Press

This article was originally published in iMedia Connection on June 6, 2006. Read the original article here. 

Driving users to your branding campaign is just the beginning. nFusion’s Drosos offers some tips for getting your audience to join in.  

In my article last month, I examined how user-generated media has reversed the chain of events when marketing to your users, evaluating three key ways to utilize a user-generated media campaign. First, engage in branded media partnerships with companies like iFilm, Revver and YouTube to promote campaigns like the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Casting Call or with multi-branded promotions like the Zippo Hot Tours. Second, seed your campaigns by creating feeds to podcasting networks, developing branded pages on social networks and providing tools for your users to create their own branded pages or profiles. Finally, we looked at the efficacy of promotions. Fans clamor to collect memorabilia, meet the stars or get their 15 minutes of fame — use it to your advantage! 

The outlets to distribute control can create a “brand network” for your entertainment company, energizing new generations of brand advocates while leading to a deeper engagement with your consumer audience. 

Now that you are armed with ways to drive people to your user-generated media campaign, here are two simple creative paths you can take to help you set up your campaign and get going. I like to distinguish them as “free hand” and “color by numbers.” 

Free hand
Free hand user-generated media is when marketers provide a blank canvas for consumers to develop original content, as in Comedy Central’s Test Pilots, where viewers are encouraged to enter their own one-to-five-minute pilot episodes that they can submit as videos or storyboards, via “hidden camera” or any other format desired. In such a creative free-for-all, you surrender control to consumers, but in return they market the heck out of your product for you, and spend gobs of time with your brand. 

Free hand user-generated media can even be developed without your having asking for it, providing a serendipitous opportunity for you and your audience to interact. The “Saturday Night Live” skit “Lazy Sunday” was downloaded 1.2 million times when it was added to the videos on YouTube and spawned parodies like “Lazy Monday” and, my favorite, “Lazy Muncie,” which started popping up among users’ YouTube creations. This has provided SNL with a great opportunity to create a targeted promotion– when, apparently, it wasn’t even looking to do so! SNL could manipulate this user-generated media in any number of ways, all while stoking the creative fires of a younger audience clearly looking to get involved in the show’s product. 

Color by numbers
In the color by numbers scenario, brand marketers are able to better control their brand identities, while still playing in the user-generated media space. Companies provide branded content and allow users to customize portions of it. New Line Cinema’s Wedding Crashers “Crash the Trailer” is a great example of this: the studio provided materials to users and allowed them to personalize it, again with target audiences (and their friends) spending tons of time interacting with a company’s brand. 

Utilizing either of these scenarios (or both) to engage your consumers, while taking advantage of the various methods of driving them to your campaign, will help you create a successful user-generated media avalanche as consumers interact with your product to much greater degrees, all while pushing your brand way beyond the limitations of your paid media campaign. 

Today’s consumers are eager to be entertained while they’re being marketed to. Further, they want to be a part of creating that entertainment and, in return, they will help market your brand and product for you. So how will you answer their call? As entertainment marketers our answer is simple and hails right out of our own backyard: “Let us entertain you.” 

As vice president of business development/client services, Mark Drosos is leading the creation of nFusion’s interactive marketing capabilities. Read full bio.