The guys over at Mashable have a cool little piece on how the corporate website is irrelevant – a concept similar to The Siteless Site that I’ve mentioned earlier. Some key takeouts about the campaign:
Call to action was sign-up on a Facebook FanPage.
Strong advertising budget – little reliance on virality for acquisition but still used the Facebook news injection feature.
350k people signed up to the Fanpage
Risky as it could end up bombing if the two players don’t head up against each other.
The Glaceau campaign fits in perfectly with the siteless site concept. It will be interesting to see what Glaceau does with the users/fans once this campaign is over, as they could easily rebrand the site for a new campaign.
Mozilla Labs have just announced the Jetpack development extension for the Firefox browser. In essence, it allows for much easier development of Firefox plugins. Previously, you’d need a developer who was somewhat clued up with the intricacies of the browser, it’s never had a massive barrier to entry, but you wouldn’t just build a plugin for any campaign. But if I’d have a buck for everytime I’ve heard a pitch related to “let’s build a Firefox extension” I’d probably be a rich man. Inevitably it always get scuppered somehow (costs, lead time, limited knowledge, etc).
Now, with the release of Jetpack, it will allow developers who develop a microsite or other campaign related material to develop new plugins for the browser using technology that they are most familiar with – CSS, HTML, Javascript, etc. This means more stuff that you can do for a campaign. Here is a brief video explaining the basics – it does get quite technical later on so if you are an account or brand manager, don’t bother watching past 3:00 mins as it gets a bit techie, you’d be able to understand the gist of things though.
Well, it means that your development team will be able to develop an extension a lot quicker than previously as they won’t need to learn a new technology, plus your users would be a lot more willing to download and install the extension as they won’t need to restart their browser (this has always been a barrier to adoption for Firefox extensions).
By making it easier to develop and install these extensions, we might see the advent of “throw away extensions” – plugins that exist only for the duration of the campaign and are removed afterwards. I mentioned the Orange Internet Balloon Race campaign yesterday – something like that would work brilliantly as a quick extension for your campaign.
As with the emergence of constellations, brands need to realise that they exist on many different levels – not only on their own brand site or microsite and that the browser is a great place to tie all these elements together. A Firefox extension is a fantastic way for brands to develop engaging conversations with their fans – the danger of course being that you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much!
On another note, Mozilla has now also decreased the barrier to entry for potential extension developers. As stated above, one required different knowledge to build a Firefox extension previously, Jetpack now allows any person with knowledge of the standard web technologies to create an extension. And it’s been the extension market place that has led Firefox to become such a popular browser in the first place (that, and the fact that it’s NOT Internet Explorer!). This is a great step by Mozilla to expand on their Marketplace strategy (just as Apple, Nokia, Facebook, etc have done).
Here are links to Techcrunch, as well as ZDnet for some other light analysis.
Are there any great extensions that you can think of to develop for your brands’ campaign?
The Siteless site is a concept used to describe a website that is used as a landing platform for the distribution of other content related to that site or brand. The site itself has no content of it’s own, but merely pulls in data and content from other partners.
It is sometimes used a hub to send the user off to a Flickr page, Twitter profile or Facebook page.
In other instances it can be used as a term to create self-referential links between all other sites relating to the same meta-brand. In this case there might not be a single domain tying everything together, but references to other properties are visible on e.g. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter.
Some Examples:
Skittles and the Modernista website were two of the most popular examples. The feedback on the campaign quickly pointed out the negativereviews and comments – something similar happened to the Yogisip campaign locally in South Africa where semi-explicit videos were uploaded, but also immediately taken down. These types of sites will always require a moderation tool built in.
However, the feedback and hype generated by the campaign can most certainly be argued for in a positive way. Estimates range that the Skittles campaign was seen by close to 500k people directly, generated more than 10k tweets plus all the earned media that it generated was worth the hype. The Skittles campaign definitely worked as a once-off, it is tricky seeing that this type of concept would work well in another iteration. But the lessons one can learn out of it is valuable.
Regarding Modernista, the site is a brilliantly executed and produced piece of work. It shows us what is possible with a simple piece of javascript. They’ve used the best tools possible (Flickr for sharing work, Delicious for thoughstreaming, etc) to achieve their objectives.
In the Jeep example (they’ve since launched a new campaign and site), a small widget pulled through examples of member photo’s uploaded to Flickr and tagged with Jeep.
GLOBAL – Nokia Point and Find landed in the UK and USA early last month, and now the folks at Betalabs have put together a neat video highlighting the key features. If you haven’t heard about Point and Find before, it’s a new service that enables you to get up to date info about a product or service, on your phone. Right now info on movies are available, but more products and services will be added over time.
Sophie-Charlotte Moatti talks us through how the service works in the video below. Once you’ve downloaded the app from pointandfind.nokia.com, you can fire it up and point your device’s camera at a movie poster. The app will quickly locate the movie and with it a host of options, including reviews, ratings and even your nearest cinema (the service uses the GPS in your device to work out your location, before suggesting nearest theaters).
Pointing works regardless of the weather and you can even point at an angle – there’s no restriction like having to be right in front of the poster. Alternatively, you can use text entry to access info through the service, simple type in the name of the movie you’d like to know more about. You can even buy tickets to the next show over your device.
The range of supported devices is limited right now, but more will be added in the near future. Alongside products like the E71 and N96, we’ll see support for newer products like the 5800 and N97 coming online before too long. Later in the year there’ll also be a Java client which will work on most S40 devices.
The guys over at Mashable have a cool little piece on how the corporate website is irrelevant – a concept similar to The Siteless Site that I’ve mentioned earlier. Some key takeouts about the campaign:
