Social Media – The New Age Marketing Channel

Much of today's Internet revolves around individual users, the content they create, the communities they form and the transactions they choose. The term that has been coined for this is UGC (User Generated Content).  

Too few companies study how people actually interact with the Web and utilize online collaborative tools, according to Knowledge@Wharton report. BMW, HP and Ernst & Young, however, have been savvy enough to tap this power of social networking.

Let me provide here with a very good example to emphases this. Here is how Sony leveraged the popular Facebook Vampire Application to reach its target market. 

Everybody is aware of Facebook and its various applications. One such application is Vampires. Sony effectively rebrands the popular Vampires Widget with 30 Days Night, upcoming Vampire movie Vampires, which you may already know as the RPG where members bite each other to receive points (and duel) was already popular with over 3 million installs in Facebook. 

Sony pictures, the parent company of the very scary 30 Days Night vampire horror film rebranded the existing application, and launched a sweepstakes contest to generate registrations and glean intelligence and what were the grand prizes? 4 wheel ATVs and $1500. 

Specifically, they placed banner ads on the rebranded vampire applications which promoted the movie (one could assume that those who opt-in for the vampires application would also like a vampire movie) promoting the sweepstakes. 

The campaign was only live for 3 weeks, and there were 59,100 sweepstakes entries. (Success was deemed at 10k, this clearly moved beyond that). The visits (I don’t know if they were unique or repeated) were 11,642,051 for the bite page, and 17,652,567 for the stats page (I believe these are part of the interactive experience of the game. Sony was happy, it exceeded expectations, and users of the application weren’t over branded. 

This is not for the faint hearted or closed minded. Don’t think that you can create an application and it will spread like wildfire. Nothing could be further from the truth if the application is executed improperly. I applaud companies that choose to engage in social networks like facebook. It can be very smart and effective branding if done properly. 

So companies should now adapt to the newer and recent methods to sustain in today's competition.

---Pramila