Cisco Marketing Has Got Game

Some call it social media excellence some just say we've gone crazy...whatever you call it, it seems to be working.

As an extension to the social media efforts that we're leveraged for Cisco's ASR launch, Cisco announced a tournament around the EDGE QUEST game where they are offering $10,000 cash plus a Cisco ASR 1002 router to the sole winner. Not a bad deal for playing a game but the competition is stiff with a top score currently at 204,540.

I haven't exactly kept it a secret that I'm one of the marketers behind this campaign so of course I think it's cool but here are a few specific reasons why I think it’s working for us:

1. We're reaching our target audience in a new, fun, and engaging way. Last year online gaming attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population -- almost 217 million people -- and according to CIMS, 24% of those were IT professionals! Us marketers are always trying to fish in a big pond but it helps when they’re all swimming in the same place.
2. Low cost, high ROI. This program was an extension of an existing program. The EDGE QUEST game was created at launch so the cost of the tournament includes just the "carrot" of $10K plus the router. We also invested a small amount in changing the game a bit for the "money round" of the tournament but no budget went into promotion we focused solely on social media outlets. In return we've had an influx in PR and Blog pick-ups and a substatial increase in traffic to the game and product page. All of this activity of course is being measured and considered as part of the ROI of the campaign.
3. It was just a blast to work on. Hey there's nothing wrong with that - it's fun for the people engaging with Cisco in a new way and it was fun to be part of the marketing team to develop and creatively promote the game and tournament leveraging social media tactics which included a social media release, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg and Flickr.

This particular campaign won't work for everyone but creating a social marketing campaign can get your customers engaged and extend your message far beyond traditional marketing.

Web 2.0 Expo - Friday Session Wrap-Up

I wasn't able to make it the Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday but I was there all day Friday and attended a few good sessions. But it was Friday after a long week so I apologize for the delay in getting this post up but here are my key takeaways:

Keynote: Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs
This guy is hilarious and he authors an entertaining blog from the perspective of Steve Jobs (on crack). He talked about how and why he started the blog and why he thinks it works. In the end it boils down to boredom, fear, an idea, and an engaged audience.

Boredom because it started as a prank that happened to take on a life of its own. Fear because as a traditional Forbes tech writer he saw print publications coming to an end due to the emergence of blogs. An idea - "what would Steve Jobs write if he really did go nuts?" And an engaged audience that included 90K monthly readers after just 6 months and 25-50 emails a day with suggestions on what to write next.

Games 2.0: Why the Future of Games Looks More Like Zombies and Scrabulous and Less Like Halo 3
This session ended up being a little different than what I expected but what was interesting is that while social networking sites are trying to deploy game dynamics in their communities as discussed in the 'Children of Flickr' session, game sites are trying to embed social relationships and social context into games.

The Audience is the Medium: Video 2.0 & Online Communities
I was a little late to this session but joined in on the debate of Live vs. On-Demand video. Live events have a higher interaction and allow viewers to be part of the conversation. BUT...the web is not equip to handle live video distribution and advertisers look at the big numbers as oppose to engagement. Ultimately there's a place for both and the decision needs to be made based on the objective.

The Power of Online Communities: Lessons from the Best of the Consumer & Business Community Managers
This session included community managers from SFDC, Dell, Yahoo!, Kiva and Flickr. Here are a few things worth passing on:

• SFDC put the responsibility of their community into the hands of their product managers by making it part of their job to create, encourage and maintain conversations for their product.
• Kiva lucked out and avoided formal marketing all together. They grow 100% organically through word of mouth - but a big part of this was knowing and connecting with the right people.
• Flickr suggests being 'elastic' and don't just try to make your audience do what you want them to do.
• When building a community create a feedback mechanism. Don't just listen - engage.
• When hiring a community manager look for someone with relationship building and communication skills - PR background a plus. Also someone who authors their own blog or possibly someone in your community.

Best-kept Secrets to Search Engine Optimization Success: the Art and the Science
This was a session on Wednesday that I attended but didn't have good notes for. This guy - Stephan Spencer - really knows his stuff but it was hard to keep up. Luckily he made his slides available and you can view them here:

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Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web

This was the last morning session and ended up being my favorite. This session was moderated by Justin Hall from GameLayers with three panelists: Rajat Paharia from Bunchball, Christopher Chapman from Areae and Gabe Zichermann from rmbr.

The theme of this session - Everything can be a Game.

This session focused on game dynamics and how game psychology can drive engagement, interaction and loyalty on your website, traditionally a non-gaming environment.

Gabe was clearly passionate about the gaming concept and explains it as "the only force that exists without the threat of violence that makes people do irrational things."

Here's a few key takeaways I walked away with:

• The definition of a game is changing and what people really want is to do something they like, something they consider fun, and/or something that makes them feel like they accomplished something.
• There are three basic things to make something fun: Challenges, Leaderboards and Points - when added to any experience it changes peoples behavior.
  Advice is to think about how to make an experience fun from day 1. If you’re not in a situation to do that you can still go through the experience and layer in gaming mechanics to et more engagement and interaction from your existing community.
• Game mechanics involve rewarding people along their journey. You can have different metrics for success to make them feel like they are 'winning'; for example slice and dice the data - different activities can have different leaderboards and that data can be grouped by network or time.
• Gaming Essentials from Gabe: It needs to be overly simple (no instructions required); you need to be able to play with one hand; you need to be able to start/stop playing at any time; and it needs to be infinitely playable.
• Interesting stats - woman who are 35+ are not thought to be traditional 'gamers' however they are the demographic that drives a big portion of the gaming industry including Yahoo Games.
• Gabe dropped an interesting bomb about how women don’t respond as well to 3D environments and the fact that they are not well liked by a lot of people because they are confrontational. He recommends sticking to a 2D environment like the world we live itn. He says 2D environments are easier to navigate and ultimately more flexible.

Game On

It's no secret that I'm an advocate of using online games to create an engaging and fun environment for people to learn and interact with your brand. I've even questioned whether online gaming was web 2.0's killer app. Cisco's latest EDGE QUEST game was a result of my persistence on this topic and has proven to be a good investment so far. But if you're still looking for more ammo to sell this concept to your organization, iMedia Connection posted a useful article: 11 Reasons to Extend your Brand with Games. Here are the highlights:

1. The bottom line is we just want to have fun: According to the National Institute on Media and the Family, 35% of Americans rated video and computer games as "the most fun entertainment activity."
2. Online games can be viral and ubiquitous: They are portable and can be emailed, hosted on websites, syndicated, distributed to mobile phones, etc.
3. They deliver results: Some say that advergaming offers retention rates 10 times higher than broadcast commercials; 15-45 percent of consumers who receive an advergame actually play it, and for an impressive average of 25 minutes. (Source: YaYa LLC.)
4. Games and simulations are a great way to educate your prospects and customers: They also added sales to that list in the story. Cisco's EDGE QUEST game is a great example of how we made it educational but still fun and engaging.
5. Online games create an impetus to interact with your brand: If you're looking to build a relationship with your customer this is a good way to get to know each other in a way that "appeals to our emotions."
6. Online games deliver greater brand recall: It's memorable. Why? Because it's visual, interactive and engaging.
7. Provide greater customer insights: Customers are more willing to share personal/preference information in exchange for the ability to play a game.
8. Games engage the emotion to reach the intellect: You're not only drawing them in for the fun but able to deliver key info and brand messages. "It's a one-two punch."
9. Provide your prospect with an active (not passive) experience: Participation is required.
10. Multiplayer games can be the glue to build community around your brand: This is something that is probably best done with Second Life. Simulating real life environments are no longer abstract thoughts when you can illustrate it in a virtual setting.

Synchronize your brand vision across all touchpoints: Because of the portability you can "span far and wide" hence fully leveraging your investment for a large, global audience.

Leveraging Social Media and Web 2.0 in a Product Launch

Part of the reason I've been a lazy blogger lately is that I have been consumed with launching "the most powerful compact router every created" - the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers. It's been a fun launch and we pulled out all of the web 2.0 stops creating a Virual. Viral. Visual. launch. Here's a laundry list of how we leveraged Web 2.0:

• Pre-Launch Uber User Site - We leveraged light hearted videos on this site and posted them on YouTube to maximize visibility.
• Facebook Group - This was part of the pre-launch so I was able write about this one in an earlier post and even shared our process and tips here.
• Interactive 3-D Game - I would like to give kudos to the vendor - Somnio - who helped us create this very cool online game. "EDGE QUEST" offers our audience a fun and engaging way to learn about the product and interact with the Cisco brand - a no-brainer given the playing statistics of online games.
• Social Media Web Widget - Again kudos to Somnio here for the development of Cisco's first web widget that 'lets our content free' by allowing users to embed it on their site (as shown below).



• Social Media Release (SMR) - It's been nearly a year since I stumbled across and wrote about SMRs. What make them different from a traditional release? It's the approach and the fact that a SMR leverages and highlights all of the social aspects of the announcement.
• Second Life Presence - We were able to leverage Second Life pre-launch by hosting a countdown party and post launch by walking through a product demo.
  Other Stuff - We also leveraged sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, Reddit and StumbleUpon - we also have a focused blogger outreach program and a pretty cool looking launch page.

Want to know more about this launch? I'll be presenting on March 26 with Wilson Craig, PR Manager at Cisco for the Silcon Valley American Marketing Association to share processes, best practices and results.

Round up

• Fast Company does a nice job of covering the history and future of blogging from a revenue generating, not traffic generating, perspective. They also provide a list of the most popular blogs as determined by Technorati’s link counting system. Definitely some interesting bloggers out there.
• Latest update on OpenID. Bringing pretty robust identity management features to the social web. I’d suggest reading the article and the comments as some really great questions that were not in the article are addressed. Until now, the benefits of “single sign on” have been confined to proprietary domains.
• More affirmation that browser-based, casual gaming is gaining steam. For those thinking of out-of-the-box ways to use Web 2.0, gaming is a great option as I discussed previously here.
• Farhad Manjoo reports on the ongoing Facebook/Beacon debacle that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook has finally given in and will allow users to turn Beacon completely off – as opposed to the partial concession made last week.

Demonstration of Brookstone's 3D Store

Here's a show-and-tell demonstration of Brookstone's 3D store.




Here are some related links for more information:

Brookstone Website

Brookstone 3D Store

Previous post mentioned in video

Online Gaming - Web 2.0's Killer App?

The Diva Marketing Blog highlighted online games in a Friday Fun post. The marriage of marketing and video games is nothing new but with the increased expectations of an engaging and interactive web experience it is a communication vehicle worth revisiting.

I can only be encouraged by how well gaming has been to be received in the B2B world. I knew gaming was popular, and it wouldn't have been a huge stretch to imagine the gaming culture has considerable overlap with IT professionals, my target demographic - but I was still surprised at the numbers from the IntelliQuest CIMS Spring Business Study 2007:

• 18.6% of IT professionals spent an average of 1.6 hrs with Video Games the previous day


• 24.2% of IT Staff spent an average of 1.8 hrs with Video Games the previous day


• 24.21% of IT Professionals have accessed the Internet specifically to play single or multiple player games

Words like "exposure" and "adoption" don't adequately describe numbers like that. 1.8 hours a day? That's not "playing" video games - that's living in a virtual world. In fact when it comes to Web 2.0, online games are the most popular Internet activity in the US - eclipsing both online video watching and visits to social networking sites.

Okay, so my customers are playing games, but is there an opportunity for me to reach them there? Not sure. But in a recent Nielsen Entertainment research study, in-game advertisement for technology tools increased brand rating by 70 percent! What's not clear is whether those ads are relevant to the gaming experience itself or part of "out of game" advertising campaigns. From my limited exposure to gaming culture, it seems that ads that reinforce the virtual experience would gain more traction than those that don't.

I'm not sure if online gaming is Web 2.0's killer app but for now it's the winning one and I'm convinced I have to find a way to get online gaming on the radar and into my Web 2.0 strategy.