Tag Archives: top post

My creative contribution to ‘Skyfall’

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As it is the official premier of James Bond film ‘Skyfall’ today (though it opened in LA yesterday?) I wanted to post my contribution to the event from a Sony business pov.

Bond TV advert

Bond also involves the theme of ‘product convergence’ with Sony looking to use the film to show Bond use many of its different devices, from Xperia phone to Vaio laptop. And in consumer terms it’s looking to prove to customers that it’s worth investing in inter-connected Sony devices. For example my little Xperia mini pro also works as a remote control for my Bravia and Google TV box.

To help bring this potential to life my suggestion is pretty tried and tested:

1. Post a competition on Facebook for people to show a short video of their use of old and new Sony devices, and display their creativity.

2. The winners get invited to a day long ‘hackathon’, where they will get to play with all the best Sony devices, to create something exciting.

3. The day and the end result will also be video’d of course.

4. The winner will get further coverage, and it would be good to have one VIP creative on hand during the day in Apprentice like fashion to hand out advice, and to help judge the end result.

So what do you think, does it fly?

 

Helping your community manager to make money through influencers

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As I understand it what Dr Michael Wu saying in his most recent blog is that using social network analysis (SNA) to find the right influencers to influence target users’ purchasing decisions (bearing in mind the value of the targets’ first online activity around a product as the indicator when to start the persuasion process) relies on the finding the right type of influencer – which is not the one with the most friends as the connection, or with the most discussions around a product, but the one with the most recent discussions about the product: relationship + product discussion + timely = best chance of success.

The Right Content at the Right Time: Influence Analytics 3 by Dr Michael Wu

What this strongly reminds me of is my own blog post (‘Greg is one way to make money out of social media’) about how communities managers can potentially play a role as influencers if done properly:

What I want to say for the benefit of companies trying to see how to make money from using social media in the marketplace is to see your own community manager if you have one, and other partner’s community managers, as influencers in their own right.

I pretty sure I’m not breaking any ethical code by saying that, after all your community manager isn’t just going to start spamming the community with product messages – that wouldn’t work. Quiet the contrary, what I’m talking about is the subtle, patient task of persuading members of a community of the value of a particular offering – which requires both intelligence & integrity.

Now after reading the latest piece from Dr Wu, this suggests to me is two things. Firstly that your community manager using SNA tools for large communities, or their inside knowledge coupled with community anayltics for smaller ones, can ‘lead the charge’ to find these right influencers.

Secondly it suggests that they themselves take on this role indirectly by nurturing debates around certain products, nurturing influencers who command attention, and then helping them reach the right users at the right time.

This avoids them directly playing the role of influencer as such, but does give them the power of delivering this tool as a means of creating revenue which has long been the holy grail of community management.

Practically realizing that tool is a combination of the SNA/analytics, plus consultancy work with the community manager to help deliver this.