O2 blueroom

Lolly, has given a great post talking about her thoughts on seeded campaigns:

“Steve at VCCP asked me a while back how I felt about the 3 Skypephone seeding programme. The timing is perfect to share my thoughts as I have just agreed to take part in another seeding programme…

1) Pitch it right

In case you didn’t know, my name is not Darryl and no I don’t live in the US! I am not quite sure how I would be able to blog about a US product when I don’t have any knowledge of the market… Read my blog (or at least pretend to read it!) and understand what makes me tick and what doesn’t. In the 5 minutes that you take to customize your pitch, the chances of me blogging about your product has gone up from 1% to 100%…

2) So I’ve agreed to write about your product…

Comments and feedback about my posts are always welcome – it shows that you’ve bothered checking your links and that you care about what I have to say. I would suggest leaving comments on both my blog and your blog – it allows conversation (blogging is all about sharing ideas, right?) and will probably increase traffic on your blog.

Both the O2 Cocoon and 3 Skypephone campaigns were well executed – good pitches, interesting ideas but overall I felt that that the online discussion was one-way when I would have liked to see a two-way conversation i.e. people bouncing off ideas of each other, rather than a list of all the posts/reviews. As a researcher, I like to understand the why’s and how’s therefore when criticising a feature, I would have liked to know why the bloggers felt this feature was bad and how/what could be improved in future phones.

The 3 campaign was cleverly orchestrated using a number of successful web 2.0 sites such as flickr and youtube, however (sorry guys!) I didn’t get involved beyond the phone review, partly because I am not the target market for the 3 Skypephone.

Both the O2 and 3 blogs look great however, my main criticism is that they are hard to find and I can’t see a link on the networks’ websites – consumers should be able to find these blogs easily and I would suggest that O2 and 3 put a link on their homepage which should hopefully increase traffic hence online interaction.

Kudos to O2 for allowing consumers to co-create (i.e. write posts) on their blogs – this blog could be a useful resource covering phone reviews as well as an online troubleshooting portal. If marketed properly, the blog could become a real strength for O2…

Looking forward to reading your thoughts on this”