Cocreation of Marketing Language

Rob Birgfeld at SmartBlog recounts a great example of product cocreation by IBM.

The point of his post was not the grass-root creation of the product, which was impressive enough, but how IBM picked up the language and "keywords" those in the communities used to talk about the product.

After much work building a significant community, IBM was able to gather data from comments on its blog, in its forum, on Twitter and on YouTube — and not just data on how to make the product better. The IBM team looked at how the community was describing the product — the benefits, the features — and integrated that language into the marketing materials.

This is a real insight for many companies wondering about how to use social media, how to use it more deeply, or the benefits of such social media collaboration in product development.

As Birgfeld says:

To many businesses, this is the inverse of their marketing strategy. They define their messaging either in a closed room, cross their fingers and hope the message spreads across social media channels. That’s only using half the value of social media. Interacting and engaging on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs continues to be key in a successful social media strategy, but it’s time we take a closer look at the data we might be ignoring. Getting people to talk is great — but monitoring how they’re talking and integrating that language throughout your marketing campaigns can help extend and expand that conversation. A good message will travel regardless of where it originates. But if you use your community to help identify that message, you’re arming yourself with the best market intelligence money can buy.

While marketing and sales are the poster boys of social media, it is most likely in these "back office" efforts, whether they be in product development, or product support and service, where very significant benefits lie for business.

See Axel Schultze's post Social Media Rock Star or Social Media Business Consultant?

It's important for companies to develop strategies around these kinds of activites, and to think through the dual roles of branded and non-branded communities and how they interplay. And also how the ongoing dialogue is maintained and the enthusiasm maintained after say a new product release.

There is not doubt that by IBM developing and harnessing people in product design, and giving communities and people that sense of ownership, they have created a force more powerful than any marketing dollars could buy.

By the way the product is sMash, which evolved from IBM's Project Zero "community-driven commercial development" which is a great example of cocreation and well worth examining the site.