Recently Mullen had a wonderful experience working with Olympus to launch its new E-P1, the world’s smallest interchangeable lens camera.  This beautifully designed camera shoots great stills and HD video.  As a content creating machine, it seemed the perfect product to bring to life in the social media space.  After all, aren’t YouTube, Flickr and Facebook where we show off our photos and videos?

However, you don’t simply appear, announce your presence and hope people pay attention.  You start at the beginning.  So here’s what we did and what might work for you.

1.  Make a commitment

Seems obvious, but it’s important. Social media isn’t a campaign or a program, it’s an ongoing relationship.  Olympus understood this and made that commitment.

2.  Define your community

The more clearly you define your community and learn how they engage with a category, a brand, content and media, the more effective you’ll be. We weren’t trying to reach a mass audience, but rather to connect with digitally savvy photo enthusiasts who might enjoy learning and talking about the new camera.

3.  Determine objectives

True, Olympus signed up for the long term — to listen, learn, share, contribute — but our real objective was to launch the E-P1, generate buzz, get bloggers to pay attention, and have the press pick up the conversation.

4.  Engineer your presence

Essentially we constructed a social media brand platform, connecting Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube so we could take our questions, content and conversation to the community rather than ask them to come to us.  Of course, Olympus prominently displayed links on its website, too.

5.  Build a following

You can let it happen serendipitously, or you can develop a game plan.  We chose to follow key influencers, promote their content, contribute to their conversations, and offer them value in hopes they might follow back.

6.  Engage, share and inspire participation

Long before we were even ready to talk about the new camera we got fans and followers engaged in discussions.  We shared videos, product demos, invited them to submit content, and simply talked.

7.  Do something attention getting

Even in the social media space, you have to compete for attention and generate content worth talking about. We did it by partnering with Tom Dickson of Will it Blend fame.  We started with a teaser video that generated nearly 200,000 views in the first couple of days, then followed with a full blown product introduction. We didn’t create a viral video for the sake of creating a viral video; rather we came up with a fresh new way to demonstrate the totality of the camera’s features.  It worked, evident by this blurb in Wired.

8.  Mobilize your community

Ok, in this case we did something social outside the digital realm.  We invited bloggers and reporters to a product demo and photo shoot at Coney Island.  But we also provided our fans and followers with the full story and useful background about the camera.

9.  Measure results

As our head of analytics likes to say, “you can’t put up a weather station and measure yesterday’s weather.”  So early on we put in place systems to measure the conversation, sentiment, tweets, RTs, web traffic and impressions from both online and offline media coverage.  This gave us a base to compare the conversation at the start of the project with the buzz generated after the announcement.  It will also give us a baseline to use in determining actual sales and their relationship to the conversation.

10.  Keep on going

As we said, and as Olympus knows, this isn’t a program or a campaign, it’s a commitment.  So we’re still at it.  Listening, talking, sharing, responding.  Of course it’s too soon to see the sales numbers, but feedback from dealers has been very positive.   And we know based on previous experience that there is a correlation between buzz and sales.  So that’s a good thing, given that bloggers and press are writing, prospective customers are talking, and the videos are getting shout outs everywhere.

Can you think of anything we missed?   Are there best practices we didn’t consider? Have you introduced a new product this way?  Please share.

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Photo by Manny Garcia, Poster by Jared Fairey

I don’t believe a word of this one. On the eve of Shepard Fairey’s first major exhibit at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (in fact he speaks there tonight) the AP sues him for basing his ubiquitous Obama poster on a photograph taken by Manny Garcia in 2006. Not like this is news to anyone. The poster has been around for well over a year. Hundreds of thousands have been given away and couple thousand sold. Fairey has always admitted it was based on the photo in question, but that he’s within in his rights. Now, in a perfect orchestration of public relations, the AP and Fairey get together to concoct a lawsuit. Brilliant. Every network, news site and daily paper in America covers the story. Fairy gets more famous. The poster becomes more coveted. And the potential value of the original photograph goes through the roof.  A brilliant idea. Congratulations to everyone involved in thinking this one up.  Wish it had been me.  Then again, maybe I’ll get sued by both of them for writing this and using their images.

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Yousuf Karsh is one of my favorite portrait photographers. Yet until last week I had only seen his images in books and online, never in an actual exhibit. Fortunately I caught the last day of Portraits of Greatness at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. It’s now moving to the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a great show whether your interest is in photography or in the monumental subjects. Everyone who was anyone — Winston Churchill, Pablo Picasso, Nikita Khrushchev, Ernest Hemingway, Audrey Hepburn, Albert Einstein, Fidel Castro, Mohammed Ali, and Jacqueline Kennedy – wanted to sit for Karsh. My two favorite stories: He refused to photograph George W. Bush, not because of political reasons but because George W. said he didn’t care what the image was long as Karsh was the man who pushed the shutter release. Such a comment showed no understanding, respect or appreciation for Karsh’s technique and the time it took to know and capture the essence of his subjects. The second is how he achieved the expression on Churchill’s face in the image above. At the last moment, Karsh plucked Churchill’s cigar from his lips, resulting in this stern expression. Two other things are worth noting for anyone constantly looking for inspiration. Karsh got his idea for controlling light by studying Rembrandt portraits on exhibit in Boston museums during his two years apprenticing in that city between 1928 and 1930. There he realized that the artist could control how light affected a subject. A year later he joined the Ottawa Little Theater, and the spectacle of stage lighting helped him learn how to achieve the intense moods that define his images. They remind us that, among other things, we all need constant exposure to new sources of inspiration if we’re to make something great.

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