Earlier today I wrote about this promotion and posted it on The Lip-sticking Blog since I am the guest blogger for Wednesdays. So I’m posting it here as well.

Wednesdays are my guest It’s tax season again, the time of year that we all love to hate,
especially us small business owners! I handed over all my papers to my
accountant a couple of weeks ago which of course is the hardest part of
the job. I have two daughters that are both in college now so I was
excited to learn that I’d be getting some tax credits for this. My
oldest daughter is in her second year, in what I believe to be the #3
most expensive college in the U.S. – NYU!

Anyhow I recently received an email advertisement from the Neat Company in which they invited me to “Tame the Paper Monster this Tax Season” and enter the “Paper Monster-Less Tax Day Giveaway”. So it got my attention and I clicked through to learn more. 

They’re promoting their NeatDesk scanner
and digital filing system that digitizes and organizes documents, such
as all those little receipts that you need for tax time. Their website
has a brief, instructional video that demos the product and clearly
states it’s features and benefits. I’m liking that more and more
companies are using videos online to communicate their products or
services. Very smart online marketing.

Also what I like is that this promotion is very simple. They’re giving
away 10 of these little NeatDesk products with the intent to “spread a
little organized, digital love this tax season”. So I clicked on the
“Enter Now” button and was taken to this blog page which told me about the two ways I could enter the sweepstakes:

1.
I could comment right on the blog post telling them how NeatDesk will
help me reduce paper clutter and simplify my life at tax time. They
reminded me to use a valid email address so they can contact me if I
win!

2. Or I could follow The Neat Company on Twitter and re-tweet the contest by posting a pre-written tweet that includes a short url and the hashtag #papermonster. 

So
I did both, entered through the blog promotion and through their
Twitter promotion. The Neat Company currently has 1,245 followers, now
including me. I did a search for #papermonster and found a whole page
and more of others who “want to Tame the Paper Monster” as well.

Yesterday I attended a breakfast event in Rochester with guest speaker Peter Shankman on social media which I wrote about on my blog here.
Peter’s advice was to keep it simple (so it can be retweeted) make it
fun and make it relevant. This sweepstakes promotion does it all. Now I
hope I win one of these little wonders. Will make my life in 2010 much
simpler.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow night’s 82nd Academy Awards ceremony. There appears to be a quite a bit of hype around whether we will see the first woman director, Kathryn Bigelow for the Hurt Locker, take home this year’s Best Director Oscar. Now I have to admit that I don’t often see many movies while they’re in the theater. I like to wait to see most of them on DVD at home. However, my husband and I did go to see Avatar because we thought the large screen would be the way to see this film and we enjoyed it very much. In fact, I think I liked Avatar even more than he did.

So whether you’re pulling for Avatar and James Cameron or the Hurt Locker and Kathryn Bigelow, Avatar by far had the biggest interactive promotional marketing campaign of all the films up for Best Picture Oscar. McDonald’s got on board with Avatar and pushed the creative limits with a augmented reality game that let players explore the movie’s computer-generated planet Pandora with a set of on-package cards.

While the campaign took different forms around the world in order to integrate with different menu items, the U.S. marketing effort centered on McDonald’s Big Mac. McDonald’s U.S. chief marketing officer Neal Golden said “The Big Mac is all about the thrill of your senses, that’s why the company decided to link it to the Big Mac in North America.” So from December 18 through January 7, U.S. customers who bought a Big Mac also got packaging that included one of 8 different Avatar “Thrill Cards” attached.

The game, called PandoraQuest, was accessed on McDonald’s local Web site around the word. It tasked players with such
goals as finding hidden objects within three different Pandoran
landscapes. If players retrieved all objects, they advanced deeper into
Pandora and reached their goal of becoming a member of the “RDA Research
Team” as in the movie. U.S. players who scavenged successfully gott more than just the
honor of joining the team: They also got to unlock bonus features in
the form of scenes from the movie.

Players could also use an online version of a PandoraROVR, a transport
vehicle seen in the film, to explore the planet on the Web, capturing
and sharing images with others. Participants held up the cards to a Web cam and used McD Vision
augmented reality software to interact with the jungle landscapes
generated for the movie.

McDonald’s also ran a social media campaign on Twitter which asked followers to be the first 10 to decode daily word scrambles. The grand prize was a private screening of Avatar along with a Big Mac lunch with producer Jon Landau.

Now this month PMA is holding their 27th annual Reggie Awards which are the highest honor in integrated marketing. The McDonald’s Avatar campaign is one of the finalists in three categories:

• Age-Specific Marketing
• Digital Marketing
• International/Global Marketing

Happy Birthday to Donna’s Promo Talk which turned 3 years old over this past weekend. I wrote my very first post here on February 27, 2007, which was about Dove’s Energy Glow Contest and my second post on March 2 about Dove’s Cream oil Body Wash. At the time I was very impressed with Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign, so I devoted my first two posts about this campaign and some promotions surrounding their brand.

I had commented at the time that Dove had really hit an emotional cord with us 40+ something woman as well
as the young female adults and teens who really embraced seeing
real women in the campaign, not your typical “skinny” models. The user-generated contests that Dove was sponsoring were also a new and popular growing marketing trend.

Fast forward three years and I have to say that I’m not sure where Dove is at with this campaign. The funny thing that what I do recall seeing recently is their marketing push to enter the male health and beauty market. Dove devoted their Super Bowl ad two years ago to their Real Beauty Campaign and this year their ad instead promoted their Men+Care line of products. What’s also different this year is that Dove has also been pushing the line for a while on its Facebook page. Facebook was not even in most of our vocabulary when I started this blog three years ago.

Dove currently has over 125,000 fans of its Facebook page, most of whom are women. So most of the marketing has been directed toward getting women to buy the products for their men by offering them promotional coupons and by posting wall updates about the Men + Care line of products. The Facebook page has a Dove Men+Care tab which enables visitors a chance to watch the Super Bowl ad, learn a little more about the product line, and print a $1.00 coupon good towards any Men+Care product.

Visitors to this Facebook page can also enter for a chance to win a Backyard Makeover for their man. This is also a user-generated contest similar to the Energy Glow contest I wrote about 3 years ago. This promotion is hosted by Brickfish who I’ve written about before over the past year. All entries must be a photo, video or blog that features or depicts the entrant’s man’s “Unsung Moment” when they knew he was comfortable in his skin. Blogs must be no longer than 1,000 words and videos must be no longer than 3 minutes. Currently there are 261 entries which can be submitted up until March 22.

So it will be interesting to see if Dove is successful in penetrating the men’s market by directing much of their marketing efforts towards women. We still do most of the shopping and Dove certainly has been doing a great job marketing woman’s products to us. I have to say that by combining a Super Bowl Ad with social media and a promotional contest they certainly are doing all the right things. I wish that all the Social Sweeps promotions that I’m involved with could have the budget that supports a spot on the Super Bowl. Maybe by the blog’s next birthday!

So, Happy Birthday again to Donna’s Promo Talk. Hope we make it another 3 years! Thanks to all my readers, both new and those that have been around for awhile. Please introduce yourself at some time.

The Pepsi Refresh Project got quite a bit of buzz around the Super Bowl for the fact that Pepsi decided not to run a Super Bowl ad. I wrote about the Super Bowl and Pepsi in this post and many others bloggers and columnists did as well. The program was just beginning and as I said then, this is one social media marketing initiative that I want to follow.

Well a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet with someone who currently has a project being voted on in the program. To review, the Pepsi Refresh Project originally launched on Jan. 13 and invites people to submit their ideas online for their projects that will refresh their communities to make a better world. February has been the first month that visitors to the site could start voting on projects that have been submitted. Pepsi estimates they will fund thousands of projects spending in excess of $20 million dollars with the hope to start a movement where others will begin funding community projects in the same manner.

The specific project that I’m referring to is called “Elastic Park” which was submitted in the Arts and Culture category by Larry Moss of Airigami, LCC. Larry is an artist who builds balloon sculptures, so this project is basically a Jurassic Park made out of balloons! His goals are to demonstrate what can be accomplished by working together and building community through art, science and “pop” culture. His plan is to build an exhibit at Exploration Place in Wichita, Kansas that will serve as a template for a national museum tour. To accomplish this he will need to recruit 100’s of community volunteers which will hopefully result in 1,000’s of visitors all learning about pre-history and art in a very unique way. Check it out:

Larry has displayed his work in 12 countries, and has been recognized by the Associated Press, CNN, Smithsonian Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! He has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and NBC’s “Today.” He created  Balloon Manor here in Rochester last Fall, which was a haunted house for Halloween all in balloons. Also this past December he participated in the DARPA Network Challenge which celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Internet and the way social networking now plays a role in communications. For that he had cupcake balloon structures flying over various major cities in the U.S. including New York.

February is now winding down with only a few days left for voting. What Larry told me that I didn’t realize at first is that visitors can come back every day to vote. So those projects that are associated with a large organization have the advantage of sending out reminders to people to go back and vote again. Therefore, there does seem to be a disadvantage for the small biz or entrepreneur.

So please vote here for Larry and Elastic Park. He’s ranked #18 today, down from #15 from when I met with him. The good news is that if he doesn’t win this month he’s received enough votes to come back for a second try. Winners from all six categories will be announced on Monday, March 1.

BTW – I usually write on the Lip-sticking blog on Wednesday, but Yvonne really wanted to get word out on a new product today. So I’ll post this there tomorrow instead!