ChasNote

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.)

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.

I love these embed-able ad units that feature longer-form video programming (here’s Dell’s), this one from a section of Cisco’s Welcome to the Human Network site that FM is helping them with:

From Adweek’s coverage of a panel at Ogilvy’s Verge conference. Outgoing Facebook chief revenue officer Owen Van Natta defended the company’s Beacon advertising concept, while Gawker’s Nick Denton slapped back:

“Gawker media publisher Nick Denton said he believes the ‘innovation’ in social media ad models is mostly a result of their failure as media properties. Even MySpace gets higher click rates than Facebook display units, he noted.”

FM’s Battelle disagreed:

“Not all ads on Facebook perform poorly, though. John Battelle, founder of Federated Media, said Facebook applications like Graffiti Wall are running ad campaigns for companies like Dell that are performing well by all metrics. ‘There’s no engagement in ad networks,’ he said. ‘We haven’t yet figured that out yet, and I think social media will.’”

Check it out here.

How Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin described it to the LA Times:

“We wanted it to be fun and real and something that felt like a natural evolution of a blog,” Jardin said. “We’ve been approached by big TV networks about doing a BoingBoing reality show or ‘American Idol’ type show. But the idea of having a prime-time network show seems like it would automatically be wrong for us and doomed to fail. . . . We wanted to adapt things that are already part of the vernacular of BoingBoing.”

AdAge reports:

“Andy Berndt, co-president of Ogilvy & Mather’s New York office, has left his post at the agency to go to Google, where he will helm a new global unit dedicated to collaborating with marketers, agencies and entertainment companies.”

I saw this at Searchblog. I’m especially interested to follow Battelle’s assessment….

Ogilvy Interactive’s Co-CEO Carla Hendra used her slot at FM’s Conversational Marketing Summit to present the case study of Dove, and the heart of her message was this: While Dove gets credit for last year’s most successful viral campaign (Dove Evolution), a video produced on a shoe-string, watched by millions and the inspiration for YouTube spoofs such as Slob Evolution, Carla underscored the conversational success of the broader Dove Real Beauty campaign — fuller-figured women (and now nude models in their 50s, 60s and 70s) on billboards, which sparked a conversation by Oprah and her tens of millions of fans.

Last month’s “Welcome to the Human Network” campaign by Cisco continues to illustrate the impact of “author driven” or “conversational marketing” beyond the surface metrics of impressions and click-through rates. Sure, by letting authors lend their names and personal definitions to Cisco ads on their own sites, Cisco’s ads experienced better-than-average click through rates.

But more than that, the campaign introduced a new phrase — “the human network” — to the business / IT lexicon. As proof, the term has made its way to Wikipedia as an entry, with Cisco getting credit for popularizing the phrase. The campaign’s landing page, because it’s a collection of insights and definitions from leading business and tech thought leaders rather than marketing-speak from Cisco, attracted links from sites across the web. Now, as a result, a Google search for “human network” returns the campaign’s landing page in the #2 position — ahead of Cisco’s own site.

I forget which coach for the Italian national soccer team coined the phrase “total football” for a style of play in which every player played like he was actively, offensively involved in every play, wherever he was on the field; every player firing on all pistons, all the time. This kind of ad campaign ought to be called “total marketing.”

I don’t know what kind of value to put on this (is it $100,000s or $1,000,000s?), but Cisco’s Human Network campaign has apparently entered the popular discourse: It’s now an entry on Wikipedia.

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.