Entries in community (3)

Wednesday
Jan142009

Can Netflix be the first social network in your living room?

DateWednesday, January 14, 2009 at 2:27PM

netflix_4c_white_logo1

I have written before about the convergence of tv and the web. CES built on that trend last week, introducing an array of media-streaming TVs and DVD players (see #7 on Lifehacker's list) that bring online services like Netflix to your TV, without the need for a Roku player. For Netflix, media streaming devices represent a tremendous opportunity for not only growing membership, but bringing a social network to their members' living rooms.

Netflix does have a community built into their site. It's a good start, but it could be a lot more. And given the prospect that Netflix will soon be front and center in living rooms everywhere, it should be.

Netflix subscribers enjoy movies, and they are all, to some degree, critics. They are the same people that took trips to the video store with friends and returned an hour later with at least one person unhappy with the choice that was made. They have an opinion and they enjoy making it heard. They also want to know what their friends are watching, and they want to commend or ridicule their choices.

The existing Netflix community doesn't make doing any of those things easy, on a computer or on a tv. But it should.

Going to the video store used to be a social experience. There's no reason picking a movie in your living room can't be the same thing.

Authoradam stewart | CommentPost a Comment |
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Tuesday
Mar042008

The Success of Blue Shirt Nation

DateTuesday, March 4, 2008 at 10:40AM

In a recent post, Gary Koelling of Best Buy talks about Blue Shirt Nation, an employee community he developed with counterpart Steve Bendt. The idea was to create a place where employees could talk to each other. Through the chatter, they hoped to tap into insights that would improve customer service and marketing within the stores.

With little funding behind the site (built for free with open source software), Koelling and Bendt set out upon building the community. Following the June 2006 launch, they visited Best Buys around the country and talked to employees about the site. They used employee insights to improve the community. They encouraged users to join and post about what they liked (and disliked) about the site. In facilitating the dialogue, they began to address the biggest complaint that employees had: "My opinion doesn't matter".

The community now includes 20,000 members and has been influential in affecting changes to the email policy, improving enrollments in the 401k program and setting up systems for employees to communicate between shifts. In his post, Koelling calls the success a "fluke". Building a community is not easy and it takes time. Even then, not every community will succeed. But Koelling and Bendt made the most of the opportunity by listening to employees and treating them like valuable members of the Best Buy family. By empowering them to get involved with their feedback (positive or negative), it addressed their biggest concern - that their opinion did not matter. Employees now felt a sense of ownership in the community; it wasn't just another form of "corporate-speak".

And it paid off. Best Buy now has a community teeming with opportunities to improve the customer experience and employees engaged in helping them get there.

This post also appears at digTrends.

Authoradam stewart | Comment3 Comments |
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Thursday
Feb072008

The $2.7 million question

DateThursday, February 7, 2008 at 4:16PM

Before the Super Bowl, Joseph Jaffe captured some thoughts on why advertisers flock to this event, the effects of a changing media landscape and if it makes sense for advertisers to continue to shell out $2.7 million for their spot. The excellent post is here. I have pulled out some highlights below.

  • The Super Bowl is one of the few mass reach opportunities remaining on television. Smart advertisers like Anheuser-Busch are making an effort to tie in their ads with mobile promotions.
  • Advertisers now rely on YouTube (which wasn't even around 2 years ago) to confirm a Super Bowl Hail Mary, validating that Super Bowl advertising is all about the P.R.
  • Unless you're in the top 5, you've pretty much flushed your money down the toilet.
  • With half the audience divided between males and females, there's almost always 50% wastage built into the value proposition
  • Most people aren't watching the game by themselves. They are at a loud party or a bar, making audio essentially a non-factor. Throw in alcohol and the likelihood of recall drops even further.
I can't help but wonder where the research is that proves the Super Bowl actually drives product i.e. sales...The last case study that existed was the dot com example, where companies ploughed up to 50% of their budgets into 1 or 2 Super Bowl commercials and to thank them for their efforts, they went out of business.

Most brands advertising during the Super Bowl aren't saying anything new -- they are saying what they always have, just louder and to a bigger audience. To assure they get their money's worth, it is imperative for the spots to reach beyond the Super Bowl, creating buzz that not only draws people to view their ads on YouTube, but also to their website, MySpace pages, mobile sites and to any other place that consumers can interact with their brand. Reprise Media's Search Marketing Scorecard rated Cars.com, T-Mobile and Tide among the winners, with the best integration of commercials with search and social media, resulting in a spike in search.

But was this really the best use of $3 million dollars? If your focus is maintaining an already established and successful brand, it could be. But if your goal as a growing brand is to build an online presence and community that will embrace your product, Mack at the Viral Garden has a suggestion of how to better utilize your $3 million budget.

So what is the answer for your brand?

Authoradam stewart | CommentPost a Comment |
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