ChasNote

Dell launches Digital Nomads, a social media site where experts, Dell employees and visitors discuss their hopes and dreams for a better, more mobile future. And they’re inviting visitors to collaborate on a whitepaper that will define “digital nomads.”

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.

“Federated Media Packs Banner With Features And It Works” is the headline at AdRants. Thanks, AdRants!

Jeremiah Owyang says Dell has:

“taken the next step by assembling some of the winning drawings and created an emebeddable flash player that shows the art work being created in time-lapse style. Yes, you can see how the engaged community of artists hand drew each of these ads…. Now you should be sharing this with your creative team (see the initial case study) and start to think about how your brand can start listening to your customers –- and allowing them to tell your story, rather than you always having to use a megaphone.”

Congratulations, James Gross, Andrew Bowins and the rest of the crew at Dell and FM that put this together.

From James Gross’s site:

“It contains:
- a video player that redraws all six of the winning graffitis from the ReGeneration Contest. Currently runs on auto-play but could also be a click to play.
- At the top it pulls in the RSS feed from the latest post at ReGeneration.org
- an overlay that allow users to(more button):
- send to a friend
- subscribe to the RSS feed
- download the video
- embed the video on another site (like I’m doing)”

James asks his readers for feedback. Here’s the comment I posted:

“James–As you know, I’m a huge fan of this execution. Two things I especially like. One, while it’s sponsored by Dell, the content comes from its customers — Dell merely surfaces and promotes a real conversation (in this case, a visual conversation about the environment). Two, Dell encourages us to ’steal’ the content and share with other people we think might be interested. This strikes me as a new paradigm: Dell isn’t using ads as teasers to get us to its website, instead it’s giving us its brand assets to take with us.”

Dell’s ReGeneration Graffiti Contest here.

You careful ChasNote readers may have seen this coming when you read last month about Chevy’s sponsorship the Best of the Green Web project (or Dell’s sponsorship of a green drawing contest in Facebook’s Graffiti), but now it’s official. FM has launched its Green Federation, a collection of the best green-leaning sites online, including Inhabitat, GigaOM’s Earth2Tech and the ViroPOP video network.

Here’s the press release.

The former president of Digitas will head up WPP’s Project Da Vinci, Dell’s new agency. More at Ad Age.

Congrats, Torrence and congrats, Dell!

At Regeneration.org Dell announces the winners to its “What Does Green Mean to You” Graffiti contest in Facebook. Here’s “best overall.”

I took a look at interaction rates and other early data on Dell’s embed-able, subscribe-able, share-able video ad (it launched about two weeks ago), and saw something obvious, but something our industry too often forgets. It’s inevitably a teeny tiny fraction of people exposed to your ad who will click on it — we are thrilled with 0.2% — yet that’s the group we spend most of our energy thinking about, optimizing for, zooming in on.

In this campaign Dell opened the aperture; it built a creative unit — a brand asset — intended to provide value to more than that tenth or two-tenths of one percent of an audience inclined to click on banner. The ad pushed content to Dell’s audience (and let audience members interact with the content right there), rather than attempting to pull that audience back to Dell’s site for some kind of pay-off.

I can’t give away trade secrets or actual performance data. But I will say that some average and tiny percentage of people clicked on the ad. Eighteen TIMES more people took advantage of the opportunity to interact with Dell’s brand and content right there in the ad itself. Imagine the lost opportunity had Dell built an ad that only worked for that tiny click-happy group.

Dell’s embed-able, subscribe-able, share-able video ad has added itself to the list of great commercials — ones that engage people enough that they are inspired to tell their friends about it. For example, here’s Maxwei’s blog:

Marc Farley, a Dell blogger at Inside IT blog, shows the rest of us how it’s done. Dell is tapping the Techdirt Insight Community to foster a conversation among IT pros on storage, and what storage vendors like Dell need to be developing. (Here’s the site, The Future of Storage.)

EMC’s Chuck Hollis blogs his discontent about the project, namely that Dell’s role in the project isn’t disclosed clearly enough. That’s good feedback and always worth listening to. It’s Dell’s intention to be transparent; if certain visitors are confused, fix it.

Farley, a storage expert and Dell employee, admitted that he could relate:

“I didn’t understand myself for several days, including the whole posting process and was wondering what the %$#% was going on. In fact, I put up a completely wayward, post — wondered why it wasn’t being posted, then found out it was way off base. FWIW, there is a blog post that is pretty critical of Techdirt for the way the initial entries (insights) are handled. Mike Masnick’s reply to that review is good enough for me that they are working on improving things. But I don’t want to throw out the baby here, I think Mike is really onto something that is very, very good and that could fundamentally change the analyst business — something that Chuck would probably be very interested in also.”

That alone is refreshing — a representative of the brand (Dell) who publicly voices criticism of the brand or marketing practices. Then he goes on to articulate the project’s intent:

“So here’s how it’s working: Dell opened an Insight (request for blog entries) with Techdirt and they invited members of their community to contribute. These entries were screened by Techdirt editors for suitability (no Dell influence in this process) and then published on a Dell sponsored site called the Future of Storage, as a way to expand the discussion. We now have some of that going on and people can contribute there. Just keep in mind that the entries are moderated by Techdirt and it takes a little time for them to be published. I think if you look for the usual wolf in sheep’s clothing ads here, you won’t find any (at least that’s the goal). The point is not to pimp our stuff but to establish dialogue –- and this differs in a very major way from most blogs, including Chuck’s and mine.”

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick adds a comment to Farley’s post:

“On the issue of independent analysis, we actually think the Insight Community model works even *better* because you’re getting multiple viewpoints from multiple independent parties — and given how we recruit people, you can rest assured that there are always a varied set of opinions. The folks in the community are *passionate* and don’t back down. That’s what we like, and that’s why the Community generates such interesting output. As I’ve said before, the Insight Community model is designed to make you find out what you *need* to hear, rather than what you *want* to hear.”

An unusual conversation is underway: Editors, sponsors and their business partners are engaged in an open and professional argument over the important issues in digital media, and learning from each other. My hat is off to Dell, Farley, Hollis and Masnick.