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Clients harnessing media social networks

MM: Who are your clients? And how are your clients harnessing that notion of media social networks?

RT: I guess one of the easiest ones to talk about that shows the true power of the networks — the Icelounge test case that I spoke about — which is really the test case for our technology and our understanding of communities.

It was a hugely successful community. We created a community of roughly 50,000 skateboard enthusiasts.

MM: This was for which company?

RT: This was our own test case. This was how we actually started Omnifuse. Omnifuse was started from icelounge.com, which was our skateboarder community.

MM: That still exists? IceLounge.com?

RT: Yes. You can go there. It actually will forward you to IgnitionSk8.com. This community was so successful, it was a highly sought-after demographic, we ended up selling the community to a mobile action sports provider. Ignition was the name of the action sports mobile content provider.

We worked with them to create a seamless integration to their mobile content store.

It’s interesting because communities are really sensitive to authenticity. So if you have something that you want to sell them, you’d better do it in a very, very precise way.

As soon as you have a sense in your community that you are just trying to “sell” to the membership, your community is done. They’re not going to accept it. They lose that sense of authenticity that’s so important when you’re building community.

One of the things that was interesting was, in this demographic particularly — 15- to 18-year old male skaters — was very receptive to this kind of mobile content. They could have their favorite skateboard company logo as wallpaper or their favorite shoe company pictures or ring tones for their favorite rock group. Integrating the ability for members to not only consume those pieces of content, but also to rate and review them, and tell other members how much they liked or disliked this piece of content drove their mobile store to the point where we actually had to rebuild it for them, because it wasn’t effective enough at managing all the content they were distributing.

So a skateboard community of 50,000 members, in the years between 2005 and 2006, generated additional revenue by using the community to drive pay-per-use content in their mobile store.

Again, it had to be done pretty subtly. We couldn’t just throw a whole bunch of ring tones and say, “Here, you guys. Buy these, now.” We really did it in an integrated fashion, to show when they were looking at a group and that group was DVS. We were showing them DVS-specific content.

MM: DVS?

RT: Yes. DVS is a shoe company. It’s a hardcore-skater shoe company. We were showing DVS-related content to the members.

MM: Did you generate the DVS content? Or was that coming from DVS?

RT: It was Ignition’s business model to acquire the sole licenses from many of the action sports companies for mobile content. So they were the licensees of all of that content.

We provided the software mechanism that allowed the contextual serving up of the content meaningful to the user as they were navigating through the taxonomy of the site.

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