One of the things I’ve been meaning to write about for a while are the recipients of 2007 Wommie Awards. This is the second year for the awards, which are given out at the Womma Summit. Last year, we were fortunate enough to win one for our work with The Canary Project, but this year we lost graciously passed the torch on to some very deserving candidates. Two, in particular, I thought really stood out.

The first from Quicken Loans. I’ll note that the presenter of the project was Clayton (the man) Closson, who used to work at our MS&L Ann Arbor office. He moved on to Quicken to be part of their blog team among other things about a month before I started.

Clayton’s program was a collaboration between Quicken and Yahoo! Answers. As the story goes, Clayton was perusing Yahoo! Answers and saw someone that had a question about mortgages. Being a home loans expert, he stepped in to answer the question. After several months it became evident just how many questions there are on home loans. Clayton’s Answers were picked most often as the best by Yahoo! users giving him and the company instant credibility. The people at Yahoo! Answers took note and offeredQuicken a Yahoo! Answers Knowledge Partner profile, as the Home Loan Guru.

What started out as a nice thing to do turned into an awesome word of mouth campaign. Personally, that’s what I love about it – Quicken didn’t go out there and hit people over the head with adverts that screamed “We’re the experts!!!!”, they reached their target audience in an engaging manner and left the loan decision-making process to the consumer. Through this partnership, Quicken Loans is seen as the authority on home loans and mortgages from a trusted and credible third-party source. Well done!

The second Wommie campaign I want to highlight is Converseon‘s Second Chance Trees project. Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, and Paull and Christi‘s boss, presented this amazing campaign. Converseon blurred the line between the virtual and physical worlds by incorporating Second Life into what was basically a fundraiser for the reforestation of the world’s rainforests.

Converseon, in collaboration with Plant-It 2020 bought an island on Second Life on which any Second Life user can purchase a virtual endangered tree to plant on the island for 300 lindens (about one U.S. dollar). From there, each tree planted on Second Life plants the same species of tree in a real life rainforest. It took off like gangbusters. People who planted trees on Second Life began sharing them on Flickr, making memorial trees for loved ones and blogging about the program – all with minimal involvement from Converseon itself.

I had to eat my words a little bit, because I am not a fan of Second Life, but I think the SCT project works where others have failed for several reasons:

  • Even though you have to buy something to participate, the campaign is not trying to “sell” you anything (notice a trend here?)
  • Philanthropy always goes a long way with the general public
  • People who aren’t on Second Life can still understand, identify and be likely to pass on the information to others
  • It was a Second Life campaign that was in no way limited to Second Life (something that resonates with me, especially)

There were two other winners: Affinitive for their American Skiing Company: MyA41.com Passholder Community and Fanscape for their campaign, “Clear Channel NEW! Populating Site with Musicians” Feel free to check those out as well!

Congratulations to everyone! And watch out for next year. We’re reclaiming the prize in ’08.