The Vodafone Big Idea show on Sky One

vodafone big idea

Originally uploaded by ew4n.

I first heard about the Big Idea from Kevin who received that apparent unsolicited text from Vodafone earlier this week.

I was on the Vodafone home page this Saturday afternoon and saw the promo for it, so clicked.

If you haven’t already had a look, the Vodafone Big Idea is effectively Dragon’s Den for Sky One. Care to guess who the sponsor is? 😉 Yes. Obviously, it’s Vodafone. Good. Kudos. Supporting small business. Or at least, aligning themselves with the concept.

Someone, somewhere in Vodafone is doing a brilliant job with sponsorship, events and television — the Vodafone Music Awards were last week, we’ve had Vodafone music events all over the place. It all looks good from my vantage point. I’m certainly not thinking much about Orange or T-Mobile when I’m out and about. O2 is a glint in the milkman’s eye in terms of my consumption of media recently.

So here’s the concept of the Big Idea:

One inventor or entrepreneur will win £100,000 in Sky One’s new prime-time show in partnership with Vodafone

There are three judges:

Ex-Liverpool footballer and designer of the ‘Predator’ football boot Craig Johnston, Chief Executive of Cobra Beer Lord Karan Bilimoria and finalist on ‘The Apprentice’ Ruth Badger

Ms Badger: The girl dun good, eh? She’s done well to be featured in the show.

You can still pitch your idea to the show although time is running out quickly. If you’ve got a good 2 minute pitch, I reckon you should go along, knock out the various forms and see if you get anywhere. You can pitch online.

Obviously there is no scope for any Big Ideas along the lines of ‘stop charging people pounds and pounds per meg for their data,’ or ‘introduce a flat rate unlimited text, data and calling plan,’ will all be disqualified from the get go.

Richard Bacon, Dick Strawbridge and Di Stewart are the presenters. Di will certainly make it watchable. Good team I reckon.

One issue. I do a lot of work in the online community space – particularly around advising big companies how to manage interaction with consumers. It’s quite an alien concept to a lot of organisations who are so used to broadcasting a carefully constructed message to their customers — but are completely incapable of managing any form of communication back from these customers. One company I met a while back was redirecting all communications from it’s discussion board to it’s complaints department, because it didn’t know what to do with the incoming messages of support, ideas, thoughts and opinion — which it had originated using its community.

Someone, somewhere at Vodafone, decided it would be a good idea to include forums on the Big Idea website — to enable people to discuss the episodes and so on. That’s a super concept. However the cardinal rule in community management is to never, ever, ever go live with forums that are empty.

Take a look at this screenshot showing the forums with 0 topics, 0 posts — every single one of them. Ooooh dear. It’s a virtual ghost town.

Vodafone’s community management team should have started it off. It needn’t be a difficult task. Just whack a mail round to everyone in Vodafone Interactive and ask’em to register and post a few messages.

Now I’m put off registering because no one else has. Well, no one else has posted anything. I don’t really want to be first, you see.

This is linked from the frontpage of the Vodafone site — one would magine there’s quite a lot of traffic flowing over the site, so at least 100 people out of the 100,000 (made up figures) visiting Vodafone’s site this afternoon, should have found the forums, registered and posted. It won’t be long until there’s some activity I’m sure. I wonder how they’ll deal with people posting comments like ‘please could Vodafone introduce an unlimited text/call/data plan’.

Will they delete the messages? Will they allow them to go live and allow people to pile on supporting messages? Will they formally respond to the messages? i.e. get their Head of Billing Customers Crazy Amounts to pen a reply? What would happen if I posted a topic along those lines and 500,000 people replied to it saying ‘YES, HERE HERE.’

Would Vodafone introduce such a price plan? How would they react if the national press picked up the story. What would happen if, over night, 20% of Vodafone’s customer base picked up the story and also demanded such a price plan?

Hmm. Interesting. They must have considered these ramifications. If it was me advising them, I’d either tell them to be open to it and to expect and to respond to their customers via the forums — or completely moderate the whole thing to prevent any ‘off topic’ messages from going live.

Anyway, when’s it on?

Watch The Big Idea on Sky One every Sunday night at 9pm from 15th October to the 26th November.

Immediately after the Sunday show turn over to Sky Three for More Big Ideas. In this 30 min show, hosted by Di Stewart, you can find out even more about our finalists and their ideas. Di will also review the week’s best ideas submitted in ‘What’s your Big Idea?’

I’ll Sky+ this.

If you’re not in the UK, you’ll be able to catch the video highlights here.