Social Media Research > Kudonomics

I heard this case study during a presentation at a conference—I believe it was Blognomics 2007—and recently again when the Dutch division of OMD gave a presentation at the University of Applied Science Utrecht (International Communication and Media). In this case study Sony hired OMD in order to promote the new Playstation 3 before the big launch in The Netherlands. Of course, the internet was full of buzz about the device, price and launch date. Trying to tap into that conversation, OMD started a Playstation 3 category—sponsored by Sony—on the forum of, the immensely popular tech-website, Tweakers.net.

Since the forum is mainly about technology and the latest gadgets—I generalize a bit—tapping into the conversation should be, in theory, a smart move to make. Unfortunately this backfired. Members of the forum started to complain because they felt that their community was being commercialized and invaded. This is something that can be understood, since the forum is a place where the tech savvy help each other free of charge. What I understood from OMD is that they thought of pulling the plug and leave the forum.

Eventually they did not. OMD tried one last thing by simply asking the members what do you want? This restarted the conversation. On top of that OMD and Sony started, amongst other things, a competition where members could win a day at Sony to talk to game developers and play with the Playstation 3 before the big launch. When the campaign was over, they had to close the Playstation 3 category on the forum. However some of the members asked OMD if it could leave it online a little longer. OMD did.

Tapping into the conversation can indeed be a powerful thing, especially in the social media era. Simply interrupting a ongoing conversation with a sponsored message can go wrong. Advertisers should be aware that this can backfire. When two people, in a restaurant, are having a personal conversation you also do not interrupt them with a sponsored message. Will advertising ever be able to tap into the conversation? Leave a comment, and while you’re at it drink a nice cool tasty Coca Cola, I know I will.

After launching kudonomics.com a little while ago—and posting only a single post—I started to dislike the design. I even started rethinking my previous post about not wanting a tumbleblog. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not very keen on completely changing from a blog to a tumbleblog but at least I could use more social media services.

This blog will still be worked on the following days so don’t mind the mess!