When I was heading up the Marketing for ZagMe, a location based marketing channel, I knew we’d succeeded beyond most Marketing Director’s wildest fantasies because of one incident. While we had stunning feedback from our customers, one day, one of them phoned up Capital Radio (London’s biggest radio station) and dedicated a song to “ZagMe and the cool offers they send me when I’m at Bluewater mall”.
In an age where kids are increasing cynical about marketing, we had managed to create a passion, not dissimilar from how some people feel about sports teams. Furthermore, we’d done this on a diddly squat budget and with an under-resourced team.
The guys at Flickr must be feeling the same way about this site. yourcompanynamesucks.com is normally used by disgruntled customers and ex-employees to whine and bitch about your company. Check out this and this, by way of example – I am not endorsing these sites, incidentally, but they are in the public domain for you to visit.
But if you go to www.flickrsucks.com, you get this:
The domain was purchased by an adoring fan. Thanks to Business Logs for spotting it (on Web Word).
To me this is a strong indication that Flickr will be one of the winners in this market, despite the launch of a plethora of rip-offs. People who feel this strongly, won’t be easily persuaded to go elsewhere. And having cornered the market for the Alpha users, who teach everyone else how to use technology, they’ll be teaching people how to use Flickr, not some Johnny-come-lately entrant.
A further reason why they’ll succeed is that sites like Flickr have a strong inertia factor working for them. Having uploaded all your photos, you’re going to have to have a very compelling reason to go through all the hassle of uploading them to someone else’s site.
Having said that, ZagMe failed despite the passion of the staff and customers alike. But that was probably more a factor of poor timing than anything else. Sorry to repeat myself, but if you don’t know, I’ve got a free White Paper based on the story of ZagMe. Email me if you’d like a copy. russell at mobhappy dot com.
Talking of passionate customers, I had a little rant a while ago about the “c” word – “consumers” in this instance. I hate the word and companies who talk about consumers, as opposed to customers or clients.
It seems that the legendary Doc “Cluetrain” Searls is thinking the same way. Writing about successful marketing is our post-mass-advertising world, he says:
purge the old mass marketing lingo. Forbid the terms “consumer” and “message.” The first insults your customers, and the second is something nobody demands. Face it: neither conversation nor relationship are about “messages.” I know this makes what we used to call “message development” really hard, but that’s too bad. A good clear description Û yes, good copy Û beats the crap out of a “message” any time.
Yep, I agree with that.
—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo
Recent Comments