The Tom Sawyer Effect


Stephen King’s Domes Day
December 11, 2009, 1:32 am
Filed under: community, entertainment, marketing, technology

Dome Day is now a month past and we have been starting to evaluate the Hidden Masterpiece campaign. Firstly you should check out the Gigapan finale shot we hid the final pieces of the book in. This was shot over an hour on the cold bright morning of 6th November before going up as an exclusive on Wired and the Guardian.

The inspiration for this idea was the infinitely zooming photo tool in Blade Runner.This has always been my favourite ridiculous gadget in films and the fact we got to replicate it was incredible. As a crazy idea that came together beautifully it’s the best for a very long time – for more details on this check out Sam Hill’s blog

The gut ‘was it a success’ reaction is yes, absolutely. Everything worked, which with the logistics of breaking up a book into 5,000 pieces, distributing them out, sharing the clues from both the real world and online, then when they had been found identifying which piece it was and if it was the first time it had been found; finally to then upload the piece to the site live and allow it to be manipulated alongside all of the other found pieces.

However, we had the benefit of a hugely exciting piece of content to exploit and a very engaged fanbase to reach out to. Combine this with an unprecedented and genuinely engaging campaign premise and we had a campaign worth talking about.

And talk about it they did: the campaign generated coverage across more than a hundred sites, blogs and forums, including 8 of the biggest Stephen King fansites & blogs in the world,  scifi and horror websites, cultural and book sites and marketing and trends sites, including Wired, Contagious, PSFK, GQ and the Guardian. Interest also spread far beyond the UK market and posts were generated in France, Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, the US and Canada. In the end more than a hundred news pieces and blog posts added to hundreds more discussions.

Thanks and props should go to the guys at Line Industries for sorting this out, with not a vast reservoir of money or time to play with. And also to Hodder, for believing in Unity’s core idea of breaking the book up and hiding it and then working with us to make it feasible.

However, we have to admit that while the level of awareness and discussion around the campaign was extremely high the number of people actual hiding and finding snippets was relatively low at just a few hundred (though fifteen thousand engaged with the content on the site).

This was largely due to the effort required to actually participate in the campaign versus just talking about it. Participation required registration and then a reasonable amount of time and thought to either find or track down the hidden pieces. In order to get this level of engagement it is necessary to either more tangibly demonstrate the results or to demonstrate better the progression of the campaign for people to follow, and have more of a gradual evolution to the campaign.

As the Canary Trap blog accurately observed, this was partly deliberate in that we couldn’t allow too much of the novel to be deciphered. However, this did mean that the excitement around solving the puzzle was relatively superficial. We took this feedback to Hodder, and we’re working on something now that should have the same level of buzz and excitement, but a genuine evolution of narrative and involvement. Just like a book you might say!



The Tom Sawyer Effect in the Sandpit
November 28, 2009, 3:54 pm
Filed under: community, entertainment


The first of our updates from the three open invitations issued in this post almost a month ago concerns the most recent – Hide and Seek’s November Sandpit, a monthly event to play-test different kinds of pervasive game with  a willing audience.

The game we were trialling – Storyline – was a perhaps surprisingly analogue one. Players had to select a prop at random (from a selection containing everything from Guns n Roses style wigs to a stick) and then incorporate that prop into a scene that was shot on polaroid, then stuck onto a card and annotated to explain what was going on, then adding this to add the next chapter of an evolving story.

The physical results are now on Flickr, best viewed as a slideshow, though you will need to pause it for the more complex slides!

The learnings from our side were:

- If you get the right audience they will throw themselves into relatively complex/abstract activities

- However, you do need to give a solid structure for them to adhere to

- And also a theme to help guide things (we left it completely open ended which threw the first few players…)

- You need to give up any ideas of controlling the story or its execution – some efforts will be better than others, but it defeats the point to try to maintain a certain direction, style or narrative coherence

- People seize onto familiar narrative devices to help guide them – in particular whereas we hoped to explore a multilinear storyline moving in different directions at once most people just wanted to tell the next chapter of the main story

Overall the game went as well as we could have hoped, people were engaging with it the whole night and everyone that featured in it wanted to keep track of how the story was evolving. The original idea was to have one giant sheet of paper, which would have helped to take the story in different directions.

The next event is at a much bigger one at the V&A open evening in March and we hope to run a slightly more complex experience as part of it…



Good reverberations from Xbox
November 10, 2009, 9:45 am
Filed under: community, entertainment, marketing, social media

The Tom Sawyer Effect has just been brought in by Xbox and its digital agency AKQA to manage its music communities on Twitter (@xboxreverb – sorry, WordPress’s hyperlinks are down) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/xboxreverb). Xbox Reverb is all about bringing the bands and the fans together with a series of exclusive gigs arounds the country. So far, so seen it all before – from O2 and T-Mobile to Carling, Topman, American Express, even Right Guard (trying create the first sweat free moshpit maybe?) … they all claim to give you priority access, get you closer, give you more. And maybe they do.

Where Reverb is different however, and why Tom Sawyer is excited to be involved with the campaign, is that Xbox is gradually handing over control of the gigs to the community. So far it is fairly limited – design the gig poster, choose the cover played by the headliners etc – but we are gradually opening it out, so for Gig 3 we have opened out where in Essex the gig will take place (town and venue) and the fans will also help us to create and share the content. And from there it will go even further until potentially a certain point down the line we will become mere facilitators for the demands of the community.

This is the kind of user-collaborated campaigning we have been banging on about, and is a natural end point (or midway point to whatever comes next…) of social media campaigning – we give the key audiences that we need to engage almost total control over the brand experience and what do we ask for in return?? Only that they like us! That they feel that we are a part of their life, and help them define who they are. And maybe tell their friends.

Everybody wins, hopefully everyone has a good time. And, as in this quick cut of last week’s gig in Leeds, the gaming experience is integrated very naturally with the whole thing. No-one asked the bands to play any of the games or talk about them or do anything other than play the gig, but they did anyway – because they were there and they wanted to, and the whole thing just kind of…worked.



The Tom Sawyer Effect invites you…
October 29, 2009, 10:23 pm
Filed under: community, entertainment, marketing, social media

Angel_of_Death

We never gave an update on how the Hollywoodstock project at Bestival went (which is that we had some fun, learnt a lot and while the original script went out of the tent flaps pretty quickly, we did get enough content to make something with, I just need to find some time to cut it together. Thanks for asking!).

But we’ve got some more social-collaborative-pervasive projects piling up pretty quickly that you’re all invited to:

The first is our first run at an Alternate Reality Game at the Winterwell Halloween party this Saturday at the fantastic Tabernacle venue in Westbourne Park. As ever we’re running at it pretty quickly, but it’s coming together well and more than anything will make a great playtest for future events that are built around the gaming elements rather than having them tacked on at the end…

Then next Friday (6th at 9am) we’re supporting Unity with the climax to the Stephen King campaign (which has gone well thank you – more on this soon too…)

The ’stunt’ (for want of a better word) is our second attempt at a massive resolution Gigapan shot like the one done at Obama’s inauguration (the first one for the Guardian online for the 1010 campaign launch didnt work out when the cherry-picker the camera was on moved too much in the high wind) .

This time we’re shooting a panorama of the City from the South Bank with the final section of Under the Dome hidden in the image, words held up by Stephen King fans standing at every level, from Millenium Bridge to the roofs of buildings on the North Bank, to under the dome (geddit) of St Pauls. Sign up on the Facebook event or check Wired.com next weekend…

And then finally we’re running a little ambient game at the next Hide and Seek pervasive game sandpit at the Festival Hall on Monday 23rd. A polaroid driven multilinear dress-up narrative game. You better come along to make sense of that, just turn up on the night from 7pm…



Would any Steven King fans please ‘The Stand’ up

Home - Stephen King_1255470545279

Sorry, I had been planning that tweet for so long I can’t let go of it…

Under the Dome, A Hidden Masterpiece – the pervasive media campaign for Stephen King’s biggest novel (in both size and scale)  launched properly today, from Unity with a bit of Tom Sawyer support. The idea is to give his biggest fans the opportunity to get their hands on the book before launch, but they have a challenge on their hands to do so – having to both hide and find chunks of 70 words each, just over 5,000 of them. Once they’ve found them the fans then have to bring them back to the site and try to reassemble them into the right order. Which is obviously a bit of a herculean task, but one that is supposed to be both tantalising and rewarding as you go – providing a taste of the novel and it’s massive scale and sweep of characters at the same time as offering a genuine role to play in the campaign. And if fans work together they may just get somewhere.

It’s one of those campaigns that’s impossible  to gauge how successful it will be. Some of the biggest fansites are on board already, as well as GQ.com, Open Magazine, Culture Critic and hopefully Wired.com. But it will really depend on the depth of engagement of the fanbase. We’ve already seen they’re excited, but whether it’s enough to create a buzz for a week and find a few hundred pieces or carries all the way through to November 10th launch and reveals every one of the 5,000 pieces remains to be seen…



The Tom Sawyer Effect vs the Collective Unconscious
October 5, 2009, 9:03 am
Filed under: community, marketing, social media | Tags:

Grey London have asked Tom Sawyer to look at auditing their digital profile – website, natural search, social media channels and communities, mobile, even what could be done with their reception.

A really interesting proposition, particularly in the context of the agency’s recent mandate for ‘Openness’. The manifesto on this will hopefully be the launch pad for whatever digital channels we develop together, but for now it’s basically the rules of social media applied to advertising. Not rocket science, as they well admit, but still smarter and bolder than most of the big ad firms.

As I was writing the proposal to do the audit I suddenly realised I had never tested this site for search. A case of the shoemaker’s shoes –  I have never done anything to position it, other than some basic tags and keywords (not even yet linking into it from my other blogs…). However, as a deliberately unusual name and premise based on an 18th century fictional character I thought I should still comfortably hit the top spot.

So I was slightly put out to find it languishing in fourth place. But not as much as the reason why – the top three posts are stories from two US marketing blogs and The Washington Post back in 2007 examining The Tom Sawyer Effect, a social media marketing phenomenon that is all about bringing grass roots communities together to do things that previously had to be done professionally. They even used the same part of the story as an anology as I do in my definition – when Tom gets his friends to help him paint the fence.

Of course it is possible that I heard about this phenomenon, stored it away and then dug it back out when trying to conceive a name. But I like to think that I did come up with it independently – it is a very apt analogy, although the other definitions of it were looking at it cynically rather than positively as I do, saying that Tom actually profited from the exploitation of his friends. Maybe so, but he was only paid in apples and lollies if I remember rightly and he genuinely made the process into a fun experience for the group, which is the more important take-away…

In another piece of mild synchonicity Adam and Jo were having a similar debate on 6music this morning facing off two people who both claimed to have made up this joke:

‘How much do they charge to do sports at Hogwarts?’

‘A quid each…’



Return of the ROI?
September 21, 2009, 8:44 pm
Filed under: marketing, social media | Tags:

There has been a lot of chat this week about social media measurement and ROI. There’s always a lot of talk about social media measurement and ROI, but this week Twitter, the blogosphere and London Digital Week has been gushing with it. Or rather squeezing. Trying very hard, but not really getting much more out than we had before. Sorry…

Econsultancy warn us that some companies are better set up than others for social media engagement and think that we will hit  upon better ways to measure as brands get more dependant on them. Which is a bit of a cop out, but valid to point out that social media is essentially the new customer service and without it most retail and service brands will just die. However, an earlier post on direct approaches for measurement was more useful…

Essentially with all of these conversations we just seem to be covering the same old ground, just gradually welcoming more people into it. But at least as we do so we should move away from the current situation. Last year we were working with a global measurement agency (that really shouldnt be allowed to remain nameless) to evaluate  a pan-European integrated campaign. They were suggesting using a standard value for every site, regardless of where it was on the site, whether it was editorial or multimedia, how targeted it was, how many people responded or what they thought.

At the Imagination event How was it for you? a panel mostly formed of content and entertainment leaders (channel 4, covent garden opera, mobile content and digital content) kicked over the dust for an hour – we need to measure all of the areas our brand is being discussed, we need to relinquish control of the content etc etc – before we started getting somewhere.

Louise  Brown, head of new media for Channel 4 surmised that people only have a certain amount of time to spread across all activities, let alone media. And so if we can measure how much of this time you have managed to grab you’ve got a universal benchmark for measurement.

The trouble is, this exercise is almost for its own sake. Time might matter to a broadcaster, but for a retailer, or a service, an event, even a charitable campaign, what matters is who signs up, who goes to the event, who buys. And it is difficult to tell at the moment how much of this is driven by chat.

She made another interesting point around this, which is that for Skins the users who follow them on more than a couple of their channels – broadcast, website, facebook, bebo my space, twitter, messenger – are so involved that they will do any request made of them. We didnt find out what these requests were, and of course most people dont have such a great asset as Skins to play with, but interesting that depth of engagement can lead so directly to power of response.

essentially there are two take-aways from the whole debate for me:

1) that each campaign needs to be evaluated on its own merit. or rather, on what provides the most merit (or value) to the brand. the whole idea of a cost per acquisition needs to be extended to a cost per engagement, per recommendation, per visit etc depending on what the likelihood of a conversion

2) that once we start to implement these more robustly measured programmes we need to encourage everyone to share, as a comparison with a similar brand or campaign is the best benchmark besides direct returns. and essentially it will always be these competitors who are vying for your audiences eyes and paws.

There are some places where this sharing is already happening, most notably the monthly meet-up and wiki Measurement Camp and  ex Forester analyst Peter Kim’s wiki, which has now expanded to a third list to accommodate nearly 1,500 examples…

Then for the first bit we are talking to the lovely people at E.Life to trial to put together specific and relevant criteria blending traffic, engagement and discussion and overall sentiment changes as well as any measurable actions. As ever, more to come, but for now more links of varying usefulness can be found on my delicious page



TEDxTuttle
September 18, 2009, 1:43 pm
Filed under: social media, socialgood, technology

TED is a showcase of some of the greatest minds, displaying the insights and experiences gleaned from their best work for the greater good. Tuttle is a meeting of many minds who try to come to some kind of greater good through sharing their experiences and developing their insights together.

They have essentially the same goals, but approach it from very different directions and they didnt quite become the multiple of their parts, felt more like a layer cake of contrasting elements (albeit a tasty one)

it was undeniably a great event, full of inspirational nuggets about what is possible now and what’s coming soon. you’ll have to wait to be able to see the live action on the TED site (in particular Rachel Armstrong’s beguiling talk on living architecture – using bacteria and protocells to create living, growing buildings that are ‘in dialogue with’ their natural environments).

The videos from the programme are of course available to the world though and all well worth a watch, in particular Pattie Maes’ on an incredible augmented reality set up is the biggest mind blower…

As with any interaction with TED content it was inspirational to see so much work being done for the good of the world (with the arguable exception of PW Singer’s talk on war robots which although interesting was a strangely destructive choice considering how many videos of positive robotics there are to choose from on TED…)

However, it was frustrating not to have more opportunities to share responses to the talks. At the very least to show the twitter feed on a screen to allow a more public access of the discussion that was already going on covertly.

To allow the TED and Tuttle combination to germinate to its fullest extent though would be to provide an opportunity for the audience to have a more directed discussion together: to ask itself what it could usefully work on together in a similar vein. What skills and ideas could we combine together to take beyond the day for the greater good.

But then, as the ever accommodating Lloyd Davis explained again in his talk on Tuttle and social group activation, anyone is welcome to use the forum for whatever they choose to. So maybe I should just get on and do it next time…



Hollywoodstock
September 8, 2009, 9:56 pm
Filed under: entertainment | Tags:

transformer

This weekend we’re having our first run at the kind of user collaborated content I have been banging on about in this and on The New Entertainment blog for a long time now. I’m in danger of repeating the mistake that we always lambast clients the most for – being too busy to take decisions and leaving things to the last minute as a result.

At Bestival we are running something called Hollywoodstock. A loosely crafted narrative that is really a record of an event, and an excuse for people to engage with both friends and strangers in a deeper way than before. To take the fun of dressing up to another level and allow people to let go of their normal selves and be someone or something else. (or as one management consultant said in the excellent Glastonbury documentary of 2007 ‘I’m only ever really me at Glastonbury’)

Bestival is the perfect environment for it, as the most ridiculous and revelrous of the bigger festivals. But every year I feel that we are all dressed up with nothing to do. That there could be a lot more done with the atmosphere and the huge efforts people go to. We’ll see this weekend hopefully…



The Hype Cycle
August 24, 2009, 9:16 pm
Filed under: marketing, social media

Not to be outdone by Neilsen with their consumer trust report, Gartner has released its 2009 Hype Cycle, tracking new technologies as they move from launch to a peak of over-excitement, then falling into the ‘trough of disillusionment’ as they fail to deliver quickly enough.

Finally the technology has the room and time to mature, people learn what it is best applied to and how to manipulate it and the interest starts to climb again (but not as high as the initial hype) as it enters the plateau of productivity (as long as it has enough to offer to make it through).

Gartner Hype Cycle 2009
There are some obvious players entering the trough, microblogging and blogging for example starting to frustrate as much as they please. Meanwhile corporate blogs and ge0locational tools are pulling out of the trough and really starting to deliver a useful meaningful impact.

But the most interesting part of the graph are the technologies that are just starting to gain momentum in the early phases – behaviourial economics, mobile robots and even human augmentation all being addressed seriously as forthcoming realities as science fiction looms ever larger on the horizon.

Ray Kurzweil is a good man to go to for explanation if you’re interested in exploring the furthest extent these areas could take us. I’m just 150 pages into his tome The Singularity is Near, so will offer more insights when I’ve got off the introduction but essentially the singularity is the point at which artificial intelligence takes off, and machines are able to improve their own capabilities themselves which then starts to happen exponentially.

Or there’s this slightly more accessible (but probably less informative) video, appropriate enough shown on Vimeo’s new HD channel…

Supernova from Siggi Eggertsson on Vimeo.