A good example of this is Michael Jackson’s new video for the song “Behind the Mask”. Thousands of MJ fans worldwide contributed to the posthumous Michael Jackson music video for “Behind the Mask” released Tuesday, June 15 on the star’s Facebook page.

To participate, fans selected from a number of actions from Jackson’s website (“playing an instrument, singing a lyric, acting out a crowd reaction or demonstrating a classic MJ dance move”), then filmed themselves with a webcam or uploaded video shot elsewhere. Using a split-pane interface, they could then line up their video with Jackson’s in order to follow the directions. In this case, there is a Tribe of fans, who are connected with the common act of liking Michael Jackson’s music. This was a great concept as MJs fans(tribe) got to participate in the video, which engaged then with their beloved star, even though he is not with them anymore. Brilliant work, according to me !

Another interesting example of it is Iceland’s new constitution. The country’s 25-member constitutional council is posting draft clauses on its website and inviting the public to comment on them there or on its Facebook page. And their comments are actually being incorporated into the document. The council also has Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts and is streaming all of its meetings live. This was again a very interesting use crowdsourcing  through social media since the people of Iceland, got a chance to give their opinions and have a say in the constitution. They also got a chance to see all the meetings live which kept them well informed about how the affairs of their country are shaping up. Especially through channels they regularly access.

Now a look at MJ’s Crowdsourced video:

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Now Twitter has launched their own official button. On the Twitter blog, it says that a quarter of all tweets include a link in them, so the decision to develop their own button seems bulletproof.

Besides having the actual function of sharing, the sharing buttons also count the number of times an article or blog post has been retweeted which gives the user (or the owner of the website) an indication of what content is more popular.

For a long time, TweetMeme has been the dominating Twitter sharing service and will now meet serious competition. According to Twitter, they have been working closely with the people at TweetMeme to develop their own sharing button.

You can check out the features of the official Twitter button here:

Install the button on your site

The Tweet button is available in different sizes and you can grab and customize a code from Twitter/Tweetbutton to implement on your site.

If you run a WordPress blog like we do, you can also install the Twitter Button WordPress Plugin developed by Blogsessive, that automatically places the button to your site.

We have already installed the Twitter button to our site – try and hit the Tweet Button :-)

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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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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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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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None Found

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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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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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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