My good friend and the Finnish crowdsourcing guru, Sami Viitamäki, has been busy lately with his latest Sonera project, the Aivo service. Lauched last week, Aivo is a crowdsourcing and marketing service, following the success of Dell Ideastorm and My Starbuck Idea services. So, the basic idea is that people can suggest ideas, and the company tries to implement the best ones.
Aivo service has already been tried and tested in real life. Sonera had some Aivo banners that expanded with a mouse-over, and filled the screen. Surprise, surprise, these were not liked by the web crowd, and huge uproar started at the Mikseri and Basso sites. Here’s some comments on Mikseri.
Somebody also complained on Aivo. Then Sonera did something, which I think is pretty cool and companies should learn from. Sami went in with his own name and said that they’ll fix it.
Here’s a screenshot of the new banners at Basso. Which are stating, “sorry & thanks for the idea!”.
And, the comments from the Mikseri crowd. Someone even commented that he took of the AdBlocker to see the banner.
I think Aivo as a service, and the quick response now taken, is something behind the idea – marketing as a dialogue. This proves that companies can and should talk with their customers and consumers in general.
Related issue: Why are so many people afraid to represent their companies online? Why we don’t see these kinds of examples more?
Do you have any examples that an online community would have attacked against a person who represented a company with their own name? (and was not the CEO or the owner…)
I have “intercepted” a few conversations about a brand and they have always changed direction or responded to me and continued the conversation. But always it has been a positive experience for everybody, even though the threads have been a bit hostile in the beginning.
By: PerttuT on September 29, 2008
at 9:30 pm
PerttuT: Excellent point.
It’s so much more difficult to attack a real person even online, than a company, so I also believe that people representing their companies, would mainly only do good.
By: ssalmenkivi on September 30, 2008
at 11:36 am
Thanks for the exposure, Sami. The turnaround on the discussion forums regarding the AIVO campaign was definitely a revealing point for everybody at our marketing dept.
As for companies being afraid to speak through real people online, I can from our three weeks’ experience say that the response from our customer has been overtly positive compared to our expectations (telecomms IS anyway the 2nd most complained industry in the world). We have around 10 bloggers writing for the AIVO blog and among them also there was a fair amount of suspicion as to whether people would clog their emails or attack them personally via online or even physically. The fear stems from the feedback our customer service gets and they way Sonera gets treated on forums, etc.
This fear is also a bit out of proportion, since all the times I have seen a company being viciously attacked online is where they have tried to conceal information and pretended to be something else than they were (sony psp flog, anyone)? And even when companies get attacked, it is companies, not individual, workers within the companies, especially if they’re not top management and therefore can be related to more readily by the regular folk. Inboxes haven’t been swelling either, even when I have sent people email from my personal work mail stating that their ideas have not passed our examination because of inappropriatedness etc.
Bottom line I think is: for the most part, people don’t attack people, they relate to them. Which is why brands and companies should speak to people more via people, not press releases and ads.
~s
By: Sami Viitamäki on October 3, 2008
at 3:04 pm