This morning I’ve spent some time on Kiva.com relending money to entrepreneurs across the globe. The last thing one is told to do is to introduce Kiva to my friends and by doing so help Kiva reach more entrepreneurs. Since I’ve got a blog with some traffic I thought I might as well paste the mail in here instead.

Here we go:

Hi! I just made a loan to someone in Philippines using a revolutionary new website called Kiva.

You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone across the globe who needs a loan for their business – like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent – and you get updates letting you know how the entrepreneur is going.

The best part is, when the entrepreneur pays back their loan you get your money back – and Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.

I just made a loan to an entrepreneur named Aida Suyu in Philippines. They still need another $400.00 to complete their loan request of $525.00 (you can loan as little as $25.00!). Help me get this entrepreneur off the ground by clicking on this link to make a loan to Aida Suyu too:

It’s finally easy to actually do something about poverty – using Kiva I know exactly who my money is loaned to and what they’re using it for. And most of all, I know that I’m helping them build a sustainable business that will provide income to feed, clothe, house and educate their family long after my loan is paid back.

Join me in changing the world – one loan at a time.

Thanks!

———————————————————
What others are saying about www.Kiva.org:

‘Revolutionising how donors and lenders in the US are connecting with small entrepreneurs in developing countries.’
– BBC

‘If you’ve got 25 bucks, a PC and a PayPal account, you’ve now got the wherewithal to be an international financier.’
– CNN Money

‘Smaller investors can make loans of as little as $25 to specific individual entrepreneurs through a service launched last fall by Kiva.org.’
– The Wall Street Journal

‘An inexpensive feel-good investment opportunity…All loaned funds go directly to the applicants, and most loans are repaid in full.’
– Entrepreneur Magazine

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

As Twitter grows bigger and bigger I came to think of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. What looks like a flock of beautiful birds end up being our worst nightmare.

Candy brand Skittles have produced some kick ass TVC’s (Skittles leak being one of my favorites) through out the years and now they’re innovating the use of social media within fast moving consumer goods.

This blog post started in my head after seeing this discussion below between two of the bloggers I’m following. David Armano from Logic+Emotion and Jackie Huba with Church of the Customer Blog. They’re talking about Skittles and how they changed turned their entire website into a Twitter search for the keyword skittles. Jackie doesn’t like it, David does.

Skittles is of course not the first FMCG brand to do cool things online. Altoids has been rockin’ the web with cool content since about 2001. Jackie Huba mentions Jelly Belly and their content heavy site. The thing though with strategies like this is that you’re not taking advantage of the social crowd out there. Instead you’re constantly paying to pull traffic to your own site instead of placing yourselves where the customers are on their terms.

What’s really cool with all this to me is not the fact that Skittles is using Twitter but instead the little widget they’ve created that goes on top of whatever they want.

So, instead of building they’re on site or even mashup, they’ve created the ultimate mashup – a Skittles widget that navigates you directly to the respective channels online – Youtube for video, Twitter for chat, Facebook for friends, Flickr for photos and ultimately Wikipedia for product info.

This case is a simple yet cool explanation what you can do online today. I’m speaking quite often about the power of distributing your content outside of your own domains and this is a good example of it.

Sum up. Experimentation has to be a part of your communication. Sitting at home waiting for the ultimate strategy won’t work cause the net is ever changing!

Aloha!

Branding today is about creating a brand platform, then dramatize it and start screaming to people – COME ON AND BUY MY PRODUCT. IT’S GREAT. Of course in a slightly creative and modest manner than that. But it very often about traditional advertising in classic media channels.

Branding of tomorrow is about knowing who you are, what your brand stands for and start experimenting with innovation, partnerships, entertainment and above all involving your potential audience as a part of your product development. And note – call them audience, cause the will pay to stay but leave if they don’t like the show.

It’s all about constantly innovating your brand and then making sure you know what people think of your work. Do they like it? Do they hate it. What do they miss, what would they do differently. Speak to them. Learn their language. Once you think you know the formula to success – erase your brain and start all over again. We do not want repetition from brands that lead we want the new stuff, the shit that makes us go wow!

The first step to keeping on top of your game is getting into the conversation. There’s no need to wait even if people aren’t talking about your brand just yet. Get in there and learn!

First step – automize your intelligence information
The key to becoming successful when becoming a brand conversationist is to know…yep, you guessed it, where people who talk about your brand are hanging. Put your ears to the rail and listen for. And remeber that most of these things you can output as a RSS feed into Google Reader or Netvibes. Built a dashboard!

1. Google alerts
2. Twingly blogsearch
3. Twingly microblog search
4. Get Satisfaction
5. Co-comment, Backtype, Intense debate
6. Google analytics
7. Have a mint
8. More statistics…you can never get to much!

The 59 services you can currently keep track of using Friendfeed.

Get into the discussion
Once you know where people are discussing your products, your brand or anything else related to your mission (cause you have one of those huh). These are the tools you should get accompanied with.

1. Twitter & tweetdeck
2. Bloggy
3. Brightkite
4. Jaiku (still not dead)
5. Messenger
6. Friendfeed
7. Co-comment, Backtype, Intense debate
8. And don’t forget to get into blogs and comment on subjects relevant to you!

Spread your digital presence
Getting into the conversation is not only about spying on others and then going after the buzz. Your digital presence – website, campaigns, digital events, groups…everything has to go beyond their own sphere and servers. In order to do this you’ve gotta start spreading your information socially. There’s tons of tools but a first must have are these.

1. The god of spreading content – SEO (Note, not paid search)
2. Ping.fm
3. RPC all content that you write to leading aggregators and mashups on your local market.
4. Send images to leading photo sites like Flickr and Picasa
5. Send videos to leading Video sites like YouTube, Blip, Vimeo and others (See earlier post on this)
6. Socially share things with Share This
7. Connect your RSS feeds to Twitter, Jaiku, Bloggy, Friendfeed and other social plattforms.
8. Constantly create playlists that are killer in your office and spread them on Last.FM and Spotify
9. Post book marks on Delicious
10. Pixelpipe
11. Tarpipe
12. Feedburner
13. Widgets
14. Facebook groups (and others)
15. Wikipedia if possible

And more and more and more and more. This goes on forever. But you’ve gotta be everywhere!

Last but not least! Create advertising and communication that matters to people. We want to have fun – as I said earlier this year. You’ve gotta be a clown!

Ok, that’s it for now. I’m aware that I’ve left a couple of question marks in the heads of you guys who don’t know what RPC, RSS etc is. But I don’t have the time to elaborate on that now. I’ll get back to it soon

Nothing is like it used to be. A couple of years back I attended a Luxury marketing meeting in Monte Carlo. I was one of the speakers and I spoke about how the younger generation will want to see more things from the Luxury brands than just good old beauty shots of expensive products. A couple of posts back I highlighted the IWC print campaign which is a step in the right direction.

Today however I’m amazed with how prestige cuvée champagne house Krug balances innovation with luxury.

Together with niche luxury art and fashion printing press Visionaire, Krug has created a marvelous piece of pop-up art. The 10 beautifully designed pop-ups have been created by Sophie Calle, Andreas Gursky, Cai Guo-Qiang, Steven Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Alasdair McLellan, Steven Meisel, Guido Mocafico, Nicola Formichetti/Gareth Pugh, Sølve Sundsbø, and Mario Testino. These guys all stand for innovation in their own field. The planning of this campaign is spot on.

Krug has limited the edition to 4,000 numbered copies worldwide and 12 sets with a bottle of Krug Grand Cuvée in a gift box only available at the Ode to Art Gallery in Singapore.

What’s truly nice about this piece is the fact that it’s demonstrates what branding is about today. If you’re looking to spread your brand it’s all about becoming talk of the town and not necessary pay to place your ads all over town.

This activity is about innovation, creativity, partnering with great people, a great print house, the Krug brand, industrial design, video, print, ideas, effect, visuals etc etc etc. There is something for everyone out there.

When you create communication pieces like this they’re spreading them self due to the fact that they offer something unique that is relevant to a multiple of audiences that in their turn spread the content further. In this sense my blog now becomes another branding surface for Krug.

Krug spreads their brand in social networks based on creative and innovative ideas

If your communication initiative is good enough you’ll probably end up with all good branding surfaces. The thing is that bloggers like me and other brand surfaces like to blog about bad stuff too. So make sure your piece of communication is up to the job, otherwise you might end up damaging your brand instead.

So, to conclude this post. What you gotta do is to create brand activities that are absolutely on top of the scale when it comes to innovation and creativity. If you partner up with someone or as in Krug’s case a bunch of great people, your campaign will kick off like never before since there is so much in there for everyone.

ps. I found the campaign on Luxury Insider. Down in Monte Carlo I met the founders of the site, a great bunch of young entrepreneurs.

A couple of days ago ComScore published a Top Social Media Sites 2008 list. The list that I found on Techcrunch is an interesting read since I for one thought that Facebook and MySpace would be on top. But instead we find Blogger as the largest social media site in the world. Blogger and WordPress together actually outnumber Facebook and MySpace which means blogging is the number one social media activity in the world right now.

Blogger however is only a site while WordPress also provides an open source platform to bloggers who want to host their own blog (like me). This probably means that WordPress is up there with Blogger fighting for the number one spot.

It’s notable to see that Facebook is the one with the most positive trend. Blogs are showing a healthy growth too while Windows Live has taken a dive. Next years graph will show us if Windows Live has changed their trend with the new features launched in the end of 2008. I do however miss sites like Twitter, Digg and YouTube in the results. They’re just as much social media sites as Flickr, Scribd and Facebook.
Personal publishing remains strong and we can expect more people than ever getting involved with social media in one way or another in 2009.
 

Your advertising has to change

Reaching out to consumers however will require a more complex and advanced execution of communication than ever as people distribute their online behavior on more sites than ever. 

• Creative advertising that entertains your target group becomes more important than ever if you wanna stay ahead of your competition.
• Ideas that don’t include a social spread are only half way there.
• Understanding of technology is key.
• Brands that focus on distributing their communication rather than trying to pull traffic to their own campaign sites will be the winners.
• Making sure your content is relevant and close to brand and product is more important than ever.
• One idea - visible everywhere in every way. (i.e. don’t place video in one place, place it everywhere.)
• Make sure measurement and statistics is in place to show where to feed more money and where to cut the investments.
• Change campaign set up on a daily basis in the beginning of the campaign.
• Don’t forget the technical back end of the social sites – provide applications, widgets and code that supports your overall idea.

If you end up producing valuable content to the masses that have no relation to your products you’ll end up playing clown without getting paid.

One of the worlds most awarded websites has been redesigned. And the way Absolut.com is heading doesn’t come as a surprise. The new site has been give an slick, well designed user and SEO friendly interface. Many parts of the site has been moved from a flash based interface to a classical CSS based interface. Everything is done with the touch of Absolut.

This is definitely a first switch from Flash based sites of many to come. I’ve personally been part of building lots of flash sites through the years. But the possibilities to create rich user and SEO friendly interfaces with CSS gives us no reason anymore to use Flash for entire sites.

Also the fact that marketing departments around the world have undoubtedly noticed that their visitors leave after seeing that first loader will lead to change.

All in all I like the new Absolut.com better than the old. But there’s a few things I would have done differently:

The flash intro
Get rid of it. It takes time to load. We’ve seen it before and it doesn’t ad anything. There must be something different you could do with it?

Products
Why do you still separate the product experience from the brand campaigns. Integrate this better. The shouldn’t be any need for me to visit both products and a campaign site anymore. Mash it up! Also, why can’t you let people rate, comment, trackback, tag etc. Afraid of getting bad publicity?

YouTube integration?
The site has taken a step from interactivity to passivity. Why aren’t there any videos? Absolut could easily create the worlds most visited YouTube channel that could be reflected on Absolut.com. I think the time is over for sites that look to draw all traffic to their own site. You’ve gotta distribute your content in all different channels in different ways. And Absolute should be ahead of their game here.

Where’s the conversation?
Ok, we’re aloud to comment on blog posts etc. But where’s the stuff that generate conversation. Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, social sharing, commenting, reviews, ratings, user generated drink recipes, ideas etc. 

The blog?
Jacob Nielsen once said “People spend most time on other sites”.

Why is the new blog some sort of innovated blog that actually works bad compared to established blog standards. I think we could have expected more from Absolut. And why not base it on WordPress? This way it would load faster, it would give you access to hundreds of thousands features created by the open source community. It would give you credibility too.

Innovation?
Last but not least. I definitely think that this new site is nice. But it doesn’t ad anything in my book. Absolute has taken a step 5 years back from an innovation stand point of view. This is an ordinary site with some flash content and beautifully designed pages. I sure hope we don’t end up seeing this site staying on as a launch platform for new flash based campaigns but instead see more true but user friendly innovations that reach the broader audience with the Absolute brand message still intact.

So, conclusion

Original conclusion
This new site cannot be a strategy coming from online savvy people cause the tactical execution is great. Someone has identified that Absolut.com as it worked before didn’t deliver on usability and SEO and therefor needed to be changed. The project must then have been controlled by people within Absolut’s organisation who doesn’t understand how to create the next generation web presence.

Alternative conclusion
I’m totally wrong and this is the first to come of many releases that will put Absolut.com on the map again. But then I also expect a switch to open source, mash ups, conversation, openness etc.

I have just finished sending my christmas gifts. This year I’ve skipped the Porsches and the Learjets. Instead I registered an account on Kiva.org. Apart from a loan to Ms Chhum Sreng I’ve bought loads of gift certificates. These ones became the perfect christmas gift.

Kiva, that I found on Jardenberg.se is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

So, if you still have some money left in your pockets. Don’t waste them on worthless things. Spread the love!

In this recent study Forrester asked people in North America what information sources they trusted. Look at the 2 bottom bars. The least trusted source of information is a company blog and social networking initiatives from a company or brand.

Lately I’ve been talking a lot about how communication must shift from event based communication (launches, seasonal etc) to conversational ongoing brand communication. This study in my mind is a great proof of that. The strong brands of tomorrow really must change how they communicate their products and their brand.

Think about it. If you took your entire marketing budget (including media budget) and directed it all towards keeping conversations alive. Making sure you’re the talk of the town constantly. Stopping all paid marketing activities and instead focus on establishing and maintaining a dialogue with your target group. What would that do for your brand. Which TV channels would then talk about your product on prime time anyway. What blogs would follow your every move. How many viewers would you have on YouTube and other online channels. How would this support your sales force when they’re trying to get space on that tight shelf?

One thing is for sure. Your brand would be included in more emails from people I know, you would be rated higher on sites like Pricerunner and Compricer, Google would upgrade your SEO value, people would look for your products in the Yellow Pages, newspapers would write articles about you, your latest innovation would travel through social networks at the speed of light, radio channels would report on your success, the news anchor would speak about your product and somewhere in the end you might get more people to trust your company blog.

Of course I understand that you might still have to spend some dough on visibility, but the visibility of tomorrow is not about traditional media channels. Instead its about supporting your conversation on and offline. And this is something you shouldn’t pay your traditional media agency to do.

psst – Found the study through ReadWriteWeb.

ReadWriteWeb reports on a new startup from Portugal called Tarpipe. Basically Tarpipe does for PR companies and social networking nerds what Yahoo Pipes does for Web 2.0 developers and feed junkies. 

Hmm what the heck does that mean?
Well, with Tarpipe you can ad all kinds of social networking accounts like Flickr, Jaiku, Twitter, Tumblr, Friendfeed, Photobucket etc. Once added you can then create workflows and this is the nice part. For example if you ad a Flickr image (like the image above) you can then create a workflow that takes the image you created and starts to process it around the social networks of yours.

Use case: automatically tag a screenshot using Evernote from Bruno Pedro on Vimeo.

Hmm, is this really something to write about?
Of course it is. Let’s say your company wanna create a social pressroom. Then put the developers of yours on the case. Let them get jiggy with the Tarpipe Open API. Hours later you’ll have your site based pressroom connected to the whole damn internet.

Hmm, is this really good?
For now yes. But once tools like this get easier to use, then we’ll have product shoots and press release swarming the web asap as they are updated on websites. For now people have to get their buts over to sites like this one and Yahoo pipes in order to get that spread on the road. Within the next 6 or 12 month we’ll definitely see integration of tools like this in the big content management systems. Not to mention the PR companies equiped with these laser sabres.

There’s a lot of talk about viral marketing and especially YouTube video virals. Brands and agencies seems to think that viral marketing is a viable marketing method. It COULD be. But it might just as well FAIL big time. Of course it depends on the actual video but many great virals have been doomed to no viewers at all simply due to the fact that people don’t even spot them.

Every minute there’s 13 hours! of videos uploaded to YouTube. That’s the equivalent of Hollywood releasing more than 57,000 full-length movies every week according to Click for Nick. So, think of viral marketing via YouTube as an alternative strategy that might just kick off, but may also disappear into eternity without anyone noticing it.

Ford however, they’ve sort of gotten themselves a guarantee for viral spread. First, it a very good TVC from a brand that is boring, anti-personal and not so sexy. Suddenly this TVC proves the opposite. But more important, they’ve actually included people from all around their company. There’s one fantastic scene where all workers at the Ford factory sings along while eating their lunch in the Ford cantina.

Probably someone has told all employees to become part of this TVC and then distributed it to each and everyone. The effect? Well, for starters almost 100 000 employees will send the video to friends and family to show them the TVC the were involved in. Given that this has happened then it’s not a coincidence the video is already up there among the most viewed videos on YouTube this week. And it’s only been running for 7 days.

Crowd is the currency of tomorrow!