Innovasium Interactive

The WInd

2007-09-17T08:39:00.000-07:00

Guess who this guy is?

Cadbury Gorilla Goes Viral In The Air Tonight

2007-09-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

The video was originally posted at a Website called, Cadbury Dairy Milk - A Glass And A Half Full Productions, where it says this about the creative:

"Drumming gorillas, Phil Collins and Glass And A Half Full Productions? Well it just seemed like the right thing to do. There's no clever science behind it - it's just an effort to make you smile, in exactly the same way Cadbury Dairy Milk does. And that's what we aim to continue to do; simply make you smile."

What's a Wiki?

2007-07-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

So what is a Wiki anyway? How can I use it for my business or personal life? Isn't it just a big encyclopedia online? Here's an explaination "in plain English"

(Actually Wikipedia is the ultimate online encyclopedia that lets you be the editor... So long Britannica! )

What is RSS?

2007-07-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

Curious to know what all the buzz is about RSS? Here it is "in plain English"

Ask a Ninja about Podcasting

2007-07-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

So you want to know what a Podcast is.... Well, just Ask a Ninja

“Shiny Toy Guns” in MySpace

2007-06-27T10:57:00.001-07:00

Part of our job at Innvoasium is to keep you in touch with what’s happening on the Internet. So it’s a gift when we turn on the news and see Liz West at CityTV gushing about a band that’s used MySpace to grow their fan base.

The alternative band Shiny Toy Guns has leveraged the power of the Internet and My Space to build their business. Lead singer, Jeremy Dawson stated (roughly paraphrased) on CityTV, “Yeah, I could stand on a corner and hand out flyers but you’d be like who the hell is this guy? Better to have our online friends tell others about us.”

And Shiny Toy Guns friends have spread the word, they have over 250,545 friends and had over 5, 375, 814 views on their page. http://www.myspace.com/shinytoyguns

Shiny Toy Guns also uses the profile information from their MySpace friends to determine where they were going to tour and play. Their tour covers the US, Canada, the UK, England and Sweden.

Shiny Toy Guns has been getting lots of attention on e-music web sites but little to no play time on the radio. Finally they’re getting the attention of industry insiders. They’re anticipated to be “The Next Big Thing!”

So if you do hear Shiny Toy Guns on the radio in the next few months, you’ll know that their success was generated by the Internet!

The Phenomenal YouTube

2007-06-27T10:56:00.002-07:00

YouTube grew by an astounding 616% between April 2006 and April 2007.

616%

Imagine if your boss told you that he was going to increase the sales goals of your company by 616% in a one year period, you’d quit. It’s not realistic. It’s phenomenal.

So what does this phenomenon mean to marketers?

There are three interesting marketing trends to watch with regards to YouTube

Word of Mouth Trend

One of the most moving videos I’ve seen on YouTube is “Free Hugs.”

Originally created by “Juan Mann”, Free Hugs has been viewed almost 16,000,000 times on YouTube. It’s inspired similar videos around the world including Australia, Korea, Amsterdam, Italy and Japan. And a World-wide Hug Day was organized in response to the video.
“Juan Mann” received international recognition for his kindness and was interviewed locally in Australia and by Oprah Winfrey.
Juan Mann claims that he had no ulterior motives – he’s not collecting names, phone numbers or addresses. He simply wanted to share a hug and bring some happiness into people’s lives. He clearly accomplished his goal.

Brand Created Entertainment Content

One stand out case – Evolution by Dove.

Initially posted on YouTube, the video “Evolution” made it around the world in just a few days. In just hours, three times more people viewed the Evolution video than watched the Super Bowl. Currently YouTube records over 9 million views and that doesn’t include the people who saw the clip on the news or talk shows.

Consumer Driven Product Advertising

User driven content means that you have to accept the good, the bad and the ugly.

Search M & Ms Candy on YouTube. There numerous videos many are uploaded by consumers and some of the content is not pretty….eating M&Ms from between their toes, eating 100 M&Ms in 5 seconds. But there are also some creative uploads – the M&Ms Addams Family is really clever.

User driven creative is valuable because it shows that the user is attached to the brand. True consumer generated content is inspired because of love of the brand

Consumer Driven Content is not the same as no the same as a Consumer Contest. A consumer contest means that consumers are participating because they want to win. There’s an incentive. Heinz Ketchup is running a contest on YouTube until mid-August. The winner who creates the best Heinz Ketchup ad will receive $57,000 and their ad on TV! So far, Heinz has received 645 entries and the average entry gets viewed 400 times – that’s over 250,000 times that somebody somewhere has watched a Heinz ad.

Multi-Channel Product Advertising

Chevy had what seemed to be a great Multi-Channel Advertising Campaign. The 2007 Tahoe was featured on and promoted through Donald Trump's The Apprentice, where the two teams put together a show for the top General Motors employees to learn about the new Tahoe. During the same program, Chevy launched a series of ads announcing an online contest apprenticechevy.com The online contest challenged viewers to create a commercial for the new Tahoe by entering text captions into the provided video.

During the contest, Chevy received over 22,000 entries. While many of the entries were sincere ads, Chevy also received numerous negative ads focusing on the fuel consumption of the vehicle. Environmentalists took the opportunity to produce spoof videos and published them on YouTube. A YouTube search on Chevy Tahoe produced 800 videos with the most viewed parody “The Ultimate Padded Cell” generating 9000 views. Was this all negative? Not necessarily, the word of mouth on YouTube was ultimately beneficial to Chevrolet and contributed to the 4 million page views, 400,000 unique visitors and 22,000 ad submissions on their site.

The microsite http://www.aprrenticechevy.com/ attracted 629,000 visitors. On average, those visitors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks running, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many requested info or left a cookie trail to dealers' sites.

Ed Peper, Chevrolet’s general manager, commented on the success of the campaign, “So, a few media pundits seem to think this social media program was a failure and others seem to revel in the apparent anarchy. In our opinion, this has been one of the most creative and successful promotions we have done.”

So how do we evaluate the success of a campaign?

Methods of Evaluation in YouTube Campaigns

Views – how many people watched your video on YouTube?
Ratings – did you get a 1 – 5 star rating?
Comments – how many comments did you receive? Where they favourable?
Favourited – how many people chose your video as a favourite?
Links – How many people linked to or embedded your video?
Embedded
Mash-ups – Was your video or elements of your video used by viewers to create a new message?
Chatter beyond the posting – Think about “World-wide Hug Day” – that’s chatter.

The Edge of SEO

2007-06-27T10:56:00.001-07:00

We all realize that Internet users have evolved, they‘re no longer gatherers of information. They want to be interactive and engaged contributors.

The challenge is determining which elements are interactive and also attractive to search engine spiders. Some Web 2.0 interactive elements such as AJAX, widgets, Flash, podcasts, and video are inherently inhospitable to search engine spiders, rendering them dazed and confused. That’s one reason why Innovasium always creates hybrid sites so we can avoid rejection by spiders.

There are a few simple new ways to interact with online visitors that dramatically increase your SEO. One way is a blog. Blogs are adored by Spiders – especially Google. That’s why we added a Blog to our Innovasium site. Blogs are textually rich, have relevant links, are frequently up-dated and are rooted in semantic language. Blogs also allow you to communicate with your audience about product trends, internal and external events and industry news. And blogs allow you to get immediate response from your audience – positive or negative – it provides you with valuable consumer insight.

RSS and XML are inherently search engine friendly. That's because an RSS feed is an XML file, and XML is text rich with semantic markup. The problem lies in the fact that RSS isn't yet well supported within traditional Web search. It is within certain vertical engines, like Google Blog Search and Technorati.

We’ve added an RSS Feed to Innovasium. Not only does it improve our SEO, it keeps us and our clients on the edge of interactive technology and marketing. If these are areas that you’re interested in subscribe to our feed so you too can keep on the edge.

Are blogs just a lot of “blah-blah”?

2007-06-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

Consider the facts:
There are over 1.4 million postings every day.
There are 120,000 new blogs started every day.
Half of the Fortune 500 Companies blog.
42% of all Canadians have read a blog
Blog use* is most popular among those:
With a household income of $60,000 or more
Men (48% vs women 35%)
Younger adults aged 18 – 34 (50%)
Those with post-secondary education (45%)

There are several benefits to blogging:

First , blogging can address many areas – Creativity, PR, Strategy, Influence, Conversation and Advertising. RBC was the first bank who used a blog as part of their strategy to attract a younger audience to their site by launching an Innovation Competition. The blog kept the audience up-to-date on the competition and the innovations offered. http://www.rbc.com/innovator/innovators_main.html
Most blogs are not as involved as the RBC example. Many allow the contributors the freedom to comment on their company, industry and current events. We think GM is doing a great job with their blog http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/
Second, blogging is immediate and responsive particularly if a corporation is facing a crisis. Blogs can address immediate concerns without following the tedious process of agency involvement or the slow responsiveness of TV and newspapers. The blog’s role in crisis communications is:
to disseminate the facts, staying ahead of the news cycle
to project a company’s message
and to combat error and quash rumours
Here is a forum of PR experts commenting on using blogs in a crisis. http://www.globalprblogweek.com/archives/blogging_in_a_crisis.php

Third, blogging can support the brand’s voice.
Score Magazine uses its blogs to clearly position itself as experts and leaders in the golf industry commenting not just on golf tournaments and products but even on golf and government. This blog builds relationship not just with their readers but with golf courses and their advertisers. http://www.scoregolf.com/blog/bob-weeks/2007/June/ontario-governement-tourism-ads-forget-golf.cfm

Fourth, blogs can build community among employees and shareholders. Check out WalMart’s Associates blog. http://www.walmartfacts.com/LifeAtWalmart/

So are blogs a lot of blah-blah? I think not. Blogging is an effective method of communicating with your clients, your audience and your industry.
*Ipsos-Reid June 2005