It’s been a great few week of calls and conversations with some major players across quite a few industries.  What’s interesting about the work we do is how applicable it is to so many types of business.  I wanted to share some great ideas from the interaction we’ve had across many seemingly different org types.

Real Estate – A great conversation this week with the CEO and Marketing Director of a major Real Estate Group in Wisconsin.  We talked about the type of advertising and marketing they’ve done in the past, and how they create messaging to their prospective new home buyers.  Some great questions to consider:  How do you get a message out to area home shoppers that it’s time to buy, or to buy from them?  How do you capture people before they are ready to buy a home, so when they are ready, they come back to you?  How do you capture buyers who are increasingly younger, and don’t seek news in the same places you’ve advertised for years?  Our contests applications create relevant engagement with these prospective new home buyers because we custom design the contest around an idea that would interest your target market.  If you’re looking to target new home buyers, create a contest around a room remodel, or a best family photo.  How about a best snowman contest.  It’s community goodwill and that’s the point.

Create a contest that reaches your audience, find a prize that creates incentive, make spreading the message simple, make voting addictive, add a offline conversational component by offering a campaign product (like buy the picture of your son’s snowman on a magnet), and voila, you have a campaign that captures an audience and brings them back.  When they are ready, you’ll be the company they need your product or service.

Politics – A new program we’ve joined forces with to test our application in the political space has some very interesting implications.  A great new documentary “By The People – The election of Barack Obama” provides insider accounts of the pandemonium that developed along the campaign road for our new president.  Produced by Ed Norton, it captures a clear picture of the emotion of the campaign trail, and it’s incredible.  A must watch, and a great case study on what components led into a successful campaign for the Obama group.

The interesting conversation in politics is the topic of how to make people care about an election, or a candidate.  Especially in local elections, no one really thinks about an election until the close to election day, and even then a very small percentage actually vote.  In local elections less than 10 percent typically come out to vote.  How do we capture that audience?  How do we understand and speak to their issues?  How do we communicate with them?  How do we let them spread the message?  How do we keep them engaged longer than that guy at the grocery store that asks if I’m registered to vote in San Diego?

Though it’s only one small component to a successful political website strategy, our voting and engagement technology can help open the door and start a conversation.  If you want to reach a target audience of 25-45 yr-old affluent women in a the San Diego area, try a home makeover or a garden photo contest.  If you want to reach Latin-Americans in Miami, try a favorite food, or family picnic contest.  The prize is a special lunch with you, their next local politician.

Sports – After helping launch a new campaign in partnership with Active, and the NBA/NCAA we got into the door with a few Sports franchises.  Our first major team campaign launch will be a major NFL team this month.  Some great questions here.  As an NFL team how do you get your fans to participate with the organization when they’re not watching a game?  What’s your objective with fans that come to the website?  How are new fans exposed to you?  How do offline, online and event marketing strategy work together?

Fan supported contests, especially ones that have real value because they bring the team spirit home (to a backyard BBQ for example), or to a tailgate party, create real viral engagement.  What if fans could submit photos of their favorite team spirit moment on an easy to use and addictive to play platform.  What if they were competing to win free tickets, and free team gear.  What if recognition were available to everyone that submitted ideas, like showcasing the best ranked photos on the megatron.  What if we captured 5,000 new fan photos every month, and fan’s emails to send them updates on voting and new promotions.  Would advertisers be interested in sponsoring a contest that captured that kind of data, and created one million votes per month or more?

It’s going to be an exciting 2010.