LeBron James, Lady Gaga, and Coca-Cola have a problem…
A problem that besieges the loftiest gamut of celebrities and brands.
A problem that undercuts the very status and interrelationship with the fans they have built.
A problem that is not going away anytime soon–potentially decimating connections and earning power ramifications.
For as much as social media is raved about, there’s a larger disconnect apparent. The breadth of social outlets present a virtually, fundamentally flawed ecosystem. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all platform that truly maximizes the best interests of a celebrity or brand. No matter how much an influencer interacts with their respective audience, it can’t be as nuanced, authentic, or fruitful as they would like. These properties have distinctly contrived limitations that negate pronounced experiences and monetizable engagement.
Power users become powerless.
For instance, in the music industry–arguably the most negatively impacted sector by digital disruption–most artists, by themselves, have little wherewithal to generate revenues of any consequence. Late last year, Nipsey Hustle’s Crenshaw record was dubbed as “the world’s first $100 album” by the masses. This launch allowed fans to purchase hard copies, one of just a thousand of them, from a specified location that also came with a ticket to an upcoming Los Angeles concert at that price point. Not only does this instance shed light on the great lengths an artist must create a meaningful value exchange with their fans, but the overarching issue predicated by social media as well.
“If it’s an artist I really connect to and they motivate me, I won’t trip about a price. No price is too high,” Louis Gray, a fan, told MTV News at the time.
Hustle, himself, then spoke about what this project, at its core, really means: “I have 400,000 followers on Twitter, 140,000 on Instagram, and 400,000 on Facebook. But what good are they if they don’t mobilize around my releases? If only 1,000 of those people are engaged to the point of brand loyalty, then that’s who I’m focused on.”
This example conveys the discrepancy between total volume and a legitimate fan base is far too great to ignore. The audience developed through social channels doesn’t suffice as a viable relationship. The entire infrastructure isn’t efficient or effective enough. There’s a lot of costs involved in order to upkeep these social networks for insights conducted by external sources. They are also proprietary entities that constantly change whenever they see fit, which hampers the ability of celebrities or brands to prosper.
In fact, the landscape among social media intermediaries has evolved just as fast as the mediums they leverage from.
Buddy Media was the first startup to capitalize off of Facebook’s presence with brands through content marketing. They parlayed their immediate success to an exit of $689 million to Salesforce two years ago. Subsequently, other competitors emerged, Vitrue and Wildfire, in the space followed suit with their own acquisitions to Oracle and Google, respectively. They swarmed to the native advertising trend; one that increased by nine percent to a tune of $43 billion last year, per CNNMoney.
Currently, new startups such as NewsCred, Sharethrough, and Contently have entered the fold with hopes to become like one of their predecessors. They have all been able to raise rounds of funding of late. The former two companies have even agreed to partner, not merge, in order to serve as a referral program between their clients.
Simply put by NewsCred’s Shafqat Islam, Chief Executive Officer, explanation on declining to merge among these two complementary startups: “The market is pretty massive when it comes content marketing.”
Where do these developments leave celebrities and brands?
They should position themselves to invest and develop in their own proprietary platforms. By doing so, the tangible opportunity for enhanced data collection and revenue streams exists. Social media should just serve as tools to redirect users to these optimal properties. The inherent mobile nature–both literally and experientially–of social media facilitates towards the end goal. Control over one’s audience under crafted terms and objectives supercede those exclusive to social media outlets.
The path that leads to success varies, contingent on strategies. The mechanism, however, that perhaps enables the most potential is gamified loyalty programs.
Gamification and loyalty programs are not novel ideas. They both have subsisted for quite some time. The former deals with the implementation of game functionality that trigger users’ behavior and continual receptive habits. The latter encourages users’ purchasing power as well as a big data ploy. Together, though, they spawn a productive business proposition that’s conducive to unique experiences and monetizable outcomes.
This synergy shouldn’t be deemed a fad, either. According to Forbes, three years ago, gamification was projected to be a “highly significant trend” in 2014, to the extent that upwards of 70 percent of the global top 2,000 companies will feature at least a single gamified element. One of the more prominent cases last year of this explosion would be the fact that Angry Birds was played for 11 billion hours. There’s boundless opportunity for gamified loyalty programs, provided these systems strike a balance between extrinsic and intrinsic user motivation coupled with high level design.
Concurrently, LeBron James, Lady Gaga, and Coca-Cola represent the upper-echelon of celebrities and brands that stand to benefit a lot from applying this concept–not falter to social media guidelines and obstruction.
James’ evolution within this digital foray extends beyond advertising shifts. His Twitter account has provided a vehicle for his brand partners to disseminate their messaging, both as direct and indirect promotional tweets. Nike, in particular, mastered the latter as a better form of product placement, which garnered over 1,500 more retweets for their top singular tweet than that of the former in 2013. They also comprised nearly 18 percent of James’ tweets by subject, the most mentions among his interests. This intel aimed to take advantage of James’ massive upside for high engagement via retweets that ranges close to 875 of them per a given tweet.
What’s more, some of James’ brand partners have taken the next step to harness their own gamified loyalty programs, at some capacity, and utilized him as the pitchman. Nike took over two years to create their Nike+ Hyperdunk sneaker in an attempt to merge basketball training and achievements through a gamified loyalty system. James promoted this wearable technology that featured a Bluetooth 4.0 sensorized chip, an app, and its proprietary Fuel ecosystem, which could potentially have led to in-app monetization.
Nike’s Digital Sport Experience Director, Ricky Engelberg, told The Verge that the point of this endeavor served as “training as game.” They tried to deliver the function that “it’s every athlete, your entire network, together.” And therein lies its future ambition: “Nike+ is the home of your entire athletic life, connected by Nike Fuel.”
More recently, almost in similar fashion, James marketed Powerade’s Zero Drops. Powerade decided to use its YouTube channel as the mobile platform to introduce one of their newest products. An hour-long gamified video challenge ensues that’s interactive by the HTML5 functionality, which responds to users who click on other juxtaposed videos. They lacked, however, the rewards program element to stretch the user experience further.
As for Lady Gaga, she has had incredible social media success due to building community. Gaga focuses on the one-percenters–influencers–shared values, and embracing her fan base. These aspects have paved the way for her huge social following and its engagement results. The authentic and transparent dialogue fosters loyalty that her brand partners crave. In 2010, Universal Music Group’s Vevo reported that 20 percent of their traffic derived from her videos as a byproduct.
Yet, Lady Gaga’s presence at this year’s SXSW as a keynote speaker perpetuates her earned clout. When she teamed up with Zynga for GagaVille, this moment was unprecedented in the music industry for an artist to release an album through a socially gamified prism. Born This Way was first consumed and experienced by her fans on Facebook. According to Forbes, 33 percent of Facebook users played games in 2011, of which 12 percent acknowledged willingness to purchase items within music games.
However, this initial undertaking, while successful, didn’t completely suffice Gaga’s macro-level goal of owning and gaining a better understanding of her fans. A year later, LittleMonsters.com launched on the platform called Backplane, which she personally had a fiscal and development stake in. Titans in Silicon Valley, like Google Ventures and Menlo Ventures, have been involved since its inception as well. The customization between user-generated content and community drives a lot of the value, both in terms of big data and personalized relationships.
Jan D’Alessandro, Backplane’s Head of Business Development, explained the platform’s uniqueness during the inaugural Hashtag Sports #SportsConf: “Whenever the organizer likes or comments on a post, there’s a special star designation. And it’s an opportunity to show real fan recognition, which is something that’s very important in the sports and music arena as well as with the brands. To be recognized by the athlete, musician, or brand that they love is incredibly empowering for a fan. And it’s sort of the reason why people would want to join and participate in a targeted social network–the opportunity to be recognized and rewarded for their fandom.”
With regards to Coca-Cola, last year’s Super Bowl–the one with the blackout–represents one of the better examples of the brand’s gamification tactics. They allowed fans to choose the ending of their Big Game ad with a hashtag, which helped them generate more YouTube views of it. The first 50,000 users who voted and registered at MyCokeRewards.com received more content and a redeemable coupon for a soft drink. This multi-screen approach appeals domestically more so than their gamified vending machines in South Korea and Belgium; where fans must dance to earn points for free Cokes powered by technology likened to Microsoft’s Kinect.
Coca-Cola is also taking part in the Backplane medium to receive the same benefits as Gaga. D’Alessandro specifically noted their plans with Coke as well: “With Coca-Cola, what we’ve done is relied upon the communities that we are building for them around their marketing initiatives. So, I mentioned the first one is around the World Cup. We are going to be rolling one out around the Olympics. We are going to be doing one for Coke Zero that’s focused on gaming. We’ve also built one for ‘Coke collectors’; a message to fans that have helped us build our digital archive to people who are collecting Coke memorabilia as a place to share them amongst one another.”
Nevertheless, the problem facing LeBron James, Lady Gaga, and Coca-Cola speaks volumes on what the true value proposition of social media is and how it should be activated. For more perspective, SportTechie proudly presents an exclusive, originally-produced infographic about Jay Bobo’s, Director of Strategy and Content Development at GoodProduce, the digital firm that’s a partner of James’ LRMR, case study on why developing proprietary gamified loyalty programs matter (Click to Enlarge):
