Crowdrise On 4 Ways To Make Engaging Fun For Your Users

May 12, 2010 By 7 Comments

When Robert Wolfe was a 21-year-old entrepreneur, he wanted to build a company that was fun. Which is exactly the top priority for a lot of 21-year-olds, but most don’t manage to be so successful. (The average 21-year-old with fun as a singular top priority spends at least a couple hours in jail.) But fun was front and center from the onset of Robert’s outdoor gear company, Moosejaw: for example, customers participated in a homerun derby in the parking lot. When it was time for Moosejaw to develop an online presence and e-commerce site, fun was back at the top of the to-do list.

Fast forward to the start of Robert’s wildly popular nonprofit, Crowdrise, and he put fun at the forefront once again. Similar to Trada, Crowdrise is built on a crowdsourcing premise. As Crowdrise describes themselves, “Crowdrise is about volunteering, raising money for Charity and having the most fun in the world while doing it.” Or to truly put a spotlight their personality, their tagline is, “If you don’t give back no one will like you.” Definitively true. No one likes a taker. Everyone likes a giver. (You can read about how Edward Norton is helping with Crowdrise on the WSJ)

Lots of people have fun, but few can make companies fun. I recently got to interview Robert on how he’s developed fun personalities for both brands online.

1) Make engagement fun and worth doing for your customer.

As I recently saw on Twitter from Brian Morrissey, “The only person who wants to have a relationship with most brands is the brand manager.” So how do you make your brand relationship worthy?

What Robert and his team execute well on is making engaging with Crowdrise and Moosejaw entertaining. He takes passionate users and makes their

Napkin Used on Crowdrise About Us Page

days a little bit spicier and well…nuttier. An incredible example of this at play – Robert and a Moosejaw co-worker launched Wikipedia recently to see what was happening that day, and found that cricket player Phillip “Tuffers” Tufnell was having a birthday. They asked their nearly 8,000 Twitter followers to wish him a happy birthday and those that participated received Moosejaw rewards points.

Crowdrise includes a picture of a napkin on their About Us page. Just a funny aside that highlights a quirky personality of their brand. But what’s more is they continue to have fun with it and asked on Crowdrise’s Twitter account, “1st person to reply w/ a new pic of napkin http://tinyurl.com/33qd9y9 for us to use on Crowdrise gets a Crowdrise tee. This is the best day.”

2) Motivation through promotion

Will Ferrell Fundraising With Crowdrise

Can You Say No To This Face?

Understanding that users are motivated in different ways, Crowdrise makes fundraising, a sometimes thankless and tedious task, more personally rewarding. They offer fun promos to motivate people to donate and fundraise at different levels. Donate $9 for a chance to win an Apple Macbook Pro, donate $47 for a chance to win a Nintendo Wii and raise $7,000 for a chance to win three shower caps. And who doesn’t want to ensure their hair stays dry as they avoid washing their greasy roots? Their offbeat humor has won them big fans including the likes of Edward Norton, Kristen Bell and Will Ferrell.

As Will says, “Hi, I’m Will Ferrell. You may know me best as one of the front runners on the 50 Most Beautiful People list 10 years in a row. Some know me as an actor, others know me as the best yoga instructor on this side of town. But what I really want to be known for is the best fundraiser in the WORLD.Can you help me achieve this goal?

Yes.

Donate just $17 dollars and I will send you a bottle of my sexy sunscreen just in time for summer. Donate $34 dollars and I’ll send you 2 bottles. Then things can get really slippery.”

Even Will understands how online humor transfers to results. I’ll take two bottles, please! But I actually did donate to Will’s campaign. They grabbed my attention with a shared sense of humor, but they won me over with their commitment to a real cause – Cancer for College. An organization started by Ferrell’s fraternity brother, a two-time cancer survivor, the organization helps fund college scholarships for cancer survivors.

3) Incorporate Humor Into Your Communication With Users

Humerous Moosejaw Banner Ad

Moms Love Stickers. Fact.

Moosejaw is a company that makes even the most tedious of tasks more humorous. How many other companies offer you a list of all the best mimes in Portland for signing up for their e-mail newsletter?

Even the thank you page for my donation was hilarious:

“Thank you so much for your donation to CANCER FOR COLLEGE. Amazon Payments will send you an email confirmation of your donation within 24 hours. We’re super excited that you’re getting involved and hope that you’re already telling all your friends about this amazing cause you donated to. My seventh grade English teacher gave me permission to end that previous sentence with a preposition.”

Both brands have personality and allow it to shine through in communication with users.

4)      Motivation Through A Rewards Systems

Crowdrise Profile Points

I'm Racking Points Up

What both Crowdrise and Moosejaw nails is understanding different ways to motivate people. Not only does Crowdrise offer motivation through different promotions, it offers a comprehensive point system.

“Remember that you get 100 points for every vote you get from the Crowdrise community and 10 points for every $1 you raise or give. Points mean potential prizes, lots of respect and hopefully one day, a trip to the White House or at least a trip to Vegas.”

I received points for joining Crowdrise, by donating to Cancer for College and answering a trivia question. Reward points keep me engaged at every step. Plus, Crowdrise told me after I answered the trivia question, “you’re the smartest person in the world.” Don’t think I didn’t forward that to my boss.

Be sure to follow Crowdrise’s adventures on Twitter, through their Facebook page, and friend me up on Crowdrise. AND to sign up as a Crowdrise participant.

Full disclosure: Robert Wolfe is an investor in Trada. But that’s not why I like him. I like him because he gave me a Crowdrise sweatshirt and it is really soft.

Filed Under: Crowdsourcing, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

Advertise On Bing With One Click in the Trada Marketplace

May 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Today Trada added Microsoft adCenter support putting paid search with Bing in reach for smaller advertisers. With one click, an advertiser can start pay-per-click advertising with Google, Yahoo and now Bing in the Trada marketplace.

Trada was built with businesses spending between $3,000  and $50,000 per month in paid search in mind, and we work hard to eliminate the hassle and cost of managing a paid-search campaign for time strapped business owners and marketers. When our CEO Niel Robertson (@nielr1) envisioned Trada it was from his own difficult experience in making paid search work. With each added feature, we help advertisers to focus on what matters for their business instead of being bogged down in the nuances of paid search. That matters a lot to us at Trada.

Many advertisers on the smaller side are missing out on the ability to capitalize on differences among the search engines in terms of demographics and keyword pricing across the search engines. For many, Google is biting off enough. But those advertisers are missing out on the opportunity to lower the cost of clicks and conversions, which can vary across search engines. Plus, as we’ve talked about previously Bing is becoming a leader in travel, health, local and e-commerce.

So if you’re an advertiser, come speak to us about how you can incorporate Bing into your ad mix. If you’re interested in becoming an advertiser, sign up to learn more about Trada.

Also, we have another video explaining how Trada now works with paid search. Check our how Niel, our CEO and fearless knitter, has fared since he started using Trada paid search in our last video.

Filed Under: Trada News

Anonymity in the Crowd

May 11, 2010 By 10 Comments
Face in the Crowd: Crowdsourcing

Does A Name With Your Work Matter? (Photo courtesy of VividBreeze)

One of the important tenets of the Trada marketplace is that all optimizers (our paid search experts) must use their real names. We thought it was very important for our advertisers to know exactly who was working on their campaign. In addition, we felt if real names were out there it would encourage them to focus on being the best they can be (as their real name appears in leaderboards [screen shot] and such).

I had an interesting conversation with John Winsor (@jtwinsor) and Claudia Batten (@claudiabatten) at Victors and Spoils on this subject. V&S doesn’t require their creative crowd to use their real names as far as submitting their work goes. They do require their creatives to sign up using their real name and V&S takes a lot of care to vet the person is who they say they are. They do this because they feel:

1)     The verification of “reality” by V&S is good enough for their clients (they are the vouch-for)

2)     A client doesn’t want to sift through everyone’s profile anyway (even if they could see it)

3)     Some excellent creatives simply can’t let the world know they are moonlighting in V&S as they work for existing agencies which may be the AOR of the client or may be a competitor to the AOR of the client

4)     V&S doesn’t want to preclude the best of the best from being in their system due to issues of having to be public about participation and the conflicts it might bring

Interestingly, some of these anonymous creatives are having great success in V&S they will inevitably want their real name to be associated with their work. For example, V&S just produced a large TV campaign spot for a big brand advertiser using their crowd and the winning creative team will be behind a massive public campaign. I can only imagine they will want to get the credit for their amazing work. So how do you handle this dichotomy?

My original stance was that most paid search agencies wouldn’t mind if their PPC experts moonlighted in a system like Trada. In talking today about this with our VP of Product Management and Marketing, Bill Quinn (@billquinn), he asked a very simple question: would you want to know if one of our engineers was doing contract work on the side. My instant answer was yes (simply because we pay our staff as full-time employees). Now that I think about it, would I care if our engineers were working in TopCoder? Maybe the answer would be “no”, I love it when people continue to refine their professional skills and these competitions are one way of doing it. So I’m split on this.

So what is the right answer to the anonymity question? All crowdsourcing companies have to grapple with this issue. Some are completely anonymous, some are completely public. In discussion Claudia said something very important to this:

“Shouldn’t a system of ratings and rankings matter more than a real name?”

In Trada, if you’re an advertiser evaluating who is (or might be) working on your campaign what’s more important: knowing their real name or seeing that they are one of the top 10 optimizers in our marketplace? Clearly most people would pick the latter.

We’re embarking on a series of extensions to our profile system in Trada. This includes the first pass at  important stats and rankings in the system (both positive stats like conversions earned as well as negative stats like rejected keywords). It will be interesting to see if over time our requirement for being public about who you are becomes less important as the merits of what you’ve done become more. In the end, it’s not your name that will get you on a campaign, it’s your results.

For now, we’re sticking with our policy knowing that some wonderful PPC experts simply won’t be able to participate due to conflicts with their full-time jobs. I promise to keep an open mind about this subject and regardless of a change, ensure that everyone in the system can live and die by statistics as the most important measure of their expertise.

Filed Under: Crowdsourcing Tagged With: , , , ,

Win an iPad for The Best Online Marketing Blog Post in May

May 7, 2010 By 41 Comments
Blog Battle for iPad

Want an iPad? Show Us What You've Got!

Each week we try to find a good sampling of articles that help small businesses make sense of all the online marketing tactics available to them. As I noted, social media can be confusing as can all of the other aspects of online marketing. We love putting together of collection of articles that we think can help small- to medium-sized businesses get smarter about web tactics.

To make it more fun, we’ve decided to award the best online marketing article for SMBs for May with a 16 GB iPad. Here’s how it’ll work:

1) You submit a link to a post on your blog in the comments section of this blog post by 12 am MST on May 31, 2010. One entry per person. But if you have multiple people writing for a blog, you can more than one entry for blogs.

2) We’ll narrow it down to the top 5 blog posts.

3) Then we’ll let our readers vote on which article they thought was the most helpful to SMBs from June 1 to 4.Voting will end at midnight MST.

4) The topic MUST relate to online marketing but that can cover a wide gamut including paid search (of course!), SEO, e-mail marketing, social media, keywords, landing pages, home pages, etc. Tip: We think how-to posts or detailed posts are really helpful, and we love some humor thrown into it.

5) By submitting a link (and you HAVE to submit your own). Your entry constitutes written permission to use your name and blog post in the announcement of the contest winner and then we’ll repost your blog post on our blog.

6) If you work for Trada or have invested in Trada, we still love you. But you can’t enter the contest. However, our optimizers in the Trada marketplace can enter since they aren’t employees.

If you have any questions, drop an e-mail to elaine at trada.com.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Everything You Need to Know About Being a Social Media Cynic Can Be Summed Up by Conan O’Brien

May 7, 2010 By 1 Comment

This Man Has Something to Teach All of Us

Social media should be an incredible marketing asset for SMBs. Social media is cost effective, simpler than most marketing tools and can be immensely successful. Last week I did two break-out sessions at the Boulder Chamber event for using social media for SMBs/startups, which ended up being very disparate groups.

My first session was full of cynics. People who inherently believe that Twitter can’t deliver sales leads and is a giant waste of time. They were there because they felt should be there, but they had no inherent desire to learn.

My second session was full of those who wanted to learn but weren’t sure where to begin or start. They were eager to learn and add new tricks to their marketing arsenal. They didn’t know how social media would work, but they wanted to give it a try.

Two groups of similar small business owners, but who would likely see two disparate results from social media.

Everything you need to learn about being a social media cynic can be summed up by Conan O’Brien.

“I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen.”

Marketing through social media is hard. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s time consuming, the technology can make you pull your hair out, the tools are constantly changing and not everything works to deliver results.

But you know what? So are the rest of marketing tools you might employ. You’re just more comfortable with other facets of marketing.

The second part that Conan nails about being a cynic is that awesome things don’t happen if you’re not nice. Do you promote other people’s content? Do you interact with other people on your social media tools? Or do you throw up your hands because you started a Twitter account and you’re getting nothing out of it.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a hard look at social media to evaluate if it works, and ask critical questions. But people who inherently believe social media won’t work will have a self-fulfilling prophesy on their hands. So if you decide to try social media, commit to it. Don’t keep it an arm’s length away.

Thanks to Groundfloor Media for having me at the Boulder Chamber event!

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: ,

Andrew Warner of Mixergy Interviews Trada CEO Niel Robertson

May 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Andrew Warner (@andrewwarner) of Mixergy interviewed Trada CEO Niel Robertson (@nielr1) to discuss Niel’s former success as CTO of Service Metrics and what’s ahead on the road map for Trada.

As Andrew said, “I don’t usually do interviews about newly-launched companies, but I had to ask Niel about Trada because I’m psyched about its use of crowdsourcing to improve paid search clicks and conversions. If you see the video on this Trada page, you’ll see what I got so fired up about.”

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

Filed Under: Trada News Tagged With: , , ,

A New Model for Newspaper Advertising: Pay Per Call

May 3, 2010 By 5 Comments

Stop the Presses: We Have a Solution

There has been much discussion about the death of newspapers and the general print news model. This industry has survived for a long time on advertising and want ads. For many newspapers, the want ads were dealt a final blow by Craigslist and its followers leaving only the display advertising portion of revenue left on the table.

To defend their territory, newspapers have been shaking the Google bushes and threatening to turn off Google’s ability to index their content (and thus direct searchers to it). Pay-for-content walls have been experimented with (most have not worked very well) and online versions have been built. While online versions capture traditional ad spend in an online form, the revenues still struggle to attain growth numbers that would make them successful alternatives to print. So what is a newspaper to do?

Enter Pay Per Call.

Pay Per Call has been around for a while, but in the recent two years it has seen an incredible growth with SMBs and local advertisers. The basic idea for Pay Per Call is that a service provider tracks inbound calls to an advertiser’s business and then charges the advertiser for the success completion of a quality phone call. Defining and managing what is “quality” is a bit of a fly in the ointment. A business may want to pay more for a call in their own area code or may not want to pay the same amount for a repeat caller. Some pay per call systems allow payment based on the length of the phone call (a problem when the caller has to listen to a 30 second voicemail before leaving a message) or more recently from companies like Yext, certain topics are present in a text-translated version of the call. Setting aside some of the difficulties in finding the right price for each phone call, consider how a newspaper could change their model.

Newspapers could include phone numbers for each of the advertisers (brand advertisers as well as classified advertisers) so they could track calls. To the end user (caller) this is a seamless activity. They talk directly to the company (not a middleman call center) and the pay per call provider simply sits in the middle. Rather than charging a fixed (and somewhat prohibitive cost) for a placement in the classifieds or ads the newspaper could charge the advertiser based on calls generated. In some instances this might vastly outperform the fixed fee of the advertisement based on the value of the call. It works because it shares risk. It also handles the secondary reader issue (e.g. each how many people pick up the same copy of the New York Times in a coffee shop on Sunday morning). I stopped using newspapers a long time ago because I just couldn’t justify the cost and the feeling that I bared all the risk here.

The same thing could be done with coupon codes or affiliatized links for websites (e.g. www.landsend.com/NYT would trigger an affiliate code). Let the newspaper participate in the sale from the customers they generate. This is just like an affiliate does on the web.

The affiliate world is only now reaching the mainstream. As more content gets created, and more links are generated on the web, websites big and small are learning that they can participate in the “referral economy” quite simply. In fact, I sit on the board of a company, VigLink, that automatically turns any blog’s or website’s links into affiliatized version of themselves. Just link to whatever you want, and we’ll do the rest. We’re trying to help anyone with content monetize it in new ways and affiliatization is a growing and powerful way to do this.

If newspapers started thinking of their pages from a monetization perspective much more like website owners did, they’d find all sorts of new ways to generate income. You don’t hear a lot of bloggers asking to shut down Google’s search engine indexes. Granted many of these bloggers don’t have full-time editorial staffs, but they do understand there are many ways to monetize content other than charging directly for it.

Filed Under: PPC Tips Tagged With: , , , , , ,
Newer Posts »