MixedRealities

How do we talk to people instead of advertising to them? A deceivingly simple question asked by CEO Reuben Steiger of Millions of Us during the Metanomics show of last Monday. It is a question which is relevant for commercial brands but also for non-profit orgaizations or political movements. It is a simple question, but it seems to be very hard for organizations and brands to do just that, talk in a normal voice.

Reuben calls it the defining question of social media. Concrete versions of these questions are how are we successful on Facebook or how are we going to be successful on Twitter.

There are some characteristics about these environments – electronic social networks, microblogging platforms, virtual worlds – like the fact that the people there often don’t like marketing very much, at least not in its traditional forms like banners or commercials.

The other problem for marketing people is scale. They want to reach hundreds of thousands of people, eventually millions of them. Most of those electronic environments are great for smaller groups, but they don’t facilitate sending out messages to millions of people.

The question remains how can marketing people value those different numbers in different way, I guess that it boils down to the question whether those people want to think long term. In the meantime they are confronted with the downturn of the economy, slash advertisement budgets and go for trusted solutions like Google, offering verifiable results on a massive scale.

All this was rather interesting, but than Reuben came with some stuff which in my humble opinion is really fascinating. He suddenly told us about building a movement that might not be about my brand:

lI’m not sure people are dying to join the Pepsi movement. I think that they’re excited to join movements, and movements are things that often have very little to do with a brand, other than that the brand may have brought it to you.

And, when a brand brings you a movement, meaning something you really care about that you’ll devote a lot of your time and energy and passion to, then that’s good for that brand.

Of course, all this is related to another specialty of Reuben: telling stories which engage the audience. One example is “taking over” forums of Gaia Online and act out a confrontation between the good and the bad guys there, inciting the teens to buy virtual goods and to watch professional wrestling on live television.

Another example however is a collaboration with Stanford professor Byron Reeves on the Green Energy Conservation Challenge, which involves interaction with a virtual environment, competition and one of the most compelling stories of our times: the preservation of the environment (watch the video of the Metanomics show).

Reuben:

At the beginning I said Virtual World principles are just endemic, and I think this Byron Reeves stuff shows how you actually take Virtual World game feedback system principles and attempt to use them to change real behavior. And that’s a very big deal, I think. If we, not we as Millions of Us, but we as a population of people, as a community of people, are able to make people in the Real World more energy efficient, that’s massive.

Of course, Reuben demonstrates here the principles he described, about bringing movements to the people. The energy company or the virtual world which allows for this ecological competition benefits strongly in terms of brand name.

Not because the people become members of a “brand movement”, but because the brand connects them to a movement which is really important.

It is a strategy which enables conversations, involves people and connects them to stuff which really matters. It is smart marketing, playing and talking with the community. I don’t know whether it will be immediately successful in these times of crisis, but it clearly is the way to go.

Roland Legrand