A Wider Net

Webkinz, the latest pre-teen craze from Canadian wholesaler Ganz, are little stuffed animals (Beanie babies, basically) with special tags that contain secret codes. Kids go to www.webkinz.com and enter the secret code to unlock an online social media game world that borrows from MySpace, Second Life, and casual game sites like Pogo, and Puzzle Pirates. The site features daily activities that kids perform to earn Kinzcash with which they can purchase all sorts of virtual add-ons for their virtual pets. The kids play against other kids in some of these games, and the winner wins more Kinzcash. The website is driving demand for the plush toys which can quickly get forgotten. The tags on the toys drive kids to the website, and the daily activities keep them coming back - often. Every year, the child must buy a new toy and get a new code to continue playing on the site, else they lose all they have earned. This isn’t going to sit well with Parents, who are already having to call around to find these things before the sell out (usually within an hour of arrival).
The persistent web community is driving demand for these toys WAY beyond beanie babies: Ebay features Webkinz on their front page pretty much all the time and there are usually around a dozen Webkinz auctions ending every minute.  The traffic on the website has rocketed past ty.com, the home of beanie babies, which had its peak two years back. Webkinz.com shows little sign of slowing down, either. According to this NYT article, the site now services about 3 million unique visitors.

This brilliant campaign has it all - and they did it without the help of major toy retailers. I find the the way the product drives traffic to the website, the quality of the activities, the community aspects, and the steady drive to buy more product inspiring. They even retire the plush toys rapidly to drive up their value as collectibles (baseball cards and coins are a lot easier to store, by the way, and once you use the unique secret code they’re worthless).

Tom Asacker has a funny post that looks at perception among different types of thinkers. He goes way beyond optimist vs. pessimist and concludes by asking, “how does a marketer see a glass that is half full/half empty?” to which there are now many interesting comments in response.
If you pick through the comments, you’ll find mine.

Thanks, Sue Pelletier, for calling this to our attention.

This LEGO sculptor built our logo (out of LEGO’s, obviously) for our trade show booth last year. We loved it. It tied beautifully into our “connected” theme which included a nice print mailer, and a lego-themed premium.

I’m mentioning him here because we finally noticed his hilarious case study about our logo on his web site. Now, if we had written something like that for our clients and posted it without approval, we probably would have gotten into a bit of trouble. But I love it, and I wish we could be as creative with our client case studies. This is typically tragically dull web content that he has made as fresh and fun as a logo made out of LEGOs.

Sao Paulo Brazil passed a law banning outdoor billboards. The law mandates that all billboards must be removed by December 31, but the effects are already being spotted, as shown in this flickr photo set.

One Flickr comment mentions that Memphis has been doing this for years. That makes two billboard-free cities that I didn’t have on my vacation wish list anyway. Without billboards, who will remind us to turn off at the next exit for gas, burgers, and shoes? I foresee a massive highway logjam of gasless cars occupied by angry desperate people with gasless bellies and shoeless feet.

Imagine what it would be like if we banned billboards, unsolicited phone calls, spam, and direct mail? Then what if we all TIVO’d over commercials, tore out ads from magazines, and continued to ignore website banner ads? We would no longer be told to rush to a low-quality furniture store for insane bargains. We would no longer be told to buy a car because it has “V6 Power” or the best somethingorother in it’s class, which might be no big deal since we usually have no idea what other cars are in this supposed class, why the somethingorother is important, nor who decided that it is the best of whatever-it-is in it’s class of whatever-they-are-s.

We would also probably be unaware of a cure for cervical cancer. We wouldn’t hear about a better/faster/cheaper/easier/cooler way to do (fill in your favorite/hated thing to do). And we wouldn’t know what station to turn to and when to catch our favorite game, drama, movie, or radio show. Yet I agree that the world could survive without Deal or No Deal.

I’m not really sure how I feel about removing billboards. The photo essay is romantic and inspiring - that a city can choose to make a drastic and sweeping change against the tides in an effort to improve it’s quality of life. At the same time, when you look at the pictures, the city appears to be left with a lot of derelict rusty frames mounted atop a sea of urban blight. It’s hard to imagine a billboard as doing any worse visual damage to a countryside than a skyscraper, power plant, or condominium complex. If anything, it’s the billboards that breathe life and color into an otherwise dull and lifeless cityscape.

What I think we need are better billboards and ads. We can choose to inspire, motivate, encourage, and educate, rather than manipulate, brainwash, shock, and con. Maybe the law merely has to mandate that the billboard cannot suck.

UPDATE: A billboard for a billboard company that adds to my argument can be seen here.

Thanks Gogi for the tip on this photo set.

Techcrunch had some coverage of Box.net, a new service that allows you to easily store and share files publicly or privately. Marketers may find it interesting because one of the ways you can use it is on your website or blog to make the sharing of relevant files really easy for users. The widget is completely re-brandable and you can decide whether to allow public file uploads. For example:

At the recent Exhibitor show I visited a few booths devoted to lead retrieval and lead management that puts more power in the hands of the exhibitor. Often times the lead retrieval systems offered by show management are overpriced and offer little customization features to help with campaigns and post-event follow-through.

Owning your own lead retrieval system and taking it from show to show allows you to make the most of this sensitive piece of customer interaction. For example, you can swipe their badge and write notes on a strip of cash register receipt, or you can have the user swipe their own badge, answer a few questions on a touch screen, select the information they want to receive, and even download materials to their USB Memory drive. You can control the amount of information you want to gather, build a question structure that is sensitive to the customer’s job title, buying power, or readiness to buy. You can also automate the fulfillment of materials and speed up the sales follow-up cycle.

Once you have the leads, you have to do follow-up. At least one vendor was offering to take all your leads and deal with them. They sort, scrub, and transmit the leads to appropriate people in the sales force, and offer a variety of fulfillment needs as well.

Here are the vendors that stood out to me, in no particular order:

Capture Technologies offers a software package that enables companies to develop their own lead retrieval systems, including self-service kiosks that can deliver personalized content and follow-through.

Lead Wizard offers a PDA-based lead retrieval system that can handle bar codes and magnetic stripe badges. It does not transmit the leads as you get them but it stores them locally for easy import into Salesforce or several other CRM systems.

CardScan, the business card scanner people, had a neat Lead Qualifier package. You order a customizable pad of mini surveys which feature self-adhesive areas to which you attach your prospect’s business card. They fill out the survey questions on the sheet and feed the whole thing through one of their slick little scanners. In a couple of seconds you have all their contact information and their survey data in an application that you can use to deliver additional information on screen or automatically fulfill their requests. I like the paper backup it provides, and the fact that it not only circumvents the expensive lead retrieval database fees, but it even works at shows that don’t have coded badges at all.

Event Technologies will retrieve your leads, then manage and distribute them, following up directly with emails as directed.

Haven’t heard of an “unconference“? Then you’re in the majority, but the growing unconference community, mostly on the west coast, and mostly in the web development community, may be wondering why there aren’t more unconferences, and fewer traditional conferences.

I have to be honest - I’m new to the term “unconference” so I had to do some digging research. Most of the unconferences I found take place in Southern California, which may explain why we’re relatively immune to them up here in New England. But I love the idea. In fact, some of the aspects of an unconference are precisely what I recently spoke about at Exhibitor 2007.

An unconference is a conference inside-out. For starters, the content is dictated by the attendees rather than the conference organizers and speakers. This is typically facilitated through an online wiki where prospective attendees can openly shape the focus of the event. Then, the sessions are basically open-format brainstorming among the attendees rather than a lecture by a speaker or a panel. According to Wikipedia, this format is pretty much the same as Open Space Technology - a meeting format pioneered over 20 years ago. But whether you call it unconference or O.S.T., this idea’s time may have finally arrived. It is to conferences what Web 2.0 is to the internet - a paradigm shift in the direction content flows and the role the audience plays. Like Web 2.0, an unconference gets it’s content from it’s users, and users are free to voice their opinions about the content, the agenda, or the entire notion of the event. More importantly, users are free to take away what they can from these events - typically immensely valuable ideas and networking connections. Call it Conference 2.0, I guess.

In my session at Exhibitor, which was called “Building Larger and More Connected Audiences - Online and Onsite”, I talked about using Blogs and other web tools to allow meeting organizers to share the discussion points with their audience in advance, and give the audience a chance to react and voice opinions and ideas. This alignment process would make every meeting more effective for audience and speaker alike. I believe this is the very least meeting organizers need to do in order to accomodate web2.0 audiences at their event. Give them a voice.

Unconferences will clearly never replace conferences. But conference organizers may serve their audiences well to incorporate lessons from the unconference into their conference planning. Folks who attend unconferences speak loudly about how much more they get out of unconferences than from conferences. A conference may need to engage their audience early and communicate more than just the goals and objectives of a meeting but the content itself. After they have given their audience a chance to adjust the content to best suit their needs, conference organizers may want to schedule one or more sessions in the O.S.T. format, perhaps even using the term “unconference” if they want geek cred, in order to support those attendees who want an open format to collaborate and generate totally new ideas.

Here are those references I promised:

Wikipedia Definition of Unconference and O.S.T

CNN, Why “unconferences” are fun conferences

Kaliya Hamlin’s Blog, unconference

An article from Dave Winer’s Blog, Scripting News Annex

Recently at the Exhibitor Show in Las Vegas I was given a promotional pen from Nimlok, a national provider of exhibit structure solutions. The pen has a great feel - strong, heavy, metal with fine details and a smooth interlocking ‘click’ between cap and body. It feels precise, solid, and reliable - like any booth structure should be. I felt this pen captured their brand perfectly. Sure - it’s just a pen, but if you had to ask your company “What kind of pen are we?” what would you expect for an answer?

Would your company be a cheap bic, a neon roller, a fake designer, an ergo, a space pen, a genuine Mont Blanc, or a fountain pen with platinum nib and radioactive carcinogenic rhodamine ink?

With every promotional item you dispense, you have the opportunity to extend your brand into the lives of your customers and prospects. With so many options it seems a shame to see exhibitors sporting heaps of crummy pens that effectively advertise their lack of creativity.

So here are some pen ideas for you to consider for future campaigns, ranging roughly from inexpensive to executive-level:

A perennial favorite: The syringe pen.

This pen contains post-it flags in the body of the pen.

The pen pictured and described above is a steel Cosmonaut found on Fresh Promotions.

This one projects your logo on the wall.
Your customers keep forgetting things? This pen has a voice recorder built in.

How about a pen that contains a stylus and a laser pointer?

Here’s a pen that cleans your camera lens, but strangely and sadly has no actual writing capability.

I’m not sure what message this sends, but this pen contains a breathalyzer.
But they may need it after using this pen with a built-in bottle opener and can tab-lifter.
Here’s a pen gadget-gone-wild that contains a USB Memory drive, a laser pointer, a flashlight, and (oh, yeah) a pen.

And here’s a tiny silver pen so sleek, it fits in the fold of a mens wallet. Nice.