“Brands take new ideas underground” is a BBC news article on ‘micro events’ by T-Mobile.
Now, whether sticking 300 people and a cool band in a small venue buys t-mobile any credibility is debatable, but I think it’s interesting to see the acceptance of tiny events by their marketing team, and there’s obviously an expectation that this event will reinforce the brand message.
The important trend here is how does the event transcend the moment? Do blogs, sms, myspace, youtube, livejournal, mms, etc. etc. mean that significantly large groups will vicariously live the experience by seeing/hearing/reading about it? And will that experience will be defined through the cultural filters of the original small audience?
The message will initially be tightly contained within the original audience’s peer group, and then concentrically expands through hyperlinking, maintaining, within the first layer or two of links, a reasonably tight cohesion within the original audience’s demographic group…which then dilutes as it reaches the 1000′s, but still has that umbilical link to the (usually still the original blog/myspace entry link/mms/youtube video) original audience experience.
Could this micro-event marketing method be used in organisations to spread new ideas/messages?
Take a typical £20,000 piece of e-learning that’s inevitably mass-designed. Would taking that money and spending it on an incredibly interesting, high energy, single event for say, 150 highly connected and influential people in the company, and giving them the same tools (blog/etc.) to ‘spread the message’ work as effectively as t-mobile’s brand team think it does for their brand message?
I guess where a brand is a fairly simple idea, a learning message may be highly nuanced…but I think the idea of spending some of the money on influencing ‘mavens’ is a smart one.
Of course, you’d need to _have_ built and be _using_ the rapid information dissemination infrastructure to implement this approach…how many organisations out there have employees hyperlinking to each other’s documented conversations and experiences?
The hyperlink is the basic DNA of the web, that function that makes ideas so fluid, yet the ability to hyperlink is missing in a lot of companies.