Participation Marketing ... Make Music Not War


Click Here to watch a quick YouTube video of a clever (and a little scary) example of User-Generated Content. The sounds of EA Games' "Battlefield 2" set to a cool music groove.

2 points:

1) This is a quality non-professional production (from a prolific kid named Serpento99) that demonstrates good stuff from beyond the incumbent gatekeepers. The smart and nimble content producers are building models that encourage this - from Viacom to Conde Nast to Warner Music (well, actually the Music Biz is still struggling with the "nimble" part).

2) The brand and product are honored. It is time to let the consumers take (even a little) control of your asssets. Sure there is weird crap out there but the good stuff gets virally shared. The stupid stuff is forgotten. EA listed this video on their home page recently.

Sales of games will result from this kind of exposure.

See the Sir Community for the state-of-the-art in game modding and experimentation. They empower "unorthodox style of gameplay never before seen in a gaming community."

Getting people to collaborate increases the influence and footprint. Google's GMail initiated a nice video campaign where users could add the next scene. See it here.

How are you encouraging the use of your brands?

See this iMediaConnection article from Molecular's Mulder and LaRosa about "sharinging Content for Web 2.0 Success." Here are their three elements to keep in mind:

- Separating the content, the structure and the design is more important than ever.
- Instead of creating a website, provide tools that enable users to create their own experiences.
- What we create is less about places and things and more about streams and flows.