Participation Power Laws
Ross has a fascinating post on Participation Power Laws – along with an interesting diagram. What Ross is getting at is what so many companies miss in creating blogs. It isn’t about the posts and publishing as much as it is about engagement with the community.
When users participate in high enagement activities, connecting with one another, a different kind of value is being created. But my core point isn’t just the difference between these forms of group intelligence — but actually how the co-exist in the best communities.
Congrats to The Southwest Team…
Angela and the crew at Southwest Airlines launched their second blog this week – Nuts About Southwest. It comes close on the heals of the Adopt A Pilot blog which provides a voice for this neat community initiative. Congratulations gang!
The Lark Group provided a helping hand on both projects – but all the credit goes to Angela for having the drive and enthusiasm to get the project off the ground. (And the crew at RD2!)
The blog is getting plenty of attention and feedback. I know Southwest is going to listen to the feedback so keep it coming.
Participatory Product Reviews…
One upon a time the only way you could get a product review was through a print rag or through an analyst firm. James pointed me at this review of Sun vs. Dell. This is an end-user giving a pretty technical view of performance and the like.
Reviews like this are all part of the participatory movement – they differ from the conventional recommendation found on Amazon in that they are far more authentic and detailed. In some respects the person doing the review is passing their intellectual property back into the community.
MarketingProfs Daily Fix…
MarketingProfs has launched a blog – Daily Fix. Lead story falls into the current story trend of “why not to blog“. In this case, some of the reasons not to blog are the very reasons to blog:
10. You can’t control every message on a blog. (But message control has always been an illusion.) Right. So might as well blog. At least the loose creative act will result in more authentic messages with real-time feedback.
9. You’ll have to decide when to respond and when to ignore comments. Isn’t that the whole point? Don’t do it if you don’t want dialogue. And plenty of blogs simply turn-off comments all together, or, only turn them on for topics that they want feedback on.8. It’s hard to build an audience. It takes time, effort, and skillful promotion to build an audience for a blog. So get started now. Immediately. It’s just as hard using any other medium. If the point here is that it isn’t as simple as it might seem, I agree. But just because it is hard, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a swing at it.
And… 3. Blogging is addictive. You might not be able to stop. It’s also lots of fun. I agree!
Countering Conventional Marketing
In the upcoming war for Soccer mindshare, Nike isn’t countering Adidas with conventional marketing. Adidas is set to spend upwards of $200m on ads – some of which sound very creative. Rather than match them dollar-for-dollar, Nike has launched a MySpace style network for Soccer nuts:
The site, which launched on Mar. 15, will roll out to 140 countries in 14 languages. Hoping to make Adidas wonder why it spent all that money on mere ads, Nike is making the site a replica of top social network site MySpace.com (NWS ) for soccer-mad fans to commune with each other over their favorite players and teams, download videos, create discussion groups, and the like. – BusinessWeek
Nice move. Both strategies are probably right. Where one zigs, the other zags.
