Marketing Safari

Thank You for Voting

I want to thank everybody for voting. Both those that voted with a fully valid vote in the election and also the 868.144 that voted in "IfTheWorldCouldVote.com". It's been a fantastic experiment and we've met a lot of great people during the process, both people on the ground like Bob in Australia, reporters that have inerviewed us around the world, bloggers and voters. It's been an honour to be a part of this project.

The reach has been amazing. We've managed to get votes from almost every single country in the world. And all this reach has been by using social media only. We have not spent a single dime on advertising, PR or any other publicity. Yet we have thousands of blogs that have written about us, discussions on forums, press coverage in all sorts of traditional media and word of mouth. I will be analyzing the data we've gathered and sharing with you some of the things that we've learned about social media marketing along the way. So stay tuned.

Now that the voting for the next president of the USA is over, we will start thinking about the next voting on our site. Gay marriage? War? Death penalty? Global warming? Abortion? If you have any ideas to questions we should allow the world to vote on, please add your suggestions in the comments below and subscribe to the blog to get notifications when we release a new question or some of the data behind our success.

Thanks again for participating.
Hjörtur

ps. America, congratulations with the participation in the election and with the new president. You've brought hope for change to the whole world.

The Word is Spreading

As of now the number of voters on IfTheWorldCouldVote.com has exceeded the total population in Iceland. We have now 341.000 votes from 198 countries. We have only used social media to spread the word. No ads bought, no links or registrations bought. It's just natural spread on the Internet and traditional media in various countries picking it up.

Sometimes we see a peak in the results from a certain nation. When that happens we check where the traffic came from. Was it a blog (like those from Egypt, Jamaica, USA and here and there, yes, even from Northern Marina Islands), a bookmarking site, a newspaper or just word of mouth? When it's online publicity it's easy to track. But word of mouth off-line is very difficult to track.

Last Saturday I got a great letter all the way from Australia. It's from Bob, a seventy year old guy in Sydney who liked our idea and decided to take the matters in his own hands and really spread the word:

"A couple of days ago I decided to help you further, and in particular Australia. I sat down at the computer and typed up the web address along with a short 4 line message 14 times to fit an A 4 sheet, and then printed multiple copies to yield around 200 units, then cut them up on the guillotine. I carry them in my pocket and hand them out to people in the street or on the bus and invite them to check the web site out. So far I have handed out just over 100, I plan to produce a lot more as I will be participating in an annual bike ride on Sunday where there will be 6 to 7 thousand riders taking part. So after Sunday it is possible that you may see an appreciable increase in the number of votes coming from Australia, if that should be the case you will know the reason why, and I will also feel good about it."

Today it's Tuesday and we've got over 10.000 votes from Australia. When Bob started a few days ago, there where 4.541 votes from Australia. But Bob doesn't just have friends in Australia.

"Then earlier today (Friday) I decided to make a single handed assault on boosting the numbers in one particular country. You may well say how could I possibly do that (I am 70 and not silly) I noted one country (there are a few others) that only had one vote registered, this being Vanuatu, which is a small Pacific Island country which lies North and to the East of Australia which has a population of well under one million. I have been there (3 years ago) and have a good friend who is a local man. He and I correspond quite regularly by email, so I wrote to him and gave him all the details and instructed him to write the details up like I did. Now remember this is a Third world Pacific Paradise, and there are very few computers, and even less people who are connected to an internet service. So I have asked my friend Ben to canvass all the shops and offices in their main (small) capitol city of Port Vila and invite those who have internet access to participate if they wish. He has friends on some of the other islands, and I have asked him to pass the details on to some of them.

 

So if you see some votes starting to arrive in the next few days from Vanuatu, you will know the reason for the sudden increase of interest in the project. I would know how you managed to receive the first vote, there are quite a lot of Expat people from several countries who live in Vanuatu, and it would be safe to say that one of their friends sent them the details in an email."

I've been monitoring Vanuatu for a few days now and it just stood still in 1 vote. Today something happened though and when I checked the numbers, all of a sudden we had 30 votes from Vanuatu. My guess is, Ben read his email :) While writing this email, 9 more have come in from Vanuatu. It may not be big on global scale, but it's big for Vanuatu and all this is a great example of the importance of a single man picking up the cause and spreading the word.

If you have more stories about people going the extra mile to spread the word about our site, please share them. We love to get stories like this one.

Keep up the good work people. We have two weeks to go to the election. We won't manage to get more voters than voted in the last US election, but we are determent in getting more than a million votes. With your help, that is quite possible.

Thank you world, for participating
Hjörtur

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Tipping Point for IfTheWorldCouldVote.com

As you may know, I have a pet project with two of my friends which we call IfTheWorldCouldVote.com. It's a website where we give the world an opportunity to vote.

We launched the site in early June and got a pretty good start, with over 3.000 votes from almost 40 countries in the first day. It's been growing slowly ever since and on September 10th we'd got 20.000 votes. Since then the traffic has been growing fast and the word has been spreading. search.twitter.com shows an increase in mentions of the site and the number of blogs linking to it grows fast. It looks like we reached a tipping point now in September and last Wednesday night we reached 100.000 votes!

I think we will not reach our "insanely ambitious goal" of more number of votes than voted in the last US election. But we might reach a million. Possibly. To get there we need a little more publicity, so feel free to tell the world about our little experiment.

Bloggers from all over the world have written about If The World Could Vote:

Νίκη για το taxalia νίκη για όλους μας
¿Quién ganaría si el mundo votara Obama o McCain?
Εσείς τι θα ψηφίζατε; Obama ή McCain;
Global Vote for President
Politik | If the world could vote the US president
The US Presidential Elections
If the world could vote?
McCain campaign imploding along with economy
If the world could vote …
Entracte 65
Vote na Eleição dos EUA
Join the World Vote for the next US President
Promoçao através de acontecimentos populares
McCain or Obama?
Fun fun fun (se o mundo votasse nas eleições americanas)
Si el mundo votara, ¿Quien ganaria las elecciones en los EEUU?
Interessante
Presidente do mundo
E se o mundo pudesse decidir as eleições americanas?
E se o mundo inteiro votasse?
E se você votasse na eleição dos EUA?
Palin - Bush style
Link to entry: Speedlinking da Semana [7-13 Setembro]
Voto
Como votar em Obama ou McCain
If the World Could Vote
Eleições 2008
Maria Cristina
Political non-partisan Jib Jab
If you want to weigh in...
Statele Unite ale Lumii
Eleições nos USA. E eu com isso?
E se o Mundo votasse nas eleições Americanas?
If The World Could Vote
Other Things We Found Mildly Interesting This Morning…
E se o mundo votasse para quem seria presidente dos Estados Unidos? Pior que já tem!
McCain is a liar
Surpresa (2) - mais uma gralha do Público
معرفی سایت
Eleições nos USA
Surpresa (2) - mais uma gralha do Público
Se pudessemos votar...
If the World could vote …
Vote for the world!
Se o mundo pudesse votar
E se o mundo pudesse votar?
E se todo o mundo pudesse votar nas eleições americanas?
Vote Obama!
Querem votar nas eleições norte-americanas?
Parece que o McCain está à frente
The Bobolee Chronicles
If the world could vote?
links for 2008-09-07
Blah Blah Flowers
If the world could vote?
Wenn die Welt wählen könnte …
la Convention Démocrate
If the world could vote ? McCain vs Obama
Et si le monde aussi pouvait choisir entre Barack OBAMA et John McCAIN ?
News of the World
Et si le monde aussi pouvait choisir entre Barack OBAMA et John McCAIN ?
Si le monde pouvait voter
If the world could vote?
Si la terre entière votait pour les élections américaines…
wie man den Stau auf der Datenautobahn lichten kann
Barack or John - If the world could vote.
If the world could vote
Barack Obama     85.1%
This and That
Republican New Zealand
If the world could vote?
If The World Could Vote For US President
Reality Me
demokratie 2.0
If the world could vote
If the world could vote?
If the world could vote
Rich’s latest Tweets
Ef heimurinn gæti kosið
Wahl-O-Mat
Et si tout le monde pouvait voter ?
US-Wahl für Nicht-Amerikaner

If your blog is missing from the list, add it to the comments below and I'll add it to the list.

Hjörtur

 

If The World Could Vote ...

Have you ever wondered what the world thinks about the president of the United States? Just about everybody in the world seems to have an opinion. After all, the president of the United States is probably the most powerful person on the planet.

So, do you think the outcome would be different if the world could vote? Would it be Obama or would it be McCain? A good friend of mine got the idea of asking the world so we created IfTheWorldCouldVote.com, an online voting where the world can vote for the next president of the United States. We've had a great start, with 6613 votes from 69 countries. But we want to do better.

OUR AIM

Our ridiculously ambitious aim is to get more than 122,267,553 people to vote on our site, which is more than voted in the last presidential election in the US. To achieve that, we are going to need all the help we can get. Already we've got translations into Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish but more languages are still needed. So if you want to help out, you can translate the site into your native language or you can help us spread the word. Blog it, stumble it, redd it, digg it or share it via any other social media, email or word of mouth.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS

As I've told you earlier, I suffer from insatiable curiosity. That is the main reason. We find it interesting to see what the world thinks, and see the difference between countries. Do Israelis and Iraqis share the same opinion? What about the Chinese and Japanese? We are looking forward to see some results.

Another reason is the challenge. How many people can we get to our site to vote? Where will all the traffic come from? What are the best traffic sources in each country? When the experiment is done, we should have a pretty good database over the best social media sites around the world. So far, Stumble Up On has been our greatest source of traffic with reddit coming second. Icelandic link dumps have proved to be effective as well.

I will be keeping you up to date here on the blog on the development.

Hjörtur