Category Archives: Super Fans
Do Interactive Applications Pave the Road to Superfan Communities? Part 1
Andrew and Alex joined Forrester for its 2008 Marketing Forum, which focused on the challenge of customer engagement in a digital media world. This second series of articles focuses on case studies of companies using interactive applications as the hook for building communities of superfans.
Creating Brand Advocates at Nike’s Jordan Brand
Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content, Nike’s Jordan Brand
Nike’s Jordan Brand has developed a couple of immersive experiences for highly engaged fans. The experiences start with deep insight into these “superfan” needs, and build intense community engagement for these hardcore fans, but are small scale communities relative to the scope of the Jordan Brand. Which raises the question, are these high ROI applications for engaging and activating superfans, or are they so focused on the hard core that they are failing to engage the brand’s mass market? Read on and share your opinion…
Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement, Part 1
Digital Podcast joined Forrester for its 2008 Marketing Forum, which focused heavily on the challenge of customer engagement in a digital media world. We will be writing about the conference over the next two weeks. Our first series of articles, like the conference, is focused on the topic of engagement. This article covers the first two presentations of the conference.
Setting the Stage
Harley Manning, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester
Super Fans and the Power of the Link
All week we ran a series of podcasts focused on how companies are trying to engage, activate and monetize fans using all kinds of social media. The reason we focus on these key fans is because they are big consumers and influentials. Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0, has an excellent article titled: Influentials On The Web Are People With The Power To Link.
Digital Podcast 38: ExpoTV’s David Becker on Managing Risk in Social Marketing Campaigns
David discusses the concerns advertisers have about marketing around user generated content and some of the steps marketers can take to mitigate the risks. He provides case studies from other companies that show how they have managed to produce successful social marketing campaigns. David has suggestions about how to connect with super fans and turn them into allies that will make social marketing work for you.
Digital Podcast 37: Microsoft’s Dean Carignan on In Game Advertising
As part of our Super Fan series, we interviewed Dean Carignan. Dean is Director, Advertising Business Strategy for Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division. Dean was able to provide us with some excellent perspective on these new advertising opportunities. He is part of a group that looks at opportunities to advertise via the Xbox, Media Center, Zune and mobile platforms. We go into depth on in game advertising and how important this new segment will be. He walked us through case studies of Domino’s Pizza and P&G that describe how a well designed campaign can add to the realism of the game experience and yield results for the advertiser.
This is must listen podcast for advertisers who are struggling with breaking through on television and are looking for new ways to market their products using these quickly growing platforms.
Digital Podcast 36: SodaHead’s CEO Jason Feffer on Social Networking 2.0
We interview Jason Feffer, Founder and CEO, of SodaHead. Jason was one of the earliest employees at MySpace and experienced their rapid rise into major social networking site. After MySpace, Jason founded SodaHead, a company in the Social Answers space. SodaHead allows users to set up opinion polls that users get to vote and comment on. It’s a fun and addictive experience, and well worth trying. Jason’s discussion of his experience at MySpace illustrates the importance of operational optimization to drive monetization of super fans. In his new company, Jason is putting a lot of what he’s learned to create a new and fun social site. SodaHead has mastered the art of lowering the difficulty and barriers to user generated. It leads to an experience where its much easier to join in the social mix in a more meaningful way than just asking someone to be your friend. SodaHead is definitely an experience everyone should try.
Digital Podcast 35: Pandora’s Tim Westergren
As part of our Super Fan series, we interview Tim Westergren, founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora, about how Pandora works and what they are doing to engage and activate their community.
We discuss the importance of having a good product and connecting with fans. Tim speaks about how he has traveled the country to learn from Pandora’s fans and how he uses Town Hall meetings to get feedback directly from the fans. They started small with just six people in these Town Hall meetings and now have meetings where as many as 400 people show up to meet with Tim.
Digital Podcast 34: Reuters’ Stephen Smyth
We spoke with Stephen Smyth, General Manager & Senior Vice President, Americas Reuters Media about how Reuters is working to build it’s audience and strengthen its relationships with Super Fans. We discussed how they think about user segments and their needs. Stephen shared how they start with the target users experience and then build the content to fit the desired experience. He highlighted a number of the more interesting initiatives Reuters has underway at Reuters Labs. Reuters Labs is where technology, user experience, content and business model meet together as Reuters explores new ways to distribute its content in applications such as Face Search, YouWitness and Context Based Video Ads.
Digital Podcast 33: Will Flannery of Fox Cable Networks
We sat down with Will Flannery, Vice President of Advanced Services for Fox Cable Networks (FCN), and Brian Peterson, Director of Corporate Communications, to discuss the challenges of multi-channel content distribution, the importance and role of Super Fans and what we can learn about Super Fans from sports fans.
Comments, Comments, Comments – What makes people comment?
Posted on by Alex Nesbitt
The post is an interview with MizFit Online who’s a fitness blogger. Reading the post however did not get me too far, other than MizFit’s avid blog reading and commenting herself and a key phrase “commentversation” which tried to capture her approach. Even MizFit seems unsure of what drives the comments saying “If only I knew. It varies wildly.”
I decided to do some analysis to figure this out. The results are quite interesting…