Wade Rockett : Random

Social media reunites man with jacket

Wade Rockett — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:40:00 GMT

You see, all you scoffers and naysayers? Social media produces measurable results!

Before social media: no jacket.

After social media: jacket.

That is a 100 percent increase in jacket presence.

Now I wonder if social media can cause a sandwich to appear on my desk.

Tags: David Dalka, social media, jacket

Does Coca-Cola have a "look, don't touch" blog policy?

Wade Rockett — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:18:00 GMT

I hate to interrupt the grownups when they're talking about implementing customer reference programs, but I need to take a moment here to discuss soda pop.

I recently wrote that a throwaway post about My Coke Rewards on my personal blog had gotten a surprising amount of attention. The post was getting as many as 20 hits a day, many of them from a message forum devoted to discussing the rewards program. Wow! Twenty whole hits per day!

That post is now getting nearly 150 hits per day. Why don't I link to the post, you ask? Why bother? If you search Google for "my coke rewards", my post is now the fifth result. The message forum closed up shop in response to a cease and desist order from the company, so many of its participants took the conversation to my blog (also Matt Volk's.) As of this writing, that post has 64 comments.

What are they saying about the program? (Here's a fun game: try and figure out how many of these are real customers, and how many are undercover marketing agents!)

A couple of people are pretty happy:

"I have recieved several free magazine subscriptions, movie rentals and an entire month of Blockbuster Online! All without any problems! It’s been easy and free."

"The new site is fantastic! I really love the “Grab your drink” section including a kick-ass Pibb Xtra bull-riding game. The guy who came up with this is a pure genius."

But then people started to report problems:

"YeA well I havent been able to get on in over an hour. Sux 4 me, probly sellin out of everything I want..."

"Taking part in this contest has been the most frustrating experience! I think I’ll just switch to Pepsi or maybe even water, it’s a lot healthier."

"I received a text message telling me to enter the code they just sent me to earn 10 points. When I tried entering the code, the site said it was invalid. Got another text saying they updated thier system and to try re-entering my code. Now I can’t even get on to their site. What will they think of next?"

"You all should just drink PEPSI, it’s a million times better than Coke anyway. I only looked here after buying a sprite at some dumb store that didn’t sell Pepsi. I was just curious what the code thing was about. PEPSI would never, ever do something so totally & completely retarded."

Rage begat rage. People lashed out in all directions, complaining about the 1985 switch to New Coke, ranting about the RIAA (??), and for some reason reposting a June 2006 Motley Fool article about the Diet Coke/Mentos video.

Who's voice is missing amid the clamor? The Coca-Cola company of America's.

Come on, Coke--this bitchfest is the number five Google result for your promotion. Matt's blog entry is number four. Would it kill you to have an intern pop in just once to tell these unhappy people that you hear them? Or better yet take a page from Dell, who abandoned its "look, don't touch" policy toward blogs and set up one of its own.

Because all of these negative comments on my blog are bumming me out, man. And if there's one thing I learned from my childhood in the early 70s, it's that Coke is not a bummer.

Tags: My Coke Rewards, Coca-Cola, Coke, customer relations, Google, Dell, comments

Is My Coke Rewards successful? Let's look at my numbers.

Wade Rockett — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:09:00 GMT

The My Coke Rewards promotion turns codes printed on Coca-Cola bottlecaps into GOLD! (If by "gold" you mean NASCAR hats and coupons for movie popcorn.)

One day, I innocently posted a minor gripe about the promotion on my personal blog. I was astonished to find that it quickly became the most popular post on the site. Not just the most popular, but really popular. I started to get between 15 and 20 hits per day on just that post.

Then I saw that some of the hits were coming from message forums dedicated to discussing the intricacies of the program, trading codes, sharing ways to hack the promotion. I'd stumbled across a whole My Coke Rewards-driven subculture that I never knew existed!

Check out this screenshot from my blog stats page:

As you can see, the only non-Coke search that led to my blog was "buy me a chai". And the REASON that it led to my blog is because I have a page entitled "Buy Me a Coke" with a PayPal button on it.

What am I to make of this? My own favorite loyalty program belongs to Qdoba Mexican Grill--if I blog about it, will I start getting huge amounts of traffic from burrito-related message forums? What other promotions are out there that produce this level of fanaticism?

Tags: Coke, Coca-Cola, My Coke Rewards, loyalty programs, loyalty programmes

Back from SXSWi 2007 - mad scientists, venture capitalists, and of course barbecue

Wade Rockett — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:10:00 GMT

Sadly, I wasn't able to post to this blog from South by Southwest Interactive 2007. However, I did update Twitter frequently using my mobile phone. So if you were watching Twitter you knew, for example, that I was at one point tossed into the back of a battered red pickup truck and driven across Austin to an unknown destination. Fortunately, delicious tacos awaited me at the end of the ride and not a horrible death at the hands of a drug cartel. (Always a possibility at these tech conferences.)

Here are a few scattered observations:

There's more to the Metaverse than Second Life
SXSWi opened my eyes to a variety of online virtual realms, such as the delightful game-powered world of Puzzle Pirates, Three Rings' Whirled project, and MTV's virtual space that lets fans of the shows Laguna Beach and The Hills interact with their world (and smooch their stars.) Hot topic for discussion: should companies market to users, or to their avatars--the online representations of who the users would like to be?

There are good notes on the panel "Avatar-Based Marketing in Synthetic Worlds" available at Blast First (summary) and 3pointD (full).

Alternate Reality Gaming is on the rise
How would you like to take thousands of smart, talkative, excitable people and immerse them completely, obsessively, and joyfully, in your brand? Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, have been doing this since 2001 when subtle clues in promotional materials for the movie A.I. led audiences down the rabbit hole where they collaboratively solved a genre-crossing interactive murder mystery. Since then ARGs have been employed by sponsors such as Microsoft, Audi, and ABC to promote their products. Panelists at "ARG! Attack of the Alternate Reality Games" reported that the flexible costs and measurably positive results of ARGs are causing companies to beat a path to their doors.

Notes on the ARG panel at Licence to Roam.

Check out this presentation on the Audi ARG "Art of the Heist".

SXSWi is a fantastic place to meet people
After the aforementioned pickup ride, I got a lift back to the conference from Tom Merritt of CNET. While I was waiting to get into the awards show, Patrick Norton of DL.TV gave me advice on editing podcasts. A trip up to the roof at the Yahoo! party put me next to Ze Frank, days before he was due to post the final episode of his yearlong project The Show With Ze Frank. Lunch at Stubb's resulted in a chance meeting and great conversation with folks from Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Wieden + Kennedy. And I spent most of the conference in the company of an interactive strategist and the senior manager for information architecture at The Designory. And that's the short version of the list.

Many business cards were exchanged and LinkedIn connections made.

The Discovery Channel wants you
Representatives from the Discovery Channel were at almost every panel I attended, and they were HUNGRY. They really, really want to get into the interactive space, particularly interactive video, ARGs, and virtual worlds.

Mad scientists and venture capitalists make good co-panelists
After the first panel I saw with pioneering blogger and PMOG visionary Justin Hall on it, I decided that whither Justin Hall goest, I will go. Especially rewarding was "Online Games: Beyond Play and Fantasy" (notes at 21apples) where he and venture capitalist Joi Ito dropped science on the convergence of games, life, work, and education.

Stubb's does barbecue right
Ben, one of our global writers, told me that I had to eat at Stubb's when I was in Austin. Now, I'm of Southern descent and I have very particular ideas of what constitutes proper barbecue. I am pleased to report that Stubb's serves its barbecue with slices of white bread on the side (as God intended), and--shockingly alone of all the restaurants that I visited--has sweet tea.

See y'all next year?

Tags: SXSWi, alternate reality games, Justin Hall, Joi Ito, Twitter, Patrick Norton, Tom Merritt, avatars, Ze Frank, Whirled, Puzzle Pirates, Virtual Laguna Beach, Stubb's, Austin, sweet tea

Why Nielsen cares about how you play video games

Wade Rockett — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 16:17:00 GMT

Recently, the Weekly Geek podcast reported on this story from Ars Technica about Nielsen Media Research tracking video game playing habits. Nielsen will install a People Meter in participating homes that picks up videogame sounds, compares them to a database, and determines what games people are playing, when, for how long, and how.

The Weekly Geeks wondered why this knowledgewould be useful. Wouldn't it make more sense to just track game purchasing habits? And why not simply ask people what they're playing, instead of investing time and effort into compiling a database of every recent videogame sound in the world? They invited any of their listeners in the marketing industry to write to them and explain Nielsen's reasoning.

I'm no expert on all things Nielsen, but I did write about them once. So I sent this missive to the Weekly Geek mailbag:

Monitoring people's game purchasing habits only tells you what games people are buying. Nielsen's scheme tells you where their attention is focused during their leisure hours. This is extremely valuable information to any number of entities, the most obvious of which are game developers and advertisers. (Less obvious: the Great Old Ones and their minions.)

Game Developer: "Look, manufacturer of products for women! These Nielsen stats show that women in their 20s are spending X hours a week immersed in our game. Those are hours in which they are NOT DOING ANYTHING ELSE. They are not watching television, listening to the radio, surfing the Web, listening to podcasts, driving around looking at billboards, reading magazines, or paying attention to any other advertising platform. The ads you're running in those places during that time are not reaching them. If you want to effectively reach them, you'll want to work with us."

Or maybe a company just says, "Hey, the ads we're buying on TV during those hours are wasted. Let's use that money for something useful instead."

I know that there are all sorts of other things that clever people can do with that data, but tragically it's not my area of expertise.

To answer Frodo's objection to installing a bleeping spybox in folks' homes: Asking people to keep track of what they're doing and when is fraught with peril. They tend to forget. Or lie.

For example, back in the day, the Billboard charts were determined by asking record store owners what albums were selling the most copies at their stores. When Nielsen developed a technology that hooked directly into the point of sale, Billboard learned that their charts were totally wrong. Contrary to what the store owners were telling them, customers were actually buying tons of records by some obscure dude named Garth Brooks.

Thanks for another great episode!

Take care,
Wade

Tags: Nielsen, videogames, video games, advertising, weekly geek, podcast

My notes from Blog Business Summit 2006

Wade Rockett — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:19:00 GMT

I've posted my notes from the Blog Business Summit on this site as articles, because as posts they were just too long.

I've cleaned them up a bit but they're still a little rough. But they're notes, right? Not transcripts. However, if you attended the conference and notice that I've made mistakes either through mishearing or misunderstanding a presenter, please let me know.

Yes, I know Halley Suitt didn't say that RSS is "teh sux0r" in so many words. But that was her gist.

What's next in online communication?

Jason Calacanis keynote speech

Online community

Establishing Corporate Standards and Policies

Tracking Buzz

10 Ways to a Killer Blog

Ben Edwards - Branding in the age of YouTube

Podcasting and video blogging best practices

John Battelle - Blogs, search, and the changing media landscape

Blogging and SEO strategies

The future of blogging: tools and trends