A nice article from CRM Magazine about the work we did with OK Labs. -cfc
A Social Strategy That's A-OK
OK Labs forgoes traditional marketing in favor of a community-based Web 2.0 approach.
• Tell us about your organization.
Open Kernel—OK Labs—is a three-year-old start-up that was born in
Australia and is now headquartered in Chicago. My role when coming on
board was to build up the brand and, most importantly, create awareness
among the technical developer community who work on developing mobile
devices. Our area is mobile open virtual solutions. We are in the
innards of mobile handsets. It’s not at the application level, but it’s
embedded within the device.
I realized initially that the company
wouldn’t exist if Google didn’t exist. The first commercial
opportunities came through online inquiries. The obvious thing to do
was to find out who these people are, what their needs are, and what
kinds of places they go to find information. I tried to figure out the
types of things these global engineers care about and tried to address
their thirst for information that was accurate, technical, and in a
peer-to-peer venue.
• At what point did you turn to service provider Cerado for strategic support?
I found Cerado through networking and I said, “I’m building a community
of developers and I know this community behaves differently from other
communities. Can you help me build this?” I knew I couldn’t do it on my
own. Cerado did the typical things of defining the behaviors of the
community—and came up with something I loved. Cerado reinforced the
notion of creating elements that can be shared easily—or “social
objects”—and showed us lots of practical, real-world examples,
ultimately taking us down a path toward building an online community.
In addition to the community-development plan, Cerado introduced us to
the overall concept of social media and, of course, Twitter—before its
big ascent. What started out as a community-development plan evolved
into a complete sharing plan—which included viral videos, webinars, and
social networking—to grow organically and accomplish brand awareness
along the way.
• What results have you seen from your online efforts? Our
goal after developing the community was to have 1,000 members within a
year. We’re at about 1,500 now. And, in our realm, when you consider
the size of the developer community, that’s substantial.
We
definitely have increased our online footprint and visibility. Now when
OK Labs releases a press release, for example, we launch a webinar
surrounding that news and we might ask a person with an impressive list
of industry followers to twitter about our event or accompanying white
paper. That leads to increased participation in our webinars. When we
deployed new social sharing tactics during our last news launch on the
topic of Google Android, we had the longest number of days in which
people participated with a sustained increase in traffic.
OK
Labs’ GeekTV videos are viewed via YouTube and Vimeo approximately 70
to 100 times per week. We know that we have not scratched the surface
of what can be accomplished by actually promoting the videos with
social media tactics. Most of our traffic for videos comes from links
through our email nurturing program.
The majority—about 90
percent—of our leads come from Web searches and through email queries.
Google search is the reason that the OKL4 technology was discovered by
developers and led to our first design-in solution for a major chipset
manufacturer for mobile phones.
It’s a challenge at this point
to keep up with lead qualification. Twitter and LinkedIn will play a
larger role in OK Labs’ social media strategy in the coming months.
Five Fast Facts
>>>How old is the project? We
completed the community rollout in December 2007, then underwent
another phase of social efforts, including blogging, in January 2008.
>>>Who was involved in the decision process? Me and several other members of the OK Labs team.
>>>What has been the best idea? Breaking
some of the rules of what you can and can’t say in a Web presence.
There’s a little bit of an informal character about our company. We’ve
found that communicating a sense of humor with a brand is a whole lot
more fun.
>>>Biggest surprise?
With people talking about personal lives and business on Twitter or
social media, you get a steady stream of information hitting on a
variety of topics. It’s making business so much more personal. If
people know something more about you, they might be more likely to do
business with you.
>>>Biggest mistake? Using conventional advertising to reach technical developers. They don’t click on ads. They just don’t.
source: CRM Magazine