Johnnie Moore is a marketing consultant and facilitator based in London. As well as 20 years of marketing experience he's trained in psychotherapy, NLP and Improv. Find out more at his blog.
Andrew Lark's more than 18 years experience of all facets of marketing, branding, sales and communications spans technology, Internet, telecommunications and consumer sectors. There he has led award-winning programs and teams for brands such as Dell, Sony, SBC, IDSoftware, Nortel, Microsoft and Sun. He is a thought leader and innovator on the convergence of brands, communications and social networking technologies. Find out more at his blog.
Jennifer Rice is a strategist and evangelist for relationship-centric brands. She brings 15 years experience in brand strategy, customer insight and marketing communications, and has worked with companies such as Microsoft, Verizon, Alcatel and Corning. Her current passion is exploring how brands are being impacted by blogs and other social technologies. Her company blog is What's Your Brand Mantra?
John Winsor is the author of Beyond the Brand: Why Listening to the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business and the Founder/CEO of Radar Communications, a consumer-centric consultancy. You can find out more about him at Beyond the Brand.
About this Insider
BrandShift explores key trends in branding such as customer
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I just had an interesting interview with Liam Mulhall, co-founder of Blowfly Beer in Sydney. He talks about how he launched his brewing business using open source principles he'd learned working at the Red Hat Linux consultancy. I've blogged fuller details and a link to the podcast here.
Johnnie's terrific post on Skype below inspired an entry over at my blog which a few of you suggested I post here... So, here you go.
Skype is a brilliant example of the power of nurturing communities with a high-quality product, continued innovation and ease of connection. While recognizing that in this instance it's also the essence of the product, that's a sub-text.
Compare Skype to Vonage for a second and you will see what I mean. I "joined" Vonage about four months ago. They treat me just like SBC or Verizon. Every add-on costs more. I get a bill and little else other than the product. The quality is pretty suspect. And while cheaper than Verizon, it ain't cheaper than Skype.
Then there is my Skype account. I get more and more value from neat add-ons developed by Skype and its community. The price and quality are much better than anything Vonage offers. And the community just gets better as a result of this innovation. Then vSkype comes along and adds to my Skype experience with video calling. Bam! The community activates and becomes more valuable - to Skype and to each other. vSkype's CEO says in an email that in the first 36 hours they had 50,000 downloads while some 8 hours later they zipped past 100,000. That's momentum.
Skype Journal has a terrific interview with Stuart Jacobson. In the Participatory Era Skype is establishing an incredible lead over Vonage - in participatory terms,
Skype is an engaged brand. It is engaged with its community. It has engaged with its users. So many brands forget this. They sell, you buy and that's it. Nada.
I attended an interesting session at the Reboot 7 conference in Copenhagen at the weekend. Malthe Sigurdsson, from Skype, did a talk about how they built the brand, which he blogged here, with a pdf of his slides here and an MP3 audio recording here.
I was struck by the principles Malthe articulated: do simple things really well; release all the time (ie keep updating the application in small bites); evolve; open up; and viral features. A good illustration of the idea of simplicity is their preference for plain language - so talk about sharing and calls, not peer-to-peer and VOIP or telephony. Bearing in mind Skype has about 45 million registered withouth advertising, I think it's a pretty interesting case study.
One of the things that he said that caught my attention was what he said about fear. They do fear their competitors (eg the big telecoms)... and that makes them stay busy innovating. I like the notion of acknowledging fear and using it, instead of blocking it.
It seems to me that Skype is a brand with a lot of vitality - and this presentation makes good sense of how it operates.
C/Net reports on Sun's launch of Open Solaris in which blogs feature prominently.
This is the first time we've seen social networking technology integrated so fully into a launch. It's appropriate that an open source product would so actively use open source marketing to engage with its community.
I'm sure the skeptics will dismiss this as yet another PR stunt but it simply isn't (although I won't deny the PR benefit).
Sun deserves credit for the geek-centric approach, said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. "The best aspect of it for me is seeing a rather large software organization actually recognize the audience they want to be speaking to--in this case the developers." - Shankland, C/Net
This is a really smart and deep use of a complete spectrum of participatory communications technology to enhance and streamline communications with a fast growing community - it goes well beyond the standard corporate blog which for the most part is still about transmitting information and soliciting a response. I like how they are providing tags as well. Then there are the photos on Flickr. And, Johnny L - Sun's head of software launched his blog. It's a regular blogfest!
They've lit up the Open Solaris community inside Sun to light up the community outside Sun. You need to be a tripped-out geek to get some of this but the mobilization of the Sun team to provide different views on the product is great.
Conversations are a feature of the launch. Having spent 18 years in tech I can't tell you how different this is - most launches follow a standard pattern of big transmission followed by an expectation that what was transmitted will be written about then read.
The launch is about inviting participation. Shankland points to a great example of this as Sun flags 300 bugs in the product and invites the community to get involved with fixing them. Here is Liane Praza's first bug-fix.
Stephen has a terrific Q&A over at the Tecosystems blog, an excerpt from which looks at Sun's blog-fest:
Q: What did you find most interesting about the launch itself?
A: The way that it targeted the most important constituency of all; developers. Back in April, I posted the following note:
Spoke to a vendor marketing representative yesterday who I won't name (though they should feel free to identify themselves if they wish) that actually initiated a dialogue around del.icio.us, Flickr and tagging in general. First time that I can recall that's happened. Very refreshing, and a good sign for the product line in question.
Well, that person was Claire Giordano, and the product line was OpenSolaris. Her hand is directly visible on the OpenSolaris.org page itself with links to developer-friendly services like del.icio.us and Flickr, and also in the lack of a big bang style launch, press release, etc. The focus has instead been on conversational and participatory launch mechanisms like the aforementioned services and an explosion of related blog entries. OpenSolaris, as with any other product, will ultimately sink or swim on its own merits. But if those merits will jointly determined by Sun and the community around OpenSolaris, it's obvious that engaging developers using the means and mechanisms that they prefer is imperative. Given that context, I'd say that today's launch was an excellent start.
Couldn't agree more. Gold stars to Sun. Great reporting by Shankland. Great analysis by Stephen.
Jennifer Rice
Andy Lark
Johnnie Moore
John Winsor
