Sony VAIO launches City Style Challenge

Written by Paul van Veenendaal on March 3rd, 2009 | 6 comments

Introduced at the CES 2009 in Las Vegas in January, the VAIO P-Series is the new stylish ultra-portable and lightweight netbook by Sony. The slim netbook offers full PC functionality in a package about the size of an envelope.

Bubble clouds visualize the city ranking

A month after its CES debut Sony has rolled out Phase 2 of the VAIO P-Series campaign, introducing a European style contest, titled “Europe’s Top Spots“, to create awareness and engagement around VAIO P-Series.

In the contest, developed by Nascom, Sony let’s the community decide which is the most stylish city in Europe by letting participants share interesting spots like fashion hotspots, art galleries, hidden restaurants, memorable architecture or great music venues across 65 cities in 26 countries in Europe, making use of Facebook Connect, Widgets, Google Maps, Twitter, VIP bloggers and YouTube.

In the online contest that’s all about style and travel, not only European cities compete with each other, also participants and categories battle for the top spot! Cities will grow on user actions through nominations, tips, ‘thumbs up’ votes on the tips and participants can earn extra points by inviting others to vote on their tips or by sharing their tips via Facebook, Twitter and widgets. Bubble clouds visualize the difference in points between the cities.

Before the official launch Nico Henderijckx of Sony Europe offered members of the Facebook group Club VAIO a sneak preview and to pre-test.

Facebook Integration
Integration with Facebook connect let’s participants easily login into the competition with their Facebook account ID, invite Facebook friends and cross-publish their interactions to their Facebook Mini Feed and News Feed. This digital identification eliminates the need to register and fill out long registration forms to join. About 250 sites have integrated Facebook Connect till now.

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The VAIO contest let’s you login with your Facebook account ID

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Invite your Facebook friends to participate in the competition

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Share tips to Facebook’s Mini-feed to create viral spread

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Promote yourself via a widget-like application in your Facebook profile

Widgets
To promote your city, category or earn extra bonus points participants can embed a city, category or personal widget on blogs or into popular social networks.

City widget: Amsterdam

Category widget: Art

Personal widget

Google Maps
To specify the locations of fashion hotspots, art galleries, hidden restaurants, memorable architecture or great music venues Google Maps is used to geotag the tipped spots.

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Geotagging of the style spots

Twitter
To spread the word to friends on the popular microblogging service Twitter, you can tweet your nominees after registering, by simply entering your username and password. To track the tweets the hashtag #VAIOtopspots is added. Also by checking the checkbox “post on Twitter” below a new tip, your followers get notified.

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VIP bloggers
For the contest Sony invited several famous VAIO Travellers from the world’s of fashion, sports, media and business, e.g. German fashion designer Michael Michalsky, to share their story via blogs about their new VAIO P Series.

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Fashion designer Michael Michalsky blogging about the VAIO P Series

YouTube
The Europe’s Top Spots contest is promoted via a teaser video on Videosharing sites and blogs in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Seeding is done by SocialMedia8, tracking with ViralTracker.

Teaser video to drive traffic to Top-spots.eu

Currently Bilbao (Spain) ranks number one in the city ranking with 504 points, followed by Paris, Vienna, Rome and Berlin, after 16 days of competition. Mala Mujer from Cadiz leads the user ranking with 8.315 points, and is on her way to win a new VAIO P-series and a European city trip for two.

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