The Opportunity for a Billion People to Help Build Your Brand

Cross posted from the Web Strategy Blog.

Open Branding - The Opportunity for a Billion People to Help Build Your Brand by Gurval Caer, President and CEO, Blast Radius

American Idol teaches us a lot of things about how society, participation can create success, we also know that customers listen to their peers more than anyone else. Social Marketing needs three ingredients to be successful: A social platform, Social media, Social Data.  Nike Jordan had ‘breakfast clubs’ that engages customers.  These customers can create customized training programs for personal sports workouts, and peers can share and review. How to listen and learn? Explore how customers participate, by understating the social media profile of your target audience.  Recognize there there is a spectrum of users, where do yours fall and what are the corresponding tool and experiences we provide them with.  Map out how users will participate both today and tomorrow, the joiners of today will the creators of tomorrow.  Gave a case study of EA, a packaged product called “Need for Speed”, in the pre-launch encouraged a rivalry of sub-cultures of different racing classes.

Takeaway: Start with the customer, the lifestyle, and relate to the cultures before starting with the brand.

Comments

[Md Sarker]

The idea is to create fun environment for the user. Where they can enjoy as well as feel engaged. Its hard, but once done success would follow.

[nmw]

"Explore how customers participate, by understating the social media profile of your target audience. Recognize [...]. Map out [...]."

Very interesting -- and very DIFFICULT, too.

User behavior is influenced by many factors -- so understanding user behavior INDEPENDENT of such factors is virtually impossible. I did this type of research in information retrieval settings of advanced users in a particular (topically focused) community (this was before the web took off, so it was not an "online community" the way we know them today). It was during this study that I realized how sophmoric it is to assume that understanding user behavior could be a matter of tallying up check-marks. To do this with a satisfactory level of reliability requires a degree of sophistication that would be VERY controlled and NOT AT ALL natural (one rather straightforward example of this is "eye tracking" -- which requires EXTREME care in order to provide half-decent results).

[Jeremiah Owyang]

Md

Yup, fun has a lot to do with getting users to return to a web experience, I'd add useful and easy to use also helps the process along.

NMW
Agreed, the task to understand users is a daunting one, how can we classify people that are so different in interests in intents. I'd add that although this is difficult, we should still strive to understand the best we can. Thanks for adding to the conversation.