Community

It’s The Customer, Stupid! – Viral Marketing and Engaging Your Community

One of the best things that can happen to you as a company or organization is viral marketing from your community.  This can take in the form of video clips, images, e-books, Flash games, or even email messages.  Bear in mind that when this happens, it’s usually initiated by your community – by themselves, without expectation of reward or compensation from you.  The motivation for them is always personal, and the “campaign’s” growth is organic, spreading through word-of-mouth or click-of-mouth (more specifically, social media).  The effect is definitely more brand awareness for you or your product which can lead to other results like more sales.

The best response when this happens is to engage your community.  Engagement doesn’t mean interfering with what they are doing, it means being part of the conversation.  Remember, you don’t control it, you just need to be part of it.  Companies like Apple and Nike have successfully embraced the power of viral marketing and even Hollywood has learned how to leverage it effectively, as we have seen in movies like Cloverfield, Transformers, Iron Man and The Dark Knight, which have people getting excited about the movies, even involved with it, way before the film was shown.

Avoid the mess that happened with 3M, which just threw out the window the huge opportunity that came their way.  What happened?  Not too long ago, a practical joke which involved a car and couple of thousands of 3M Post It notes became a huge Internet hit, in short a viral activity.  They were photos uploaded in Flickr that spread online through blogs, social news, and even became Yahoo!’s Pick of the Day.  3M, seeing the success of this viral activity, wanted to build on it through a marketing campaign.  Instead, it resulted to an epic fail marketing mishap.   What happened in short is 3M wanted to use the photos for a nationwide campaign, user who created them asked for a certain amount (which is really not big), 3M thinks it’s cheaper if they’ll copy rather than pay for the original, and the result was another viral activity but this time against 3M.  For more of this, check out the article in consumerist.com and all-about-content.com.

Obviously, 3M’s emarketing supervisor doesn’t have a clue what it means to engage their community.  In this day and age when your market expects you to have a presence in social media websites, it’s really going to cost you if you do not engage your community properly.  But if you do know how, then it’s certainly going to pay.

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© 2008 Twikinomics by Jonas de los Reyes.