CRAZY DUDES

It's impossible not to watch.

A man in a white lab coat, safety glasses and a blissed-out grin stares straight into the camera holding a wooden garden rake. At his side, a simple tabletop blender. He turns on the appliance, then starts feeding the rake into it handle first. The handle slowly disappears into the blender, which is making noise like a dental drill…or a wood chipper. After 90 seconds, there's little left but the metal rake head. The man empties the blender bowl, and we see a pile of well-masticated, garden-fresh wood pulp. Another shot of the grin; peppy theme music builds; and out.

It's an episode of the Web video series “Will It Blend?” that appliance maker Blendtec of Orem, UT has been posting to its WillItBlend.com microsite and simultaneously to YouTube. Together, the six-month-old series has made an online star of CEO Tom Dickson, the guy with the lab coat and smile, who throws various unlikely objects into one of Blendtec's standard units while the camera rolls.

Everything is grist for Dickson's mill, from a handful of marbles or cubic zirconia to the collected cell phones of his staff and his own iPod. Memorable videos in the series have Dickson blending a jar of pickled pigs' feet or a half-dozen unshucked oysters, then getting marketing vice president George Wright to drink down the resulting tan sludge.

“It was awful,” Wright says of the pigs' feet cocktail. “The stuff tasted like pure vinegar.”

But show biz is about giving the public what it wants, and the online public has expressed a real zeal for watching stuff like this. The rake video has been viewed more than 530,000 times on YouTube. Blendtec has posted several more videos each month since the first ones went up in November, and all told, they've scored 12.5 million YouTube hits. The “Will It Blend?” microsite has gotten a roughly equal amount of traffic in that time.

Blendtec's version of grindhouse cinema is an example of the measures some tech marketers are taking to start a conversation with the masses. They're sidestepping the usual lockstep progression of ad/message/offer in favor of creating a more involving, interactive experience with their wares.

A lot of these tools of engagement fall under the Web 2.0 heading: wikis, social networking sites, consumer-generated content. Those are sometimes dangerous areas for advertisers to intrude upon; users are pretty quick to spot a commercial in disguise. But marketers that get customers or prospects to relate to their Web sites in ways that offer undeniable value may find that the indirect approach pays off in better customer relations, stronger brand loyalty, or even suggestions for future product development.

Grinding up oddball items was Dickson's idea, but capturing it for posterity was Wright's. “The original plan was just to have something for our salespeople to talk about with clients, showing how we test our blenders,” Wright says. “But we put the first ones out on YouTube last November, to see if we could build some brand awareness, and they just went crazy.”

A video star was born, for an initial cost of about $1,000. The “Will It Blend?” campaign has generated lots of chatter in blogs and in the media — mostly local news programs, although Dickson has done his mash-up thing on “The Today Show” and on the NBC iVillage Live program and Web site.

Blendtec's video success, Wright points out, is that visitors are drawn in simply by watching something cool, like a bundle of green glow sticks getting pureed into radiant goo; but they're also taking in a tech message about the power of Blendtec's product.

“We've tried to keep the campaign real,” he says. “The blender really does what we're showing it doing. I can talk all day long about motor sizes, blade design and programmable blend cycles, and people will just go to sleep. Throw 50 marbles in a blender, push a button, and you've got their attention.”

Blendtec also operates a straight-ahead Web site with product demos, customer service and lots of general-interest content about recipes and tips for healthy living. But Wright says it's the crazy stuff that's driving people into the tent. There's a place on the microsite where visitors can suggest future blending victims, and Wright has gotten “hundreds of thousands” of them.

The videos have spawned a few ancillary revenue streams. The “Will It Blend?” store lets visitors buy not only the blenders they've seen in action but “Tom Dickson Is My Homeboy” T-shirts. And the videos themselves, originally hosted by Blendtec, now reside on the servers of video delivery platform Revver.com, which appends a display ad to the end of each and gives Blendtec a cut of any clickthrough revenue.

Some people want to see cell phones ground to dust; others prefer to learn more about their advanced features. New York-based Smart Phone Resource operates a family of Web sites, each centered on selling and advising about specific high-end mobile phones, notably EverythingTreo.com, devoted to the Palm Treo, and EverythingQ.com, for users of Motorola's Q line. (Smart Phone president Christopher Meinck also took a flier on registering EverythingiPhone.com in April 2006, about eight months before Steve Jobs justified Meinck's faith by settling on that name.)

Meinck was elbows-deep in a redesign of his family of Web sites last June in an effort to give them a similar look and feel. He decided at the same time that they needed an easier, more user-friendly platform for integrating comments and content from the community of users that had grown up around these versatile but complex phones.

Expert advice had been part of Meinck's Treo and Q sites from the beginning. “With these phones, you get a really thick user's manual that nobody reads,” he says. “The Web has become the new manual. We've had very active forums on our sites since we launched in 2003. But that's still only one channel per site, and using them can set up too many hurdles for users who aren't familiar with the technology, causing frustration.”

So Meinck went looking to replace those forums with wikis, which let users actually collaborate on page content directly, not simply enter comments. But even most of the wiki software Meinck looked into seemed likely to pose technical obstacles for the less digitally adept among his customer base.

But he found a wiki platform he liked in Wetpaint, a Seattle start-up. Wetpaint's wiki-building service is aimed squarely at non-technical communities that may want to build a collaborative Web site. Business sites such as Meinck's can map the pages created under the Wetpaint platform to their Web URLs to create a wiki-powered section that has the look and feel of their regular Web site.

And it was the Wetpaint product's relative simplicity that most attracted Meinck. “The key to any successful relationship with customers is making things easy,” he says. “I'd say it's comparable to using an average MP3 vs. using an iPod. Using Wetpaint is as easy as editing a Word document.”

Right now he doesn't track traffic to the wiki, although he plans to set up that function with Wetpaint. He keeps tabs on the content with a couple of visits a week and occasionally edits or adds articles himself, when a rollout or important software upgrade has been released.

Besides adding wikis to his sites, Meinck took advantage of the relaunch to add comment capabilities so visitors could offer their opinions on the phone news and product descriptions that make up some of the site content. Again, Meinck sees that as another necessary step toward empowering Web users.

“Comments used to be only on blogs,” he says. “Now you can leave comments on the CNN and USA Today Web sites. Wikis, comments — these things are all part of building interactivity into an online business today.”

Next up for the sites are video demos. “I'm tired of the video of two guys sitting on a couch talking about technology,” Meinck says. “I want to do things like, ‘OK, I'm on the train, I'm about to watch a movie on my phone, here's how it's done.’”

Meinck says Motorola has contacted him and other third-party sites about possibly fielding some surveys and focus groups for product feedback. Dell Inc. set up that function in house in February with Dell IdeaStorm, its customer-feedback site that resembles social-network site Digg in its ability to receive submissions from registered users and have other readers “promote” those ideas — that is, vote on their value.

The new communal site leverages one advantage Dell believes it holds over rivals like HP: a direct relationship with customers, with no retailer involvement. “We wanted to tap into [customers'] expertise with our products and give them a chance to tell us what enhancements they'd like to see,” says Dell spokeswoman Caroline Dietz. “We're directly engaging them in how we build our products and services.”

Site visitors can view the most popular ideas, the most recent, or the comments others have added. They also can break out the ideas by topic.

By any standard, users have proven enthusiastic about telling Dell what to do. A counter on the site reported at press time that in its first three weeks, the registered IdeaStorm community had contributed 2,800 ideas, cast 160,000 votes on those suggestions and made 6,300 comments.

Of course, the flip side to letting a user community voice its ideas is proving that those notions have weight and can influence corporate strategies. It quickly became apparent that the IdeaStorm audience had one primary topic on its mind: Linux operating systems, and the fact that Dell's product line of Windows computers made it hard for anyone to install an open-source system. More than 100,000 of the votes received on the site centered on the Linux issue.

Such a dramatic user response can't be ignored. One week after IdeaStorm broke, Dell announced in the “Ideas in Action” section that it would expand the number of computers available without pre-installed Windows and make it easier to remove unwanted software in many others. Some comments faulted the company for not going further and offering pre-installed Linux, but a large proportion gave Dell credit for a quick and respectful response to user preferences.

“We'll be looking constantly at these ideas at all levels of the business, from products to service to our strategy,” Dietz says. “We'll be actively trying to turn around and close the loop, coming back to the community and showing that we've listened.”

Widgets: Always On

Want to get users interacting with your Web content without putting them through the trouble of going to your site? Want a permanent, possibly branded, presence on their desktop real estate? Then you may want a widget.

Widgets are chunks of portable code that can be downloaded by users and embedded on desktops or within personalized home pages, blogs or social Web sites — which is making them more and more prevalent in the Web 2.0 environment. Often run on RSS, they can automate functions that users perform regularly and pull useful information without requiring an active search.

That makes widgets particularly applicable to business-to-business marketing in technical disciplines. Indeed, B-to-B merchants are now creating widgets that help engineers compare product specs quickly and allow access to the latest information feeds.

For example, Avenue A/Razorfish has rolled out a widget for General Electric's GE Silicones division. The tool gives engineers a quick lookup of product comparisons based on chemical specifications like melting points, viscosity, adhesiveness at different temperatures and so on.

The B-to-B sales process once began with a short list of trusted vendors. These days it usually starts with a search for online data, and the GE widget helps users in that search.

“Customers of our B-to-B clients almost always head to the Web first to do research, before calling vendors,” says David Friedman, president of Avenue A/Razorfish, central region. “The GE widget is meant to provide value to customers and put information they access often at their fingertips.”
— BQ