Social media strategy and branding: creating a brand through video games
Powerful brands can be created through a creative video game. Social media branding needs to be engaging, it needs to be fun, it needs to be visual. Video games are one medium that does this. On social media, customers want to engage with your brand. They want to take content prepared or created by themselves and then share it with their friends. A video game is an incredible medium to do this.
The creation and sharing of a brand by a customer is an interesting phenomenon. It is one of the most interesting observations that can be made on the subject of social networks. Human beings have an intrinsic need to interact with one another. When people find a product they like, they feel the need to tell everyone how good it is. This is why social networks are so viral. To create a world-class brand, a marketer must enable customers to do this. Modern brands are actually created and developed by customers. Customers take over the brand. The material has to be attractive, interesting and visual. If a marketer can do this, a world class brand will be created.
The strongest brands are created through user-generated content. The two benchmarks in social media campaigns are the Fiesta Movement, involving the Ford Fiesta, and the Obama presidential campaign in 2008. In both cases, it was customers and followers who created and shared content with their friends. This exchange created the touchpoints that created the brand. Customers took over these two brands and created the brand for the main ones. It’s a startling observation, but it’s one for a modern marketer to make. In the case of Ford, 700 videos of the Fiesta were made. These videos generated 6.5 million views. In the case of the Obama campaign video, there were 442,000 user-generated videos, viewed more than 80 million times. It is not surprising that strong brands were created.
Social networks are powerful because they are so manly.
A powerful metric for a marketer to keep in mind is that, according to Reed’s Law, a network of 2 quickly becomes a network of 1092. This is why a video game strategy can be a powerful method. branded. Video games are visual, immersive, collaborative and obsessive. If you can motivate a fan to create a video game around your brand, this can be a powerful means of building a brand.
The creation of the video game can adopt two methods. The game can be created as a standalone game—-or the game can be turned into a “mod”. Your branded video game can become a reality in the modification of a marketed game. Mods are an important part of the video game industry. A video game is created and players take the game and modify it according to their interests. Many video games are created using open source software for this very purpose. Game makers have found that mods are a great way to expand their brand.
A reference game could be “Civilization”. In this game, players are encouraged to take a civilization and guide it from the Bronze Age to the current era. A game like this could be built around a brand. The players could give their opinion on how the brand should be developed. If it was done this way, customers would own the brand. This game would be a help both for customers and for the brand itself. There would be a large group involved in the game. There is wisdom in crowds. The crowd would discover an infinite number of branding strategies. Marketers could watch this game unfold and adjust their branding strategies based on in-game information. By using an interesting game that really engages customers, a salesperson could dial in real time.
Dean Hambleton