The World Economic Forum

I was asked to create a strategy and practical functional specification for WELCOM.

WELCOM was the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) rather brilliant idea to build a social network for their members.

Why was it such a good idea?

It was a good idea because the World Economic Forum is an organisation that is joined by its members (and some pay thousands for the privilege) precisely because they get to hob knob  with the other members, who also happen to be the worlds most powerful people. And, not only to they get to meet, they get to do so in private and on a social level that other international events don’t provide.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

So the basic idea was sound. In theory it should be no problem to build a workable social network. But what should the functionality of this social network look like? Do Bill Gates get to ‘poke’ Tony Blair?

I approached fascinating project by looking at the WEF structure, and interviewing staff and its members.

The key question to my mind was this? Why do a very diverse set of really important people, that are time poor, interact with each other and how might new digital media help this?

I brainstormed the possible needs and goals of WEF members with members and staff and used use cases to create the functional specifications.

Key to the proposals was a personal activity feed a la Facebook, now standard in Social Networks.

Read about WELCOM on Techcrunch.

We’d already been brainstorming with the team at Ben & Jerry on how to get that elusive ‘MTV audience’ interested in a pretty serious message. Then we got the call that they wanted to ‘go viral’. The objective was to raise more awareness about the campaign and get more people to send in their application videos.

Rather than do the usual, dull melting-iceberg approach, we approached it with a bit more rock ‘n roll attitude. B&J immediately realised the potential of a girl smashing up a big 4×4. It worked a treat.

What we learned: At the time, our knowledge of seeding was limited. We recommended to the client to use a major seeding company, but budget restrictions meant that didn’t happen. So if this project would happen right now, we wouldn’t just come up with the concept, but also suggest an overall social media approach to distribute the message more efficiently.

And it served its purpose internally. Through internal show-and-tell conferences, it managed to get other countries interested in the Climate Change College and the UK team at some point planned it to use it as a cinema ad.

We’d been working for the lovely people from 3VOOR12 for a while, creating a magazine show for tv and developing a visual-radio live-broadcast solution for internet-streaming on location.
So we knew and understood the brand very well. 3VOOR12 is Holland’s most important alternative music portal. They’ve been doing internet radio since the dark ages and mobile streaming since the semi-dark ages. They’re known their innovation, for their credibility and for their out-of-the-box-thinking. Nowhere in the world can you see a death metal video and then a Dutch hiphop act.
As part of their target to cover all platforms, they’d been running 2 semi-automated music channels online for a while, but it wasn’t getting much attention and it was becoming cluttered.
To add more clarity, we streamlined the scheduled, created a promo strategy and gave the in-house team a brief and tools that allowed them to re-brand certain aspects of the channel.

But 3VOOR12.TV couldn’t be seen to become a ‘proper’ tv channel, that would have been suicide. So we made sure the promo and schedule strategy wasn’t repetitive, that it wasn’t patronising.
And we added some interactivity. We developed ‘My3VOOR12′, a show where users could submit their own 30 minutes of music video programming. Plus an interactive chart, voted for online and via the Red Button.

But the program that got the awards-people excited was ‘White Noise’. Based on the concept of visualising radio (which the guys at VPRO had been exploring for a while), the plan was to do something special for DJ Dave Clarke’s weekly 2 hour-set on one of their radio stations. So the idea came about that it would nice for people to type in keywords (online and through their tv remote) and that those words would pull in picture from the Flickr archives. Which, in turn, would be cut together on the beat of the music. It worked a treat, thanks to the great programming work from the guys at Do-Tank.