Social Media or Bust!

Social media marketing has become increasingly popular with traditional big brands.  Consumer brands have been some of the very first to adopt social media strategies.  One segment, in particular, has taken social media marketing to a whole new level.

Cola, it makes you feel good!

The cola giants PepsiCo and Coca-cola have both embarked upon large budget social media campaigns focused around making consumers feel good.  Coca-cola’ s project, as mentioned by Vicki here, is dubbed “Live Positively”.  Their current campaign benefits the Boys & Girls Club.

Pepsi’s first foray into Facebook fan page campaigns is their Refresh Everything page.  It is modeled closely after the Chase Community Giving promotion, but the key difference is that it invites fans to vote for their favorite social responsibility project.  The categories range from Health to Art & Culture.

Perhaps as a response to the current economic climate, both campaigns seek to impart a sense of happiness.  While the highlighted campaigns are charity and cause related, both Coca-cola’s Open Happiness and Pepsi ‘s Refresh Everything main campaigns are a broad endeavor to make you good.

Superbowl Strategies – A First

As both are slated to be long term campaigns, it will be some time before we can tell which of cola will brings the most happiness.  A glance at last week’s Superbowl social media frenzy of activity may offer some insight.  For this year’s Superbowl, Pepsi chose to forgo a traditional TV ads for a purely social media advertising campaign.  This bold move has been covered extensively by publications such as Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal.

Following the Superbowl, Forbes magazine provided some insight into the successes and weaknesses in Pepsi’s approach.  In contrast, Coca-cola aired ads in the Superbowl and  invested in their social media strategy via a wraparound frame ad on popular video site, Hulu.com and the aforementioned  Live Positively tab.  Our own analysis of the trend in Facebook fan page numbers for both Coca-cola [+388k for the week] and Pepsi [+208k for the week] post Superbowl presents a finding that suggests Cola-cola’s comprehensive multi-pronged strategy won over Pepsi’s bold decision to eschew a television ad.

In other news

Recently, newly minted Director of BBC Global News, Peter Horrocks, has directed his journalists to embrace social media with these stern words: “If you don’t like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn’t right for me, then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen. You’re not going to be able to stop it.”  It will be interesting to note any changes to content at BBC Global in the near future.

It appears that is prudent to augment traditional brand strategies with new social media campaigns a la Coca-cola, but there is no denying that it is the Pepsi and BBC social media or bust strategies that have gotten all the press.  Do you think this is new approach of “social media or bust!” is the way of the future?

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Online Engagement for Social Change

On Friday, I presented a session called “Online Engagement for Social Change” at the She’s Geeky UnConference in Mountainview.

We had a great group of women from all different sectors but there seemed to be a focus on causes and the non-profit sector. It’s interesting how ’social change’ is still not equated with for profit ventures.

I began by showcasing how brands are using Facebook to create and support social change.

We talked about Hopenhagen.org which was created by my company to build a community of citizens from around the world who supported the creation of a fair and binding agreement at Copenhagen. This campaign was widely supported by Coca-Cola, SAP, Siemens and Ogilvy.

Coca-Cola has been a real leader in the space of online engagement – especially on Facebook. Their current campaign is donating $250K to the Boys and Girls clubs of America for every person who messages their friends about the campaign which gets their brand out there on the newsfeeds. They are clever ways to engage fans, give them something to do and increase their brand recognition on Facebook.

The questions with these campaigns is, are brands actually getting more recognition for doing the same things they’ve always done? Imagine that Coca-Cola always gives $250K to the Boys and Girls Club. In the past, Coca-Cola would publish the donation in their CSR report and very few people would actually see it. Now Facebook gives them a way to broadcast their good deeds while also ‘engaging’ users in the donation through amplification of their brand.

The Chase Community Giving campaign on Facebook  is another great idea that brought up some new issues. This was a campaign by Chase bank to give away $5M to non-profits, including $1M to the charity who garnered the most votes for their charity during this campaign on Facebook.  First off, there was an accusation from Invisible Children (the eventual winner) supporters that the Isha Foundation (the runner-up)  had cheated by creating ‘fake’ users on Facebook in the final hours of the campaign. Secondly, in our session, there  were a lot of concerns about how brands, like Chase, are using non-profits to build their fan base on Facebook. Target was the first company that created a giving contest on Facebook, their Bullseye Campaign, back in early 2009. They identified 10 charities they wanted to support and said they would give away $1M across all 10 charities based on their percentage of the vote. Part of the requirement of voting was fan-ing the page.

What do you think about this type of campaign?

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Massive Uptick in Consumer Interest in Sustainable Consumption

Yesterday, I attended the Executive Council’s Value-Based Sustainability: The Business Case for Green & Clean event in San Jose. About 150 people attended and shared their case studies and stories of how they are approaching sustainability in their corporations.

Adam Werbach from SaatchiS was the keynote and he said there has been “a massive uptake of core and dark blue consumers – 30% – who want to substitute products that are more sustainable” into their regular shopping experience.

His core message, also laid out in his book Strategy for Sustainability is that companies need to work on three levels when it comes to sustainability; transparency, engagement and networking.

Transparency:

Adam claims that as part of their research at SaatchiS, consumers are not only drawn to companies that are more environmentally aware but that they also reward companies (he specifically sited cosmetics, phone and paper products) for being honest (the example he gave was a phone company admitting to having mercury in their phones).

Engagement:

If you aren’t engaging your employees you are not only losing ideas that might lead to innovation (Walmart employees engaged in their own personal sustainability plans around energy savings came to work with that in mind and took the lightbulbs out of the vending machines in the store…which led to a $1M savings as it spread throughout the retailer nationwide) but it also increases your business risk (he gave the example of the ConAgra factory workers that didn’t let management know there was a leak in the roof of their factory which eventually led to the big salmonella recall of peanut butter).

Networking:

The ability to scale the impact of your sustainability efforts – the network effect – was illustrated with a P&G example. When P&G did their corporation-wide carbon footprint analysis they found that their worst culprit was in people taking  home their laundry detergent and doing laundry in hot water. …and Tide coldwater was born of that learning.

Finally, Adam believes that companies should pick a NORTH STAR goal like P&G’s – to sell $15B of sustainable products by 2010. These goals should be;

• actionable by every employee
• core to the business
• solves a global human challenge
• achievable in 5-15 years
• inspirational

It has been proven over and over that engaged employees can ignite passion in the organization and build your brand equity amongst consumers.

I was really surprised to see that employee engagement numbers in the US are only 17% according to Towers and Perrin. That means that 83% of employees in your company are not fully engaged. Imagine the impact that has on productivity and your bottom line. Employee engagement tied to your business goals needs to become the norm from an innovation, productivity, and retention standpoint.

Please share your thoughts. Do you think employee engagement in sustainability can drive innovation and higher productivity?

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The Year in Review

2009 was a great year for us at Zazengo. Thanks to all of our customers, partners and advisors for making it a great year!

We are very excited to be working with Walmart to develop a global employee engagement program that utilizes our software to track meaningful actions (i.e., sustainability, health and wellness and environment).

We also launched a number of custom Facebook applications for clients like Ogilvy, Coca-Cola, United Way, Martin Luther King Day, Kodak, and Cosmopolitan.

The Hopenhagen application was used by Ogilvy, The United Nations Climate Commission and hundreds of other partners to call individuals to action around the Copenhagen Summit in December. When you install the app you get a passport to Hopenhagen that suggests simple actions you can take to lower your carbon footprint. As you take actions you get points and as you invite friends who participate you earn partial points which moves you up the leaderboard from a citizen to a delegate to an envoy to Ambassador.

Zazengo enables brands, publishers, media companies and non-profits to create powerful social engagement campaigns on any digital platform. Use Zazengo to challenge your target audience to take action, distribute the actions across the web, visualize the impact of the actions and re-engage in a game-like atmosphere. Zazengo identifies your brand ambassadors and gives you the tools to build a powerfully engaged community.

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Facebook Impact Challenge Redesigned and Improved

We’re happy to announce today that we’ve done a significant rework of our Facebook application, Impact Challenge. The application was working well, but we felt it wasn’t working well enough. The main goal of this update was to make it more user friendly, to give you a better sense of what is going on in your community (your friends, your challenges, etc), and to let you create any kind of challenge you want to improve our world..

Rather than try to explain it all in depth, here’s a few screenshots highlighting some of the changes.

On the Your Challenges tab you can see your total impact, and quickly access your current challenges:

Also on the Your Challenges tab, you can get a quick view of what your friends are up to, something which was hard to find in the previous version:

Wondering what other people will see when they click on your name? Click “View your Impact Profile” on the Your Challenges tab, and you’ll see this. It shows your latest impact, as well as your total impact and photograph:

In the Find a Challenge tab, you can now find challenges based on a category, and sorted by popularity. In the near future there will be more options here to help you find something interesting to get involved in:

Perhaps the biggest rework was in creating your own challenges. You can choose a metric from our ever-growing list of metrics, upload a photogragh, and generally work to make your challenge compelling:

If you don’t find the thing you want to track on our existing list of metrics, well now you can create your own!

And that about sums this new release up! We’re really looking forward to seeing the kinds of challenges that people create on Impact Challenge. Lets see if we can make a difference! And please send us all your feedback, suggestions, or bug reports.

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A challenge to everybody, send us your feedback!

It may have been a new year for a while now by the western calendar, but it was the Chinese new year yesterday and what better time than that to start something new. This is just a quick post to let you know that we want your feedback! We want to know what you love about Zazengo, what you hate about it, and everything in between.

We have an long internal list of stuff we want to change/add/remove on the site, and of course it has been based on feedback we’ve received from many members and organizations, but we’ve never really formalized our feedback system, until now.

We’ve integrated in a feedback system using UserVoice.com, (another Santa Cruz company by the way!) on every page in our site. You’ll see the tab on the right side of your page. Just click it, and let us know your wildest dreams about how what you would love to see on Zazengo. Big ideas, or small ones, we’re open to hearing all of them.

The smart thing about UserVoice is that you can enter as many ideas as you wish, but you can only vote up a limited number of them, and the ideas that have the highest votes will for sure be the ones we look at first. So use your votes judiciously!

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MLK Day is coming up and you can make a difference

Exciting times are upon us these days. President-elect Obama is calling on all Americans to make an ongoing commitment to serve our community and our country. Martin Luther King Day is on January 19th. Obama will be serving that day along with millions of other Americans. What will you be doing to help?

We’re honored to announce that we’ve been working with the Corporation for National and Community Service and its partners on the MLK Day of Service using our freshly minted Impact Challenge application on Facebook. On the Impact Challenge you can pledge to take action, and challenge your friends to do so as well.

The MLK Day of Service is a featured campaign. When you are taking action on Martin Luther King Day, report what you did on the MLK Day organization on Facebook or right on Zazengo and invite your friends to join you.

But that’s not all, you can get your community involved by:

1. Inviting your friends to join Impact Challenge directly.
2. Adding the MLK Day widget on the right to your own site or blog or social network profile.
3. Pasting the MLK Day banner anywhere you think people might see it.

We’re looking forward to seeing what all of us can do to make a difference in our communities!

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Impact Challenge, our Facebook Game goes live!

We’re happy to announce today that we recently launched a new game on Facebook called Impact Challenge.

Impact Challenge is a game you play with your friends that has real world, positive, visible impact. Challenge your friends, and yourself, to take the daily action you choose (volunteering, recycling, conserving…), all the while building up your Impact and Inspiration scores.

We’re off to a good start, right now, Tracy Weiss is leading the pack with 35 actions taken from recycling bottles to reusing bags to carrying her own coffee mug, but perhaps you can do better!

If you have a Zazengo.com profile already, your Impact Challenge can be easily linked with it, keeping all your actions synchronized between the two places. You’ll see a link on your dashboard to the add Impact Challenge application ensuring it is sync’ed.

Or, you can synchronize your account after from within the Impact Challenge:

Please check it out, and feel free to send your feedback our way, we’re always looking for ways to improve the experience.

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Zazengo to present at Astia Conference

Hi there,

We were selected as an Astia-company in early September. Astia is an organization committed to funding and supporting women-led businesses. We’ve been busy with our coaches in preparation for the Astia Conference which takes place 19-20 November in San Francisco.

Check out the conference if you are in the area and come and see us present!

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Exciting News: Zazengo 2.0 Launched!

I’m proud to say that we have released Zazengo 2.0.

It was a huge endeavor. We’ve been working around the clock to make this happen, but we are more than excited with the results. We have given the site a complete new redesign, coupled with improved functionality.

What can I show you? Well the list is long, and we will soon be adding videos that will walk you through each site feature, but for now here are the big changes:

• An overall site redesign.
• A highly customizable personal dashboard.
• A flash visualization of your Impact.

A Stylin’ New Look

Michael Kroll, our amazing designer, has been working hard on giving Zazengo a new look. It’s reminiscent of the old design, but overall is cleaner, hip, and of course – has better usability.

Here are a couple of my favorite pages:

Friends Page
Dashboard
Search Interface
Organization Profile
User Profile

Dashboard – Your Zazengo World at a Glance

Instead of trying to be a “one-size-fits-all” type site, we decided to let our users customize their Zazengo experience – particularly their Dashboard area.

After logging into Zazengo, you will land on your dashboard. This dashboard is completely customizable. You can add and / or remove widgets. You can also move them around to best fit your need.

The Dashboard area has been designed to keep you informed on the latest happenings. Think of it as a window into the rest of the site. Stay current on messages, invitations, site updates, projects, newsfeeds and more!

Visualize your impact

The final big piece of the 2.0 puzzle is our Flash impact visualizer:

We’ve worked closely with Teknision, a Flash development house based out of my hometown, Ottawa, Canada. They’ve put together an incredibly engaging way to visualize your impact, viewing other people’s impact, comparing your impact to others, and see how your impact rolls up to the greater good.

Here are a couple different views to demonstrate what we have created. You can click the image to be taken to that page.

We hope that you enjoy our changes and please let us know what you think. This is your product and we are here to listen.

Have fun and let’s make an impact!

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