I recently read a terrific blog post by Ashu Garg, who is a entrepreneur in residence at Trinity Ventures. I have copy/pasted his blog post here because I believe in it so strongly. For those interested in more of Ashu’s posting’s please visit his blog by clicking here.
The “Momentum” Effect. In traditional media, brand advertisers kept control on the story and obtained reach and engagement through mass media. In digital media, especially with young consumers, that model no longer works. Consumers control what media and brands they engage with, and advertisers need to start conversations and then let their consumers continue the dialog. In so doing, consumers often evolve the story (which is challenging for brands) but also often create a tremendous viral effect. An example of this is a recent Adidas campaign on Myspace where the Adidas brand page only got 690,000 page views but the Adidas brand “built momentum: through the 21 M+ exposures it got thorough links that consumers inserted into their Myspace pages or forwarded to their friends. In short, the most successful brands will start conversations and then “build momentum” by leveraging communities of consumers that in effect become brand ambassadors, but without any constraints on hat they can say or do.
