My good friend Adriana at the Big Blog Company flipped a link over to me today aboout building a brand via a blog and a community, which I wished we could have shoehorned into our book Communities Dominate Brands .
From the loiclemeur blog which I think worth quoting heavily from
The French entrepreneur Patrice Cassard redefines ecommerce by entirely basing its sales on the word of mouth his products and blog create. To my knowledge, he does not buy any advertising and sales are soaring.You only have to read his Movable Type blog and how many comments he has to understand the community of t-shirt fans he has created. Patrice's readers participate in everything, they give their advise and suggestions, they create trust around an unknown brand for new site visitors by the quality of the comments.
There is more. Patrice has just relaunched his ecommerce shop to integrate his customers in the t-shirt creation process. Anybody can propose a new t-shirt visual, which is then submitted to vote. The best logos are produced on t-shirts and the authors get 300 euros for each of them.
La Fraise customers are in the center of the company and define the new products. Amazing experience that shows us the path to new e-commerce around blogs and conversations, with trust and customer feedback as the two key drivers of business. The word of mouth does the rest.
If anyone out there believes that today we can ignore communities, or that we cannot create them I suggest they pause for thought. Because this is happening at so many levels that it demonstrates that our insights at SMLXL are correct. Markets are conversations and the role of what we describe as GenC or the community generation is a theory based today on reality.
This turns conventional branding and marketing on its head. How many times have I said that - I feel like a broken wheel. But if the Vice Chairman at General motors blogs because he knows he has a wider community he has to engage with, as well as the COO of Sun Microsysytems Jonathan Schwartz or Robert Scoble of Microsoft. If the Boeing World design team numbering 150,000 people contributing as a community into a commercial project. These are indications that we are witnessing a paradigm shift at many levels.
What is branding? What is media and who controls it? How do you go to market? How do you build your business model? Who are your stakeholders/community? There many more.
One has to understand that today 'the community' has the potential and capability to be a potent force that changes how we interact with eachother.
And how we do business. And this has as much to do with traditional bricks and mortar businesses with industrial age business models, as it has with any body else.
If I were a brand I would be sitting and thinking who is my community and how can I engage with them before someone else does?
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