Fiskars takes brand to bloggers…or maybe bloggers to brand
CoBrandit has an interview with Geno Church of Brains on Fire. Geno discusses how they implemented a brand ambassador and community program around Fiskars and their scrap booking line of products. Fiskars found four scrap bookers and hired(?) them to be brand ambassadors. Stephenie, May, Cheryl and Holly all have blogs at fiskateers.com as well as participate (moderate?) a community message board and gallery.
I think this is a great strategy. Geno makes it clear that they educated these new bloggers on transparency and the unwritten rules of blogging. They found these bloggers via forums so these were individuals that were already participating in online communities and familiar with online social networking. For them, it must be a delight to have a brand like Fiskars approach them and ask them to participate. For Fiskars, the overall cost of the program must have been very manageable and provides third party credibility to their brand.
Technorati : Blog, Brains on Fire, Fiskars, WOM, WOMMA
June 27th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Josh, thanks for the love. We are very excited to be a part of this project.
I would like to answer some of your questions about the Fiskateers. The four ladies you mentioned Stephenie, May, Cheryl and Holly have been hired part time by Fiskars. BOF and our client Fiskars, based on the brand ambassador interviews and other past and present ambassador programs felt that paying some form of stipend was the route to go. Scrapbooking is time consuming, very social, and mostly consists of offline networking clusters, crops, conferences, etc… So we felt like we needed to reimburse these ladies for their valuable time. We also have a great client that allowed these ladies ownership of their brand. They do run fiskateers.com, they write their blogs, they moderate comments. They even control the level of conversation about fiskars, scrapbooking, other competing srapbooking products, and their lives. One big point here is that only one of these ladies had ever blogged before.
Again I can’t tell you how lucky we are that Fiskars is behind this direction, hire your customers, and empowering them with ownership of the brand.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Geno,
Are you working on other projects similar to this that you can discuss?
October 5th, 2006 at 10:46 am
Hey Josh, so sorry I lost track of your blog. I really appreciate your interest. We are working on a project with a similar scope of focus. We cut our teeth so to speak on brand ambassador programs and wom based movements about 5 years ago when we won the state of South Carolina’s anti-tobacco campaign for teens.
We worked with in-state teens to develop a ViralMentalist curriculum to help them flame their passion for a cause, fighting ignornace about smoking and big tobacco manpulation. We have been working on fumes for the last 2 years, but the state just re-funded the program so we are re-building the program as a Youth Ambassador Model with 50 RAGEers invited to Camp Rage in Novemeber for 3 days of training, learning to infect others. We will then setup two districts in the state with a RAGE Command Center maned by RAGE teens but supervised by trained adults to stay connected with the RAGEers in these districts as they follow through with mini-grants on policy initiaitives, smoking awareness and expanding RAGE membership. I would love to talk to you more if your interested. Sorry for the rant. Check out the tour the RAGE guys are doing right now; http://www.rageagainstthehaze.com
Geno
October 5th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Geno,
Thanks for the update.