Empowered Involvement

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of speaking at a global meeting of independent PR agencies in Amsterdam who are all united under the Worldcom umbrella. I had been invited by Crispin Manners, of London-based agency Kaizo. Kaizo have started their own pioneering work in the Empowered Involvement field. Speaking at this event was quite an honour, because the people present were all directors of their own companies, so they are all PR pro’s with years of experience.

I presented the results of my research and also how this is being applied in the way trnd organises its Word-of-Mouth Marketing campaigns. Afterwards, we had a very interesting discussion.

One gentleman talked about a company that markets a specific type of lubricant brand, WD40. Normaly, one would think that a lubricant isn’t necessarily something people get all excited about. But he explained that the company had, more or less by accident, managed to develop its own community of fans. He said that they are building very close relationships and dialogues with this community, and this dialogue very much informs the company about what the customers want, and how to adapt the product to their needs. The most remarkable numbers were the following: the company asked its customers about types of usage they can come up with for the brand, and received 360.000 submissions! Out of these, they identified 2000 different usage situations.

And through this group, the company not only gets feedback and insight, but they also launch new products through the community: “They just share it with them, and then it spreads to the rest of the world.” The fan community now has ist own board of directors – all fans themselves, and the company isn’t really involved in running the community, they only provide the platform.

The other interesting story came from Phoenix. A participant explained that community-marketing efforts often take a lot of time, and at her agency, they had found that they could jump-start their community marketing with Twitter. (Which I then demonstrated to the whole audience live and on the spot.) In one example, they had managed to reach 4000 women in the Phoenix region within a very short time span who were all interested in a new medical treatment that they were promoting, all through Twitter. She wanted to know what I thought about such approaches. I had to confess that my Twitter activity had only started a few weeks ago, and that in Germany, Twitter is still overwhelmingly a geek-web2.0-tech-in-crowd thing, so mainstream marketing would still be fairly difficult through Twitter.

All in all, I had a great time at the conference – also because the night before, I already got to hang out with some of the people, and was having lots of fun.