Susan

http://www.car-insurance-choices.com

The speed of innovation is directly related to the dynamic nature of the community, and while I agree completely that it’d be nice to see people put more effort into addressing the big issues of our time, not doing mindless clones, I’m not sure that most of what we see *are* mindless clones…

Very good Thread

Alan Underkofler - Follow Up Success´s last blog post..Are You A Multitasking Follow Up Extremist?

But now since the word is out: Yeah, Cirque Du Soleil LOVE is definitely something else. I’m still overwhelmed by all the colors and amazing costumes. Too bad John and George didn’t get to see it.

I am also glad I got to see it with great company.
Life is good.

Awesome to meet you at BlogWorld #BWE08.

I ♥love♥ that you have your own written Twitter Policy! I’m always recommending to my clients and students to create a written Facebook friending policy.

You rock!
Cheers
Mari
@marismith

In this case it happens to be the creator of a project I just critized rather harshly.

Rohit thanks very much for clarifying a few things. I am a sucker for Olympic sports as well as you are. I’ll keep visiting the voices site during the games. And if there is interesting content on there I will sure spread out the word.

I just wish we find some athletes that will speak their truths without being to politically correct. That has been a big dilemma of Olympic games long before 2008.

Enjoy your trip to China. You’ll sure find ways to proxy around that firewall;-)

I posted a longer comment to your first post, but just wanted to return here too. I think that while your ideas might go quite viral, they do tend to focus on controversy at the expense of strategy. None are really on target with positioning Lenovo as a New World brand or with portraying a brand like it in a positive light. When it comes to marketing, I’d much rather see a brand focus on their positive attributes rather than talking about how much a competitor sucks.

I agree wholeheartedly that having a sense of humor is really important. In fact, check out these videos to see how Lenovo does indeed have one and used it in the past: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MZmmv6h5oo

I don’t think you necessarily need to do it at your own expense, though. There is a way to be funny and still be focused on a bigger strategy.

Thanks for posting about this campaign and sharing your thoughts, as part of the team behind it I wanted to respond to a couple of your points. We have some history as fellow marketing bloggers and I definitely respect your opinion and enjoyed meeting you at Ad:Tech. There are a couple of points in your feedback that I wanted to highlight just to share a bit more detail about our thinking and strategy behind this effort:

1. You mentioned the absence of stars as part of our program, and this was completely intentional. In putting the program together, our focus was on getting the “local heros” who were not necessarily big Olympic stars. We are doing an effort with those top stars too, and you can see it at http://tinyurl.com/lenovochampions. This program is about the real olympic athletes and their stories, whether they are champions or not. That said, we have several participants who are strong medal contenders and will likely win medals for their countries, including David Oliver (Hurdler, USA), Robert and Chantel Newberry (also potential medalists in Diving from Australia) and Rajyavardhan Rathore (India’s sole medalist from 2004).

2. We would have loved to include some former Olympians like Dick Nowitzki as you suggested, but our program is about capturing voices of current Olympians and we focused on that.

3. We had a cap of 100 athletes and did pursue several in Russia as well as a few other countries but were not able to finalize their participation before hitting our target of 100.

4. There is also a deliberate choice to let all the athletes blog in different languages, because the audience for this site and the Olympics goes beyond only those who speak English. We have built tools into the site to allow you to filter by language so you can just see those posts in your own language if you like, but I believe limiting ourselves to only English-speaking athletes as you suggest wouldn’t capture the global nature of the Games.

5. You mention the absence of conversations about air quality or quarrels with sports groups. In fact, much of the missing content you talk about are things that create controversy and media spectacle. That’s really not what this project is about either. Sometimes athletes may blog about what they are going to pack to get to China, or how they are worried about what they will eat, or how they stayed up all night the day before their big Olympic trial. I would argue that those topics are the MOST authentic as they are real voices from real athletes and not sensational content for the sake of controversy. I can totally understand that you may have found these things “boring and too politically correct” - but we haven’t told athletes what to blog about, only helped to give them technology to do it.

At the end of the day, I think despite the fact that we weren’t able to get every country involved as we may have liked, this program will stand as one of the most authentic marketing efforts of the 2008 games solely because it is not a marketer telling you something or even a media property filtering a story. Our site is 100 athletes all talking about their personal passions and experiences in a way that you really cannot find anywhere else at the same scale. That’s what I’m excited about.

Check out:
http://www.AskAFloorGuy.com
http://www.StartupStoryRadio.com
http://www.ContrivedMedia.com