Open Source Marketing
Posted on December 2, 2007 by Martin Zagorsek
I came across an article the other day about a french site called BlogBang, owned by Publicis. It’s set up as a community of bloggers, with just over 2200 members so far. Members get some basic social networking functions - profiles, voting for one another’s blogs etc.. but the real point of the community is to create a forum for Publicis clients to engage bloggers in some participatory marketing.
The more straightforward aspect of this is what the site calls “Diffusion” - advertisers post ads, and bloggers can pick the ones they like and put them on their sites.. they then get paid for click-throughs. So far it’s basically an ad network.. but where it gets interesting is that advertisers can also put out a “Brief” to the community, and members can create and submit their own ads. These then become available for everyone to Diffuse.
This feels more than a little bit like an open-source community, but with graphic design instead of coding as its core skillset. For marketers there’s an extra twist - not only are you getting the benefit of collective intelligence in helping you craft your messages, you’re also implicitly doing research on the perception of your brand among community members.
It remains to be seen whether these types of communities will develop the same mix of altruism and professional pride (or ego) that fuels projects like Linux or NeoOffice. It might only work well for more non-profit, socially desirable advertisers - two of the open briefs on BlogBang are a school and a fund-raising telethon.. but then again maybe not - the biggest BlogBang diffusion to date has been a campaign for Nestle.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Social Networking, Word of Mouth
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