Social media strategy and branding: using a video game can be an amazing branding tool
Social media strategy and branding: creating a brand through video games
Powerful brands can be created through a creative video game. Social media branding needs to be engaging, it needs to be fun, it needs to be visual. Video games are a medium that does this. On social media, customers want to engage with your brand. They want to take content prepared or created by themselves and then share it with their friends. A video game is an amazing medium to do 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 on the subject of social networks. Human beings have an intrinsic need to interact with one another. When people find a product they like, they have an urge to tell everyone how great it is. That’s why social media is so viral. To create a world-class brand, a marketer must allow customers to do this. Modern brands are actually created and developed by customers. Customers take over the brand. The material has to be attractive, interesting and visual. If a marketer can do this, they will create a world class brand.
The strongest brands are created through user-generated content. The two benchmarks in social media campaigns are the Fiesta Movement, involving the Ford Fiesta, and Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. In both cases, it was customers and followers who created and shared content with their friends. This exchange created the touch points that created the brand. Customers took over these two brands and created the brand for the main ones. It’s a startling observation, but it’s an observation a modern marketer should make. In the case of Ford, 700 videos of the Fiesta were made. These videos generated 6.5 million views. In the case of the Obama campaign video, there were 442,000 user-generated videos, viewed more than 80 million times. No wonder strong brands were created.
Social media is powerful because it is so manly.
One powerful metric that a marketer should keep in mind is that, according to Reed’s Law, a network of 2 quickly becomes a network of 1092. That’s why a strategy of using video games can be a powerful method. branded. Video games are visual, immersive, collaborative and obsessive. If you can motivate a fan to create a game around your brand, this can be a powerful means of building a brand.
The creation of the video game can adopt two methods. The game can be created as a standalone game—-or the game can be made into a “mod”. Your branded video game can become a reality in the modification of a commercialized game. Mods are an important part of the video game industry. A video game is created and players take the game and modify it according to their interests. Many video games are created using open source software for this very purpose. Game creators have found that mods are a great way to expand their brand.
A reference game could be “Civilization”. In this game, players are encouraged to take a civilization and guide it from the Bronze Age to the current era. A game like this could be built around a brand. Players could give their opinion on how the brand should be developed. If it were done this way, customers would own the brand. This game would help both customers and the brand itself. There would be a large group involved in the game. There is wisdom in crowds. The crowd would discover an infinite number of branding strategies. Marketers could see how this game plays out and adjust their branding strategies based on the insights from the game. By using an interesting game that really attracts customers, a salesperson could dial up in real time.
Dean Hambleton
