rd, 4th and 5th, respectively. With the expansion of broadband and the coming of web 2.0, everyone is a publisher, and thus consumers are more suspicious and don’t believe everything they read online. In the US the FTC are targeting bloggers’ freebies (PDF guidelines), and in the meantime there are some un-official guidelines on how to disclose and authenticate a sponsored conversation. In Israel on the other hand, things are moving slower (article in Hebrew).

The second issue pertains to hooking financial success with social marketing (graph below). It’s pretty obvious that social marketing is most effective for Brand reputation (39%), Brand awareness (37%) and Search engine results (38%). I’d like to point your attention to the Sales aspects of social marketing, Generate leads and Increase online sales. The marketers who were surveyed said that social marketing is not effective at Generating leads (35%) and Increasing online sales (46%). For social marketing to become bigger and better, we have to add revenues to the game, and being able to measure it. Dell are already showing the added value of their social activity on twitter, a new study finds correlation between social media and financial success and George Colony urges CEO to understand that social marketing is here to stay.

If we want social marketing to rock, Sales indicators must be inherent to any social campaign. It’s OK to start small, but start somewhere. Move the conversation from brand (only) to revenues as well. And one last request – be honest to your readers.

By now you’re probably aware that I got the new Nokia N97 for a 1 month trial. I posted an elaborate review of the N97 (in Hebrew) yesterday, and I plan on writing a detailed review here as well, following my initial post.

In the meanwhile, I’ve uploaded some screenshots to facebook, showing some of the N97 features. As I screenshot pretty often, I’m sure that album will expand. If there’s anything specific you’d like to see or hear my opinion about, let me know. Screenshots were taken using Best Screen Snap for S60 (free). Note that in landscape mode some pictures came out distorted. Portrait mode is much better.

Links:
Nokia N97 review (in Hebrew)
First 4 hours with the N97
Nokia N97 Screenshots (facebook)