Skip to main content

The world is your contractor?

Another post based on a Thorney Fallis blog entry (they've got some great stuff going on over there).

They recently launched a site for the City of Ottawa that encouraged citizens to take pictures in the city and submit their photos to the site. Basically creating a promotional / tourism portal for downtown Ottawa. You can view the site here.  It's also a great example of how you integrate flickr, youtube, and twitter.

This brings up the new reality of marketing, that you don't always have to do it yourself. There's six billion people in the world and tons of creative folks who will jump at creative outlets such as contests.

A lot of blue-chip companies have tried tapping in to that potential online with contests of various sorts. The results are usually good.

I think one of the hard things about going down this road is that an organization's biggest fear is that they get little to no response from their contest. Remember, when these types of ideas are launched it's usually a person inside the organization who has championed the idea. The worse scenario is you spend a bunch of money and time launching a contest of some sort, only to find out in the end that no one cares enough about your organization to even bother participating.

That is the fear that prohibits a lot of organizations from dipping their toe in to stakeholder-generated content portals.

Kudos to the organizations who push the envelope though, because if you simply do the same things that you've done in the past, but hope to get different results, well, you know what Einstein said about that.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Morgan Freeman Botches Reddit IAmA - Black Eye on PR

For those not familiar with Reddit it's basically a forum where people post interesting things on a wide variety of subjects. Postings gain popularity when people 'up vote' them and become more visible in their particular subreddit (a subreddit is simply a subject category, like politics or videos). One of Reddit's most popular subreddits is the IAmA subreddit - which allows reddit users to ask questions of various people. Over three million people subscribe to IAmA, which is also widely used by celebrities. An IAmA can last a couple hours during which Redditors (the term Reddit users call themselves) can ask the person doing the IAmA questions. The term "IAmA" comes from the concept of "I Am A doctor, ask me anything", "I Am A movie star, ask me anything" - you get the drift. IAmA's are not just for celebrities, lots of common folks do them as well. Recently Morgan Freeman did an IAmA  and it turned into a PR mess. To make a lo...

Mainstream versus Alternate Media - Where is the news now-a-days?

It's well known that CNN has been suffering an exodus of viewers, losing over half their viewership over the past couple of years. Yet Fox News has not lost viewers, but has increased its viewership slightly. It's an odd phenomena given that Fox news is clearly biased in their coverage. Mind you, so is CNN according to many. But I'd suggest it comes down to something much more simple.  While Fox may be holding its ground, the rise of alternative media is taking off where CNN left off - a focus on hard news. For those of the under 40 crowd, that's what they are looking for, NEWS. The simplest way to highlight the difference between mainstream media and alternative media is to take a look at their homepages and the stories they highlight. It becomes very clear why people are turning away from CNN and turning to alternative media. Let's look at five media sites and their homepage (click on pictures to enlarge): CNN Feature stories: CNN heroes Top t...

E-cigarettes: A PR battle Health Canada cannot win?

So I've now been using an e-cigarette (e-cig) for two months and thought I'd talk a bit about how I see the upcoming battle between Health Canada and e-cigs going. First though, let's do a quick overview of what exactly an e-cig is. Basically an e-cig vaporizes liquid that contains nicotine. The vapor is then inhaled. People who use e-cigs are called vapers (not smokers). Because the liquid is atomized (ie. vaporized), not burned the way tobacco is, vapers do not consider themselves 'smokers' in anyway. An e-cig is comprised of basically three components: The tank - this is the component that holds the juice (sometimes referred to as e-juice or e-liquid). The atomizer - this a coil and wick unit that atomizes the juice. When the coil is heated (from the battery) it atomizes the juice that has soaked into the wick. The battery - batteries for e-cigs come in various capacities (some last 8 hours, others 40+ hours, depending on their size).  The ba...