ChasNote

At least twice a week I hear some variation of this question: “Gee, that conversational-marketing stuff is cool, but how does it scale?”

HP’s computer-skin design contest offers one answer. Back in September HP put out a call to artists who’d be interested in designing a notebook “skin” for an HP Pavillion, and 8,500 creations were submitted. HP then featured the winning design (by Joao Oliverira) in print ads to take the “Computer Is Personal Again” message to a significantly larger audience. Here it is, ripped from July’s issue of Wired:

Other examples: BMW, Dell, Haagen-Dazs and Intel sponsored Graffiti contests in Facebook.

Among Jeremiah Owyang’s Best and Worst Social Network Marketing round up, BMW’s Graffiti drawing contest in Facebook gets the top score.

Thanks, Jeremiah!

Hey, thanks, ValleyWag!

If it makes you uncomfortable to read mention of FM on ValleyWag without middle-fingers raised in the Battelle Salute, here you go.

FM’s Bill Brazell demonstrating Battelle Salute.

More on the BMW 1-Series Graffiti contest in Facebook here.

Including Cars.com’s KickingTires blog:

Stuart Elliott, the advertising and media columnist for the New York Times, makes BMW’s Graffiti contest in Facebook the topic of today’s column:

“Almost half the spending for the campaign, estimated at $15 million to $25 million, is being devoted to online media. By comparison, executives at BMW of North America say, Internet ad spending for other models ranges from 1 percent to 15 percent of the total ad budgets. The online elements of the 1-Series campaign include letting members of Facebook, the social-networking Web site, design virtual cars and send them to Facebook friends….”

“The goal has become ‘to give people a reason to engage with or participate in your advertising,’ said Patrick McKenna, manager for marketing communications at BMW of North America in Woodcliff Lake, N.J…. ‘We’re trying to let our hair down a bit and have some fun’ with the campaign, he added. That is evident in the offbeat ads being created for Facebook, which include the chance to design virtual cars.”

BMW’s Graffiti contest that invites Facebook users to color in outlines of 1-Series cars has done a few things very well.

One, ad units on Graffiti app pages within Facebook as well as websites outside of Facebook (eg, Boing Boing) are performing better because the campaign invites participation.

Two, it enlists a core group of active social-network participants (more than 9000 submissions in the first 7 days) into a fun, transparent evangelism effort: Participants spend, in many cases, hours personalizing images of BMWs that they then share with friends.

Three, it takes advantage of the friend-to-friend newsfeed mechanism at Facebook to spread word of the campaign beyond the paid media program.

Four, the concept and the images themselves are capturing the attention of bloggers, columnists and Twitterers, such as Facebook’s Dave Morin. Ben Barren’s headline captures it best: “i found a blog post about a twitter about bmw’s facebook campaign.” UPDATE 4/7: Stuart Elliott at NT Times dedicates a column to the campaign. Others pick-ups below.

I also love that BMW’s advertising in other areas of Facebook (through Facebook, not FM) integrates a single message across multiple media plans. With the Graffiti contest BMW built a killer idea that resonates especially with existing Facebook members, so why not show the Facebook audience that you’re hip to the applications they all enjoy? Here are some banners BMW ran elsewhere on Facebook:

Credits: The team that made this happen includes Brendan Starr at GSD&M; Jon Lor at DotGlu; Mark Kantor, Tim Suzman and Ted Suzman at Graffiti Wall; Jean Aw at NOTCOT; and FM’s Jen Tamez, Marcia Simmons, Liam Boylan, Matt Jessell and Lester Lee.

A small sampling of other coverage:

Auto site Top Speed:

Autoblog:

Han D Work blog:

Blog post and Twitter from Inusual Network:

Facebook’s senior platform manager Dave Morin twittered that BMW’s Graffiti contest “could be one of the most brilliant social media campaigns I’ve seen in a long time.” Thanks, Dave!

As BMW looks to the web to build buzz for the 1-Series, it is giving its video commercials an added boost: BMW is sponsoring Boing Boing TV with pre-roll “sponsored by” billboards and full commercials mid-segment. When Boing Boing fans embed episodes in their own sites (like I’ve done here), BMW’s campaign rides on Boing Boing’s viral coattails.

On Boing Boing TV’s site, this BMW banner runs alongside the video player.

Over the weekend BMW rolled out its What Drives You? contest in Facebook’s Graffiti. Participants choose from a library of outlines of the 1-Series:

Then they color them in — more than 2700 entries so far. On Sunday, submissions were rolling in at a rate of one per minute. Here are a few faves:

And as those participants color in their entries and/or become Fans, other Facebook friends hear about it in their Newsfeeds: