Non-Media Brands and Social Media

Check out Paul LaMonica of CNNMoney.com’s blog post today that quotes Alex. It’s great to hear that brands like Amazon are engaging with their users to a greater degree using social media. Paul picked up on a great point when he talked to Alex this week, brands outside of the media industry can benefit from communities. Social media is a powerful tool for enabling sustained engagement with a brand. This is true for a media brand like Vibe Magazine and also for non-media brands of all sizes like Widmer. Something to consider as you think about your brand’s digital strategy.

BET Gets It

On last night’s BET Awards, millions of people watched video introductions to a handful of categories: Best New Artist, Best Music Video, etc. Pretty standard for an awards show, right? Nope. All of these vids were user-generated, submitted by viewers and fans through a KickApps-powered site.

Now, I couldn’t track down the show’s exact ratings, but to give you an idea, last year’s BET Awards had around 6.6 Million viewers, making it the number one cable telecast of all time among African-Americans. No doubt this year was even bigger.

The point is that BET gets it. Premium content + UGC = an engaged and loyal audience. This is cross-channel marketing at its best, and KickApps is proud to be a part of it. Oh, and the video submissions were great–check out a few of the winners (and runners up) in the widget below.

The Social Media Explosion

At KickApps we often talk about how social media applications are currently thought of as an add-on to an existing web site but that at some point in the near future there will be an inflection where these applications are no longer an add-on but rather core to almost every site. We can debate the timing on when this inflection will take place but we have no doubt that it will.

To be honest sometimes we are met with skepticism. For the skeptics out there, consider the recent study by ComScore/Piper Jaffray indicating the rapid increase in time spent online interacting with social media experiences. The growth is astounding and suggests that our inflection point may be right around the corner.

BET Leverages KickApps For Tonight’s Awards Show

Tonight at 8pm (EST) the 2007 installment of the BET Awards, one of the most popular shows on cable television, will be broadcast live with an interesting twist: The network built a community around the show using the KickApps platform in which the audience is invited to submit their own award category introduction videos. Their audience was also asked to vote on their favorite videos and have this vote determine which videos will be aired as part of the show.

The contest has been a tremendous success and has proven to be a very effective approach for BET to develop a deeper engagement with the on-air audience. At the same time they undoubtedly have gained new fans from the web who will be introduced to the show for the first time tonight as a result of the contest. Yet another creative way to leverage the KickApps platform to sustain audience engagement.

VIBE Verses Rap Battle.

Imagine ‘American Idol’ online–and for rappers–and you’ve got an idea of what VIBE Magazine’s Verses Rap Battle is all about. Using KickApps, VIBE took the community from design to launch in around three weeks. Today it boasts nearly 30,000 members, a number that’s doubled since we made the official announcement last week.

Update: As of 7/3/07, Vibe Verses has over 41,000 members!

Not only is Verses a great way for VIBE to consolidate a passionate group of people around their brand, but it’s exposing some great (and previously unknown) talents out there. One of our favorites? Atlanta’s own LSHUN, a.k.a. The Empress: