Social Media Strategy and Branding: Creating A Brand Through Video Games
Powerful brands can be created through a creative video game. The creation of brand in social media must be engaging, it must be fun, it must be visual. Video games are a medium that do this. In social media, customers want to involve themselves in your brand. They want to take content that is prepared or created by themselves and then share it with their friends. A video game is an incredible medium for doing this.
The creation and sharing of a brand by a customer is an interesting phenomenon. It is one of the most interesting observations that can be made in the social media issue. Human beings have an intrinsic need to interact with one another. When people find a product they like, they have a need to tell everyone how great it is. This is why social media is so viral. To create a world class brand, a marketer must allow for customers to do this. Modern brands are actually created and developed by customers. Customers take over the brand. The material has to be engaging, interesting, and visual. If a marketer can do this, a world class brand is going to be created.
The strongest brands are created through user generated content. The two benchmarks in social media campaigns is the Fiesta Movement, involving the Ford Fiesta, and the Obama Presidential campaign in 2008. In both cases, it was the customers and followers that created and shared content with their friends. This sharing created the touch points that created the brand. Customers took over these two brands and created the brand for the principals. It is an amazing observation—but it is an observation that a modern marketer must make. In the case of Ford, 700 videos of the Fiesta were made. These video generated 6.5 million views. In the case of the video of the Obama campaign, there were 442,000 user generated videos, watched more than 80 million times. No wonder that strong brands were created.
Social media is powerful because it is so virile.
A powerful metric that a marketer must keep in mind is that according to Reed’s Law, a network of 2 quickly becomes a network 1,092. This is why a strategy of employing video games can be a powerful branding method. Video games are visual, immersive, collaborative—-and obsessive. If you can motivate a follower to create a video game around your brand, this can be a powerful mean of creating brand.
The creation of the video game can take on two methods. Either the game can be created as a stand alone game—-or the game can become a “mod”. Your brand video game may actually become the modification of a commercialized game. Modifications are major part of the video game industry. A video game is created, and the players take the game and modify it to their interests. Many video games are created with open source software for this very purpose. Game makers have discovered that mods are a great way to expand their brand.
A bench mark game might be “Civilization”. In this game, players are encouraged to take a civilization and guide it from the Bronze Age right through the present age. A game like this could be created around a brand. Players could give their insights on how the brand should develop. If done in this way, then customers would own the brand. This game would be a help to both the customers and the brand itself. There would be a large group involved in the game. There is wisdom in crowds. The crowd would figure out an infinite number of brand strategies. The marketers could watch this game unfold and adjust their brand strategies based on the information of the game. Through the use of an interesting game, that truly engages customers, a marketer could brand in real time.
Dean Hambleton
