Insight Community

Back in October of 2005, I did some blogging work for American Express. There were four of us total: Me, Dane Carlson, Anita Campbell, and Clay Shirky. The plan was to cover this Richard Branson event they were having for their cardholders, then spend the week blogging about small business issues, which were all sponsored by Amex. The week before the event, we were on a call with Amex corporate executives, and they almost backed out. The issue was what we would do if someone left a negative comment about them on one of our blogs. My response was "if it's worthless spam, it gets deleted, otherwise, you are welcome to come on and defend your company." That's how the blogosphere works. Before answering your questions, I would like to make a few points that I think are relevant and important.

A. You cannot simultaneously go viral and control the conversations. If you really want to shoot for the rewards that a viral campaign can offer, you have to accept the corresponding risk that someone will say bad things about you.

B. People already have a negative view of most corporations. Criticism can actually be a good thing on the web, because by embracing it, you will have the chance to show you are authentic and human. In other words, people will feel like they can relate to your company better, and that will be reflected in the bottom line.

C. As long as the negativity isn't about ethical violations, you can embrace it as customer feedback, which helps you make better products and services in the long run.

D. If you give up control of the conversation, you will find out how people really feel about you, not how your marketing department reports that people feel about you.

Now, on to your questions.

1. Do your research. Find bloggers who have already written positive things about your products. Don't ask them to write something positive, just let them know about the campaign. Spend a few hours reading through old blog posts to learn about them before you hit them with a PR pitch. It needs to be custom.

Consider dividing the submissions into categories. Let users choose whether they create a commercial that is

a) professional - the kind we would show on tv - the challenge to the users is whether or not they can beat what an ad agency

b) make us better - users need to create a commercial that shows your product with features that don't exist, but they would like to see... ask them to create the commercial you should be running next year, after you have incorporated their ideas

c) outrageous - submissions that are not safe for work because of language, sexuality, or something else. Highly critical submissions should also go here. Make people register with an email address in order to view this section. That way the existence of the section may become known to the mainstream, but most of the video content will not. And you get the bonus of having an email list to send information to when you select a contest winner.

2. Engage the vlogger and web show communities. There are thousands of web shows, and the participants are trying to monetize them. Promise to enter into a $1000/month advertising contract with the web show or vlogger that does the best show in which your product is the main feature. That way you get several dozen, maybe several hundred, web shows featuring your product, and when you pick the winner, you pay them $1000 a month for a "sponsored by...." banner on the site and on each show. The catch is that you have to keep this creative and fun, and you have to find a way for the web shows to incorporate the winning commercial or best commercials. For instance, maybe you have the webshows do a mock awards ceremony for the commercials, and the best awards show gets the ad contract.

3. Put these in the registered content area. That way some people will see them, but some won't. And the web community will admire you for your willingness to admit your shortcomings. Leave comments about the negative videos. If the criticism is legitimate say "We liked this video because, even though we think our printers (or whatever you sell) are fast, obviously our users don't. Thanks for telling us we need to work on that." Or, if the criticism is unfounded, poke fun at the submitters by saying "This submission implies that our scan quality is bad, which means these guys must have never used our scanners, because we have won such and such awards for the last 4 years." The point is to engage criticism. Be thankful for helpful criticism. Poke fun at unwarranted criticism. Don't even lose your cool and react negatively - that's what these people want.

If you can let people submit weird and controversial stuff, while focusing the bulk of the attention on the professional category (call that category "Beat Madison Ave" or something like that) I think you can pull it off.

One of the best quotes I've heard recently at the Online Marketing Summit [1] was "Don't ask what social media can do for you ask what you can do for social media." Translated this means that you shouldn't go looking for people to support your brand you should go looking for communities to support. Just as offline communities have a culture and an ethos, so to do online communities and finding the communities where your brand adds value to the community's culture and ethos is the key. So the most fundamental guideline is that you should not go looking to get value out of a community, you should go looking to provide value to a community. If you can give them that value (and I do mean 'give"), then your brand will be viewed positively.

I think the question "what venues are upbeat vs. which ones are crass" is the wrong way to look at it. You should consider which communities are likely to be passionate about your brand and communities that your brand can help. "As office equipment and service vendor" is still a bit too broad I couldn't recommend specific communities without knowing your business better.

Actually, researching and finding these communities and then nurturing them is something you should consider investing significant ongoing time and effort. How to find them? Google your brands and your competitors brands, especially together, i.e. google "Acme Widgets" and "A-to-Z Widgets" at the same time. And if your company resells other brands google multiple competitive brands that you sell at the same time. Use this technique to find communities and the bloggers who discuss related topics then follow the communities and blogs to learn their prevailing ethos and what communities the bloggers participate in. Follow the links they provide to find more. This is just as important today as for the past 50 years finding the magazines and newspapers that cover your space, subscribing to and reading them, identifying the thought leaders, and crafting ads that match the readership. Even using traditional demographics approaches, you'll find each online communities to be very different [2].

You asked was how to keep the campaign "on-message." Attempting to control the message too tightly is one of the worst things you can do in social media. There's a good GapingVoid.com telling cartoon on this related blog post [3]. A social media campaign will never parrot your message; it will instead mine the existing feelings people have about your brand. Considered from a different perspective, the social media campaign can actually help you discover the message that resonates with people and easier to reinforce an accepted brand image rather than to craft one that does not match people's perceptions. Rather than try to be "on-message" why not ask people what the message should be [4]? Take a look at Ford's "Bold Flop" [5] when they tried to tightly control the message; as the author wrote, why not ask people who to turn the company around? After all, nobody is as smart as everybody (collectively, that is.)

Social media responds best to genuineness, and tightly controlled messages crafted by PR and ad agencies come across as very non- genuine. This also relates to damage control when and if the campaign goes off course; rather than try to correct it you acknowledge it and ask the community how to make things better.

Further, your question conveyed your concern numerous times that the results might be negative. That is putting the cart before the horse. The first question should be "Do people have a negative opinion of our brand?" If the answer is "Yes", then you have a much bigger problem than how to create a social media campaign. Negative responses to a social media campaign should be viewed as the canary in the coal mine; if the canary falls off its perch you don't just get another canary, you focus on fixing the gas leak.

Heck, if you believe in your own brand and you've got the corporate guts I'd say you should find an appropriate small community and deliberately solicit negative results. Some might say I'm crazy, but if you do it in a way that emphasizes humor and ask them to juxtapose with something positive about your brand "They solve all my needs but my sales rep calls me all the time, even when I don't want him too!" or find the irony in negatives "My laptop arrived late, but my car was broken into that day so it would have been stolen" people will appreciate your efforts more than you realize. From this you can get a feel for what things need to be improved about your brand and if you do on a small community any potential damaging results will be less widespread. Further, the novelty of the approach is likely to get you kudos as most companies are so deathly afraid of seeing negatives spread that your embrace of negatives in a bid to improve them will be considered genuine and fresh.

A few ways to solicit positive results are to support a charity like the Country Crock campaign [6] or to leverage an existing activity that is spreading such as "Unboxing" [7]. People are not likely to prepare negative results when it will be tied to charity, although the charity needs to fit the community, and unboxing has already proven itself; you wouldn't be the center of attention so much as the host of ceremonies. Allow them to experience unboxing with your brand as the Sherpa. Empower them to be able to unbox by giving deep discounts to people who register their intention to do an unboxing video and submit a short video about what they want and why they want to do the video, and this will allow you to follow up with them 30 days later. Some might not, but most will because you can list their request videos in a section of your site showing which ones haven't submitted their unboxing video. And even if the unbox reviews are negative, they are negative about the products, not your brand.

Another thing to consider is that social media typically works better for brands that people connect with, not brands that provide services to an organization. After all, who gets passionate about something a services organization that sells to Fortune 500 CIOs? Maybe only the CIOs, but those guys are too busy for social media campaigns and likely of the wrong generation anyway. Things that affect a broad spectrum of people on a personal level, even if those things only help them in their job are what motivate people to take part in a campaign. And passion is the key.

On the other hand, and contradicting my prior paragraph, one way to leverage a services organization is to create a "Help Corp" you can send out to do good deeds. Ask for videos soliciting how your services organization can provide some pro-bono help to those in need in the USA and around the world. Create a small corps dedicated to this activity and go around helping those who submit compelling videos requesting help and have people vote on who has the most need. Then do videos of your corp. helping them. If you want positive, oh-my-gosh would this be positive. Get a good production team to create these videos and you got a winner! It would be a real commitment and would have significant costs, but I don't think you'll be able to get a better "feel good" about your brand than having your "Help Corp." traveling around the world doing good deeds and then broadcasting about it.

And if you got the "Help Corp." off the ground you could also later create an "Auxillary Help Corp." where people could request free equipment for those in need. You send them the equipment and they film it getting installed and being put into use. BTW, if you do this don't be cheap and put a stated limit on the value of the equipment they can request, let their requirements dictate that. Or if you do set a limit, set a high limit ($5000 or better $10,000). But realize that this campaign will do best in a community that values helping others make the world a better place; not all communities will respond to that. And think of the good your brand can do with this vs. the same money going for a display ad in major magazines?

Another approach would be to go headlong into the most outspoken and volatile of communities, Slashdot [8], and offer them something that they believe in, open-source, and they believe in it with a passion. Ask them to prepare a video campaign where they solicit your support on open-source projects, i.e. probably providing hardware (servers) to support the open-source development, but it could be anything they need. Of course Slashdot would probably be a very difficult social media campaign to pull off in a positive way, but the rewards of doing so would be tremendous. Where there are great risks there are also great rewards.

As for creative ways to promote the campaign I would say to make it an ongoing campaign with periodic milestones, episodic if you will, especially if you do the "Help Corps" campaign because people will continue to need help. Another spin on a campaign that will help allow you to leverage it after the submission period would be to call for a "timeless" stories, i.e. "classic" problems and/or solutions in IT that never change. You can then run these as ads just like Mastercard does with its "Priceless" ads.

As for ignoring or deleting content, whoa! That is the last thing you want to do. Present your campaign in such a way that you can leverage both negative as well as positive content. For negative content, do what Tylenol did years ago with the tainted bottle scare; acknowledge it head on and correct the problem. And if you can't correct the problem immediately, ask for people to give you suggestions on how to correct the problem. Ignoring and deleting content will simply prove how non-genuine your company is, and that will be the kiss of death!

In closing I'll say, even if you do get a negative campaign you'll have achieved a success as the old saying goes "Bad press is better than no press." And a campaign that generates negative responses will typically give you lots of press. So, though you fear having what happened to the Chevy Tahoe campaign happen to you, I would say that you could only be so lucky [9][10]. :-)

-Mike Schinkel
My Blog [11]

P.S. I ran the question by the leading social media consultant in Atlanta Sherry Heyl [12] of What a Concept and my submission includes some echoes of her comments.

1. http://www.onlinemarketingsummit.com/
2. http://social-media-optimizat ion.com/2006/10/social-media-demographics-different-than-expected/
3. http://www.whatsnextblog.com/archives/2007/07/the_icky_side_effects_of_myallis_b log.asp
4. http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/15174.asp
5. http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/15180.asp
6. http://consumerpop.typepad.com/ fizz/2007/04/how_big_brands_.html
7. http://unboxing.gearlive.com/unbox/about/
8. http://slashdot.org/
9. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2843
10. http://connectingdots.typepad.com/thewebchef/2006/04/chevy_tahoe_cam.html
11. http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blog/
12. http://mindblogging.typepad.com/about.html

Indeed an office equipment social network or online community might be a tall order. But Anoto has done well with its digital pens. So it can be achieved. Without knowing what exactly the office material is - its difficult to provide a strong business case.

But the questions raised are ones that occur every day. Human intervention is a must if you want to control what is viewed - or when you launch the community site you ask users age and anyone under 18 views a different portal that is controlled to anyone over 18 where there is some room for movement.

The best way I find to promote services is to get artists and students involoved. Basically - I would launch the site at a festival or something and offer free beer or drink vouchers for anyone that signs up or creates videos on mobile to post instantly with the brand in mind. Some will be funny, boring etc. But its a quick and easy way to build a bank of content and to get people to look around and stick.

To keep content coming into the website - basically promotion needs to remain or switch to email / SMS to encourage continued interaction.

I don't think deleting content is good- We Don't like it .... but you might part of the website for 18+ or something similar should do it.

First, let me say congratulations on looking at using CGM to help market your product. The rash of stories on the dangers of CRM are a media creation that often create the PR crisis that drives the story, and it's good you can look beyond the hype to the advantages of connecting with a user community.

The basic rules of CGM in the video world are the same as e-mail and link marketing.

- Be respectful of your audience

- Be Grateful for the unpaid hours the community is putting in

- Don't Be Boring

A good project also has to have all the elements of any corporate project. Using CGM in the form of YouTube (and other) video products is cool, but it doesn't mean project planning goes away. Budget, marketing, adequate staff, executive-level support, and PR coordination are all required, just like any other project. Many companies shoot themselves in the foot with an innovative product that lacks sufficient company-wide support, and when a PR blunder does occur, the reaction of the company is as important as the actual incident itself.

There is plenty of research that can be performed to see what other companies have done right and wrong, and it's important to gather that research and understand it, first. The advertising and marketing blogs have hundreds of examples, and my first step would be hiring a consultant to aggregate the information and discuss the landscape and the character of the community.

1) Encouraging Positive Messages: There are two main strategies for generating positive coverage. The first is to clearly communicate what you are looking for, what you will do the information, and what your rules are. In the absence of strong, but respectful rules, companies invite anarchy to the process, and creative producers looking to make a name for themselves use your platform to bash your company. Using the correct wording, tell your community exactly what you are looking for, and in focusing them, you should generate more positive and topical results. The more detail, the better.

The second aspect of encouraging positive messages is to target people with the skills to make good videos, but the professional obligation to keep the subject matter positive. This is done with a micro-targeted website and blog marketing campaign prior to the launch. You look for professionals who are looking to make a name for themselves, and a online community that already likes your product. If you've done the research suggested earlier, you will have your, for want of a better word, beta community to launch the first videos, and also to help you spread the word.

Focus the users - send it to professionals who have a stake in showing quality work, and carefully manage your wording, striving to be polite but defined in what you are looking for.

2) Creative Ways to Promote Online Materials: If you've made a connection with evangelists of your product as described in the first answer, you'll have a platform with which to launch the resultant videos; generating more buzz, more press, and an opportunity to make the story you case study, and not a newspaper story on failed video campaigns.

Make sure your videos are easily shared, easily forwarded, and that they are "suggested" to online communities and websites that have an interest in good content. Using Stumble Upon, Digg, and a good corporate blog, you can push your story out to the people who are eager for this kind of content.

That's the meaning of leveraging online communities. They will promote your videos if those videos are relevant to the community. The best way to do that is to have a community manager who has been regularly interfacing with your target audience, and if the community manager knows what they are doing, they will be able to push out good material to the right people, who then link the story and publish it to their audiences.

3) Handling Negative Content: First, you have to come to the recognition that you are not responsible for publishing everything sent to you. I know many consultants pitch the idea of total transparency, but my goal is always results-oriented actions that can be measured. You are not at the mercy of the mob. Like a sign in your front yard, you have the authority to decide what people see.

This is why the rules are important. If you are clear that you won't allow people to attack you using their own site, you have something to fall back on, which includes suggesting they post the video at their own site. You're not shutting off debate - or silencing critics - you're deciding what you are going to show to the world.

That doesn't mean you get a free pass. A community manager will be able to decide when someone has crossed the line - and if you are upfront about it in the beginning, most of the general public will understand and not fault you for it.

Although every situation is different, you can usually tell when someone is unfair, and when they are clever. If they are making a complaint about your service, and it's a legitimate complaint, you can single out the problem and show how you are fixing it. Yes, you may be exposing a weakness, but if you know about it, you can work on correcting it, live and with the expressed gratefulness to the person who brought it your attention. It's an old trick - someone offers a solution that matches what you are already correcting, and you get to show your responsiveness, which is much more important than never making mistakes.

We all make mistakes, and so some videos, though negative, can be turned into positive messages and happy customers.

Good luck, and I hope the answer is helpful to you.

Jim Durbin <http://www.durbinmedia.com>

1. One way to get positive entries is to have a prize for top videos. People submitting videos will more than likely know that in order to attain the prize they probably must submit a positive video. Another great idea is to provide some scope to the video to help "push" them towards a positive production. A great idea to accomplish that is to have people make videos of the most creative ways to use your office equipment. By doing this you've given the producers a scope that can be taken in many ways and will unlikely turn negative. 

2. One great way to promote the videos is to allow the community to decide which are the best, funniest, etc. You can do this by building an application using something like Pligg (open source digg clone) or using video sites' (like Youtube) built in rating features. Another great way is to have people in different social networks submit videos and choose the best in each network and then have a "final four" of the best videos out of each network.

3. There are several things you can do about this. You can make rebuttal videos that make the negative video look humorous. You can definitely use them for internal market and brand research. Making a "spoof" of the negative video can also be funny and adds a viral element to push people to create their own spoofs. Keep in mind that in the Word of Mouth marketing world with "viral" videos the brand can easily overshadow the message. The idea or concept of the video is what matters, regardless of the message delivered. 

While satirical portrayals are inevitable, I think you would be surprised by the lack of outright offensive responses to what you're undertaking. It's difficult to imagine someone making a parody that mocks a furniture company, save for a potential personal vendetta or two (perhaps from disgruntled former employees).

Even if you were to have submissions that strike a negative sentiment, there's absolutely no reason you can't proactively remove the offending content. Make it clear that any submissions are property of your firm and you maintain ALL publishing rights. YouTube will have no choice but to remove offending content under that premise; what's the worst that could happen, someone leaks their parody to other venues? Big deal...if they have that kind of axe to grind they would probably leak something on their own regardless of your competition.

In terms of getting responses that are on-message...you need to lead a horse to water. It's a delicate balance between fostering the creativity of your broad audience with directing them so that the majority of responses have value. The best way is to provide one or two videos as examples. It can also help to have a FEW (not too many details) bullets explaining what you DO want and what you DON'T want. Again, lead the horse to water.

As to virtual locations, you want to focus on places that have a more directed enterprise approach. To my mind that involves two places: Second Life and Facebook. As you may know, Facebook has recently opened itself up to non students, and as of this month was the fastest growing social media community. I personally have found Facebook to be a fantastic new conduit, as have a great many of my personal contacts (including most of the Enterprise Irregulars). With Facebook opening up its platform, you have a great chance to create a user-generated series of videos. But imagine ALSO leveraging the Facebook platform to create a cool widget that gets viral uptake. For example, a 3-D graphics widget that lets someone design their ultimate workspace configuration; that they could either display on their Facebook profile and/or share with friends, who could in turn use the widget to create their own space.

I'm less personally involved with Second Life, but it's clearly an important place for any company looking to leverage social media. Just last week, I was speaking to several people from Cisco and IBM who are VERY focused on leveraging Second Life and related 3-D environments as a way to extend the power of Telepresence. 

In terms of communities I would avoid...MySpace is the obvious one. MySpace simply doesn't strike me in my personal dealings as a place for businesses to flourish. Creative initiatives, faddish styles and brands certainly, but a F500 brand? I'm summarily unconvinced.

Best of luck, I will further expound on my views in a few days if time permits.

Let me begin by asking you a few questions? And maybe answer them along...

Why are you doing this? Because everyone else is? You are not likely to achieve much if that is the case.

What is the specific need reason for you to engage your customers? Are these actual customers who have bought your product? Or are these random people who are submitting because you are looking for plain number of entries - there is inherent danger in the latter and the whole logic may be a bit flawed.  

Why would there be negative portrayal of the product/ brand? Is there something wrong with the product? Is the customer trying to tell you something? Are you taking this initiative as feedback?

Have you analysed existing feedback in terms of comments/ UGC that may already be floating around. What is the tone there? Negative/ positive/ neutral?

Are you prepared with a crisis plan?

Have you considered an outreach plan to reach influencers? Who are these influencers in your categories? Are you planning to engage them? How?

Top gadget sites/ top tech sites/ your own site/ blog maybe interesting places to feature your best content.

Your own site gives you the opportunity to showcase films that may best capture your brand and ask visitors to further rate them. Use your existing 360 degree outreach tools - ads/ pr/ online to generate traffic to your site. Is your site RSS enabled? No, should be. 

One of the key reasons why people submit negative comments on a product is when they are not able to reach someone at the company who will just LISTEN to them. They want to be heard and often there is no one to hear. Create channels for the feedback to reach someone high up - take that feedback - don't be defensive - acknowledge the problem (if there is a problem) - take back the solution - showcase the resolution. Chances are you would made a friend.

Don't use the delete button - trust goes. The customer feels this is fake, goes and talks about it some more...

Now that you have a relationship, consider an evangelist programme?

Customer will always be at the center; besides the traditional layer of media, advertising, below the line etc..the social media layer will be reached out to for decisions - peer; expert; marketer's transparent initiative, engage through a strategic approach - uploading videos on YouTube does not social media strategy make.

Cheers.  

In considering user-generated content, there are three key factors that need to be managed and carefully considered well in advance of a campaign:

1. What is my objective? Possibilities include:
• Participation as means of creating brand loyalty
• Content distribution among participants' friends/family
• Low cost content production
2. What motivates participants? Possibilities include:
   
• Artistic expression
• Recognition
• Prizes
• Fun
  
3. Quality and marketability of content. Possibilities include:
   
• High quality and on-message
• Low quality but on-message
  
• High quality but off-message
• Low quality and off-message
4. Capabilities and limitations of technological platform. Possibilities include:
• Ability to limit distribution of content 
• Ability to censor
  
• Interest of target customer segments in content
• Ability of target customer segments to find/access content
• Ability of target participants to find/access contest
  

Your motivation for the contest and how you structure it will determine who is going to participate and why. The key (obviously) is to keep it on-message (whatever that message may be) and positive. In part this can be done through item (4) - a controllable platform. Non-favorable entries should be eliminated either through the submission process or by effectively "burying" the unflattering entries under a pile of boring but benign material that no one will ever dig through.

The worst case scenario is a video that is unflattering and viral. Perhaps something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt7ftrzkxgg

Also note that there is a "long tail" on much user-generated content: i.e., even though a contest may be over, the best entries may continue to be viewed for a long time afterward, and some well-placed post-contest advertising could encourage that in secondary markets. 

Positive associations and a fun and even whimsical feeling have been what I've seen work. My favorite example are the green screen game creations of the Colbert Nation. Making a brand seem like not a brand is at the heart of the Colbert Nation appeal -- somehow Colbert Nation avoids the corporate network persona of Comedy Central and is instead associated with faux Bill O'Reilly clone Stephen Colbert. Pointing to their success is shooting for the stars but definitely something worth looking at.

Other than that, the right questions are being asked!

It would be much esaier to put this question in perspective if I were to know (a) the company (b) the products (c) What product or promotion is the central basis for the campaign (d) the strategy or target market data and (e) a meeting to ensure that we are all on the same page with regards to how we are defining certain terms, such as "branding". Any misunderstanding of the terms used changes the objectives from the campaign significantly.

In addition, it seems from the question that the company has already created a specific campaign and these questions are aimed specifically with regards to that campaign.

Without such information, what follows from me is a more general discussion about the types of options you might have.

The answers to questions asked depend very heavily on the type of viral campaign that is planned and the objectives of it. these objectives come from a basic strategy of how we need the campaign to benefit the company.

Here is the best that I can gather about your strategy: You wish to target youth and consumers and engage them in a short, highly entertaining and memorable experience that brings people together as virtual friends and communities. This will in turn create certain positive feelings amongst these participants regarding your product -- however, it wont be your product, your quality or your company that they will be happy about, but rather just the experience they all went through together.

You also feel that as these youth start working in different types of jobs, you will then start seeing ROI. Since every company or business they work for is a potential customer for office supplies vendors, what you will want to see happening is that in case some supplies run short and need to be ordered (e.g. Staplers) then your brand will be the first thing on THAT youth's mind. In this way, your brand (atleast the company name and logo) spreads at the right time.

Based on this, here are some answers to the questions above:

1) Given our broad audience of consumers, how can we best encourage positive entries and on-message responses? Suggest online venues where the prevailing tone is upbeat -- or virtual locations that should be avoided if they are known to be too crass. How can these characterizations be determined? 

Encouraging positive participation comes primarily from the design of the viral campaign. It has been shown that participants in such campaigns are not driven by monetary incentives alone, and the primary set of incentives is the chance to create a social community around that activity.

Your campaign could either be to ask for user submitted videos for contests, for infomercials, make the user-submitted videos part of a whole series that the users work together to complete and enhance, and more.

You should have the right expectations from what you define to be a "positive entry" -- is the goal just to highlight what your products can do, or to get glowing reviews from the submitters? The latter is possible but more difficult to expect than other outcomes.

If, however, you are able to design your campaign accurately, positive submissions will be the majority AND the community will have filter out the negative ones, because everyone will have the right set of incentives to do so.

2) Suggest creative ways to promote the collected video materials, after the submission period is officially over, that leverage online communities.

Again, depending on the type of campaign and the goal behind the promotion of those collected videos, a number of things could be done, such as:

• For infomercial compeitions, one will be selected from the top-three and played on mainstream media - this will also inadvertently promote that video among online communities.
• The contest can have winners based on maximum views, or througth a community vote
• The contest could just involve users creating something using your products as a DIY project, and shooting it on video. In this case, you could relicense the end-products as a "limited distribution product" and share revenue wiht the submittors or otherwise promote the submittors
• You could use a Gmail-style straetgy of letting the top-three sumittors share their creations onwards
• Or your campaign itself could require hundreds of submissions comign together (e.g. for a series).

3) Other than ignoring or deleting content that may be negative, how should we handle submissions that are not entirely favorable to our brand?

If the goal is to make sure that those youth remember a good feeling when they remember your staplers (because of this contest), then the best strategy is to embrace all submissions and laugh with the community. Never get defensive.