Seth posted this:

The winner has been announed for Tourism Queensland’s ‘The Best Job in the World‘ campaign and congratulations must go to Brit, Ben Southall, for taking out the prize.I have no idea what he did to win, but presumably he was affable, scrubbed up well on YouTube and had starred in less than a handful of Russian porn films. I haven’t been following the campaign closely, but of course, I didn’t have to. Every news channel in the world has been running headlines since day one, Sunrise had a spot on it this morning and even ABC news bulletins have talked the story up.

I’m mighty impressed with the campaign on the whole, despite some early stumbling, and given that this is only the end of phase one (the dude now has to go do the ‘work’ and write a blog about his experience), I’ll bet Tourism Queensland are chuffed with Cummins Nitro’s work. My guess is Ben’s blog won’t reach even a fraction of the people that news of the campaign to hire him did, but at the end of the day, I don’t think that really matters. Both agency and client will be hoping the online journal generates some interest, but success will be measured by overall column inches, and by that yard-stick, they’ve put together one of the best social media campaigns to date.

Will it translate into dollars for Queensland’s Tourism industry? It certainly will for Hamilton Island (I wonder what the other resorts think of it all). There’ll undoubtedly be a ripple effect too for the rest of Tropical North Queensland, but I’m really looking forward to reading the final report at the end of the day and comparing the success of this social media-bsed campaign to what they’ve done in the past. I’ll be surprised if there are any jaw-busting revelations there though. I think it will result in much greater media coverage than they’ve ever had, but in reality, Queensland is a long way from the rest of the world and favourable coverage on Fleet Street has a long way to trickle-down. For this to convert to substantially greater visitor numbers would be a massive achievement. I don’t think they’ll pull it off, but regardless, it is an absolutely fantastic advertising campaign.

Oh, and did someone mention something about a new mens range at a clothing store? No? Didn’t think so.

I wrote to Rivers this afternoon, just the general email address from the website. I wasn’t expecting much response, despite Rivers’s reputation for being pretty ‘DIY’ and approachable. They sent me an auto-response, which is a nice start, but the way they worded it made it quite special. The formatting was terrible (I’ve pasted in html so you can see), they could lift their game there, but the words were right. I thought I’d share, because it’s a great example of a company getting their customer service oh so right (I’m not a customer by the way, just thought I’d make that disclaimer):

YOU WILL BE GLAD TO HEAR……..

Your email really has been circulated to all of us senior management/ directors.

If we have our wits about us and pick up that your mail raises concerns (not covered below ) that need one of us to deal with we will do as such.

You would be amazed just how many things we fix in the business this way.

PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT BE CROSS WITH US BUT WE HAVE TO CONFESS …………

As we are trying to cut some overheads in these economic times we have generated this email that answers the most common queries which means if your query is covered by the below you will not receive an email direct from one of our customer service members…

—

The email goes on, but you get the idea… Nice work Rivers.

“Tegan,” from Australia is actually a digital project manager at Cummins Nitro, the Brisbane agency behind Queensland Tourism’s best job in the world campaign and the tattoo is quite clearly fake. Discerning YouTube viewers picked up on the facts pretty quickly (for goodness sake, fresh tattoos bleed, you don’t walk out of the shop with a pristine design), yet the video has had more than 60,000 views so far and considerable traditional media attention from around the world.

Who looks dumber, AAP and the major news outlets who ran with the story, or Qld Tourism who used it as an example video without a disclaimer?

Either way,  nice acting Rhiannon. Are the freckles real?

UPDATE: It seems Tim Burrowes over at MumBrella actually beat me to the punch on this story - for further reading and a response from Tourism Queensland, make sure you check out his blog post.

Matt: Where’s a good place to go for lunch around here?

Nathan Bush: There’s a great place off Brunswick St Mall, near Subway, they do $5 wraps - they’re great.

Matt: Really?

Nathan: Yeah, just down the alley, past Subway. They’re great.

Matt: Cool.

Matt walks to mall, finds shop easily, it’s the one selling wraps just past Subway with the long queue outside. Pays five dollars for BBQ meatball wrap with lettuce, BBQ sauce and Mayo. Finds it to be Tasty.

Two Weeks later…

Matt: Hey Christie, do you want anything for lunch? I’m just going to get a wrap from this cool little shop in the mall.

Christie: No, I’m OK thanks, I’m going out today.

Matt: OK

Matt walks to mall, finds shop easily, it’s the one selling wraps just past Subway with the long queue outside. Pays five dollars for BBQ meatball wrap with lettuce, BBQ sauce and Mayo. Finds it to be Tasty. Comes back to office bearing wrap.

Gino: What have you got there?

Matt: It’s a wrap from this little shop in the mall. They’re five dollars. They’re great.

Gino: Nice

Kasey: What are you eating?

Matt: It’s a wrap from this little shop in the mall. They’re five dollars. They’re great.

Kasey: Nice. Is that a beer you’re drinking?

Matt: No, it’s an organic ginger ale from the wrap shop. It’s great.

Kasey: Nice

Matt: Wait.

Kasey: What?

Matt: I think there’s a hair in here.

Kasey: Oh.

Matt: Oh.

Gino: Oh.

Two Weeks later…

Derek: Hey Matt, what’s good for lunch around here?

Matt: Do you like Subway?

A friend sent me this case study yesterday - It’s from a site called Marketing Profs and it’s a great example of a “mom and pop” business using social media and word of mouth marketing to build a pet food business - a $2.5 million at that.

—

Launched in May 2007, K9 Cuisine helped fill a void created by the tainted-pet-food crisis of spring 2007 by offering pet owners safe dog-food and cat-food products along with reliable and accountable service.

“It wasn’t started to be the biggest dog food business in the world; it was started to solve a problem,” said Anthony Holloway, president of K9 Cuisine, referring to the lack of product availability and quality service his family had encountered during the catastrophe. “And it didn’t take long at all to figure out we were onto something.”

Though armed with only a shoestring budget and limited marketing experience, Holloway rapidly turned K9 Cuisine into a thriving business, mostly by letting its products and service speak for themselves.
In fact, he didn’t spend a dime on traditional advertising. Instead, he connected with others on forums and blogs who were equally frustrated with the industry, and he used a very soft approach to highlight the company’s values and product quality

Buzz quickly started to build.

Now, less than two years later, K9 Cuisine is bringing in $2.5 million in annual sales and expects to double that amount in the next 8-10 months.

Challenge

Like many pet owners, Anthony and Kay Holloway found themselves in a bind when the tainted pet food crisis hit in spring 2007. The closest store carrying the new food they had chosen for their dog was 70 miles away and had inconsistent product availability. Online, availability was unpredictable, as well, and the lack of customer service left the couple wondering whether or when their order would arrive. The experience drove them to start their own pet food supply business in May 2007 with both a physical and an online store. The business, called K9 Cuisine, offered not only a wide range of safe pet products but also great customer service and live support, information on real-time inventory levels, free shipping on orders over $50, and same-day shipping for most online purchases.

But like any new business, it had to get the word out and gain credibility in order to build a customer base. Working with a small marketing budget, Anthony Holloway decided to leverage free and low-cost online media to communicate the company’s sound values, hoping that this approach—combined with exemplary service—would generate positive word-of-mouth.

Campaign

Immediately, Holloway noticed how passionate and opinionated the online pet owner community can be and wanted to use this to the company’s advantage. Working with Shama Hyder, founder and chief marketing consultant of After the Launch, a Dallas-based marketing consultancy firm, he started by reaching out to these people through forums and blogs—an effort he continues to this day.

Using Google alerts, Holloway locates posts related to pet products sold by K9 Cuisine and contributes to the conversations, but only when he feels doing so would add value for the readership and support the company’s values.

“It’s not spam,” he explained. “We try to be transparent and engage in discussions about dog food and pets, not just plant our name in forums.”

To further build trust, K9 Cuisine has set up its own blog with a handful of contributors, including two vets and a dog trainer. At first, company blog posts revolved around pet nutrition, but content has since been expanded to include interesting pet-related news and company activities, such as the time the Holloways traveled to Houston to donate 6.5 tons of food to the local SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) after Hurricane Ike.

K9 Cuisine has also launched a customer survey/product rating system on the company Web site, whereby objective and non-moderated customer feedback is posted to the appropriate product pages in real time. To encourage participation, K9 Cuisine sends an email to customers 21-28 days after the sale, thanking them for their recent purchases and asking them to take a few seconds to share their opinions about the items ordered.

In addition, the company has established a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. The K9 Cuisine Facebook page is designed to reinforce company values and connect with customers on a more personal level. It includes recent blog posts, photos, and video, along with a place for users to upload their own photos and contribute to the discussion board.

“Our goal is to personalize an impersonal experience,” said Holloway. “Whether through the blog, our Web site or Facebook, we want to make it feel more meaningful than just placing an order.”

K9 Cuisine has also conducted a limited amount of Facebook advertising and maintains a small keyword ad budget.

Results

K9 Cuisine’s annual sales have hit $2,500,000—and they’re climbing. Growth during the company’s first year registered around 50% per month, and it continues at a rate of 15-20% per month.

“The sum of it all has made for some fantastic growth for our company,” said Holloway, referring to the combination of soft online promotion and the word-of-mouth that has been generated through positive customer experiences.

Conversion rates on the Web site range between 5.5% and 7.5%, with keyword buys accounting for the best conversion ratios.

Lessons Learned

• Become a trusted source: K9 Cuisine was able to showcase its values, demonstrate expertise, and build credibility—in a time when consumers were extremely skeptical of the industry—by remaining transparent and using a neighborly, contributory style rather than a pronounced marketing approach, to engage its market in forums and other channels where those users were already looking for answers. The company blog, with regular postings from pet professionals, has also helped to establish trust among the user base.
• Let consumer passion work for you: K9 Cuisine was careful to not support one product over another when it engaged with the market, understanding how deep some product loyalties run… and how important it is for the consumer not to feel as if they are doing anything wrong for their pet. Instead, the company let unmoderated customer opinions and ratings dictate which products would rise to the top; and by encouraging such independent reviews, it was able to further boost consumer confidence on its site.
• Follow through with excellent customer service: The online campaign has been effective in driving traffic to the Web site and convincing customers to purchase from K9 Cuisine, but that’s merely step one. Had the company not completed those sales with prompt and satisfactory service and lived up to its promises, the business could have easily fallen flat. Similarly, the positive word-of-mouth that has played such a key role in the company’s success would not have materialized. Instead, because service has remained a top priority for K9 Cuisine, it has been rewarded with consistently high customer-satisfaction ratings, in the range of 98-99%, along with repeat orders from 70-85% of its customer base.”It may start on a blog or with a Google search, but the bottom line is that it’s about customer service and exceeding those expectations,” said Holloway.

“There is only one tool, one platform, one medium that allows the American people to take their government back, and that’s the Internet…”

It’s one of the more famous lines in recent American political campaign history, and it’s bang on the money. Literally, the Internet has changed the way candidates communicate with their electorate, but more than anything, it’s changed the way they raise dough. Interestingly, that quote came not from a candidate, but from a campaign manager. His name was Joe Trippi. You’ve probably never heard of him. He worked for a man called Howard Dean. You may vaguely remember him – in 2004 he was widely tipped to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination thanks to his revolutionary embracing of the Internet. He read blogs, organised rallies through meetup.com and emailed people to organise events. Trawl through news archives from 2004 and you’ll find thousands of articles on how amazing his use of the Internet was. Then he went and screwed it all up by screaming. John Kerry beat him to the post, and America voted for George W. Bush anyway. Game over.

So if Howard Dean had such a revolutionary Internet strategy back in 2004 and managed to raise enough money to become his party’s prime candidate, why does no-one remember him, and what was different about the 2008 race?

Two things. In fact they’re the two handiest things to have in any modern marketing campaign.

1. Remarkable
2. Social Media

Obama was a remarkable candidate. No one can argue against that. He is a gifted orator, a Harvard Law School graduate, an inspirational politician, a catalyst for change, loved by the most powerful celebrities in America and, of course, black. Democrats and Republicans both agree that is the most remarkable politician since JFK (not counting the effect Watergate and Monica Lewinsky had on buzz for Nixon and Clinton).

Howard Dean, on the other hand, was a bit of a toolbox. And, while Joe Trippi ran a great online campaign for him, they weren’t operating in a world with 100 million American Facebook and MySpace users.

Fast forward to 2008 and the landscape has changed dramatically. In four years social media takeup, and Internet usage in general has skyrocketed. In 2004 it was a teenage novelty, four years later it has become the main way friends and family communicate online. Barack Obama’s campaign team used social media better than anyone else and it gave them a huge advantage. Here’s how…

Facebook – Treat Friends as Friends and They’ll Like You

• Number of Obama Supporters on Facebook on election day: 3,000,000
• Number of McCain supporters on Facebook on election day: 600,000

Yep, for every Facebook supporter McCain had, Obama had five. In the online popularity stakes, there was no contest. However, that in itself wasn’t so much of a big deal. When Hilary Clinton was up against Obama she only had 20% of the friends he did, but the nomination contest went down to the wire. Obama’s real competitive advantage was a man named Chris Hughes. Before he was brought on board the campaign team he’d been busy running Facebook with co-founder, and college room-mate Mark Zuckerburg. With the co-founder of the most popular social networking site in the world on your campaign team, it was going to be hard to lose the popularity contest. Obama ‘got’ Facebook, while his opponent pretended not to care. As McCain’s deputy e-campaign manager put it, “Facebook users aren’t McCain voters anyway.” Which is a load of bollocks really, given that there are 36 million Facebook users in America.

McCain had a Facebook account of course, but in the same way John Howard had a YouTube channel in the 2007 Australian federal election, it was there because he would have looked out-of-touch without one, not because he’s the kind of guy who would have had one. McCain’s team spoke about him on his own profile in the third-person and his updates were lifeless. In fact, he didn’t even bother thanking his Facebook friends for support when he lost. Obama, on the other hand, came across just like one of your other friends would. Messages were signed-off with his first name and before he went and gave his victory speech in public, he sent this personalized note to Facebook fans:

“I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign. We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next. But I want to be very clear about one thing… All of this happened because of you.”

When Dale Carnegie wrote the world’s best-selling self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, in 1936 (the same year John McCain was born), his number one rule was to ‘become genuinely interested in other people’. You don’t need to be a self-help guru to figure out why Obama had five times as many Facebook friends as McCain. And you don’t need a degree in political science to understand that friends = votes.

My.BarackObama.Com – A Virtual Army and Fundraising Juggernaught

Facebook was the most public social media component of Obama’s campaign, but in terms of overall effectiveness, it will be a small footnote in history. The crux of Obama’s social media marketing strategy, and the main reason he raised so much money, was the custom social network created for the campaign, My.BarackObama.com.

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece for Marketing Mag called ‘Does your Company Need a Facebook Page’. It proved quite popular and I can sum up the gist of it with with this quote:

“Social networks exist to facilitate dialogue between passionate people. Their passion might be for a particular product, a cause, a celebrity or a football team, but they’re all in it together and they want to find other like-minded people to share their feelings with. If your business isn’t the kind of organisation that people are passionate (or at least mildy enthused) about, creating a social network around yourself will only serve to highlight that fact. At best, you’ll get a few staff members and cousins join, at worst, you’ll quickly find out no-one actually cares, which can end up looking rather embarrasing. If you honestly can’t envisage your clients or customers starting a Facebook group for your brand all by themselves, you probably shouldn’t have one.”

Applied to your average business, it makes sense. You can’t build a social network around something that people don’t care about because no-one will have anything to say. On the flip side, Obama isn’t your average business. Bush is the least popular president in generations and people were hankering for change. Obama was the most remarkable candidate since Kennedy and, suffice to say, he had a lot of fans. There was no way a custom social network dedicated to Obama was not going to work and hiring the co-founder of Facebook to run it was a stroke of genius.

My.BarackObama.com ended up with more than 1,000,000  members, which makes it (as far as I know) the biggest private social network in the world. McCain had nothing like it and Hilary couldn’t come close. Members were passionate and campaign management empowered them to enact the change they wanted to see. My.BarackObama.com was, in no uncertain terms, an army.

Instead of relying on an external tool, like Facebook or MySpace, which was beyond their control, campaign managers used My.BarackObama.com to maintain complete control over the dialogue and craft their messages precisely how they wanted them. They used it as a rallying tool to get supporters excited, a messaging centre to communicate with supporters and allow them to directly contact interested voters on behalf of Obama, a revenue raiser and a planning tool to put local supporters in touch with each other and allow them to set up meetings and arrange events.

Watch this video overview of My.BarackObama.com and you’ll see exactly why it worked so well. It’s probably the best example of a corporate social network the world has ever seen.

Pay particular attention to the fundraising section at 3:22. By getting a million supporters to hassle everyone they know for small amounts of money, they were far more effective in raising huge piles of cash than they would have been if they’d asked a hundred thousand people to donate large amounts. Anyone who’s a fan of Chris Anderson’s long tail theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail) will know exactly why this is such an effective strategy in the social media age.

At one stage in the nomination race Hilary was forced to loan to her own campaign $5 million to try and keep up with Obama’s fundraising. By June 2008 Obama had raised more than three times as much money as John McCain. My.BarackObama.com was, in Barack’s own words “the largest grassroots campaign in history”.

YouTube – You Don’t Need Broadcast Media When You’re this Popular Online

Obama’s use of YouTube was staggeringly successful. Every modern politician has a YouTube Channel (even our very own John Howard had one), but the world had never seen anything like http://au.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom. Look at the stats:

• Subscribers: 141,678
• Channel Views: 19,865,534
• Videos Uploaded: 1,823

Those figures sound impressive enough out of context, but compare them to the next most popular celebrities and you’ll see just how popular Obama’s YouTube site was:

Oprah:

• Subscribers: 46,352
• Channel Views: 1,790,402
• Videos Uploaded: 76

AC/DC:

• Subscribers: 28,302
• Channel Views: 1,180,100
• Videos Uploaded: 20

While YouTube views aren’t a measure of voter support, they are definitely a measure of popularity. If the American Presidential race is the world’s biggest popularity contest, Obama was definitely the prom queen.

Flickr – Bypass the Press

As Stefano Boscutti from Australia’s own SBS put it on his New New Media blog:

“So which news organisation landed one of the biggest photo stories of the year, exclusive behind-the-scenes pictures with the Obama family on election night? None of them. Obama’s personal photographer snapped the photos and uploaded them to Flickr under a Creative Commons license, skipping the media altogether.  The popularity of the photos subsequently crashed the site.  This is what happens when you get the first post-boomer president who actually gets the net.  The future just got brighter.”

Check out Obama’s Flickr stream at http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/ and you’ll see literally hundreds of examples of the Obama team using the world’s most popular photo-sharing site in exactly the way it was designed – for giving your friends an insight into your life. By providing that ‘behind the scenes’ footage, it served to humanise Obama, which in turn won friends and influenced people.

Twitter – You don’t Have to Talk Back

Obama’s Twitter account was a great example of how politicians can use this micro-blogging service as a one-way communication channel. Rather than trying to message back the 133,000+ people who follow him, which would have been logistically impossible and ended up hugely impersonal (the antithesis of social media dialogue), Obama’s campaign team used it as a broadcast tool.

The danger of using social media in a campaign is that once you start engaging with one person, everyone else will expect you to be their friend. By being up-front and not engaging anyone in this particular medium, there was no expectation amongst followers that they were going to get any attention. Australian politicians Kevin Rudd (http://twitter.com/KevinRuddPM) and Malcolm Turnbull (http://twitter.com/turnbullmalcolm) might do well to follow Obama’s lead sooner or later, or they’re going to end up with lots of angry followers wondering why no-one writes back to them.

Furthermore, in a sign that Obama took Twitter seriously during the campaign, but doesn’t see it as part of a viable long-term communication strategy for a world leader, Obama stopped tweeting once the election was over. Fittingly, it was with a message to his supporters that neatly sums up why engaging social media (and the people who use it) won him the election:

“We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks 5:34 AM Nov 6th”

Truer words were never spoken.

Mother Theresa was probably the BEST marketer of the 20th Century. Her directive from senior management was to “go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation” She ended up running 610 missions in 123 countries. It’s downhill from there though.

The chill-out room at schoolies week. School scripture. Suspicious looking ‘learn to surf’ lessons run by smiley people with tents. Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming album.

The two young men in suits with nametags, door-knocking on a bright Sunday morning. Hillsong. Ted Haggard.

Missionaries, ‘helping’ the aborigines, the islanders, the Africans and the Chinese.

The man standing on a street corner, quoting from the bible and talking about the end of the world.

Abortion ‘help lines’. Jihad training centres.

Terrorism.

Religious people do some terrible marketing, but they’re incredibly effective at it. Proof, I think, that the more remarkable your product is, the less you need to worry about strategy.

Name one other brand people are quite literally happy to die for. And don’t say Marlboro.

Kirrihill Wines sent me some bottles of vino a couple of weeks ago as part of their wine for bloggers program. I blogged about the wine from a social media marketing perspective a couple of times and a lot of people read with interest. In fact, as is the nature of the medium, word spread around the world. A few US wine critics even took notice.

Which is lovely, but the feedback from most comments was “that’s great Matt, nice use of social media marketing, but what did you think of the wine?”

I figured it was about time I told you. In fact, it was pretty good. I sampled half a dozen bottles with friends and gave half a dozen away to co-workers who expressed interest. I wanted to wait a couple of weeks before I wrote anything about the wine so I was working from my lasting impressions, rather than my immediate impressions.

The results are as follows:

• After two weeks I could not remember the exact name of the winery that had sent me the dozen bottles. I thought it was Kirrihill Wine and had to go back and change the title of the blog post when I visited their website just then and realised it was Kirrihill Wines. Not a big deal, but, interesting.
• Of the 10 people in this office who saw the bottles on my desk, the six who professed to be the most interested in wine were given a bottle. None of them can remember the name on the label, although two knew it started with a K and one thought it was Kirribilli. So, including me, that’s 0/11 brand recall after two weeks. They all thought the wine was OK and said that if they saw it in a bottle shop they’d consider buying it again, but none were raving about it. Ouch.
• I sampled the following wines:
  • Chardonnay Viognier
  • Riesling Pinot Gris
  • Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc
  • Garnacha Rosé
  • Cabernet Merlot
  • Shiraz Viognier
  • Tempranillo Garnacha
• I was actually really looking forward to trying the Riesling Pinot Gris and went to the trouble of having a dinner party and cooking a thai-style bbq prawn and macadamia nut salad to match the wine, and it was OK, but it didn’t really stand up against a few of my other favourite mid-range rieslings from Petaluma and Pewsey Vale.
• The Tempranillo Garnacha was fantastic and unusual. I would buy it again. In fact, I would actively seek it out in a bottle shop. If I could remember the name. It would be nice if their website mentioned more about it because it’s such an unusual variety.
• The rest of the range was OK, but to be honest, I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy them again.
• I loved the packaging.

I’ll drop Kirrihill a line in the next few weeks and do a more in-depth interview about how the campaign went because it’s certainly generated some buzz, but for now, those are my thoughts as a wine drinker.

Oh, by the way, if you’re a wine fan and haven’t checked out Project Vino, make sure you do. It’s an online Australian wine community and it’s brilliant.

Imagine if you knew exactly what your customers were thinking. Imagine if you knew EXACTLY what they wanted. Imagine if you could switch your TV to a channel which showed non-stop, live coverage of your customers thoughts about your brand, their concerns and their ideas on how you could do things better. Imagine if it was free and, as a company, you were encouraged to participate in the conversation. Sound satisfying?

Get Satisfaction is a community that helps companies engage their customers in dialogue. The concept is that members of the public with an idea can share their thoughts and then employees can jump online and show that your company is listening – it could be a rep from your corporate affairs department, or a guy from the mail room – it doesn’t matter. 6,873 organisations have joined the site, including some big names like Adobe, Apple, BBC and Dell. It’s early days yet, but the theory goes that rather than calling a customer support line and getting an average answer, customers can leave a comment on this website and get exactly the answer they want from the right department in a day or so. It’s a completely new approach to customer service, but it appears to be working.