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Paulo Coelho and MySpace Tieup and The Advent of Dynamism in Social Media
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Last week we came to know of a major tie up between Paulo Coelho and Myspace to make a user generated movie of his new book, The Witch of Portobello. The movie will be created from submissions by users on MySpace and the project will be titled “The Experimental Witch” (innovative and interesting I think).
To me this is a defining case of Social Media Marketing. We have seen a lot of marketing content going viral, a lot of branded fan pages, but none of it primarily web 2.0. Meaning that there is no user generation of the actual content. This ‘experiment’ dives straight into the definition of the neo web -
“Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” (Wikipedia)
Users will not only collaborate but are being instrumental in getting the actual content created. something so far seen only on Wiki’s like Wikipedia and to some extent on blogs. Social Networking Sites till now has somehow lagged behind in giving complete control over content to users. Like Rupesh’s fanpage incident for example. And with this initiative, the dogma is sort of broken.
The idea itself is basic and mundane, the book consists of 15 narrators each interacting with and interpreting the lead character Athena. Filmmakers on MySpace submit their interpretational videos of each of these narratives. Musicians are also invited to submit a general theme for the movie or themes for specific narrators.
I won’t claim this to be the first such attempt or a completely ‘novel ‘ (pun intended) idea, but in terms of the mileage social media can gain because it is Paulo and because it is MySpace is tremendous and can cause a decent spurt in the Social Media Marketing business. If nothing else, it can be used as a distinguished example that many people can relate to.
This brings me to the crux of this discussion, that is, the advent of dynamism in Social Media. I know social media as a concept itself is dynamic, however the application always held back on complete user created content.The guys at MySpace are to be commended for strategising such a venture (I am safely assuming that Paulo Coelho didn’t think of this first.. seems far too unlikely..radical if he did).
The call from my side is for other Social interaction mediums to wake up to such an idea and chart some of their own. They know their systems best, and should not just grab but create opportunities to take the new media into the mainstream. The industry will jump a gear or two through such dynamic creation of user collaborative efforts.
I am sure they don’t need me to say this. n fact coming to think of it I have said this before and so has Harshil. I am quite sure that a lot of ventures which masquerade as web 2.0 have latched on to this idea and a trend is in the making. So look forward to a more dynamic social media taking user collaboration to it’s next level.
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Interesting strategy - good write up. There’s only one thing. I need marketeers will need to differentiate between high involvement and low involvement web 2.0 platforms for integrating users. I agree with the master point. In India this has been done to a large extent. Contests for example are low involvement (mobile or web) 2.0. Tweet - like involvement on dashboards is again 2.0. Those are all low involvement. I think Nokia also had a video films contest (submission was offline and i think there was an online submission route as well - this since mobile bandwidth is poor). That was high involvement - like this one. I may be rambling here a little but i think value with content + value through engagement (learn something new, be heard, be an opinion leader by doing an X action and more) + Brand integration will be what advertising will definitely move towards to a large extent. People have been harping on this for ages but now i think we have the resources, the infrastructure, and even audiences have the mindset. A great time to be in the digital medium.
Correction: line 1 - “i think* (not need) marketeers…)
hey .. just saw this comment.. the perils of being the day’s first post hehe..
yes I agree with most of what you said.. and what you mentioned is exactly the point I was sort of harping on that..advertisers have woken up to the age of the digital branding.. the SNS themselves have not.. the content + engagement + brand strategy is indeed the way forward but for it to sustain itself.. even the neo web platforms have to take the initiative or like Rajiv and Shayon say take the onus on themselves to pitch to advertisers on how they (ad.) can use their (SNS) particular platform to apply this dynamic model of brand building and promotion
like I said - They know their systems best, and should not just grab but create opportunities … the examples that you gave suggest that advertisers are recognizing the power.. it’s about time event he platforms shrug off the laziness.. and that’s where I am happy with Myspace.. they took the initative..