S60 Agent: New York Wrapup
The S60 Agent: New York pilot is now over. We’ve awarded our top agents with S60-based devices. We got lots of people involved, gave away lots of swag, and generated hundreds of offline conversations about S60 and S60-based products. We ended up getting more Agents than we had first anticipated, and some of the Agents were far more active than we anticipated. Overall, the program was a success. As a result of the success, two new projects are ongoing: First our licensees have asked that we expand the program to California in the fall. We’ll begin officially recruiting agents on Sept 10th or 11th. The program will run from mid-September to the beginning of December. More details to come in the next few days.
Second, we’ve begun scoping a national rollout of the Agent campaign, with introduction scheduled for Q1 ‘08.
There were also many many lessons learned, listed here in no particular order:
1) Many agents (in fact the majority of Agents) signed up but were not heard from again. We need to work harder to keep those with initial interest “engaged”. One possible issue was that we started the program during peak vacation season, both for people on the S60 Marketing team and for Agents in NYC.
2) We need a much better e-mail tool to manage the slew of e-mails that came in from the more active agents. In the pilot, I ended having to handle e-mail communications almost single-handedly from my Nokia e-mail address, which was daunting. We’re working on a solution to this as part of the scoping for the national campaign.
3) A variety of internal forces within Nokia have conspired against using the term “Agents” going forward. For that reason, as of next week, you’ll only hear me speak about S60 “Ambassadors”. I’m interested in people’s feedback on this point. Does the word “Ambassador” suck the fun out of the program? Or is it actually a more accurate way of describing what we’re asking our enthusiastic fan community of S60 users to do?
4) A variety of internal forces will prevent from awarding Agent rewards that were as cool as they were this time around (we gave aways S60-based devices). So, the pilot was truly a one-time deal from a reward perspective. No more S60-based devices will be given out! Those of you who were brave enough to sign up for the first pilot got yourselves a once-in-a-lifetime deal. For the CA campaign, we’ll give away more and better swag to all the Agents at the get-go, and tone down the rewards for the best Agents a little bit. Cool stuff will still be available, just not full blown device. I’ll have more details about specific rewards once the CA sign up pages are up.
Click here to see more details on what we are trying to achieve through these campaigns. Send in your feedback on the naming, processes, swag, what-have-you. Over the next two months we’ll be defining the national campaign, now’s the time to submit your feedback on the S60 Agent/Ambassador program.
I like the term Ambassadors better as well. I know it’s a term I’ve used for myself on more than one occasion.
Pity on toning down the swag, though (no devices!). My guess is there’s some tax implications, given how expensive our devices are.
Ambassador is a fine name. Not as much fun as Agent but corporate legal departments have a way of taking the fun out of anything.
The S60 device giveaway was a great incentive to keep the motivation on spreading the word. Bad move to take it away.
What’s the other swag? T-shirts? Meh.
Free tracks from the Nokia Music Store. Meh.
Honestly, baseball caps and clothing aren’t much of an incentive. Maybe gift cards to major retailers but a free device would get me hitting the streets.
You should take a look at the Apple Consulting Network. I realize it’s completely different than the Ambassador campaign but you’ll see that Apple offers exceptional discounts on their equipment by joining. I’d be open to something like that from Nokia.
S60 INFANTRY, I FEEL WE ARE THE FRONT LINE OF COMMUNICATION, ON THE BATTLE FIELD, WE DONT ONLY SPEAK OF THE S60 PLATFORM WE ALSO HAVE OUR WEAPONS DRAWN (OUR DEVICES)I feel that the biggest draw for me was not only talking about what the device can do, it was actually showing them, which is most convincing. In one of my Reports I even lent out my n95 for the day, swapped sims(very close friend)so he can actually get a feel for the device, he was sold after that, also i showed many people the amount of programs i had on my phone, weather it was for business, multimedia, gaming ect… it fit all catergories so i was well armed. So the name should be S60 infantry.
The term “ambassador” is actually pretty standard in the industry I work in (promotional marketing). I suppose it brings up a less sinister connotation that you sometimes get with “Agent”. S60 Ambassador doesn’t sound too bad to me at all.
Thanks Lenny — Personally, I love “Infantry” as a name, I’m a sucker for sports/war analogies. Not sure how the rest of the company would take it tho.
Eric — Point taken. For CA, The t-shirts and other swag stuff will go out to all Agents/Ambassadors who sign up. Most active agents at the end of the program will still get decent rewards, it’s just that we’ll cap the cost of the rewards at USD$200. That’s still enough for decent accessories such as BT headsets, speakers, etc. Not ideal, but it is what it is…
We’ll continue to tweak over the next few months…
@dan,
Thanks for clarifying the upper-tier award. To your point, $200 is a fair number. It’ll get you BT headsets, GPS+software, cases, etc.
Nokia taking care of the US market is good enough for me, like the way they take care of the EU and APAC market..
What I mean by this is Whatever comes out in EU should come out in the US too with US spectrums..
I never imagined that I would get a cool swags that I got.. Like I said the farthest my imagination took me was a BT stereo headset or a BT keyboard..
Then again a gift is always appreciated..
Question.. On the National S60 Ambassador roll out.. Can the winners from the S60 Agents NYC still join this contest?
Hey Erick — Once we get the national platform ready past Agents/Ambassadors will be welcome to join as many campaigns as they choose.
Well Dan, cant wait for the rollout of the national agent/ambassador rollout.
I’ll be the odd man out who does feel that the “Ambassador” sucks the fun out. However, I don’t have any better suggestions, so I don’t think my vote should count.
I’m really excited, however, to know that the first run went so well that they’re shooting for a nation-wide launch. Glad to see the higher-ups noticing the US market, apparently.
As for the prizes, I’d think that a discount program would be cool, if entire devices aren’t an option (for whatever reason). I.e. $100 off a device from Nokiausa.com or whatever.
Rolling out nationally, I could NOT be more pumped. The more that S60 and its licensee’s realize the US market has potential for these devices and for the S60 platform, the better, imo. let’s rock it.