Communication today is all about creating engagement and involvement and to create experiences for the individual user or receiver. This is also the case for the many organizations, brands or companies who want to get their messages across on the web.
People get more and more used to being bombarded with messages more or less everywhere possible: in urban space, in buses, in public toilets, when checking your Facebook etc.
So the challenge for communicators and marketers is to create new and engaging ways to reach the audience – in other words: to involve the users.
Get in your audience’s shoes
In order to create user involvement, as a communicator you need to get into the habit of prioritizing your audience. You shouldn’t only be involved in your own products or services even though your ultimate goal may to be get this across.
But in order for you to create successful communication, you need to place yourself in the shoes of your audience, listen to them and be able to create experiences for the users that are meaningful to them. So, communication needs to take point of departure in the audience.
There are several ways in which you can focus on your audience in your communication efforts. Think about the fact that you should: create experiences, tell stories, make entertainment, be fun, appeal to the senses etc. and how you can achieve this. Maybe you are able to communicate in ways that the individual can identity with or that you are able to provide tools the individual can use in his or her own life.
Lately, there has been several examples of campaigns that have been good at involving the users. They are all centred on video and it is no surprise that images are more engaging for the user than text. Here are some of the campaigns that have created successful user involvement:
Hunter Shoots a bear: Tipp Ex has created a fun and creative campaign on YouTube, where the user can influence what kind of video that will show depending on the words you type in. It uses YouTube in a new way, which really activates the audience. Some may also claim that the product can get lost in the experience, however, the video has reached first place on Viral Video Chart with more than 280,000 shares and more than 8 mill views on Youtube.
Expendables Trailer: The trailer for the film Expendables also shows ways to do marketing on YouTube and some of the similar effects has been seen by for instance Samsung. Even though it is probably not that easy to establish a YouTube collaboration from one day to another, the way to use the platform can be used for inspiration. Watch all Expendables videos.
Tackfilm: The campaign from the Swedish broadcasting license has been so successful that there has been two versions. The first film was groundbreaking when it came out last year in the way it is able to activate the user and make the user part of the film. It is still being discovered and shared all over the world even though is it only aimed for Sweden.
Go to video
The Wilderness Downtown: The band Arcade Fire has made this video in collaboration with Google and really set a new standard for how to work with the web. The video is a Google Chrome experiment and is exemplary for how to create user-oriented content: it uses 3D animation, pictures of your own environment, special adapted browser windows and the ability to interact with the screen. This is really an indicator of some of the stuff we can expect from future web experiences. Go to video