Simply Brilliant,
Brilliantly Simple

If you’ve got a piece of 8-1/2″ x 11″ paper, a printer and a pair of scissors, prepare to load luggage-sized efficiency into your pocket. Slip your week’s schedule, travel games and puzzles, notes, conversion tables and much more into your wallet.

The PocketMod is easily customizable and immediately useful—the ultimate in low-tech Getting Things Done (GTD) tools. Create your own here.

[via: Tracy Lee]

“If this isn’t a true definition of community,
I don’t know what is.”

-Bobbie Davis, Family Friend

The Scenario

Nineteen year old Michael Treinen is in the fight of his life. Suffering a relapse of Acute Myeloid Leukemia, he needs a $500,000 bone marrow transplant, but his $1M lifetime insurance limit has been exhausted.

With only a few days to raise money to cover the costs, the Treinan family turned to email, asking friends and family to donate $20 within three days and forward the email to 20 friends. By day 2, several people at Brainstorm had received the plea from the nearby community; some from up to 4 different sources.

More than Enough

The message quickly spread beyond the immediate community and donations came in from across the country. By day 3 the family had raised $175,000. By 3pm day 4, $355,000. By 7pm that day, over $400,000. And by day 5, the deadline, they had raised over $700,000. Today, a week later, the count is $856,000.

The media’s coverage of the grassroots campaign resulted in a state insurance program approving an expedited high-risk insurance policy that would cover 60 percent of the transplant cost.

More than Money

Social networking delivered something else, too. At last count Michael Treinen’s Caring Bridge blog showed 169,670 visits and 3,677 people had left messages via the guestbook. What better encouragement to lift Michael’s spirits?

More than Email

Success in social networking is inspired, launched and sustained by the trusted connections between people. The Treinen’s email pleas were sent from friend to friend; had they been sent from strangers or generated by faceless scripts, the Michael Treinen story wouldn’t have happened.

Whether you make widgets or offer something more philanthropic, social networking demands transparency and an ongoing investment in others. Then, when the time calls for it, your friends—and even people you don’t know—may respond when called upon.

Anticipate More

Under the circumstances, the Treinens couldn’t have dreamed of, much less considered what to do should they exceed their expectations. It’s being placed in a trust fund to cover Michael’s future medical needs and they’ve said any overage will be donated to charity.

The lesson being, be prepared and model outcomes to scale in proportion to the potential explosive power of online social campaigns.

[ Image: Kazze ]

Brainstorm created a proprietary online tool to track B Series activity including offer page visits, video views, downloads, survey data and much more.

39% increase in average daily hits
on BrainstormBrand.com during the
B Series promotion.

Objectives, Then Numbers

The B Series was created as the initial step in an ongoing awareness campaign targeted to a group of C-level marketing executives and decision makers with little or no previous knowledge of Brainstorm. Our goal for the multiple-component B2B campaign was simply to build name recognition and knowledge of our firm’s capabilities.

All statistics and results were measured with that primary objective in mind, but we were also interested in how each piece performed. Because of the nature of the campaign and the protracted sales cycle in our industry, an accurate ROI measurement isn’t yet feasible; however we created a unique offer landing page for each recipient and an online tool to track their individual responses. With a total response rate of 14%, unique visits to the offer site looked like this:

B Series Response Rates

What Worked

Our mass HTML email had a 22% open rate and 3% unique click-throughs; however, the fourth piece in the series, the personal email, was the most effective with 7.5% of recipients visiting the offer page. This strong response confirms that multiple touchpoints built name recognition. After several contacts, recipients felt comfortable opening an email from someone they didn’t know and clicking through to learn more about our company.

18% of the respondents
visited the offer site multiple times.

Visitor Activity

Once visitors were at the offer site, 29% watched a video, 50% downloaded the Web 2.0 Summary Sheet and 50% downloaded the MediaSphere.

Telling Numbers

In addition to traffic to the offer page, during the three initial mailers and the mass HTML email, average hits per day on our corporate website increased 50% over the preceding 15 days. After the personal email, average hits per day were up 79% over pre-campaign traffic. Across the two and a half-month promotion, average daily hits increased 39% overall.

25% increase in
direct traffic to BrainstormBrand.com
during the promotion.

What We’d Do Differently

Two weeks toward the end of the campaign were reserved for three of Brainstorm’s principals to make personal follow-up phone calls—not to hard sell, but to merely introduce themselves. It proved difficult to connect with a live person. We left voicemail and spoke to several people, but the results weren’t worth the effort of calling the entire list. Next time, we’ll follow up via phone with only individuals who have expressed a tacit interest by taking specific action while visiting the offer site.

Qualitative Metrics

Relying on percentages and numbers alone is ill-advised when measuring objectives. A myriad of variables affect the success of any consumer or B2B marketing campaign: need, timing, industry, execution, audience, and messaging are just a few.

Our initial effort exceeded our expectations by creating awareness and developing relationships that have resulted in new work and ongoing discussions with an audience previously unaware of us. We will continue to reach out to these individuals throughout 2008 in an attempt to build trust and relationship equity through various means.

B Series Resources

To read previous installments in this series or download one of the marketing tools from the offer, click on a link below or “B Series” under topics:

The B Series Part 1: Awareness Overview
The B Series Part 2: Strategic Design & Messaging
The B Series Part 3: The Componentry
The B Series Part 4: Personalization
The B Series Part 5: Offers and Incentives

Web 2.0 and Generation Me | 524 KB .pdf

The MediaSphere | 1.1 MB .pdf

B Series timeline: personal touchpoints, destination points

NorthPoleInc.us—having fun, tees and chocolates with our clients and friends

“Votes are in. Best holiday swag this year:
a Kris Kringle Chocolate Collection package from @CindyKlaus and the imagineers at Brainstorm!”

—Chris Baskind, Publisher, Snarfd.com

Less Parity

Brainstorm took a break from .think during December to focus on our clients’ increased holiday workloads, and create our own brand of holiday fun at North Pole, Inc. (NPI).

More Parody

Initially created to thank, entertain, and interact with our clients, the project featured a daily website post detailing the mirthful trials and tribulations of NPI’s Executive Vice President, Cindy Klaus, and their larger-than-life CEO, Kris Kringle. By months’ end, the integrated print/online parody expanded virally to include a far broader audience, including Cindy Klaus’ own Twitter following.

Friendly Links

Visitors were encouraged to leave a greeting with the added incentive of winning a B brilliant t-shirt or Kris Kringle chocolates. We received a nice holiday surprise ourselves with many unsolicited links to the NPI site. Here are a couple of our favorites:

• One Degree, perhaps Canada’s premier marketing blog, featured NPI in their 2007 Holiday eCard and Viral Roundup collection.
• Coudal Partners honored us with a Fresh Signals link.
• A Viddler Unboxing showed a video of the “unboxing” of one of our Kris Kringle chocolates.

Thanks and Happy New Year

To all who visited and participated, thanks for the links, comments, emails, calls, Twitter tweets, and Facebook posts. Happy New Year. It’s good to be back.

Virtual Starry Night - Vincent’s Second Life landing point

Virtual Starry Night - Vincent’s Second Life museum is fashioned after Van Gogh’s painting, “Cafe Terrace at Night”

Virtual Van Gogh

The Virtual Starry Night - Vincent’s Second Life museum offers much of what you’d expect in a real life museum—with a touch of Second Life (SL) surrealism.

The museum exhibits 70 virtual works by Vincent Van Gogh with descriptions and historical facts about the Dutch Post-Impressionist. Befittingly, each of the 20 rooms housing the exhibit is set in perpetual twilight and the outer grounds of the museum feature overlook balconies, fountains, and garden terraces abutting a reflective and restful sea.

Unlike real life museums, this SL version includes teleportation, 3-D tours and experiential paintings that visitors can virtually “step into” to peruse selected works.

Worth the Teleport

If you like something you see, reproductions are for sale at the museum store, including virtual floral arrangements. You can even take home a reproduction of Van Gogh’s famed Starry Night for a reasonable L$35 (35 Linden dollars) the equivalent of about 12 US cents.

Appreciating Culture Clash

A confluence of culture, The Virtual Starry Night - Vincent’s Second Life museum is a metaphor for today’s brand marketer—an emergent culture where old and new collide in ever-changing venues of communication.

Visit the museum.

[ via: malburns ]