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The first Social Media Single: “Credit Crunch Christmas” by Micky P. Kerr

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:24:09 +0000

Earlier this week I shared how Peter Hartey, a recent attendee of the Social Media Starter Course was seeing some fantastic online success around a social media project he launched after attending the course in October.

Hot on the heels of Peter’s good news, I’ve been contacted by another Social Media Starter Course attendee with details of a fascinating social media project, this time featuring a Christmas single!

Liam Walsh of Ask Me PR is currently promoting an inventive musician’s Credit Crunch-themed Christmas single using social media.

Now bands and musicians using the web to promote themselves is pretty much de riguer these days; Lily Allen’s record label, Parlophone are using a viral game to promote her next album.

What is interesting in Liam’s case is that the musician in question, Leeds-based Micky P. Kerr has combined a rather witty YouTube video with a light hearted poke at the ‘current economic climate’, to great result and the comments on YouTube bear him out.

The Credit Crunch Christmas track, out on new indie label, Modern English has been picked up by UK radio including BBC Radio 1, Radio 2, BBC 6 Music and Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin).

Here it is! Enjoy.

It would appear that social media is having quite an impact on the charts this Christmas; already there is a big social media groundswell around getting Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to Christmas Number 1 over X Factor winner Alexandra Burke’s version.

The ‘Jeff Buckley for Xmas no 1′ Facebook Group now has 121,057 members and is growing rapidly. As one wise Twitterer noted, Sony, the label behind both tracks will be laughing all the way to the bank!

What do you think?

Which song captures the spirit of this year’s Christmas best for you: Credit Crunch Christmas or Alexandra Burke’s cover of Hallelujah?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image credit: dannybrown.me

4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 4

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:52:03 +0000

I’ve been sharing my notes from Channel 4’s 4Talent Inspiration Session on Online Communities. A one day intensive workshop on building and growing successful online communities, it took place as part of Birmingham’s first digital festival, Hello Digital.

This post covers my notes from Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr’s talk.

What I’ve shared so far:

Part 1 – Community Consultant Ed Mitchell’s talk on talk on public sector online community initiatives

Part 2 – Emma Monks, Senior Manager, Moderation and Safety at teen friendly virtual world, Habbo Hotel’s talk on teen behaviour on Habbo

Part 3 – Ally Branley, Community Manager at Channel 4′s tips on community management

Before I start, I must warn you that this is a pretty long blog post.

The usual disclaimer: I have typed up my hastily scrawled notes from a busy workshop session here, attempting to reproduce my favourite quotes and tips ‘in Heather’s own words’. If you attended Heather’s talk and read anything erroneous in the paragraphs that follow, please shout out in the comments.

Heather started off by sharing that she is Canadian, born to English parents who emigrated before birth. Lives in San Francisco. She showed this cool slide with the words:

“A Cannon will be fired during this performance.”

Having said that, if someone passed round a swear box during her talk, it would have had very few coins in it.

Graduated with an Art degree in 1986, can’t remember where from. “My year of Ennui Sandwiches.”

Her degree included no business classes, she was taught to paint etc. Self-taught graphic designer, learned Photoshop 1.0, when there was only 1 layer and ‘Delete’.

Worked at Princeton, 1994 as a special projects manager. Whilst there(?), the School of Architecture introduced her to the web.

Web 1.0 about a push of content to the web. She worked as a web designer on projects for lots of failed Web 1.0 companies including AOL, Benetton and Cartier.

Started posting scanned pictures –self portraits of herself taken against reflective surfaces online at her site at Jezebel’s Mirror.

Started another site called Friends of Jezebel’s Mirror (FOJM) in 2000 where people could share their own self portraits, taken against reflective surfaces.

Combined her love of photography and community.

FOJM became The Mirror Project. She likes to think of people coming online as a project.

Flickr provides points for people to come in – interests, collaboration etc.

Heather’s heroes in the context of building online communities were a number of early early adopter websites and their owners. The ones I remember were:

From the mid-late 90s: A Woman on Fire; Kottke.org, The Fray, oscillate

2001, 2002 onwards: about personal storytelling, the web made it possible for people to share stories.

Examples: dooce.com, “grew up a Mormon no longer that way”. Transparent blogging about her life. Spoke about creativity at Blogher.

“Flickr is a multiverse of communities”.

They recently investigated their ‘darknets’, the people using Flickr in unconventional ways, much of this done by the guy(s) who algorithmically explore interestingness on Flickr.

They discovered a number of huge connected Indian families using Flickr to share family photos.

Heather interjected her talk with lots of great tips for community builders. Here’s the first:

Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #1:

Lead by example. Bubble up the good by leading to where you want to go.

Examples of great online communities:

MetaFilter – pioneering community blog/discussion site (my words not hers).

FilePile – closed community with unique content commenting tools ( my words not hers).

Threadless – great example of a niche community done good. She shared that the guys behind it have a great “Don’t be evil” mantra - large sense of social responsibility.

Flickr metrics:

3 billion views a month
2.9 billion photos (and video)
52 million monthly visitors
30 million members
5000 new uploads/minute

I think she said they make 5 copies of every image that could go up.

She joined Flickr 3 and a half years ago after the Yahoo acquisition.

Grown steadily since pre-launch in December 2003, all the way up to their “Oh sh*t” moment when Yahoo! closed down Yahoo! Photos in May 2007.

It was only in the US and English speaking countries until June 2007 when it launched in 7 languages.

Never did any marketing, grew by word of mouth. This is how like minded people came into communities.

Open – there are more ways of getting photos out of Flickr than in. Open APIs.

How it grew initially was the Flickr badge.

Photos on Facebook very different than on Flickr.

Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #2:

Figure out what really succeeds in certain aspects of community building and using these building blocks. Don’t re-invent the wheel.

The challenge:
Now there are 2.9 billion photos on Flickr. Specific voice and tone, a playfulness, how do we grow that? How do we deal with this when dealing with larger scale?

Heather’s tips for the future:

Increased regulation – concerned in the US because it is an Election Year. There is the issue of ‘Techno Panic’, getting across the reality of what online community is versus what the media think.

Online communities to step up and create best practices. There are cycles in online communities, debates that repeat themselves every so often.

Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #3:

Don’t create walled gardens.

Let people use photos. It’s the meta data, tags and titles that matter.

Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #4:

Don’t be afraid to make difficult decisions.

Once you’ve decided what isn’t appropriate, stick with those decisions.

What is a community manager? Shepherd, editor, cheer leader, advocate…

“Being a Community Manager is like being a piñata. People beat you with sticks and you still need to give them candy”.

Definitely my favourite quote of the day.

On a filtering system:

Flickr use a 3 point ‘categorisation’ system:

Safe content – Moderate content – Restricted Content

Consequently, appropriateness is classified by content rather than by artistic nature.

There are those who will think the Terms Of Service are great for everybody else but not for them.

It’s about the rights of individuals versus the rights of community.

“Teeter-totters around this melcrum.”

What it takes to be a good community manager: good judgement, diplomatic, sense of humour, thick skin.

She shared about Flickr’s flagging system which allows them to make very granular decisions in terms of actions.

There are email response times of between 4 hours and 3 days and a high priority queue for reporting abuse, response time: 24 hours.

Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #5:

Communicate expectations.

Ensure your Terms of Service are ‘human readable’. Flickr go one further and have Flickr Community Guidelines which she helped put together. Not a list of ‘Don’ts’ but a list of Dos.

Twitter and Vimeo based their community guidelines on Flickr’s!

Build in tools that let members let you know when stuff is offensive. For example on Flickr, if a photo is flagged several times, the (creator’s) account is flagged.

Let users block other users. If you are blocked: you can’t comment on the user’s photos, sets, you are removed from contacts, cannot favourite their photos etc.

Don’t moderate language. At this point, Emma from Habbo Hotel added that on Habbo they let teens turn their ‘swear filter’ on or off.

Heather doesn’t think community managers should be net nannies. You are adults, create spaces online where we as adults take responsibility.

Communicate! Give members the tools to allow you to scale.

Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #6:

Don’t wait to inform about change

She gave an example about how Flickr waited 18 months to inform users that they would need a Yahoo! ID for Flickr. They informed users 6-8 weeks before the change.

She also shared about the ‘Wii’ incident when pictures tagged ‘Wii’ were pulled into a Yahoo! page put together for the Wii, without checking the license on each photo.

She showed a cool overlay illustrating how the images being shared changed from pictures of the Wii to images that said ‘Yahoo! sucks’ because the community found out what was going on.

“Have an overall respect for content – legal and right and respectful.”

“Don’t burn through goodwill through bad decisions.”

Change is hard – Stewart Butterfield initially started Flickr to share pictures with his grandmother.

I noticed that when she attributed photos from Flickr in her slides, she always used the following convention:

cc Photographer’s Name FlickrPhotoURL

Interesting.

Make lemonade – don’t take the entire site offline if you can, make rolling changes.

When maintenance work had to be done on Flickr, they ran a competition asking people to print off an image they were using as a splash page and to upload a picture of themselves doing something creative with it.

The prize was a Flickr Pro account.

It was so successful they gave away 15 Pro accounts and also added 3 months free Pro membership to the accounts of everyone who took part.

Should you have ‘news story’ issues that can rapidly scale out of hand, she recommended doing a round robin or setting up a tag team to monitor the issue on the site.

To illustrate, she shared the example of when a thief uploaded pictures of a break-in to a company’s offices onto Flickr by mistake. Flickr had to be up on the issue as tons of new members joined the community when the news broke.

Another example – when Flickr enabled geo-tagging of pictures, a gentleman uploaded 83 photos from islands around Greenland(?) to spell the F word!

This outpouring of creativity was met with tools that made it possible to hide inappropriate pictures from others on Flickr after they are uploaded.

That’s it! Heather shared a lot more than that, faster than I could write and I only noted the points that stood out to me. Great talk…

Next up is my notes from the small group session. Some fantastic and very specific advice on community building from the pros and some very knowledgeable delegates. Goes live tomorrow.

On this and some of the other presentations…

What do you think?

Which is your favourite community building tip?

Let me know in the comments.

UPDATE: A little swamped with other work to post my notes from the small group sessions here. However, I will make the effort if people ask specifically. Leave me a comment and let me know.

4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 3

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:03:58 +0000

Here is installment number 3 in my notes from Channel 4’s 4Talent Inspiration Session on Online Communities at Birmingham’s first digital festival, Hello Digital.

This post features my notes from Ally Branley, Community Manager at Channel 4′s talk.

Speakers at the 4Talent Inspiration Session on Online Communities were:

Community Consultant Ed Mitchell whose talk on public sector online community initiatives I’ve already presented.
Emma Monks, Senior Manager, Moderation and Safety at teen friendly virtual world, Habbo Hotel whose fascinating presentation on teen behaviour at Habbo Hotel you can read here.
Ally Branley, Community Manager at Channel 4 whose insightful tips on community management I will be presenting here.
Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr, the world’s largest photo-sharing site whose talk I will be presenting tomorrow.

The 4Talent Inspiration Session on Online Communities was a one day series of talks and small group sessions aimed at helping web content creators and online community managers build, grow and manage successful online communities.

Here come my notes from Ally Branley’s talk.

After a brief introduction on her journey from working on one of the first student intranet radio services to working on popular TV shows like The Big Breakfast, The Word and So Graham Norton, Ally presented a number of tips for budding community managers.

Ally Branley’s Tips for Budding Community Managers:

Think hard about the difference between an audience and a community.
What’s your long term plan? Think about running costs. Where is it going?
Pre-moderation, the facility to prevent unsuitable user comments from going live, can be a significant cost, be careful.
Embrace fan sites: examples include the Deal or No Deal fansite dond.co.uk, HollyBebo, a Bebo group created by a fan that has over 89,000 members.

Other notable points:

It’s hard for a big brand to try and launch into a space based around ‘betas’, they are in the spotlight from the word go.

Communities aren’t launched, they grow.

What’s changed? “People want to comment as they’re watching TV.”

Channel 4’s new project The TV Show attempts to address this.

As community manager for Channel 4, Ally oversees over 20 community tools ranging from the Big Brother and Hollyoaks forums to PictureThis, a community site dedicated to helping photographers improve their skills.

Ally’s heroes in online community are the new stars created by combining offline activity with online personality.

One example is Big Brother on the Streets presenter Tom Thurlow who films short interviews with people on the street about the hit TV show.

That’s it! Tomorrow I’ll be posting my notes from Heather Champ, Flickr’s Director of Community’s talk.

What do you think?

For all you community managers reading this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how effective pre-moderation is at stopping trolls.

Please share your experiences in the comments.

Oh, and on a small note, we are up 12 places to #63 on the UK’s Top 100 Marketing Weblogs. Here’s the most recent list.

4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 2

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:57:25 +0000

I’m sharing my notes from Channel 4’s 4Talent Inspiration Session on Online Communities at Birmingham’s first digital festival, Hello Digital.

Featuring illustrious speakers like:

Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr, the world’s largest photo-sharing site
Emma Monks, Senior Manager, Moderation and Safety at teen friendly virtual world, Habbo Hotel
Community Consultant Ed Mitchell
Ally Branley, Community Manager at Channel 4

it was an intensive series of talks and small group sessions aimed at helping web content creators and online community managers build, grow and manage successful online communities.

The first post, an introduction to the speaker presentations, introduced Community Consultant Ed Mitchell who shared a number of interesting case studies featuring some public sector online community initiatives.

This is second post focuses on the meat of Emma Monks of Habbo Hotel’s talk.

As before I’ll start with my usual disclaimer: what follows has been typed up (and summarised in parts) from my busy notes on the day.

If you were there and recognise something that wasn’t, please correct me in the comments.

Emma started off by sharing that she is not signed up to any of the social networking services; she neither blogs nor twitters. However, she has spent the last few years managing one of the world’s largest teen virtual worlds, Habbo Hotel.

She mentioned that early on when a tag cloud was introduced on Habbo, the members found a way to manipulate it into saying rude words! Funny…

Emma’s interesting biography is on the Hello Digital website. Some of the other things I noted from her introduction to her talk:

She persuaded BT to give her a server to use as an IRC channel. Within days(?) she had 40,000 chatters on her server and was landed with a £2000 phone bill.

Soon after that she decided that if she was going to get involved in online communities, she’d make sure she was paid to do so.

She worked on an online community project at Line One (now Tiscali) that allowed people to confess their worst sins. The community then voted on whether the person should be damned.

I think she said this site lives on in some form at Tiscali.

She worked at AOL for a period of time and then moved on to Habbo as “AOL got a bit too big”.

Habbo is a virtual world comprised of 18 virtual hotels. There are 18 community managers and 220 moderators. Emma co-ordinates the community managers and moderators.

She added at this point a note to aspiring community managers:

Community Building Tip #1: Think about how you will moderate your community and what the potential problems are.

On to some stats for Habbo Hotel:

There are 111 million registered Habbo characters and the site receives 9.5 million browsers per month.

It’s a way for teens to express themselves.

Members sign up for an account (free and monthly subscriptions available) and receive a virtual ‘room’ they can customise using ‘furniture’ and graphics provided within the virtual world.

Some of the graphics is free but members can also buy furniture using an in-game currency.

There is no way to share real life likeness within the virtual world; members are not allowed to upload images of themselves.

The user base is split 56% boys 44 % girls.

63% are 13-16 years old.

92% are at school.

Another tip for aspiring community managers:

Community Building Tip #2: Never expect what you’ve built to be used in the way you expect it to.

At this point she showed us some amazing pictures of rooms designed by ‘residents’ at Habbo Hotel using the most unusual furniture to create very grand artistic pieces.

The community managers at Habbo expected the residents to make regular rooms out of the furniture provided. Instead some created rooms designed like the Titanic, a train emerging out of a tunnel, a racing car and some other inventive abstract pieces, making unusual use of some of the in-game furniture. They seemed to favour using the cheapest items available(?): a doormat, a room separator.

Habbo have found it easy to bring people together for a common cause.

They were able to bring together 250,000 residents for an International Peace Day on 21st September.

She showed us a video of one of the rooms in which the teens gathered showing speech bubbles of “Peace … and love” (and words to that effect) in a number of different languages.

Their enthusiasm for the International Peace Day showed that teens really latch on to causes. They are doers. There is a lot of creative heroism and some of this is expressed in using virtual items in unusual ways.

At this point she showed us some interesting video clips of avatars (characters?) from popular massively multi-player online role playing game, World of Warcraft, dancing alongside singers in popular music videos.

The videos ranged from from Michael Jackson to Meatloaf(?) to Britney’s Toxic; it was an amusing few minutes. If you’re reading this and have seen any of those out on the wild internet, please share a link in the comments. Thank you!

She said people form communities in the virtual world and then create them in the real world.

On other successful examples of online communities:

Emma expressed admiration for the forums on moneysavingexpert.com where posters are actively using the forum as online diaries.

They literally have ‘thread diaries’ which encourage comment and support around a particular goal.

The example I noticed showed someone sharing how they planned to live on £4,000 for a year.

“People like to do everything in one place and use what is provided.”

“Forums are so supportive in a way that blogs are not. Already built into the community”.

Key points (for online community creators):

Don’t be too rigid with off-topic rules.
Create outlets for creativity.
Don’t be too precious about your ‘vision’.
Poll users regularly and let their feedback guide you.

Emma’s vision for the road ahead:

Total disclosure of personal details loses its appeal. Example: Lisa Locket on MySpace, clear example of ‘oversharing’ on the web
Anonymity and projecting one’s personality through a character becomes popular again (At this point she added “Habbo doesn’t let users create profiles.”)
More legislation – tools for players to report user generated content
Safety tips easily accessible on kids/teen services
Age verification – on minors? How!?
Defined notice and takedown times – 4 hours for teens?
Parents guide prominently displayed

Community Building Tip #3: Build in tools to help you moderate the community effectively.

Make sure you have systems in place that show you why people are being ejected when that happens. Put an automated report system in place.

That’s it! Of my notes anyway.

Impressed? I was…

What do you think about the idea that total disclosure of personal details will lose its appeal in this ‘age of Facebook’? I’d love to know your thoughts. Share… in the comments.

Next up: Ally Branley, Community Manager at Channel 4’s talk. Live tomorrow.

4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 1

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:37:04 +0000

I spent an illuminating day in the West Midlands on Sunday learning about building, growing and managing online communities.

It was great to attend an Inspiration Session on Online Communities put on by Channel 4’s 4Talent arm as part of the Hello World conference strand of Birmingham’s first digital festival, Hello Digital.

My guides for the day were industry luminaries like Heather Champ, Flickr’s Director of Community, Emma Monks, Senior Manager, Moderation and Safety, Habbo Hotel, Community Consultant Ed Mitchell, and Ally Branley, Community Manager at Channel 4.

It was great to learn from such experienced community managers and the experiences shared by the 19 other attendees made for a plethora of notes which I will attempt to distil into a number of blog posts.

Hats off to the team at 4Talent who put together an incredibly illuminating event.

This first blog post covers an introduction to the presentations by the panel speakers, in the order they were made.

And now for the all-important disclaimer: everything you read here is summarised from my hastily written notes. If you were there and read anything that you feel wasn’t, please pipe up in the comments.

First up was Ed Mitchell, a community consultant who was previously Production manager at UpMyStreet.com.

Ed’s introduction had the entire group sharing what the word ‘community’ meant to them in 5 words… on Post-It notes.

The unanimous feeling was that communities are about Interaction, Shared Interests and Conversation.

His slides are up on Slideshare and you can also read his blog post about the event. His ~~background~~ active work in online facilitation and community management and moderation ~~translates to work on sites~~ led to great examples like:

Ruralnet – a WordPress Multi-User site designed to aggregate information on living in rural communities.

2gether08 – a Channel 4-sponsored conference and website around using social media technologies.

Communities.cilip.org – a membership organisation that uses blogs to provide peer-to-peer support.

WhereIlive.org – a site for telling stories about Barnet, put together by one of the first social media managers in the public sector.

BristolWireless.net – a local community co-operative, online. No login required to participate.

WhoWants ToBe.co.uk – using the web to create new forms of civic engagement.

Ed’s vision of the next two years is that there will be an even bigger shift to organisations listening and changing their organisational models, facilitated by social media/online communities.

Awareness of our impact on the environment would grow as would the notion of design as a process, a flow. It would be “less industrial and more about process”.

Next on was Emma Monks, Senior Manger, Moderation and Safety, Habbo Hotel, the popular teen friendly virtual world.

In the interests of brevity, I’ll be publishing my notes from her talk tomorrow!

Where you at Hello Digital? How was it for you? Leave us a comment here or on the Hello Digital feedback page.

75% of UK Facebook Users Would Not Purchase a Product or Service from a Brand’s Profile page

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:22:19 +0000

That was one of the findings of a fascinating report on Social Network Marketing in the UK sent to me by the author, Tom Chapman of www.socialnetworkmarketinguk.com.

According to the report, UK MySpace users are even less likely to purchase a product or service from a brand’s profile page: 79% of UK MySpace respondents state they would not purchase a product or service from a brand via their profile page.

Weighing in at just 47 pages, the ‘Social network marketing, engagement marketing and brands’ report, to give it its full title, is an insightful overview on how brands and agencies as varied as the BBC, MediaCom and Holler have tapped into the popular social networks in the UK. Tom is giving away free copies of the report on his website, to receive one simply sign up to the mailing list.

The Social Network Marketing in the UK report includes interviews with brand executives including:

Sam Bailey, Head of Interactive BBC Radio 1 and the Chris Moyles Facebook page – the largest brand page on Facebook in the world with half a million fans.

Ted Hunt, Digital Manager, innocent drinks. Innocent have a 71% share of the £169m UK smoothie market.

James Kirkham, MD, digital agency Holler who developed the Channel 4 (or more correctly, E4) Skins brand page which is MySpace’s most successful UK brand page to date.

Matt Bamford-Bowes, Senior Account Director at global agency MediaCom who have developed branded pages for Mars on Facebook and MySpace.

Dom Cook, Director of Marketing and Content at MySpace UK

Key findings include:

Social network users unlikely to purchase products via profile page
Social network users would ignore brand promotions from friends
Social network users display loyalty to brands that communicate

Having been involved in social network promotion for clothing and lifestyle brand PUMA just five months ago, I’m only too aware of how much work brands have to do to win a user’s attention on social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

This report uncovers exactly what it takes to succeed.

Are you planning a social networking campaign for a brand or organisation?

What are your key considerations at this stage? What would you like to know more about?

Information on which metrics to cover: number of comments vs number of friends/fans?
Details on what kind of campaign to employ: application versus branded content?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Announcing The Winner of the 5 Day PUMA Manchester Giveaway

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:00:16 +0000

We have a winner!

Congratulations to Nathan Keller whose entry got the most votes in the 5 day ‘comment contest’ that was the 5 Day PUMA Manchester Giveaway.

Nathan wins 5 pairs of tickets to an exclusive Hadouken! gig at Manchester’s Moho Live on June 17th and a pair of USAN trainers from PUMA’s Runway Collection.

I’m looking forward to his review of the Hadouken! gig which will be published here on June 18th. Find out more about the gig at www.pumamanchester.com.

Many thanks to everyone who entered the 5 Day PUMA Manchester Giveaway. Now is the time to let me know how the contest can be improved.

I am already planning on engaging a web developer to improve the Comment Voting plugin we used; apologies to anyone this affected.

Any comments, queries or questions, leave them in the comments below.

Photo credit: programmation-python.org

The 5 Day PUMA Manchester Giveaway

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 26 May 2008 08:00:10 +0000

As part of PUMA’s hunt for Manchester’s most promising music talent, we’re giving away a pair of coveted USAN trainers from PUMA’s Runway Collection.

We’ve also got up for grabs 5 pairs of money-can’t-buy tickets to an exclusive gig featuring hotly tipped grime-disco masters Hadouken! at Manchester’s Moho Live on 17th June.

Also performing will be local bands hand picked by PUMA; if you’re in a Manchester band check out www.pumamanchester.com for details on how to bag a support slot at the gig. Your track may even be used in a PUMA marketing campaign!

To enter the 5-day PUMA Manchester giveaway
Leave a comment answering the following question:

“Who do you think is the most stylish person in the music world?”

That’s it!

To check out Hadouken! visit www.myspace.com/hadoukenuk

Competition Rules

This is a ‘comment contest’. Anyone can enter and anyone can vote on comments entered. Vote by clicking the Thumbs Up icon next to each comment.

Here are the rules:

Only one entry allowed per person.
You can only vote ONCE in the 5-day PUMA Manchester giveaway.
The comment that has the most votes at midnight on Friday 30th May wins!
The competition is open to anyone worldwide, but the tickets and trainers will only be delivered to a UK address. This means you may enter if you live outside the UK but have friends or relatives living in the UK who can take delivery of the prize on your behalf.
The winner must upload a gig review of the PUMA gig (with pictures) within 24 hours of the event.
The review must be published first on the Real Fresh TV website.

Entries can be submitted until 23:59 GMT on Friday 30th May. Entries after that will be ignored.

The winner will be announced at 09:00am on Monday 2nd June.

Good luck!

SMALL PRINT

• As PUMA’s gig on 17th June is in licensed premises, only those aged 18 or over may attend. Winners of this competition aged below 18 years will not be allowed to attend the gig.

• If the prize listed is not available in the winner’s size a PUMA product of an equal or higher value will be given.

• No cash alternative to prizes is available.

UPDATE:
Nathan Keller won the 5 Day PUMA Manchester Giveaway and you can read his review of the Hadouken! gig here.

Would You Promote Your Business Online Using a Sponsored Giveaway?

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:25:23 +0000

This post will come as no surprise as I have hinted several times that I am now looking to run future online giveaways on the Real Fresh TV site after the fantastic success of the first iPhone giveaway, flaws and all…

First, thanks again to Imran who left an insightful comment suggesting I look at running giveaways as a revenue earner for the site. He even went as far as suggesting that they may be better than Google AdSense.

Judging by anecdotal evidence on AdSense earnings on the vast majority of blogs, he is probably right.

Well, Imran, like minds think alike, as they say…

Whilst keeping an eye on votes as they came in for the iPhone giveaway on Saturday, it dawned on me that the real value of the iPhone giveaway has been the engagement shown by entrants as the competition progressed.

I have been amazed by people’s involvement with the giveaway, even after they made their entries.

As you probably know, the first few days of the first British iPhone giveaway were marred by malicious voting down of entries by a handful of determined site visitors.

We then had issues modifying the voting system used to prevent voting down of entries.

To accommodate all this disruption, I made a series of deadline extensions that probably caused the giveaway to lose momentum after its initial launch on Monday 5th November.

However, what has been overlooked so far is the great determination shown by the readers voting down other entries.

The voting system used on the site is designed to prevent people voting more than once for an entry. To vote down entries, one would have had to persistently visit the site and then vote down as many entries as possible. To be most effective, you would have to vote down entries as they were made. Even if you were using a proxy service, you still had to visit the site to vote.

My point is that by cheating, a small percentage of the competition entrants actually engaged with the competition over and above what I had expected of anyone entering the giveaway.

This leads me to believe that gadget giveaways can be used as an effective marketing and polling tool.

I’m currently developing a self-service addition to the site that allows users to purchase exclusive marketing and promotional services on the site by sponsoring 5 Day Gadget Giveaways.

Each gadget giveaway is managed by Real Fresh TV and includes a polling element (not unlike the poll used in our iPhone giveaway) and a suggest-a-winning-entry element, once again, not unlike the ‘suggest-a-TV-show-you’d-like-to-watch-on-an-iPhone’ question featured in the iPhone giveaway.

Real Fresh TV chooses a desirable gadget to give away. The promoter chooses the questions asked in the poll and also chooses the ‘suggest-a-winning-entry’ question.

Real Fresh TV promotes the giveaway on the site, providing daily updates and monitoring entrants for the promoter. Here’s a snapshot of our site engagement statistics. In addition, Real Fresh TV also asks each prize winner to submit a review of the prize, with pictures, to Real Fresh TV within 24 hours of receiving it as a way of keeping the rest of our audience involved.

The entry with the highest votes after 5 days wins the prize.

That’s the service in a nutshell.

The promoting company and promoted product or service receive daily promotion and marketing at every stage of the process, even after the prize has been delivered.

What do you think? Would you promote your business online in this way? Can you spot any obvious flaws?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image credit: bobstaake.com

Day 13 of the First British iPhone Giveaway

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 21:09:15 +0000

Image courtesy of T3

Now we’re cooking…

Competition in the first British iPhone giveaway is hotting up as the deadline approaches.

In the running so far we have:

3rd | Imran | The A Team 16 votes

Tied at 2 votes:

Ryan Todd | Prison Break
JC | Doctor Who
Mr Singh | Only Fools & Horses
Lunny | Lost

Tied at 1 vote:

There’s still over 24 hours to get your votes in.

Would be ace to see the top 3 get some competition…

The competition ends at midnight on Sunday 18th November.

The winner will be announced at 09:00 am GMT on Monday 19th November.