mlove – or how to successfully establish a brand
Thursday, July 22. 2010 | 20:08 | von Torsten Schollmayer“mlove” – what a strange and odd name I thought when I first heard about it. “It” was supposed to be a kind of conference – at least that was what I got listening to people who were involved into mlove. A kind of TED for Mobile…
This actually already shows the first mistery and magic of the confestival mlove and also explains a piece of the success story of the brand mlove:
- make people interested by not telling the full story
- design & communicate that the event is different
- approach & engage “network hub” people
- target your audience and ensure to motivate people that are willing to share
- make people feel important
Harald Neidhardt (@hneidhardt), Peter Giblin (@petegiblin), Jonathan MacDonald (@jmacdonald) and the whole international team managed to create a full 3day community event in the middle of nowhere (50 km from Halle/Saale, Germany) that was extra-ordinary & incredible inspiring for everyone participating based on that very simple rules. Of course there were many more factors, like the excellent speeches, great organisation and the ancient castle which influenced the outcome and atmosphere – but for the most impressive observation was the different approach for this event.
What you usually get when you are participating at a mobile or digital industry event is that there are some interesting speeches, most of them product or company pitches and 95% of the people at the event are consuming without participating. At mlove the share was the opposite, actually I have the feeling that everybody was sharing all the time. This behavior and motivation created the most inspiring talks and discussions I was part of as long as I can think. So what are my takeaways then? This is very hard to describe and even more hard to capture in a pure text. Lucky me, there were already a great amount of excellent writers/participants sharing their thoughts and as super-added value, mlove invited Heather from Imagethink, who was also creatively live-capturing this years SXSW conference’ keynotes in Austin, Texas. Please see the links below for more details about the speeches, sessions and personal interpretations of some people:
- Imagethink Heather’s flickr set of all speeches http://www.flickr.com/photos/imagethink/sets/72157624272483795/
- contagious magazine report http://www.contagiousmagazine.com/2010/06/mlove_1.php
- Jonathan MacDonald Future Cube video http://www.jonathanmacdonald.com/?p=4703
- Ralf Rottmann (TheNextWeb) http://www.24100.net/2010/06/mlove2010
- Heike Scholz (Mobilezeitgeist) http://www.mobile-zeitgeist.com/2010/07/05/mlove-confestival-how-will-mobile-change-your-future (in german)
Reading and watching the above mentioned links you will easily identify that the participants were not only mobile industry people, but also people that have great stories to share and open up the minds of everybody. The spectrum covered from Microsofts office future vision to design & science history, mobile needs in Bangladesh and the two lovely musicians Rocky&Balls who are well-known Youtube-Artists in UK. But the most happened “in between” when all the highly engaged people started chatting and tried to change the world by only talking about it. These were the moments where everybody was taking away the most for themselves from all the various perspectives.
My conclusion? Try to be there the next time. My assumption is that this “spreading the word” will lead to at least one another approach for mlove and the demand for tickets will be higher then the seats. The level of inspiration, mind-opening and new way of thinking is valuable and necessary for everybody who wants to make the world a better place.
Finally to give you a glue what was happening there I would like to invite you the following video showing the giant 3D digitalised projection art showed in the second night on the huge walls of the castle. Projektil, the specialized company from Switzerland, showed this awesome augmented reality and gave another hint what might happen with our senses in the future. Enjoy.
mlove show from PROJEKTIL on Vimeo.
Tags: innovation, inspiration, mlove, mobile
