Yesterday I was sent an email from The Economist through their social communication agency We Are Social. The mail presented their latest campaign – Thinking Spaces. A campaign presenting a number of opinion leaders and their ‘Thinking Spaces’. One part of the campaign contains a social component where they’re asking bloggers to contribute with our own stories alongside those of the leading personalities already featured like movie director Claudia Llosa, musician Jamie Lidell and Spotify founder Daniel Ek among others.

The campaign piss me off cause they’re asking me to contribute with quite a lot of content and traffic generation without really giving anything back. On top of that it’s clear that Spotify is featured for more than one reason as there’s obviously a hidden marketing component where I’m asked for my favorite Spotify playlist. (I would know since I’m running a Spotify playlist site on the side)

Dear Economist, let me tell you a little bit about me and MY thinking space.

This is MY thinking space.
If you would have respected my thinking space you would have started this campaign entirely different. I don’t get why you have created a flash site when you could have integrated the entire campaign on a blog platform. You could then have written a series of posts explaining your campaign to people and in that post also publicly linked to the blogs you asked to participate. This way you would have given us credit before you actually ask us to give you credit. Now the actual campaign leaves out social contributors.

The questions then?
I don’t want to answer a set of question about my personality that fit’s your campaign mold. On top of that I don’t get what Spotify has to do with it? (of course I do since one of your ‘leaders’ is the Spotify founder Daniel Ek). Why didn’t you ask participant to crowdsource your questions for you? Or give us one single question. One single question would have challenged my creativity. Now you’re more or less asking for my resume and an entire novel.

When you do social campaigns – give something back before you ask for support!
If a campaign like this would come from a brand like Kiva, Unicef, The Red Cross, Amnesty or another aid organization I’d love to participate without getting anything back. But a commercial brand like yours, The Economist, has to do better. On the campaign blog I read: “The Economist might feature your own Thinking Space on the site, along with those of the original featured personalities.” That’s not enough for me! If you succeed with this link-bating campaign I’ll end up in a long list of blogs that I don’t know if I want to be associated with.

Why didn’t you think social for real?
I don’t see why you didn’t choose 50 bloggers from around europe and built the entire campaign around us instead? I bet the budget you paid for this campaign and that flash site would have covered it. You also have access to something we don’t – a paper. If you would asked us bloggers for a unique story and in return done a piece on our blogs in your paper rather than on a campaign site you would have gotten fantastic content, trust me! And if you don’t then why bother asking for my participation in your campaign.

All in all. It’s good that you’re trying to go social with your campaigns – but don’t act like the dinosaur brand you are – think smaller, think friendly, think like you’re one of us and think social.

Finally.

I get that I’ve contributed to the SEO & link-bating part of your campaign. That is of course if people don’t decide to link to this post with the title The Economist Thinking Space campaign then I’ll be the winner.

Now I need to get back to spending my summer in the best possible way.

Best regards from the Swedish archipelago.
Johan Ronnestam

ps. Some blogs obviously got hooked. So far these blogs have joined the campaign:

Bibliobibuli, Chewytha scratchynutz: Tribeca, Code is poetry, The Curious Brain, Creative Bits, Creativity Online, Eskimon, Geoffrey Dorne, Lasse’s Findings, Marty’s Musings, Moleskinerie, Neoplayground, Nicola Davies, Notcot.org, Not For Paper, QBN, RA Forum, RiotInc, Rubbishcorp, Shawn Blanc, Theendofdecember, This May Be It, Unseen Said, Viva La Network, We Are Pop Slags, Wink at creativity

Domino’s Pizza has gotten themselves into a lot of trouble thanks to one of their employees. What’s interesting is the fact that they’ve ended up there even though they’ve done their homework on online presence. What’s lacking is obviously enough brand fans.

ReadWriteWeb reports on a video broadcast by two of Domino’s employees. The video that among other things, features an employee who farts and sneezes on a sandwich, was viewed over 500,000 times. RWW writes that Domino’s were quite fast to publish the response (below) to the video where they of course are explaining how something like this could happen – but is it enough?

This is only the beginning. As technology becomes easier to use brands will face industrial sabotage like this every week. The problem tomorrow or obviously already today is the fact that one single employee or competitor for that sake can do a lot of harm…A LOT OF HARM.

In order for companies to stand future attacks, brand communication becomes more important than ever since it’s the only protection they’ll have once something like this happens. Brand communication is the one thing that turns us into loyal and long term brand fans and therefore also gatekeepers.
Brand fans = drones. (Star Wars rock’s, doesn’t it?)

Imagine if Domino’s Pizza would have had a couple of million brand fans only waiting to be called into war. The fans would have killed the employee video with comments and created related videos. Once the official response above was published fans would instantly have created a viral spread of the video. Blogs would have been swarmed and Microblogs would have been buzzed until nothing stood in Domino’s way…

If you’re a brand owner. Start thinking. What can your brand really do for your customers. What can you give away. How can you make your brand fans loyal. And how can you gather their contact details so that you can direct them straight into the war zone? Start building walls, tanks, guns, jet fighters and everything you can think of. Then get your brand fans into training cause when the shit hits the fan you’ll be to close to the front and recruiting new soldiers will be the last thing on your mind.

ps. Just to clear things up. I’m a drone in many cases

This morning I read this survey on ‘Trends and Best Practices in Adopting Web 2.0 in 2008’ made by Awareness, a US based research company. The report explores the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and the future of social media initiatives for Enterprises in 2008.

Of course it contains a bunch of interesting stuff (read more about that on RWW where I found it) but I’ll focus on one thing that I think is typical for companies today.

In the report I read that blogs are on top of the list when companies tell us what external-facing Web 2.0 technologies they plan to implement in 2008. Photo sharing, wikis and podcasts get the bottom score.

When it comes to Web 2.0 and social media, to me this is typical. Most companies today doesn’t have a digital strategy that is truly based on their business idea and plan. Instead they go with the flow. Your ordinary trade magazine lands in your mailbox. It reads BLOGS on the cover. You run! BLOGS, we gotta have blogs.

Now, you might say. Hell, you’re using a blog to promote yourself! -Yes I am. I’m not saying Blogs shouldn’t be in the survey, of course they should. But, most companies would do better to implement social sharing, user drive support sections, pressrooms with RSS feeds, photo sharing, twitter news feeds, video streams, podcasts etc. Blogs should be somewhere in the bottom. In order to keep a Blog interesting you have to do as I and a lot of other bloggers do, post something each day. Preferable something unique that ads value. Once you stop for a few days, your followers loose interest. Most organizations that I’ve met professionally aren’t ready for this kind of commitment. On top of that few has something valuable to write about every day. With the budgets they have a well produced monthly podcast would be far more valuable.

Get me right. I’m not criticizing the fact that companies bet money on Blogs. I merely think most companies hasn’t gotten a digital strategy in place but instead follow other companies. When it comes to marketing and communication you should be very clear on what different commitments lead to.

Last but not least. If a company would really understand the value of social media, put an effort behind the right things AND treat their communication budgets one instead of allocating 90% to offline media without blinking. Then we would really se some changes!

If you missed the linked to the survey. Here it is.

Per Robert Öhlin – Mine Goes to Eleven was sent on a mission by Judith – En timme om dagen. And now I feel obligated to pass along the torch.

The mission is basic and simple. I was picked as one of Per’s favorite blogs. And therefore I should tell the world about my 7 favorite reads. So here we go. (oh, before we start, Mine goes to eleven is one of them, but I’ll list another 7.)

I basically start everyday with logging into my Netvibes account. I read about 70 feeds a day to keep myself updated on everything that has something to do with innovation, digital communication, social marketing, typography, design, inventions, research, datamining, softwares etc etc etc.

But if I’m stressed for time. These 7 blogs would never escape my eye.

ReadWriteWeb – It’s The ONE source if you wanna keep track of what’s up in the digital world.

SwissMiss - Tina Roth Eisenberg from the beautiful little country in the Alps delivers insights into the world of design and creativity

FFFFound – I like images. They start things up in my head.

ILoveTypography – That pretty much says it.

Weconverse – Mostly in Swedish, but a great read. Mr Gatarski also likes to debate. Good.

Techcrunch – “Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.”

MindPark – Initally when launched It wasn’t one of my favorites. But today the blog contains great posts often with a thought through analysis.

I picked a couple of large ones, so I don’t expect that many torches to be passed along now. But they’re all great reads.

ps. If you like Whisky, my blog WhiskyGrotto.com should probably be in the list.