ChasNote

Samsung Mobile has included a few FM sites (roadblocks on Bleacher Report, sponsorship of Watercooler’s Olympics Facebook app, and others) in their “Medal Mania” treasure hunt campaign, where registered players get email hints telling them where to find Samsung easter-egg ads at various sites across the web. Players rack up “medals” for each click and improve their odds at winning $100,000 (the grand prize) or Samsung phones, flat panel TVs and other home entertainment goodies.

I wanted to include a picture of the 300×250 easter-egg banner I found on Reuters today (I got the hint, first try!), but now I can’t find it. I’m guessing Samsung is using cookies and frequency capping to prevent players from racking up more than one medal per site. Which makes sense, but I’d love it if they allowed participants to share the easter-egg ads by embedding them in their own blogs or profile pages. Perhaps an enterprising little crook might improve his or her odds by posting the ads to “Samsung Medal Mania farms,” but in the meantime the campaign would be off to the viral races.

According to Lenovo VP David Churbuck, the Olympics app for Facebook is exceeding expectations:

“Well, we’re just a month into the program and I can attest that it is working as planned. Big credit due to our partners at Intel -– Megan McDonagh and David Meffe really pushed the program and helped us figure out how to design and pay for it. Intel CMO (and fellow sculler) Sean Maloney’s drive to transform PC marketing through innovative digital tactics is transforming PC marketing and the promotional plan for the Lenovo Olympic Blogger program has benefited from Intel’s insights. I won’t divulge numbers, but we’re more than 50% of the way to our target and the Games haven’t even started yet.”

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.

AdWeek profiles several brands that are using Facebook as a platform to amplify more traditional sponsorships, including Lenovo’s work in Facebook to extend and reinforce its official sponsorship of the Summer Olympics.

“Lenovo has created 100 athletes’ blogs in an attempt to align itself with some less mainstream sports, such as field hockey and modern pentathlon. It gave the athletes laptops and video cameras to chronicle their preparation for the games.

“‘We wanted to do something that shows our tech prowess, not something that uses the Web as billboard,’ said David Churbuck, vp of global Web marketing at Lenovo….

“The blogging program is complemented with a Facebook effort that lets users virtually identify themselves with their country’s teams. Federated Media and Citizen Sports created country applications users can add to their profiles. So far, more than 100,000 have been downloaded….”

At one extreme, brands are building Facebook apps about themselves and their products, which deliver deep and relevant customer engagement — but the number of customers engaged might have only 4 digits or fewer. At the other extreme, brands are spraying banners across social networks to reach millions of consumers, though impact — let alone engagement — is suspect. In the middle is a sweet spot: Marketers collaborating with leading apps providers (in this case, Citizen Sports) to bring their brands to customers already engaged in a relevant conversations. Lenovo’s off to a nice start, with 100,000 customers so far primed to enjoy the Olympics through a Lenovo-powered feed in Facebook.

“[The] intangibles [such as positive buzz] were the lure of the Lenovo athlete-blogging program, said Churbuck.

“‘The old model of blunt impressions, the billboard model, is not going to do it for me,’ he said. ‘I’m far more interested in how many comments we drove, the traffic to athletes’ blogs, downloads of the applications. Those are more tangible expressions of engagement with the brand than clicks.’”

It’s worth pointing out that Churbuck isn’t easily swayed by the latest fad in online marketing, either. Back in March, he blogged about a panel of social-media marketing folks, including my boss and FM’s founder, John Battelle. Here’s what he had to say just four months ago:

“Battelle recounted a Dell campaign run in Facebook — seemed semi-interesting, but not earth shattering. Bell called out the move from 101 SMM to 201 and AP level discourse on the finer points. Indeed, moderator Polly LaBarre basically told the crowd of mostly clients that if they haven’t gotten the ‘transparent, authentic, marketing-is-a-conversation memo’ then they were essentially under a rock. Bell is working with me on a very cool Olympic play I’ll disclose next week. I don’t feel compelled to rush into Facebook anytime soon, and as for Federated — we shall see.”

(Congrats to Mike Kerns and his crew at Citizen Sports; the Lenovo team at Ogilvy and Neo; Megan McDonagh and the Intel Inside folks; James Gross, Jason Ratner, Pete Spande and their team here at FM for building a concept compelling enough to win over Mr. Churbuck.)

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!

According to a colleague in Intel’s Latin America marketing group (I missed her data source), 70% of the online population in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia read blogs, and 35% of them write blogs. Sixty-percent of Mexican Internet users and 75% of Brazil Internet users are members of social networks such as Facebook or Orkut — versus 35% of Internet users worldwide.

Intel invites Facebook members to draw robots using the Graffiti application. Normally the Graffiti crew publishes the Top 150 on the gallery page, but for this contest they’ve made it a Top 250 to accommodate a bigger field of exceptional contributions. Take a look at the full gallery; they clearly made the right call. Here are a few:

I continue to be amazed (and I’m sure Intel is thrilled) that so many artists take it upon themselves to work in the sponsor’s brand. Here’s one among many:

That’s nice, you say, a few thousand consumers spending hours with Intel’s brand and a million or so of their friends seeing Intel’s messaging briefly as they swing through to vote for their favorite Graffiti. But is there more? Yup. Since it sponsors functionality that allows web publishers and bloggers to embed their favorite Graffitis, Intel’s robot-drawing contest is creating thousands of media objects that can be shared across the web — Intel commercials, in effect, that spread virally and show the world a richer, more visual web experience.

Lenovo has launched an app in Facebook and Hi5 that allows Olympics fans to root for their teams and follow their favorite athletes through blog posts from Beijing. In the words of my colleague James Gross:

“What an awesome way to showcase that advertising can equal media and all participants can benefit. Lenovo, led by David Churbuck, was visionary to create a strategy with Olympic Athletes and online platforms for long term attention share around the Olympic Games. From aggregating Olympic bloggers, to the application that Citizen Sports built for social networks like Facebook and Hi5, to communication platforms like Twitter. Lenovo has recognized that they can differentiate themselves through allowing people to use their brand to create and distribute media.”

Here’s Pete Spande’s write up.

That’s a quote from Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, in today’s NY Times.

“On a conference call last month, Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer for the News Corporation, toned down the grandiose expectations for social networking advertising and acknowledged that selling spots on personal profile and group pages is not easy.

“Social networking represents an ‘entirely new form of Internet activity,’ Mr. Chernin said.

“When MySpace’s parent, Fox Interactive Media, announced a three-year, $900 million advertising pact with Google in 2006, analysts started placing big bets that social networking would be a major new revenue stream. While the Web is becoming more social, it is hard to wring profits from it.

“Indeed, the balloon of unrealistic prospects is losing air. The attitude change was first detected at the end of January when, one year into its $900 million pact with MySpace, Google said that social networking inventory was not earning money as well as expected. (More recently, Google said the situation was improving.)”

Social Media’s Seth Goldstein posits that sponsored questions are to social media advertising what keywords are to search marketing: the ad unit that’s native to the user experience. And the performance metric will become “cost per conversation.”

Excerpts of his IAB keynote via 3 Minute Ad Age.