I may have already shared that I am currently reading a book called Digital Marketing – Strategies for Online Success by Godfrey Parkin. I am finding it very informative about how we might make best use of our web-site as a tool to encourage more members in the community to participate.
I thought the following quote may inspire some creative thinking about our Water Wise Challenge which should provide valuable learning experience for other projects.
[quote]Honda was one of the very first companies to explore social marketing. The best-selling car in the United States is Ford’s Fl5O pick-up truck and it has been in the top slot for more than 30 years. At number 2 is another truck the Chevrolet Silverado. The Toyota Camry occupies the third slot and the Honda Accord is in hot pursuit at fourth. Car companies believe in capturing the hearts and minds of consumers at an early age because the first car you own will very likely establish you as brand loyal for at least another couple of purchases in your lifetime. So if you want to maximize the lifetime value of a customer get to them early. All car manufacturers want to get teenagers to desire their entry-level vehicles – those cars targeted at first-time buyers which are frequently paid for by parents. Honda’s problem was that there was little awareness of its entry—level vehicle the CR-V among the target population and no cachet among those who did know of it. The first thing Honda did was to examine the things that mattered to the targeted mid-to-late-teen population how they communicated and what they shared. (As an aside you can gain some great market insights by monitoring MySpace Facebook and discussion forums that are currently popular with this fickle group). Then they decided to change the pronunciation of the CR-V to ‘crave’.
They built a microsite to host a competition and challenged people to upload a photo of their ’favourite crave’ to the site along with a few lines about why they craved it. ln the process they captured names and contact details. The top half of the branded competition page contained dozens of thumb—nails of the images submitted. If you moused over an image it expanded and also provided the name of its submitter and his or her comments about the image. Visitors could with one click vote on how well they liked each entry. The competition board was covered in images of dogs food girlfriends boyfriends exotic destinations sports teams and cars of all makes. Every entry was available in the depths of the site. Visitors could click a button to see a screen filled with the most recent entries but only the most popular stayed on the home-page leader board.
Something remarkable happened. Those who had uploaded an image told friends and family to go and look at it and vote for it. When they did so they were inspired to upload their own image and tell their friends about it too. So they wrote about it in their blogs and on their MySpace pages. They provided links to the competition microsite and they tagged it in social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Digg. The microsite started getting top rankings on Google. The traditional media found the story fascinating and the competition featured on radio and television talk-shows and news broadcasts locally and internationally. Virtually every major newspaper in the country wrote articles about it. The microsite cost Honda a few thousand dollars yet it generated the CR-V free publicity worth tens of millions of dollars. It captured hundreds of thousands of potential sales leads and it boosted brand awareness among the target population to levels never dreamed of. In 2007 from out of nowhere the tenth best-selling car in the United States was the Honda CR-V. Honda did not need to offer a car as an incentive to enter its competition. The reward was participation and the ego satisfaction of having your creation on the leader-board. eMarketers should never underestimate the power of the promise of 15 seconds of fame. [/quote]
While we are operating on a much smaller more local scale There seem to be some ideas here….