Guest comment: Online / offline community convergence: what it means for brands

We’ve always attended big events and come home to share our experience with friends and family, but the way we experience events is changing. Online social networks have widened our social circles and encouraged us to share our offline experiences by uploading photos and videos. Rather than waiting to get home, we can now tweet and blog from the event itself and share things as they happen live. It’s clear that real and virtual experiences are converging around online communities which are founded on the users shared experiences, but how can brands respond?

Convergence between online communities and offline events have been successfully achieved in a few areas, for example, there’s OrangeRockCorps which encourages people to volunteer four hours, share their experience online, and receive concert tickets in exchange, but some brands questioned the point. Naturally, they wanted to see the return on investment before they invested their marketing budget in this new area.

We started Festival Annual to show them how they could use this convergence to extend event experiences and monetise the online audience (in this instance, festival goers).

Firstly, we wanted festival goers to take the experiences they shared on their closed social networks and bring it to the wider festival goer community. To do this, Festival Annual struck a deal with MySpace, which led to extensive promotion across MySpace userbase. Word began to spread and people began to upload their festival pictures onto Festival Annual’s MySpace and Facebook pages. People were encouraged to take their cameras to the festival and upload their photos and to tweet live from the event.

Knowing that the best of the content produced would end up being published in a coffee table book encouraged participation in the project and gave contributors a real sense of ownership. The finished book sold around 3,000 copies.

This clearly demonstrates that brands can monetise event driven communities successfully if they take the right approach.

Brands need to look beyond traditional forms of marketing and instead focus on consumer engagement. This requires that the brand understands their audience, know which platform is best to find them on, and experiment with ways to market to them as a collective. This consumer led marketing means that the consumer has to get something back in return for listening to or participating in the brand’s campaign. This is a more targeted method of marketing and will result in a better return in the long-run as the brand is seen as fun and engaging, rather than pushing a message and killing people’s good time.

Brands can encourage the formation of online communities where people can share their experiences of events with each other, rather than simply sharing their comments and content with a closed group of online friends as they usually would. As anyone visiting the community in question would have an interest in the subject, they would be more likely to stay, participate and spread the word to others who they know would share their interest. In short, it can become a way to extend the reach and ethos of the event, giving brands more time, opportunity and flexibility to market to the event fans.

As we have seen with Festival Annual, this can lead to the monetisation of the community, but it’s not as simple as it may seem. Fans can see through thinly veiled attempts at marketing or product placements. There has to be something that they consider worth spending money on, and one of the best ways of doing this is by making the fan a stakeholder in the product. Creating something which the users themselves have to contributed to will make many of them want to purchase the finished product.

Brands need to realise that the event doesn’t begin and end in the arena. Fans are online weeks or even months prior to the event discussing it, and will be online after the event has ended sharing their experiences with friends. If brands can draw these fans into a wider community of fellow attendees they can encourage them to contribute their content. They can then acquire a deeper understanding of the community and appreciate what will work with them and what won’t. When every penny of the marketing budget counts, using bespoke campaigns such as Festival Annual to market products represents a greater value for money and a higher return on investment than the one-size fits all approach.

By Frank Lampen

Director

Independents United