So, we all know the theory. The basic idea that our greatest and most effective communications tool, especially online, comes from brand’s customers themselves eulogising about a product or service to their friends, peers, readers, viewers etc.
And again, we all know that we can help facilitate this by providing the appropriate information and resources to these individuals.
Big deal, nothing new here. Well, to spice things up a bit, if you look below at the T-Mobile – ‘Survival of the Quickest’ post below you’ll see a real life case study occurring within this very blog.
The story itself is seems to be about the very nice JonJonBaker posting up a copy of T-Mobile’s ‘Join The Dance’ advert on his YouTube channel minutes before the official channel went live, therefore achieving, to date, over 1.3 million views from those searching for the advert after it broke on national TV.
T-Mobile, or Saatchi & Saatchi, for that matter, may well have looked upon dear JonJon as a pesky little party pooper who deprived them of at least 300k views to the T-Mobile official channel. Understandably too, you may say.
Instead, clearly someone has decided that JonJon is far better as a friend than a foe. I have no idea the exact dialog between the two parties, but as stated in the comments, JonJon has certainly been invited to take part in the campaign’s follow up viral and I imagine there may be further offerings between the two parties (exclusives on new T-Mobile video content? I don’t know, I’m simply guessing)
The result of T-Mobile embracing JonJon in this way? Well, JonJon subscribes to the T-Mobile ‘Life’s for Sharing’ channel. It is his only subscription – now viewable by the several thousand visitors to his channel than have come about from his ‘Join the Dance’ scoop.
But most interestingly? Well, see the comments section of the original post. Firstly, the follow up T-Mobile virals have been discussed in a public space, as has JonJon discussed his favourable views about the T-Mobile ad itself when challenged by Alastair in the comments.
In short, this man, who literally nicked 300,000 channel views from T-Mobile’s official YouTube channel (through no fault of his own, I should add) has been converted into a full on T-Mobile brand advocate discussing the campaign and the advert both for his own channel’s benefit, but certainly also to benefit of T-Mobile, in blogs all over the web.
Good stuff
A quick note… I have made wild assumptions on all of the above. So if I’m wrong, I apologies completely. Just an interesting, if not completely flawed, observation
Not another Mindshare blog 