The use of play as a technique of social marketing has been powerful front and center last month at the annual Marketing Awards BtoB Social Media in Manhattan. Communications technology company Cisco Systems has won the honors of social marketing into two categories and also won his second “Choice” prize for a campaign that prominently interactive gaming experience. If the game was a bit under the radar of the media, overshadowed by the giant Facebook / LinkedIn / Twitter, their time in the sun may be dawning.
“Yes, we’ve had questions from a series of internal frames when we arrived with the idea of playing together,” said Doug Webster, Cisco senior director of worldwide service provider marketing. “But we wanted to change the mindset of marketing outside the traditional white paper aimed at people who need to be modified.”
Cisco’s online games aren’t for everyone, Webster said. Their intent is to appeal to the software engineers who influence purchasing decisions. Cisco’s winning social marketing entry was a viral video campaign in support of its ASR 9000 network router. While watching a live streaming video, viewers were able to operate a robot arm to yank a switch processor card out of the ASR 9000—essentially, to break it—to observe the impact on video performance.
The 100-second invitational video was posted on YouTube in October 2010 and promoted through banner ads, blogs, social networks and email blasts. In its first four months, the promotion drove nearly 6,000 video impressions, 500 contacts from interested users, 216 demos and 60 qualified leads, and was responsible for more than $80 million in revenue, according to Cisco.
Last year, Cisco took home a BtoB People’s Choice award for its myPlanNet campaign, which included a downloadable simulation game in which participants played the role of a CEO solving business challenges using Cisco products. Gaming makes perfect sense as a social marketing device, said Gabe Zichermann, CEO of Gamification Co. and producer of the Gamification Summit to be held in September in New York.
“Gaming has become the mass-market medium of our time,” Zichermann said. “In simple terms of reach, three of the top five programs in America today are FarmVille CityVille and Mafia Wars,” he said, referring to games developed by Zynga Inc. and widely accessed through Facebook and other social sites.
Applied to marketing, Zichermann said, gaming’s core strength is engagement. It can underscore everything from loyalty programs to education, and any other customer activity that can be rewarded and reinforced with virtual goods, points, badges and rankings.
Bunchball Inc. is a game development company that works with such clients as United Business Media in deploying gamelike interactions with customers. The company developed a trivia competition on the UBM TechWeb site, using knowledge of the technology publisher’s own content at its core.
“UBM has experienced a huge rate of return to work,” said Rajat Paharia, Bunchball founder and technical director. “I would not call it a game;. Rather, it was through existing content UBM wrapped in the gameplay,” said Paharia products of a company must already be strong to help the game. “The game is aimed to be the bearer of some content, such as the conduct of knowledge and excitement about your product,” he said. “You do not want to change your content or product you want to get the heart beating. “
