We’ll be sharing the stage with a group of outstanding agencies, including Wieden+Kennedy, which is cleaning-up with its Old Spice work, and our sister IPG shop HUGE.

mediahub’s award for best media planning and buying comes as a result of the strategic planning done in the process of winning JetBlue and activating the You Above All campaign, as well as the innovative use of alternative media platforms for Olympus.

This honor is certainly a nice way to start the year, particularly as the group of agencies being recognized is, in the words of OMMA editor John Capone,”one of the strongest in recent memory when it comes to our criteria of innovation and industry leadership, perhaps owing to the fact that as budgets sagged and the ground shifted beneath their feet, the fleetest ruled the day.”

John Moore - Ad Age Media Maven 2010

Mullen’s commitment to keeping media and creative closely connected has been rewarded as our Chief Media Officer John Moore has been recognized as an Advertising Age Media Maven.  As you’ll see in the Ad Age report, John was given this prestigious award based on his passion for media innovation, his major contributions to the agency’s new business success and innovative media executions that our mediahub group created recently for Olympus, Timberland and Zappos.

John joins a group of 18 media luminaries selected by Ad Age including, Brandy Ruff from Mullen client Alberto-Culver, Christopher Batty from Gawker, Ian Tait from Wieden & Kennedy, Brian McMahon from IPG’s Orion Trading, Seth Kaufman from Pepsico, David Levy from Turner Broadcasting and Colleen Fahey Rush from MTV Networks.

It’s been a couple of great weeks for mediahub, which also picked up a series of awards for media innovation from The AdClub recently. However, all is not rosy for John, as his beloved Boston College Eagles got wrecked by Virginia Tech over the weekend.  Hopefully being named an Ad Age Media Maven will ease the pain.

The Olympus Stylus Tough is virtually indestructible, but we decided to try anyway by bringing it to mountains, rivers, ocean bottoms, laundromats and even bowling alleys to see what the camera could actually withstand.

The challenges we set up were wide ranging from placing the camera inside a wash cycle to putting it in a lobster trap in Maine to placing it inside a set of bowling pins to running it over with a snow grooming machine. Each test could have proved fatal for the camera, but it easily made it through all of the challenges. Stylus Tough is a great, easy-to-use camera for taking both photos and video on the go or for extreme sports or for pretty much anything that has some rugged shooting conditions involved.

We found some pretty interesting ways of bringing the campaign to life. For instance, it’s running as pre-roll units on Transworld surrounding X-Games content. They can also be found on the video network Yume as well as Smart Clip. We’re leveraging a lot of expandable banners where you can view all the videos. The videos are also currently living together on the Olympus website.

The integrated campaign has TV, social media and print that links to an augmented reality 3D experience.

Stephen Mietelski, svp, group creative director at Mullen, said “While using the camera, we came upon a simple and powerful idea: Rather than telling people “Look What You Can Do,” let’s show them what they can do with the PEN by using the camera to produce all of the campaign advertising visuals.”

Readers of the June print issue of Wired and the July print issue of Popular Photography will find an augmented reality tip-in card shaped like the Olympus PEN (actual size). The camera card peels off the insert and serves as a marker for use in front of a webcam. Simple instructions for the demo are included and direct users to the Olympus augmented reality site.

“Augmented reality has been used by companies before, but more as a gimmick than as an actual, working, in-depth product demo,” said Mietelski. “This is as close to having the camera in your hands as you can get without actually having it in your hands.”

The end result is a campaign that uses the medium as the message.

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 to listen, engage and share

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.

That nutty Blendtec guy is at it again stuffing expensive cameras into his blender to see what’ll happen. Confession:  Mullen made him do it. It’s the focal-point of an all-out social media launch for the Olympus E-P1, a snazzy new device that is the world’s smallest digital SLR and HD video camera all-in-one. Get the blender joke, now? Watch Tom the blender guy as he grinds-up digital cameras, voice recorders, lenses and even a piece of lovely, fruity still-life.   The integrated campaign takes advantage of Olympus’s growing social media network, connecting  Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a little social bookmarking magic to help generate attention and stimulate consumer participation.  If you want to do something in the social space, it helps to have a community.