Influential Marketing Blog

5 Ways Gaming May Transform The Future Of Healthcare & Wellness

Since the Nintendo Wii came out several years ago, the term "gaming" has begun to take on a different meaning. What was once used as a misunderstood term to describe teenagers wasting hours afterschool playing online games requiring huge and powerful computers with tattoo art on the sides has broadened. Now gaming describes everything from the massively addictive multiplayer games, to a new form of journalism, to the 45 year old woman playing a "microgame" on her mobile phone while waiting for the bus. Recent stats from the E3 conference offers research that may be surprising to some, including one data point that 25% of all gamers are over the age of 50.

Yet, despite the broadening perception of what gaming means - one area that is most interesting for marketers is also an area that is often ignored ... the market for "serious games." Serious games could be a variety of things, from educational games to help teach a new skill, to healthcare oriented games designed to aide therapy or test new prosthetic devices. Today is also the opening day of an innovative conference called Games For Health put on by the Serious Games Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In its fifth year, the event is featuring lots of interesting discussions in over 70 sessions. The event will showcase what I believe may be the 5 core ways that gaming could transform almost every aspect of healthcare and wellness as we see it today. In no particular order, these are:

1. ExerGaming - The Wii has done more for this category of gaming than any other, but this is simply the idea that gaming can be a powerful motivator in helping people to get more fit or incorporate more exercise into their schedule. The WiiFit has been a big hit in enabling this activity among Americans. The conference will also feature a case study from the US Army on their own exergaming effort called Army Fit.

2. AdverGaming - On the marketing side, advergaming has been around for some time now ... but it starting to make some waves when it comes to healthcare marketing. At least one prominent healthcare blogger believes it may be the future of healthcare marketing, and there are several examples such as Pepcid's current Nighttime Word Burn game on WebMD or a highly addictive game for Miraplex, a treatment for Restless Leg Syndrome that was released several years ago but is no longer online. (Disc. - Boehringer Ingelheim is a client of Ogilvy PR) Today Humana also announced a well concieved effort called Humana Games for Health which is seeking new game concepts to motivate people to be more active and healthy and is running a paid contest for ideas from today through September. Humana's effort is an interesting crossover that could move into one of the other categories such at TheraGaming relatively easily as well.

3. TherapyGaming - A natural fit for gaming has been in the area of visual therapy and improving cognitive abilities, as well as real physical therapy. There are several sites such as SharpBrains and Lumosity that offer gaming as a way to improve your intelligence and potentially treat learning disorders as well. To some degree, this is also the type of gaming that has been around for many years before the Internet, with flash cards and other forms of real life games that provide therapy to help patients heal or improve ability. Ben's Game is a video game designed to help kids fight cancer and the Wii is finding another use here as a tool to help physical therapy which the USAToday dubbed "Wiihabilitation."

4. CauseGaming - Sitting at the intersection of healthcare, behaviour change and cause marketing is an unique effort from The Partnership For An HIV-Free Generation and Warner Brothers called Pamoja Mtaani. The game is an interactive effort designed to educate children in Africa of the dangers of HIV in an engaging way. Another brilliant example I first heard about several months ago is Akoha, described as "the world's first social reality game." There will likely be many more examples in coming months of games that take a cause related approach to inspiring behaviour change in a health context.

5. SimulationGaming - There are several interesting examples of what you might consider a crossover between simulated training exercises and gaming. Though it may be a stretch, I'm including these in this list because it's a potentially big area where gaming can have an impact in methods and knowledge building when it comes to dealing with certain situations. The conference will be featuring an interesting case study of Burn Center, a "medically-accurate simulation of mass-scale casualty burn treatment." Another older example is the now defunct SIMHealth: National Healthcare Simulation.

Victorinox Introduces A Swiss Army Knife For Your Powerpoint

One of the new arrivals to the Consumer Electronics Show this year is Victorinox celebrating their 125th anniversary by taking what many may consider a traditional and storied toolmaker and planting one foot firmly in the land of consumer electronics. Here at the CES Victorinox is set to announce their newest product, called Presentation Pro, which will be available to consumers in May of this year. The new knife follows the same form as the SwissFlash (a USB flash drive encased in a small sized Swiss Army Knife cover), but has several integrated new features including Bluetooth connectivity to advance slides and a laser pointer to point to stuff (and presumably for self defense too, since it's an Army Knife after all!). The most thought out aspect is an integrated fingerprint security feature where you can secure your data on the flash and ensure that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Aside from giving you super spy status for having a gadget this cool, you'll get the usual Swiss Army Knife features like the knife and scissors. Unless of course you happen to be flying, in which case they'll offer a "flight friendly" version with no knife or scissors.

Here is a short video where Victorinox President Rick Taggart introduces the Presentation Pro:

The Softer Side Of Measuring Social Media

How do you measure your social media efforts? How should you? Most people in the industry talk generally about measuring engagement as a concept and cite examples such as time spent on a site or number of comments, or inbound links as ways to track this. Others talk about ad equivalency (ie how much you saved by avoiding paying for advertising to achieve the same results) or even tie social media efforts directly back to sales and conversions. All are good models and we use a combination of these on just about every client engagement.

Today at the Executing Social Media event in Atlanta, I shared a thought that I have been having over the past few weeks about a missing element of measurement that has been surprisingly important to many clients we have worked with. Consider it the "softer" side of social media measurement. Here are a few examples:

Metric: Internal Bragging Rights
Depending on where you work, this can be a big motivator. Being able to talk internally about a new social media effort or innovative marketing program is something that can build reputations of those involved, as well as lead to better internal responsibilities and possibly promotions and other good things.

Metric: Industry Recognition
Recognition from peers is a big deal as well, particularly the higher up in the marketing chain you go. Though some CMOs may not admit it, getting the envy or appreciation from other CMOs is just about the best compliment you can get. This doesn't necessarily need to be about winning some sort of award, just getting industry credit.

Metric: Lessons Learned
Sometimes failures can be the best thing to happen to a social media campaign. Doing something wrong gives you the chance to learn from your mistakes and perhaps even make your next campaign much more successful. The problem is that most metrics would record a campaign like this as having no redeeming qualities. That's not quite true and though most marketers know it, many don't have a way to share it.

Metric: Media Non-Coverage
An obvious numbers-based metric is about volume of coverage but there is a softer side of social media measurement when it comes to media. This could include avoiding negative coverage - for example if there is a journalist seeking brands that "don't get it" and your brand is not on the list because of your efforts. Another similar example might be having your brand's point of view portrayed more accurately as a result of social media content you have online.

Metric: Testimonials
One of the most powerful effects of social media is the testimonials that you often get from customers, employees and just about anyone else. These testimonials provide powerful stories that can be retold within an organization. Even if there is only one great video or a single great blog post, these can take on outsized importance when reported as part of social media measurement for a campaign.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "real" social media metrics we might report don't matter. Only that there may be a softer side of metrics that we too often forget, but that do make a difference.

7 Ways To Publish A Book For Marketing

I love books. Not just for the power of conveying an idea through a printed form, but also for the emotional significance of actually holding a book in your hands. More and more recently I have been books become a brilliant marketing tool for everyone, from political candidates to technology companies. Along the way, there are several ideas that I have collected for how using a book could be an effective part of a marketing strategy. Here are a few:

1. Explain a complex idea - Some businesses or product lines are based on something complex that is not easily understood. One example of using a book to explain a concept like this was a book Microsoft was handing out earlier this year at CES about their Windows Home Server product. It was called "Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?" and took a kids book approach to explaining why anyone would want a server in their home.
2. Commission an existing author or writer - This can be a great way to build on an existing author's profile and audience by working with him or her to commission a new piece. Hilton Hotels used this strategy as part of their Olympic marketing effort when they commissioned an award-winning kids author named Todd Parr to create a new book for them around their marketing tagline "Be Hospitable." Johnson & Johnson used a similar strategy back in 2002 with Understanding Children, a book they supported the creation of from Richard Saul Wurman (well known author and creator of the TED conference).
3. Partner with a "co-author" - There are two types of situations to use a co-author - the first is if you are actually a team and share similar ideas that you want to publish together. The second is to get someone who will do the actual writing while you help to provide direction and content. This second method is the one usually preferred by politician or famous person when they get a writer to help them create a "tell-all" biography of their lives.
4. Offer a book template - Though in a very different category, the Disease Control Priorities Project has an interesting way of distributing their content in a book form. You can go online, select various chapters from a group of publications and create your own book. The model of offering a template and letting people assemble their own books with your branding/message integrated is one that could work in many other industries.
5. Commemorate an experience - Art galleries use this technique often, creating limited edition books that commemorate their exhibits and the artwork contained in them. They work well because the art is so visual and many of these exhibits can be gatherings of work that will be dispersed after the exhibit and never again brought together - so the book seems very archival and worthwhile.
6. Organize a collaboration - There are some great examples of this technique - from Seth Godin's The Big Moo collaborative book a few years ago, to the Age of Conversation parts 1 and 2 (Disclaimer - I am a contributing author to Part II) which gathered together lots of contributors and invited them to write on a related theme to bring all these pieces together into a book. The resulting publication is often something that has built in marketing support as all the contributors will promote it to their networks.
7. Sponsor a branded printing - This may be the simplest way to use a book for marketing as you are basically using a book that has already been published which aligns to your product or brand in some way and reprinting a branded edition. Pretty much any book ever published can be reprinted in a branded version, usually with a new custom foreword or different cover depending on the number of units purchased.

Microsoft Finally Tries To Tell The Story Of Vista

During my time in Beijing for the Olympics, I was using a Lenovo Ideapad U110 to blog, capture and upload images and video and video chat with my family. Loaded on the machine was Microsoft Vista, and so I had my first experience using the much maligned new operating system from Microsoft. About the same time, Marc from BizBox (a site where I am now a contributor) pointed me to a viral campaign Microsoft had put together online around their "newest" operating system code named Microsoft Mojave. They invited customers to come and test out the new operating system, and also interviewed them about their perceptions of Microsoft and Vista. All said relatively the same thing, that they didn't like Vista, but were excited to see what Microsoft had next.

Most loved using the new Mojave ... and later learned that Mojave was just a made up name and that the operating system they had used during their sessions was actually Microsoft Vista. The videos are below, but they feature an insight that I myself had a chance to experience over my three weeks of using Vista, it is actually a really cool operating system that is easy to use and offers features that take it beyond earlier versions of Microsoft's operating system. Their challenge is to redefine their brand that Apple has basically defined for them through their popular series of "Hi, I'm a Mac" ads.

It will be interesting to watch if they do manage to make some progress on telling the real story of Vista more broadly. I, for one, left impressed as a user at the capability of the new operating system and actually miss some of the features now that I'm back on my own Thinkpad X61 running Windows NT. Perhaps it really is buggy and difficult to install in coporate environments (as some people complain), but I honestly had no such problems as an individual user. That's the real secret of Vista that Apple has worked hard (and successfully) to counter. The majority of people who think Vista sucks believe that because of crafted messages such as Apple's marketing, and not based on their own direct experience. That's the perfect incentive to focus on doing some more experiential marketing. Now it's just up to Microsoft to tell it's own story rather than letting Apple tell it for them.

The Great #080808 Beijing Olympic Twitter Campaign Catches Fire

Anyone who has been to enough events with social media creators knows that it is inevitable that people will find a way to connect and find one another. To a degree, Twitter first caught on from this need a year and a half ago at SXSW in 2007. I have witnessed it over and over, through examples like attendees of four conferences finding one another to share an evening of Korean BBQ in NYC a few months ago, or finding someone to hang out with as you are travelling to a foreign city for business. Social media creators are not just creating content, they are becoming experts at connecting with one another.

So I wasn't surprised to see that the tag 080808 is catching on as a way for all of us in Beijing at the Olympics to find and connect with one another. Started by three Chinese bloggers (Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe) and described on http://tag080808.com/, this campaign is already bringing together not just everyone here in Beijing who is creating social media content, but is also becoming a brilliant way to follow all these live voices of the Games in a real time stream. As the Olympics kicks off tonight, this tag and the resulting conversations on Twitter will accelerate dramatically. For my part, I have already started tagging my content with this and will soon revise my Twitter icon to use the 080808 template created for the campaign (the image below is a compilation of current icons from a post about the campaign on Read Write Web).

In addition, I just sent out a Tweet about a blogger meetup that will be sponsored by Ogilvy and Lenovo where we can try to get some of the many diverse bloggers here in Beijing together for a drink and chat. If you happen to be here, send me a message at @rohitbhargava and let me know if you can make it to The Bookworm in downtown Beijing on Sunday, August 10th at 7pm. And even if you're not in Beijing, you'll want to start using this tag to find the best content and impressions from social media creators here at the Games. This is a case study in the making ...

Official Image from the Tag080808 Site:

37signals & Freshbooks Disagree On Customer Service 2.0

There is a fascinating "smackdown" of sorts going between two leading Web2.0 companies which raises some very interesting questions about the future of customer service and what customers really want. Ok, maybe not so much a smackdown as a philosophical difference of opinion, but its one worth watching if you are a marketer or have anything to do with customer service. On one side, you have Sarah Hatter from 37signals, the maker of hugely popular web based applications for business such as Basecamp (which are used by over 1 million people). They are one of the few Web2.0 companies that have found a way to scale and make money, so their experience is not to be taken lightly. (Full Disclaimer - Ogilvy and several of our clients are currently customers and I LOVE Basecamp).  Here's what Sarah had to say in her post last week on the topic of why 37signals doesn't offer phone support:

"In a perfect world, calling a business for help would be quick, painless, productive, and human. But it’s not and it’s not going to be. That old time ideal of calling the local retailer or company and talking with someone after two rings was demolished by the call centers and overseas help desks that sprung up in the information age. It’s time to stop thinking that phone support is so essential. We’re lucky that we have an email support system that works and is incredibly efficient considering the volume of customers we interact with daily. It works because we’re committed to making it work, and if we can do it every company with a mailserver can do it too."

Instead of phone support, 37signals has focused on offering superior email-based customer service. They do it rapidly and thoroughly, without the distraction of having those same staff that respond to emails also trying to answer the phone. Based on the great reviews for customer service they typically get, their model works. On the other side of the debate is a younger and smaller (but equally hot) Web2.0 company called Freshbooks which offers an online invoicing and timesheet management tool. The application gets equally positive rave reviews from users and has been on a huge growth curve. (Another Disclaimer - I know a few of the team members behind Freshbooks very well and like them. I DREAM of being able to use Freshbooks to record my time instead of the antiquated software from the 1990s I have been forced to use at my last few jobs).

In a response to Sarah's post about choosing email over the phone, Sunir Shah from Freshbooks rises to its defense, noting:

"I’ll tell you the secret of why we answer the phone. Sarah is completely right: people don’t expect it. When we answer the phone right away, we have proved we’re a different kind of company. We demonstrate we put a priority on customer service. Our motto here is Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday. As Sarah points out, good customer service is in fact extraordinary in the sense that it’s abnormal. That’s sad because everybody wants it. Therefore, if you want to truly brighten the day of a customer that wants to phone, answer the phone. It’s good for business! When a customer hits a wall, we can free their minds immediately by being a real human being that takes ownership of the problem and fights on their behalf. Those customers become your most loyal advocates."

The most powerful thing about Freshbooks is the way that their customers rave about their experiences with them and the personal connection they feel to them. The phone is just a part of their strategy to create those extraordinary experiences, but for Freshbooks it helps them to stand out. Of course, the easy thing to point out is that they are doing it on a smaller scale than 37signals. So here's an open question - which side of the debate do you fall on? In order to grow and be successful, can you really afford to take calls and have a human on the other side of the phone as Freshbooks does, or do you need to be hyper focused on efficiency like 37signals?

Lenovo Extends The Olympic Experience With 100 Athlete Blogs

For any die-hard Olympic enthusiasts like me, you already know that today is a special day. It's exactly one month from the beginning of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing (on 08/08/08) and media attention is already starting to turn towards these Games in a more frenzied way. For several months now, I have been part of the team here in Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence group working on what I believe will be one of the most unique Olympic sponsorships of the coming games. Of course, I'm biased since I work on the campaign, but yesterday we started to spread the word about a new campaign that I have mentioned already once before on this blog.

The campaign is called The Voices of the Olympic Games and over the past several months we have recruited 100 athletes from more than 25 countries and more than 30 sports to all blog about their experiences leading up to the games. Our campaign strategy, in a sentence is:

Use Lenovo products to power athletes sharing their real experiences leading up to and during the Olympic Games directly with fans around the world.

There are several reasons why I'm really excited about this campaign. The most obvious is that as part of it, I will be heading to Beijing to offer a live voice - something I can't wait to do. More than that, however, the scale of this project and bringing this many real voices together from so many different cultures and sports is a much needed view of the Games that will be unique in its lack of melodrama.  None of our blog posts will be set to sappy overture-style music, and the stories we have are all an unfiltered view directly from the athletes that are competing. 

Along with our site aggregating all these voices at http://summergames.lenovo.com, we are also going to be using a live Twitter feed (@lenovo2008), Flickr, del.ici.ous, and there is a Facebook application created in partnership with Citizen Sports that has already topped 60,000 downloads. I'll be blogging lots more about the Olympics, but for now please check out our site and let me know what you think. We've got another month to put the finishing touches on it before Opening Ceremonies!

Campaign Mentions & Buzz (leave a comment if you'd like to be added to this list):

• Kevin Dugan: http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2008/07/social-media-br.html
• Adrants: http://www.adrants.com/2008/07/ogilvy-er-lenovo-blogs-and-tweets.php
• MarketingVox: http://www.marketingvox.com/39699-039699/
• Kyle Flaherty: http://www.engageinpr.com/2008/07/08/olympics-and-social-media/

Don't Be A Password Nazi: Rethinking Your Approach To Passwords

How many sites are you currently registered for? Unless you are particularly organized with all your sites, usernames and passwords in one place - chances are there are probably too many to count. Among those dozens or hundreds of sites, there are a select few that you access everyday and the rest fall into your own long tail of sites you have registered for but only log into infrequently. Over the last several weeks, I have found myself resetting passwords, sending reminders and guessing my own passwords for some of those sites that I don't access that often. Along the way, I started to think about some password setting best practices that I wish sites would adopt. What if there was a best practice for setting and requiring passwords that didn't make life harder for users?  Here are a few ideas that could be part of it:

1. Let users choose an appropriate level of security. I understand that to access your online banking, you need to have a really secure password. The problem is that many sites take a one size fits all approach to passwords. Do we really need the same security to log in to read my subscription of the NY Times? Of course not. More sites need to consider how secure their site really needs to be, and give users more flexibility to choose any kind of password instead of doing things like requiring capital letters, numbers or changes every 3 months.
2. Use password hints instead of just resetting. Many times, a user will know their password, they just need a hint in order to get it. For this reason, password hints can be very effective, because they are immediate and let a user get their password without submitting a form, waiting for an email, clicking a link and going through a long process to access your site.
3. Share your syntax rules. I have one type of password I use if a site requires me to use a capital letter. I have another if a site tells me I need to do that along with a number. Sometimes, if I knew the syntax rules that a particular site used, that would be enough of a prompt for me to "remember" my password and get into the site. The most frustrating thing as a user is to go through the whole process to reset your password only to realize that you had it correct all the time, you were just forgetting to capitalize a letter.
4. Think outside the "password." One thing that I have always loved about Priceline is after entering my email address on the site, it never asks me for my password. Instead, based on the email, the site asks my response to a personal question that I set when I first registered. As a result, I have never forgotten or had to look up my password for the site. It also makes me FAR more likely to visit that site first and return over and over - because they make it easy for me to login.

NOTE - Before I get lots of comments about how I should save my passwords through the browser so they automatically come up when I visit a site ... I do that, however for sites I access infrequently sometimes these are cleared when I clear cookies or if I'm using a different computer.

5 Great Marketing Blog Lists And What You Can Learn From Each One

As a marketing blogger with a fairly decent audience, I tend to make it onto a lot of marketing lists. And they are pretty popular these days. Sometimes it seems like each month I get placed on several of these new lists (along with the accompanying requests to include a list to the lists on my sidebar). Recently I got yet another one over the weekend and realized that this tactic is likely to get more and more popular as companies continually try to find ways to connect with prominent bloggers. If you are considering coming up with your own list, you might want to take a look at a few relatively successful marketing lists and what you can learn from each one:

1. Todd Andrlik and the Power 150 - This is probably the ultimate marketing list example, because it led Todd to a partnership with AdAge magazine where his original Power 150 list is now the standard used by the magazine to rank all marketing and advertising blogs worldwide. Early on when many marketers were still trying to build a good metric for influence, Todd created a wieghted system using a combination of factors, from Technorati rank to number of Bloglines subscribers. This led him to a more detailed rating system that was ahead of its time, and now has become the standard for rating marketing and advertising blogs.

The Lesson: Create a truly authoritative way of measuring influence, and let others share it.

2. Guy Kawasaki and AllTop - Guy Kawasaki's latest entrepreneurial effort is getting a lot of attention among bloggers, in part because he has managed to appeal to the blego (blogger's ego). Each category of Alltop blogs are chosen by a group of individuals invited by Guy and his team to help select the blogs that should be featured. Once you make it, you have access to a host of great badges to include on your blog, including the one you'll see on my sidebar which indeed does offer confirmation that I kick ass.

The Lesson: Involve leading thinkers in the development and promotion of your list.

3. Mack Collier and the Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing Blogs - Mack has been publishing his list of top marketing blogs for several years now and does get credit for being among the early ones to publish a list of marketing bloggers. He has the added benefit of having a personal connection as an individual with most of the bloggers featured on his list ... so as a result the Viral Garden list feels more like a club than pretty much any other marketing blog list out there.

The Lesson: Get to know and build personal relationships with the bloggers on your list.

4. Joe Pulizzi and the Junta42 Content Marketing List - I had a chance to review an early version of Joe Pulizzi's new book on Content Marketing which will be out in a few months and I share his enthusiasm for the idea that content is the new standard for smart marketing. As part of his site, Joe has created a new metric for rating marketing blogs based on how often the talk about content marketing. As a result, his is one of the few marketing blog lists where you'll see the order completely shifted around, and new names on the list that are not on every other list.

The Lesson: Find a niche for your list that you can own.

5. Lee Odden and the Biglist Search Marketing Blogs - Lee's list will likely be one of the most comprehensive you will find anywhere, because the list includes just about every site under the sun that talks about marketing. Instead of ranking all these blogs, the list simply organizes them alphabetically. As a result, it is a less useful list ... but makes for brilliant "linkbait" as all the blogs included on the list now know about Lee's list and several have included the Biglist badge on their blogs.

The Lesson: Create the most comprehensive list possible if your goal is to increase your "link love."