Nokia’s marketing tries out the blogosphere
I knew about the Nokia “You Make it Reel” competition from a friend over at Ogilvy PR (Singapore), she asked if I or my friends wanted to participate in the music video making competition.
What I didn’t know, and now I find fascinating, is Nokia hosted the competition exclusively on Veron Ang’s blog sparklette.net. We’ve all seen marketing moves that include sponsorships, product reviews, bringing bloggers out for dinner, etc, but to host a music video voting competition exclusively on someone else’s blog tells me that blogs are now on par with traditional (or mainstream) media. Woohoo!
To the credit of the marketer at Nokia (or Ogilvy), they could have done a completely controlled campaign on their microsite but chose to go the “open” way by using sparklette.net as the platform and having the videos stream from YouTube. It could have been a marketers worse nightmare if for some reason YouTube was down for maintenance, or sparklette.net’s web host met with an outage–but the plan went ahead nonetheless. Pretty daring guys, but nice move.
So that’s 1 up for the blogosphere and 1 up for marketing too.
But upon closer scrutiny, you would realise that this competition didn’t exactly do a “Singapore Idol”. From the mechanism built into sparklette.net, only slightly over 750 people viewed the post (as of time of writing), which wasn’t any better than her previous little review on Bakerzin - Warm Chocolate Goodness. If I may say, 750 voters isn’t exactly ideal for a campaign of this size. But then again, we can’t be too sure the accuracy of this WordPress counter plugin.
Another thing I did, was check out Technorati for links back to this voting booth. Unfortunately, there was only 2. But if you discount Nokia’s own Nseries blog, then there’s only 1. Now there’s another blog linking to it. This one!
That’s probably why there wasn’t any more visits than sparklette.net normally gets.
But still, great effort and welcome Singapore marketers to the blogosphere. Thanks for choosing a blog above the newspaper or magazines.
I hope yesterday’s live performance by Greyskull at St James power station was rockin’. =)
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Well…. I do think its cool that Nokia is working with bloggers to up their hip quotient. Of course, like you said, its quite difficult to bet the house just on one blogger though I do love the work that Veron has been doing (she is also a friend of yesterday.sg). The challenge for us (ha ha) is how we can create that buzz effect without having the resources to rent an aeroplane that can spew smokescreens in the air. I saw something like this in Sydney couple of years ago, and what the plane was spewing was…No GST!