ChasNote

Chiquita Bananas isn’t going to let the crowdsourced advertising-and-label design trend leave it behind. From Rob Walker’s column in the NY Times Sunday Magazine:

“Chiquita set up a Web tool for people to whip up their own sticker drag-and-drop mixes, and an obliging public created more than 25,000 of them in less than five months, according to the company. This enthusiasm has led to a competition — 1,355 entries were submitted over several months, and online voting starts tomorrow at eatachiquita.com to pick 18 designs that will be stuck onto actual bananas.”

Chiquita introduced the blue stickers in 1963 in a stroke Walker calls “a brilliant way to solve the problem of how to apply some version of branded packaging to an item that literally grows on trees.”

I like the new contest, too. Not that it’s especially cutting edge (see Jones Soda’s label contest or HP’s laptop skin contest, both in 2008), but it’s never a bad thing to pull your customers closer to your brand, to let them touch and feel your logo.

The best part about Walker’s column, though, is the quotes he extracts out of the team behind the campaign. Such as:

“The great thing about looking hard at something the brand already owns, no matter how small, is that there is usually a cultural recognition there already. With some application of this value to an idea you have, it creates a familiar association with an unfamiliar dynamic, therefore creating intrigue in the viewer — much like pop art does.”

Exactly!

My favorite entry in the contest so far is this one, the banana as hammock.

Three years ago this month HP and Federated Media launched a campaign that allowed bloggers to publish audio-posts from their mobile phones — dubbed voice posts. From the ChasNote write-up then:

“Earlier this week, several FM sites rolled out their first ‘voice posts,’ a new series of editorial segments served up as audio files on blog sites. HP is the sponsor of the series, meaning their logo appears under the audio file with copy that says ‘voice post technology sponsored by HP iPaq 510.’ HP also bought banner ads on the sites. Beyond that, though, HP has no relationship to or influence over the content of the voice posts”

Now WordPress is making it easier for all bloggers to publish audio-posts. From Mashable:

“You can already write and publish WordPress blog posts from your iPhone, iPad, Android, e-mail and desktop, but now you can also post audio via your phone.

“Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg announced the new feature for WordPress.com earlier today. It’s rather simple: enable ‘Post by Voice’ in your dashboard and you will receive a phone number and a unique code for posting audio from your phone to your blog. You can post up to one hour of audio at a time.”

Awesome. Congrats, WordPress, for turning this idea into a real product that everyone can use. And congrats, HP and Goodby, for the foresight!

(Disclosures: I’m a co-founder of Federated Media and was employed by the company in 2007 when this idea was hatched.)

To accompany the launch of a new suite of inkjet printers aimed at SMBs, HP launched a content site to help those business owners expand their firms through more efficient marketing efforts. The Small Business Marketing Guide

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includes tips and other marketing-related editorial posts from the authors at TREND HUNTER

, Springwise, Life Clever The Sandlot movies Proof of Life dvd and others from the FM family. Coverage at eWeek:

“HP also unveiled special offers and free resources for SMBs in an effort to aid growth and technology management, including rebate programs and expanding Web-based resources to include the Small Business Marketing Guide, an online community focused on small business marketing. “

Care Bears: Journey to Joke-a-Lot

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.

These are some stylish laptops. I love that HP created them (with help from designers Paul Frank and Shepard Fairey) for charity; why not make them available for wider distribution too?

The printing and imaging group at HP has launched a new section of its wiki, Branding Bootcamp.

We — HP and this Community — will work to provide the answers, guidance, resources and camaraderie to help you develop the marketing materials you and your business need to succeed – without breaking the bank?

My first thought, What self-respecting control-freak business owner or brand manager would let an anonymous community crowd-source his or her brand materials? And then, I thought, genius. Intuit founder Scott Cook once said a brand is what a friend tells a friend about it, so why not let them — friends, partners and random people who care enough to provide input — build your brand materials from the get-go?

From Business Week:

“Social networks have some of the lowest response rates on the Web, advertisers and ad placement firms say. Marketers say as few as 4 in 10,000 people who see their ads on social networking sites click on them, compared with 20 in 10,000 across the Web. Mark Seremet, president of video game publisher Green Screen, stopped advertising on MySpace last spring because of a 13-in-10,000 response rate. ‘It’s really hard to make money on that anemic click-through rate,’ says Seremet.”

Google admits they’re struggling with the same issue, and their stock got hammered on the news.

Meanwhile, advertisers who recognize that building awareness, preference and affinity with customers involves activities other than clicks alone are finding more success in social networks. Examples include Intel, Dell, Wacom and HP, to name a few.

As part of HP’s continued efforts to make websites and blogs more printable, and to get customers more comfortable with printing projects in general, they’ve sponsored the photo sections of parenting sites such as Dooce and Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. Here’s the masthead at Dooce, where HP invites readers to share their own pet photos.

The Pioneer Woman hosts frequent “Give That Photo A Name” contests. Today’s installment solicited nearly 3000 comments in around six hours. (Yes, 3000 reader comments attached to a single post.) The lead-in to today’s contest, the Pioneer Woman alerts her readers to the new functionality added to her site as part of HP’s sponsorship: “Before I show you the prize, have you noticed the little ‘Print Pioneer Woman Photos’ blurb in my nav bar above? Here. Let me show you.” Followed by these screenshots:

Conversational marketing can be this simple. Simple yet well situated — right in the thick of an engaged conversation among 3000 web-savvy moms.

My colleague Pete Spande responds to Adam Ostrow’s post at Mashable on the topic of Facebook applications and sponsorship dollars:

“I think the article misses the point and potential of Facebook apps as a business. There are supposedly 100 million blogs and most don’t make much money – even those with decent traction. Some however, and FM represents many of them, do very well and are seeing revenue growth that now rivals the audience growth they saw in previous years. I see a similar dynamic forming with FB applications. A handful of applications are making significant dollars through advertising, affiliate deals, etc. Others are seeing real promise. Most aren’t, and won’t, make much money ever.”

From the projects I’ve observed firsthand with Facebook apps affiliated with FM (Watercooler, Graffiti Wall and a few others), brands like Wacom, HP and Dell are finding large, high-quality audiences and significant marketing value. We’re only half a year into the era of Facebook applications, but I’m betting that marketers will do what they always do — send their advertising dollars in pursuit of their customers.

Anita Campbell announces a new feature to her site, Small Business Trends, “a new section here at Small Business Trends called ‘Marketing Tips,’ with the support of Hewlett Packard (HP). We’ll be creating special content with marketing tips you can use.”

Here’s the part I like best about smart marketing, “conversational” or otherwise: When a marketer adds value to the content experience — by funding product development or other new services — the brand benefits from the goodwill it creates among the community and the leaders of that community. Here’s how Anita puts it:

“HP has given us access to a number of in-house people so that we can pick their brains and include their expertise. That kind of access has been invaluable. As a result of their support I’ve been able to get additional help to pull together some special initiatives — and I think you’re going to be excited about those.”

UPDATE 11:30am: Here’s coverage at Sphinn, the internet marketing news and discussion forums site.

UPDATE 4:45pm: As I’ve watched the first conversation at Anita’s Marketing Tips site develop, I’ve been astounded by the names of the participants she’s enlisted — Seth Godin, Jackie Huba, Guy Kawasaki, John Jantsch and a dozen others. This is conversational marketing at its best: An authentic (”editorial”) conversation among smart people on topics they are already immersed in (several have published books — and all maintain blogs — on the topic). HP didn’t ask Anita or her community of marketing gurus, entrepreneurs and small-business owners to talk about HP products or the HP brand. Instead they made the decision to let the marketing gurus talk amongst themselves in a virtual meet-up space for which HP pays the rent. When marketers are brave enough to trust their customers, like HP did here, collateral benefits start to accrue. Anita is so pleased with the content and conversation in the Marketing Tips area, she added this plug on her homepage, alongside her own trademark avatar:

The folks who helped put this idea together include Ashley Houk and Wendy Cole at HP (who run a variety of programs, including co-marketing efforts between HP and Staples, under which this initiative falls), Jared Katzman here at FM, and Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends.