O.K., if you are reading this blog chances are you’ve in one way or another heard about the “Microsoft mystery” project named Origami. You probably also know by now that Origami was the Microsoft code name for the Ultra-Mobile PC project. We liked the code name so much we decided to use it for our community site, origamiproject.com. 

So, what was that teaser all about?  Well, since I was a primary driver of the buzz campaign, I thought I’d set the record straight by using a timeline to illustrate how events unfolded.  Before I do though, let me dispel a few myths. Myth #1, we intentionally lined up the buzz campaign to overlap with an Apple announcement.  Sorry, that is wrong. Our timing was simply determined by taking the announce date, March 9^th and subtracting two weeks, which gave us a go live date of February 23^rd. Myth #2, we leaked the Origami video to create more hype. I can guarantee you that the discovery of the Origami video created by Digital Kitchen was completely unexpected.  No one at Microsoft even knew that video was publicly available until someone posted it after finding it by doing an Internet search.  Both of those events may have turned out to be serendipitous I suppose, but it wasn’t planned if I’m being honest. The discovery of the video was what took our buzz campaign from a tech enthusiast following to mainstream media.

Overall, the campaign was successful beyond our wildest expectations and frankly maybe a little too successful. When we came up with this idea a few months ago, this was intended to be a small, grassroots effort to generate some interest in the UMPC. Boy, did we do that!

Let us know what you think of the campaign. Victoria posted a question on the discussion forums to get your feedback. O.K., now onto the timeline.

Origami Project Timeline

Dec 05 – My team and I have an idea about doing a buzz/viral campaign to get enthusiasts interested in what we’re announcing at CeBIT. I pitch the idea to Michael, our marketing guy, and he agrees it’s a good idea so he and I start planning it.

Jan 06 – We hired a creative agency to begin work on the viral campaign. We tell them to leave it vague and open to speculation to generate interest. After some discussion we decided to have the campaign kick-off 2 weeks prior to CeBIT to give it enough time for people to find out about it. We also decide to host it on the origamiproject.com domain, because that is going to be the UMPC community site that goes live after the CeBIT announcement.  Also, we knew it would take only a matter of minutes for someone to do a Whois lookup to find out it was a Microsoft site without explicitly spelling it out.

Feb 23^rd – Week 1 of 3 teaser goes live on origamiproject.com, 2 weeks ahead of CeBIT announcement. JkOnTheRun seems to be the first post of it, but it is when someone posts the site on Digg.com that we start getting significant traffic to the teaser. We end day one with about 28,000 hits. Our original estimates are 10,000 – 20,000 hits over the entire 2 weeks.

Feb 24^th – Interest picks up on the site, word spreads and we get a post on Slashdot.com.  We end the second day with about 65,000 more hits.

Feb 25^th – March 1^st – Digital Kitchen Video is found on the internet and mainstream media begins to pick up the story over the weekend. By Monday we are showing up on front page news stories and many TV programs.  Monday ends with another 260,000 hits, and Tuesday we get another 200,000.  People start thinking week 2 is the unveiling even though the site shows 3 week segments.

March 2^nd – Teaser campaign week 2 goes live, we hide the words “Origami Project: the mobile pc running windows xp” in the HTML source to help settle down the speculation and give a clue.  More accurate stories begin getting written by the media. Intel decides to launch a teaser with a date that aligns to their IDF conference on UMPC.com.  The Origamiproject.com site gets another 480,000 hits on March 2^nd with people hoping to find out what it is.

March 9^th – Teaser campaign week 3 goes live in accordance with the CeBIT announcement and unveils UMPC with photos of the devices. At this point in the campaign we have had more than 2 million hits.

So, now you know the history of the buzz campaign. Hopefully this new category of PC intrigues you enough to join our community, share feedback and ideas and even pick one up for yourself.  We want to hear from you first hand what is great about these computers and where the best opportunities for improvements exist.

Thanks for reading,

Dustin