Many articles and blog posts have been written about Zappos.com as a social media best practice example, but after reading the book “Delivering Happiness” by the Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, it stands clear to me that it’s not all about social media – it’s about a company doing a whole of things right and social media is ‘just’ a tool. By the way – this is not a review of the book – you can read my little less than traditional review here.

Zappos.com basically stands out because of two main focus areas: customer service and company culture.

Customer service is first priority
The core of the entire company is bringing happiness and delivering a wow-effect to all everyone that gets in contact with Zappos.com. This basically means that profits for instance comes longer down the priority list – great customer service is seldom the most cost effective way to run a business.

This sounds almost to simple, but it absolutely isn’t! Reading “Delivering Happiness” gives a glimpse of how hard and focused work it requires from an entire organization – from the top management and especially to the sales rep, the receptionist or the tech geek of the company.

Company culture is a great brand
During several years, zappos.com has poured money and energy into building a corporate culture that can back up their mission: to deliver happiness in a box to all clients. They have empowered their employees and sourced the corporate development to the Zappos tribe, thus coming out as one of the most innovative e-commerce businesses of our time.

Corporate Culture is not built over night or with a few core values if you want to do it ‘the Zappos way’. It takes time and involvement. For instance, with involvement from all employees Zappos.com has made a “Culture Book” that has become a phenomenon in itself. It communicates the company culture to a much larger tribe than just the people working at Zappos.com

To quote CEO Tony Hsieh: “Your Culture is Your Brand”. So build a great culture and you build a great brand.

Social media is a social tool
So what does Zappo’s social media usage make them stand out as a best practice example?

I don’t think it’s because they have been technically innovative to use social media or because they used it before others. It’s basic, it’s because social media is a great tool for companies building their company on delivering great service to their customers and empowering and involving the entire tribe around Zappos.com.

It’s that simple – social media is about people, so if your aim as a company is to do all you can to do good for the people you want to connect with, social media becomes a great and very valuable tool.

By the way – I can, from a deep (very very deep) part of my heart and mind, recommend you to read “Delivering Happiness”. It will inspire you and give you mindjumps that can transform your business if you are open towards change!

» Follow Jonas on Twitter

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Festivals and concerts are part of the summer. But you won’t need a thick wallet or take time off from work to experience the music and the amazing shows. The digitization allows us to record, share and take part of enjoyments from around the world.

One of the greatest festivals is the Danish Roskilde Festival that always hands its visitors a magic atmosphere and hot artists. In cooperation with Roskilde Festival, Sony Ericsson has as the official Social Media Partner and one of the head sponsors launched a campaign called The Copenhagen X Sessions. The strongest names from the upcoming Danish music scene have been invited to a studio for recording live sessions. The best moments have been captured in both pictures and sound. The result is 18 X Session – 18 different bands and 70 unique captures of the intensity of the live performances. You can see the videos and pictures on the site and on a series of social media platforms such as Flickr and Facebook, all free for you to download. The site is connected to Facebook and you can add comments and easily share it to your profile.

The campaign is totally focused on the unique experience you get from a live performance and Sony Ericsson promotes their Xperia phones as your best friend when you want to immortalize the moment and share it with your friends. I wonder why they haven’t taken advantage of using the phone for photos or video recording to demonstrate its qualities. On the other hand they build a stronger approach to the world of music as they connect with one of the world’s largest music festivals. The Copenhagen X Sessions shows prove how to adjust function and content to their audience’s need and social media behavior. There is no doubt that Sony Ericsson is being seen as a provider of great music devices and this campaign will strengthen the approach.

We wanted to get an insight on what the long term idea for X Session is, so we caught the Communication Planning Director from Mediaedge: Cia in Denmark, Kristian Bæk-Mikkelsen on Twitter for a 140 character input:

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At first sight, it’s a copy of Facebook, but your friends are now your allies and the cause is all about human rights. Amnesty is the organization behind the Tyrannybook. It’s a social network with a focus on increasing the awareness of the cruelty against people that’s taking place around the globe. So far there are ten tyrants on the site, ten of those in power who break the Human Rights, and the purpose is to gather a community of human right defenders to make them know they’re being watched.

The tyrants to follow so far are Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Than Shwe of Myanmar, Hu Jintau of China, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Radovan Karadzic of Serbia, Aleksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov of Chechnya. Every action they do against Human Rights is shared on their made up profiles. It’s up to you to decide who you’re most interested in watching. You can become ally with other people watching them and the site allows you to bring up discussions and exchange views about current issues.

Amnesty hopes to get more support to the causes the site promotes. Like every community, the site will expand and be updated with new tools and functions. The Tyrannybook will not be a place for sharing photos from your shopping weekend in New York, it will be a place to discuss the everyday life of people living in the suffered countries and focus on the tyrants making it factual. Amnesty is using social media for social good.

When I was looking around the site, I noticed that some people liked the initiative but they were also sceptical to what we can actually do to affect the tyrants. Publicity of Human Rights questions are in competition with news, entertainment and other local press reports. This site has one focus: human rights. Amnesty can keep the discussions around their subject and is possible to locate dedicated human right defenders, find those who are ready to act and above all get people to share the story with their friends. I think this site will affect people in a new way. Users are being updated on the tyrants they watch and can connect with people in the suffered countries and listen to their story. When we’re closer to a situation and can relate to it we are more likely willing to take action and support an organisation like Amnesty.

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Do you run an online community? Some years ago it was expensive and difficult to programme a virtual meeting place. Today it’s free and really simple thanks to Facebook.

Still, many companies who start a Facebook page never succeed. Valuable resources are vasted because these companies fail to understand that online interaction is about PEOPLE.

There are certain ways to win the hearts and minds of the people in your community.

Kellogs does it. Nike does it. Novozymes does it. They build strong communities by befriending, motivating and engaging people. And all this can be done on a simple Facebook page.

We have come up with 5 tips worth following, if your company wants to succeed in building community engagement:

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In May this year, I wrote “Tribesourcing – the first draft” on our blog, hoping to get input and feedback on some thoughts. I got some very good pointers, and we started a process of developing those thoughts into a strategic working process.

A big part of the developing process of Tribesourcing where to collaborate with our clients and people in our network to create the process, and it still is!

The process is build so that it will evolve over time with new input and feedback from our clients and network, but the Tribesourcing working process is up and running, and is now being used as Mindjumpers strategic working process on our clients.

If you are interested you can read more about the process here, or take a look at the slide show below giving an introduction to the process, with some Best Practice examples on companies doing what we call Tribesourcing.

Most importantly – if you have any input or feedback – we would love to hear from you.

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At Mindjumpers we work with a strategic process we call Tribesourcing.
Instead of looking at target groups we see people as more connected through tribes, with a larger diversity in demographics, geography, religion etc.

Instead of adhering to mass-communicated marketing, we rather look at engaging, involving, motivating communication. In other words, we lead a tribe to co-create and collaborate on performing a task with the ambition to create a desirable and valuable output.

To illustrate what we mean by tribesourcing, we will during the next couple of months share some best practise examples from around the world, which have done exactly what we think is the right and new approach. The following example is about saving humpback whales.

Greenpeace – Mister Splashy Pants

In trying to create awareness on the killing of the humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean, Greenpeace created a campaign in which they involved and built a tribe of socially engaged people. They sourced the essence of the campaign to the tribe: what should the campaign be called?

With the possibility of both submitting and voting on different names Greenpeace gained the attention from hundreds thousands of people. On the suggestion list, a wide range of possible names appeared, but a humoristic approached seemed to bring the tribe together – Mr. Splashy Pants.

Now according to Greenpeace this was absolutely not the most preferred name. So they challenged the tribe with different obstacles for getting the name chosen, among other things they made the submission/voting phase a bit longer – making it possible to build an even bigger hype.

In the end, Greenpeace ‘surrendered’ to the tribe and the campaign were named ‘Save Mr. Splashy Pants’.

Besides building an enormous hype, it created some of these values:
-    Building an unexpected tribe of people around the world, ready to fight for Mr. Splashy Pant’s survival.
-    11,000 submissions
-    150,000 voted on the campaign name
-    Online PR on hundreds of websites

And most importantly, the Government of Japan has abandoned plans to kill humpback whales in the Southern Ocean this season.

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Obama does it, Apple does it, Google does it and Nike does it. It is all about involvement of your potential customers and letting them contribute to the development of your product or brand to create value.

Take for instance Nike. On many of their web pages there is an in-built feedback button so that you can easily give your feedback to a product, ask a question or share your idea. For each idea people can rate the various ideas. This is a handy tool for Nike to develop their products in a direction that is useful for its many customers, which is exactly the essence of the new way of building business.

This does seem so logical: build products your customers ask for, build a brand your tribe will spread the word about. But its not traditional marketing or product development thinking – it is in our opinion the only way to build business in this new era.

Nike also has a community site that has more or less the same functions. This way, Nike can always stay connected to their community and see what the most popular ideas are and know about common problems.

At Mindjumpers, we call this working method tribesourcing. It is about involvement by sourcing to your tribe, your consumers, your community. Read more about our tribesourcing approach here.

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After almost six months of building the community and creating awareness around the low-temperature washing, CO2-saving, climate friendly choices demanding campaign ‘I do 30’,  it’s now Christmas or not Christmas yet actually, it’s COP15 in Copenhagen.

Half a Year of Doing 30

For the last six month, it has been a wild ride of unexpected opportunities generated from the social media use of the campaign and the created awareness.  More than 20 on and offline articles and more than 35 blogs have written about the campaign, not only in Europe but also around the globe.

Comparing with the share of other climate initiatives and campaigns, I don’t think it’s all wrong to say, that the campaign has gotten its fair share of voice.

All along, the campaign has been a low budget campaign, driven by people simply wanting to help and making use of new technologies at its best. The campaign has had a visual drive with more than 12 published videos on the YouTube channel generating around 300,000 views.

The Challenge of COP15

So, now we have reached COP15, and we’ve been too busy to plan what to do during the ten days of climate conference. And besides, it’s not much fun to plan with close to no budget So what to do? It’s close to impossible to buy your way out of attention during this week where I guess that the spend from companies is no less than $10 million, and probably way more.

Well, we wanted to have fun, and we wanted to include our ‘I do 30’ community on Facebook. So instead of just going out to document COP15 and Copenhagen and bring that to the community, we wanted, in theory, to bring the community to Copenhagen.

The Statement Bubble

We came up with a simple idea, probably inspirered by the new ways we communicate on Twitter, Facebook and so on. We made a real life speech bubble (cost less than $100) and now offer to wander around the streets of Copenhagen with ‘I do 30′ statements from the community in the bubble. Everything is of cause being filmed and put back to the community.

You might think, well that does not seem like a lot, they will never get heard, what will happen? And you are right, we don’t know – and that’s the whole point. But what we do know is that in this new wired and connected world, fun and surprising things will happen. It has so far, and if we are ready to take the ride, things will happen…

These are the first two films in the Statement Bubble series. We will be making a lot more during the next ten days for I do 30.

So watch out for a guy with a giant speech bubble on the streets of Copenhagen.

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This is not a post about when social media hits the Tipping Point; rather it’s some initial thoughts on part of Malcom Gladwell´s theory and who in social media it applies to.

Said from the beginning – I would like your comments and thoughts on this – so please while reading, prepare yourself to leave those valuable thoughts.

At Mindjumpers, we have for a while now been looking into the first part of the Tipping Point theory, the part of how things go viral, not through the quantity of people, but through the quality.

Malcolm Gladwell describes (in short) the three different types of people who individually and in with the right context at the right time make things go viral.

The Connecter – a great networking person, who is connected to a bunch of people, these types of people are the reason why we are all connected by six degrees of separation, according to Gladwell.
The Maven – the persons you just listen to, because you know they are experts on the area they are talking about, experts is actually not even the right word, they are beyond.
The Salesman – the person that with fire and enthusiasm can sell or convince you of anything.

Now Gladwell’s theory got published back in 2000, before the revolution of social media. And this is also what makes it so interesting to me – the theory must have changed in some ways, or made even more relevant than ever.

With social media, we see close to ordinary people on Twitter with 30,000 followers and celebs with more than 2,000,000 followers. On Facebook it varies from person profiles with 200 to 5,000 friends (the limit for a personal profile), but we also see people with less than interesting fan pages having more than a million members.

So the world is more connected than ever, the amount of ideas, sounds, videos, articles etc. is larger and spreading faster. Does the same theory apply, or has the long tail theory taken over?

Here’s What I Think

I think the same theory applies, I think social media have put a rocket up in the ass of Malcolm Gladwell’s theory. We see people on Twitter getting a shitload of followers, but do people listen or share? Some say that the average twitter can expect less than 5% of it followers to retweet your posts (if you’re lucky) – now that does not start something viral, only 1 out of a million times. But looking at my own little area of interest, social media, and looking at who can actually create viral spreading, the above mentioned theory still applies.

Take a guy like Chris Brogan – he is a great salesman, he is enthusiastic about his topics, but most importantly, he knows how to sell his messages. Take the bloggers from Mashable or TechCrunch, I would call them mavens – I instinctly trust what they write because they seem like people who live and breathe for what they write about.

For the connecters I am more in the dark, because a true connecter lives his life for building his network, he knows the people in his network and the person brings people together in the network. I do see people on Facebook and Twitter with a lot of friends or followers, but they often seem more like the collector of people than the genuine connecter types. Seth Godin is one of the people striking me as a connecter, if you get involved in his network, make contact with him, he (from his own writing) will reply you. He seems to have a genuine interest in the people he connects with.

Now when any of the above mentioned says something, writes an article or shares an idea, people spread it – it will go viral in some way or the other and it will do so incredibly fast. I read in ‘The Stories of Facebook, YouTube & Myspace – the people, the hype and the deals behind the giants of web 2.0” by Sarah Lacy, that the three guys behind YouTube, in the beginning were sitting in their basement, trying everything to get the word out about YouTube – even ads in the paper.  But it was a combination of the the video “where the hell is Matt” (great content) and an article by the editor of TechCrunch that kick started the hype of YouTube.

I will do more research and work more on this subject, but first I would love if you would share your thoughts with us on the matter.

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Written by Anne Herngaard

The project called CitySourced brings crowdsourcing to another level. Recently, the project was in the top three finalist category in the TechCrunch50 awards.

The company and the product initiated as an iPhone app, but the app now includes Blackberry and Android devices as well. The CitySourced app lets citizens report the everyday problems they encounter when they frequent the city – such as podholes, vandalism, trash, snow removal or whatever they feel need attention. The app features a simple way to send a geotagged photo along with a comment directly to the City Hall or the appropriate body in charge of fixing the issue. With the geotag, cities can also view the reports with picture and text on Google.

This app is a great way for cities to use crowdsourcing by empowering citizens to contribute in making their city a better place. A very ambitious project some may say, yet it builds on democratic values and allows for government bodies to give a voice to citizens in their everyday lives in a simple way.

Interested cities can sign-up on the web.

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