Consumer facing brands and enterprises are increasingly adopting the credo that consumer engagement is all about enabling the consumer to be an active participant in branding and marketing exercises.
Towards that end, three customers of vSocial – Denon, Boston Acoustics and the U.S. Army – have gone live with word-of mouth marketing campaigns that allow consumers to create, comment on or share content that is a reflection of their personal stories, a showcase of their creative skills and/or a means to share what inspires them.
Consistent with the themes covered in my article, “Breadcrumbs and Conversations,” the user and usage data from these campaigns suggests the importance of taking an integrated approach to branding of content, conversation building tools, viral/word-of-mouth functions, the campaign microsite and having clear tie backs to corporate site or product pages.
The reasoning is simple. Each of these campaign microsites generates thousands of unique visitors a day, close to half of which create actual user accounts so that they can rate, review, comment, share or upload content that they have created. Plus, about a quarter of the content is spread virally offsite, either via formal embedding or by email based sharing of content.
By integrating the different piece parts in terms of look and feel, by having clear click steps that lead back to conversations, and by providing clear paths to engage or get educated, consumers do seem to plug in.
Here is a link to the press release, “vSocial powers Denon/Boston Acoustics Makeshifters marketing campaign.”
What follows are links to the specific campaigns and some screen shots of each microsite: