Content Marketing Meets Digital World
Entering the 21st century, technology is advancing at an amazing speed. Yet, technology is not a self-contained system per se; none of it can be accepted by billions of users without successful marketing. Indeed, marketing and technology are mutually shaping: technology diffuses with marketing, while today’s marketing requires extensive understanding of our digital world. Speaking of which, I just noticed a “new” trend in marketing that has ironically existed since the 19th century—content marketing.
According to Wikipedia:
Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc.
Content advertising pioneers like August Oetker “sold small packages of his Backin baking powder to households with recipes printed on the back.” Nowadays, a large part of GoPro’s success, comes from its content marketing strategy. No wonder some reports marveled at how GoPro grows from making sports-recording cameras to announcing a lifestyle, in some sense, “one cam to rule them all.”
Many of you have seen this video before. If not, please check it out:
The video tells a lovely story from a fireman’s point of view. He saved the life of a kitten after an emergency (which can be told from the video and the siren sound). Now we all know the true story behind (I would rather not say), and we cannot stop asking: what makes these viral videos “viral,” and how does GoPro benefit from its content marketing strategy?
The answers to both questions lie in our course.
What makes these viral videos? We covered this in the first few lectures, that two strong connections will likely to induce the third, with triadic closing! Suppose somewhere on Facebook, a friend of you just clicked “like” on a GoPro content; as her best friend, you were likely to see her sharing in your News Feed in a minute (notice how every component we mentioned in this class is related to each other). If you had never seen this surreal moment before, it was more than likely for you to click “like,” too. We can define a strong relation (“like” after viewing) in terms of a weaker relation (viewing without “like”, or completely skipping the video). Apart from their “eye-catching” effect, the network effect is true for most viral videos.
How does GoPro benefit from its content marketing strategy? GoPro cameras were initially little-known products that had been tinkered exclusively for sports activities. We can think of its initial improvement as mounting tools or waterproof kits. Despite certain technology advancement in later days, for example full-HD recording, there is not much to say about the technology itself. This is why GoPro relies on content marketing, and it turns out pretty successful.
“At GoPro we have this wonderful benefit. We have a much lower cost of content creation and aggregation.”
Nick Woodman, founder & CEO of GoPro
In discussing how new technology gets adopted, we introduced information cascade, in which a consumer makes choices based on expectations from others. However, while most people know what a GoPro is, not many of them are compelled to get one (MSRP $499.99 for a single latest model). In fact, it is reasonable for a skier to share the product within his team, who may or may not buy it, but how do you get people outside your profession (say, a person who never rode a mountain bike) to accept it? To solve the issue, we apply cascade in a network as the supporting theory (rather than a population-level model). As we should know from network technology diffusion, those within a network are more ready to accept the new technology. Yet the diffusion stops if nothing more is done. According to the textbook, generally by picking up individuals outside a group carefully, using them as promoters, we will eventually see a continued cascade. This is what we see on GoPro. Its social media pages update on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis, just to publish any video you can ever imagine.
Animals:
Cars:
The cascade effect is further enhanced when (with network effect) other people in the never-reached group pick up their models from stores. I don’t know the details without the statistics, but hopefully it’s more or less accurate.
Digital era gives us the best opportunity to experience new technology. At the same time, manufacturers like GoPro are reshaping their marketing techniques to best present their cool ideas. Network theory might only be the tip of the iceberg, while the rest of our digital world is still waiting for us to feel and learn.
What I read before this blog post:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2014/nov/06/digital-business-transformative-new-technology
Another example of network effect, and quite interesting:
Google’s new user-activity-based ranking system shows the importance of content marketing rather than, e.g. creating links:
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-search-now-powered-by-a-hummingbird/
Unrelated discovery on game theory (and sad):