Author: Yu-kai Chou

Toyota and Marketing Gamification

I’ve talked a lot about Product Gamification – how to make your product winning & addicting – as well as some Workplace Gamification. Many of you asked, “But how do we do Marketing Gamification? What does that even mean?”

Well, Toyota is here to show you with its all new Plug-In Champion App!

Toyota Plug-in Championship shows you who’s the best at charging your phones

The Toyota Plug-in is a new hybrid car they are pushing out, and they’re looking for ways to make their car stand out.

What they’ve come up with is sad and brilliant at the same time – they made an iPhone app that turns charging your phone into a game.

Introducing the Plug-In Championship, where people compete in charging their phones at just the right second!

This is how it works:

You open the app, and it shows some slick Tron-like designs with a meter bar that goes up and down. You need to plug the charger into your phone at just the right moment where the meter bar is full (or as full as you can accurately do).

Once you plug in the charger into your phone (lol, I feel so pathetic writing about this), an epic graphic will load, such as a lightning bolt striking, a rocket taking off, or a corkscrew gets popped. Woohoo!! I just charged my phone with electric power!!

It then shows you a leaderboard of all the people charging their phones at the “right time”….as well as “medals” that I have not earned yet.

To make things even more strangely epic, if you go to their Plug-In Championship website and click on “Ranking” it will show you a global view of all the people who are charging their phones with the app on, with very fancy lightning bolt animations, as if we are fulfilling a calling like Captain Planet and the Planeteers to save the earth. This is also similar to what Smule did with their Ocarina App, except they actually did have something exciting to tout to the world (a new song you are playing).

So was this Marketing Gamification Technique Effective?

Lets just say this: not only did this silly app get viewed on Youtube over 15,000 times in 2 weeks, it led to people like me mentioning about the Toyota brand and telling you about their new Toyota Plug-in (I’ve never talked about a car brand before on my blog!). If this campaign caused at least ONE extra person to buy the car now or later, I would say its pretty effective.

5 Dominant Social Media Marketing Techniques

After helping a variety of companies with their social media marketing campaigns in the past 2 years, I noticed that social media marketing narrows down to a few dominant techniques that work well and produce results.

However, a big problem in the industry is that most people just think about Social Media Marketing as one big technique, and without understanding what they truly want, they pay consultants(mostly self-proclaimed experts who have never driven an ROI for companies) to help them do this social media marketing thing that everyone says is essential.

The result is unsurprisingly disappointing because every company, every budget, and every goal requires different social media marketing techniques. If you are a low budget company looking to get tons of traffic in one month, you can’t make online video shows everyday like Gary Vaynerchuk did because even the great Garyvee took two years to make it big. If you hire a “social media expert” to run a blog and Twitter account for you, you will quickly lose faith in social media because they’re not going to get you 100K visitors in a month by just doing that.

Different companies with different goals should have different social media marketing techniques

This is a serious pain in the industry because social media marketing is something that truly works and can be very powerful, but most people(companies and consultants alike) have a lot of misconceptions regarding the different strategies and how they should be used.

In this post, I attempt to break social media marketing down into 5 Main Techniques. In that way, if you are a company, you can ask your social media experts to do a Social Media Targeting Campaign, instead of just a vague Social Media Marketing Campaign. If you are a consultant, make sure your client knows what you are doing for them and what results they can expect.

Social Media Marketing Technique 1: SM Brand Management

This is the most common technique that the “experts” promise to do. This includes creating and maintaining a blog and Twitter Account, engage people who are interested, share valuable things in your industry, and eventually build up followers, visitors, and trust. It might even involve maintaining a Facebook Fanpage (not effective if you DO NOT already have a strong brand established) or a LinkedIn group.

This technique is effective because it fully utilizes the SOCIAL part of social media. You are out there engaging your target audience. You are making friends with them and creating value for them. You are building your own popularity and trust. If someone knows what you do and thinks positively of you, when they need your product or services, they will not go on Google and find a random service they don’t know. They will buy it from you. If their friends are looking for services you offer, they will refer their friends to you.

The problem with Social Media Brand Management is that it takes time, patience and persistence. Since you are not out there to close deals but to build trust, you won’t see an immediate increase in sales or signups. It’s only when people really trust you and care about you do they start to check out your stuff, and that could take months to years to build.

Companies who consistently pressure their Social Brand Building workers to self-promote, get traffic, and get sales will hurt themselves in the longrun and fail in social media marketing. They clearly do not understand that this technique was not appropriate for their 1 month ROI agendas.

Pros
Really engages your target market. Builds trusts. Leads to sustainable success.
Cons
Extremely slow. Takes a lot of time. Need to truly care about your audience.
When to use Social Brand Building
When you have a longterm vision of your brand and social influence on the internet, and you can dedicate at least one longterm person who understands what it takes to be popular online and engage with your target audience.
End Result: Brand

Social Media Marketing Technique 2: SM Targeting

Continue reading 5 Dominant Techniques in Social Media Marketing

I’ve had the honor of being invited to be a guest lecturer to talk about Social Media and Marketing Gamification at a Stanford CS course on personal branding. Many of my Twitter friends wanted me to post a video, so here it is 🙂

A few things:

1) My friend who taped it couldn’t get the camera to work at the beginning, so this is about 10 minutes into the talk.
2) The camera ran out of batteries, so this video ends 20 minutes before I actually finished (but I think that’s okay because who wants to watch super long videos?)
3) I’m more used to setups where my laptop was in front of me, so for this one I kept on looking at the side, which I somewhat awkward.

Besides that, enjoy! 🙂