ChasNote

A few weeks ago Cisco’s agency, Neo@Ogilvy, asked FM to help create buzz heading into a new corporate brand campaign. Cisco’s upcoming campaign is built around the tagline, “Welcome to the Human Network.” And, in the spirit of “we just make the routers, it’s all of you who do the really cool stuff on top of those routers,” they decided to let their customers shape the meaning of that tagline.

Since the “human network” isn’t yet a well-defined phrase, they enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz, 43Folders’s Merlin Mann, Metafilter’s Matt Haughey, GigaOM’s Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News’s Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine’s Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing’s Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, Searchblog’s John Battelle and Make’s Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don’t see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the “human network” page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Truly open source advertising!

Just like the first version of an open source software app, however, we didn’t get it exactly right from the get-go. The initial thinking was, put up a definition of the “human network” on Wikipedia, and drive customers there to hone it and improve it. But as we explained the idea to the thought leaders (in order for them to write their definitions and create their own ads) several raised red flags, namely the community rules at Wikipedia that prohibit use of the site for commercial purposes. How lame would it be for us to launch a campaign around a page on Wikipedia that disappeared — evicted by the human network of Wikipedians! — before we drove the first person there to make edits?! So we reached out to Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) and Gil Penchina (Wikia CEO) and asked them how to do this right. By the end of the conversation, they convinced us to host the page at Wikia instead of Wikipedia, and Jimmy himself offered to post the seed definition.

Within the first 48 hours, 600 people had voted. And since the campaign empowered website authors to participate, build co-branded ads for their own sites and even contribute strategic input on the campaign overall, a few of the authors even plugged the campaign in editorial posts. Here’s Battelle’s at Searchblog.