I've been hammering away at my clients and former clients on how they needed to move towards a Social Media approach if they were going to have any real hope of increasing conversion rates.
Particularly, the Architects I have dealt with have such horrible conversion rates (rates that are often explained by the length of the buying cycle for this sector, but have as much to do with lousy creative as anything else). But how does a site that has no experience in developing Social Media tools or building communities suddenly do that? I mean, it's one thing to know the sickness, another thing to apply the cure successfully.
Enter KickApps.
KickApps is a way to build social networks for sites that would never, in a million years, know how to build one like Mascord.com and my former client, The House Designers. It still takes imagination and creativity to build on the community, but now, sites that want to, can build a whole social network, with all the full blown Social Networking Tools while still retaining the look and feel of their own sites plus the ownership of the communities of each site builds.
Especially, in the case of large email list, like The House Designers has (their most valuable asset, in my opinion) a Social Network built around the email list could be, if done right, more effective than any other single thing they've ever done (hint).
Sites that use KickApps? Alot of them… such as UndergroundOnline Beta, MyAFL, NationalLampoonCollege, Procter & Gamble's TAG Body Spray, TrekkiesOnline, WUAB Cleveland's My43.net.
Here's something I "grabbed" from the Trekkies site - something the Architects would not know, in a million years, how to do, but which, with KickApps, would be easy as pie to "Steal" a Architectural House Plan - and have your fans stick it all over the place … see what I mean?
First I'll show you three User Generated Videos, One from Star Wars, one of Kirk and the other of Spock - and then the Widget that was used to grab it - created easily with KickApps. You just need the "content" but when you "unleash" your fans, there's usually plenty of content!
Just think of how "creative" some of your "fans" can be.
Above: User Generated Video of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker
Above: User Generated Video on "Kirk".
Above: User Generated Video of "Spock".
And here's the Widget (below). There's a lot of creativity out there - people, your fans want to contribute to your brand - you just have to learn how to allow them to. In fact, I wrote about this with the Pontiac Island Study in Second Life a couple of days ago at the Virtual Worlds 2007 Conference.
How do you get started? Follow the instructions here.
In the past month or two I have written about tools like Collarity and KickApps that have, creatively employed, have a much greater potential to increase conversion rates than any combination of SEO or Paid Advertising can hope to match - that is truly my belief - that's why I have continued to harp on this with my current and even former clients.
In the case of the Architects, they'd have to really sit down with me and plan this all out, brainstorm mainly - just because you have the tools doesn't mean they solve your problems - Social Media needs to be built around what your site does, what your community already does.
That's right, each site has a community - even if they don't realize it- in fact, there are several communities that come to a site - and - more and more, Branding has become the way a company provides tools to enable it's commun
ities to have a 2 way conversations and to talk with each other.
I will develop a plan for KickApps for my current client, Mascord.com around http://www.mascordlivingspaces.com/, becasue they are my client, but I given a hint of what the direction could be for many sites.
Granted, there is some advertising that is shown by KickApps, you can buy it back from them, but I'd like to see an option where you pay extra not to have any advertising shown or to show your own. Otherwise, I have nothing but good things to say about KickApps.
Hopefully this will not become another example of the Path Not Taken.
