Sharing Some Recent Work

A lot cooking here and I am working on a couple of longer posts.  In the meantime, a long overdue update on some of the work Federated Media is doing that I’m really proud of:

– Comcast Fancast A celebration of great TV programming.

– BoingBoing Offworld BoingBoing looks at the world from a decidedly different angle.  Offworld focuses on the gaming space and provides a much needed alternative to the mainstream gaming sites.

–  Asus/Intel WePC What do you want in your next computer?  Share these ideas with peers or just browse the ideas from others.  There are already 1000s to review.

– Trendhunter TV underwritten by Verizon Wireless Nothing beats a great name and TrendHunter says just about everything you might want to know.  Worked with Verizon to underwrite the next chapter of Trendhunter.com.

– Digital Nomads Examines the growing group of workers that can truly work almost anywhere.  Tips, tricks, stories, challenges, a crowdsourced white paper, etc. Sponsored by Dell.

Many more.  Really excited and proud of the work I have the privilege of working on and/or watching and learning from my peers.

Dell Listening to Customers

Had the privilege over the past 7 months to spend a lot of time with various segments of Dell’s marketing team.  They are truly committed to changing and improving their relationship with customers.  Adweek has a great article about how Dell listens to its customers.

A quote:

“Your home page is Google,” said Jarvis. “It becomes really important the right things are appearing on it.”

Check it out.

A Conversation Goes Viral

Federated Media is working with Dell to stimulate conversations for Business Technology buyers around Storage Area Networks. The Future of Storage focuses on the iSCSI space. Dell has a lot to say about the topic but so does the broader community and they wanted to underwrite a broader conversation on the topic.

Its a hot market but even so, the number of people able to discuss this with any depth is much, much smaller than the group that would go to my favorite Road Biking forum. The site went live earlier this month. Dell is going to the conversation rather asking for the conversation to go to them.

Ads like this were launched to stimulate the discussion.

The conversation spread from the TechDirt Hub to ArsTechnica.

Where it was Dugg

and Yahoo Buzz(ed?)

Pretty exciting to watch. Congrats to Andrew, Jennifer, Janet, Mark, and everyone at team Dell.

(Thanks to James for the screen grabs and leadership around this program.)

Mediapost Coverage of the Dell/FM/Graffiti/Facebook program

Read it here.  Lots of good questions raised and a number of interesting perspectives surfacing in the comments area.  If you’re interested in learning more, you can read my previous posts on the program here and here.

A more conversational Dell.

Really cool to watch a company embrace a more conversational approach to their marketing. Here’s an interview with Michael Dell that discussues the importance of blogs on their market and marketing. I’ve talked about the project FM is doing with Dell and Graffiti here and it is exciting to see Michael Dell talk about the work.

And, most recently, we launched Regeneration.org as part of our commitment to become the greenest technology company in the world. This site just completed a really cool graffiti contest that was on Facebook and had more than 1 million people vote on the best digital paintings of the environment. We believe that when we join forces with our customers, we can really make a difference.

Dell ReGenerates facebook marketing

Early advertising in a new medium is so often a cut and paste job from the old medium. Early TV commercials were visual adaptations of the radio ads that preceded them. Most early search engines took banner ads. Online video ads were 30 second spots recycled from TV commercials. Nothing wrong with it. A strong advertising message can work in many mediums. I’m always excited by executions where the advertising/messaging is amplified by the platform

I’m really proud of my (tangential) involvement in the Dell ReGeneration project because it is a program that uses the unique strengths of the graffiti application. I wrote about it here previously and thought it worth another mention. After 7300+ submissions and over 1 million votes (all in less than two weeks) the top 150 submissions are available for viewing here (facebook and graffiti memberships required.) Here is a sneak peek of what surfaced after the voting ended.

The LA Times’ Webscout blog liked it too.

Congrats to the Grafiti team (Mark, Ted, and Tim,) Dell team (Andrew, Sean, Casey, et al) and the FM team (James and Matt) that made this happen.

Crowdsourcing your creative development

We (Federated Media) represent Graffiti. They’ve built one of the most interesting applications on the FaceBook platform and we’ve worked with them on a number of really cool marketing programs with the Graffiti application. The latest is for Dell. The program is in support of their REgeneration program and allows Graffiti users to create a work of art that tells their friends and other graffiti users – all 8 million of them – “what green means to them.”

The program launched last night at 7pm and already has over 600 submissions. Early submissions suggest that agencies might want to look at Graffiti as a place to find their next creative team. Or perhaps, let their prospective and current customers do the creative for them? Here are some submissions:

I love the way the artist incorporated the power button into the drawing.

This final one incorporates the REgeneration theme into the piece. There was no creative brief, the only incentive these artists have is the chance to win a Dell Monitor AND the respect of the community.

If you’re a facebook member you can check out the program here.