Giving People A Reason

April 18th, 2008

How do you get people engaged with your business, product, or service in the digital space?

The great opportunity available to everyone using the Internet to communicate their message is the chance to innovate and create. A myriad of ways exist to engage people using the Internet. Depending on what you are communicating, what your defined goals and objectives are, and what strategies you employ will determine what type of success you will encounter.

Many of these experiences are based on tried and tested techniques, and people experience them on a daily basis. For example blogs, online forums, and email newsletters have all evolved in their own ways to give people a reason to engage with your message and the value you can provide them. The best ideas and practices bubble up to the top and are continuously refined to deliver the results people are after. You only need to go and look at the blogosphere to see the endless discussion on an ever-expanding range of topics about making things better, faster, and more effective.

Why should someone care about what you have to say? Why should they engage with you? What about innovation and invention in ‘giving people a reason?’ What are the ideas and techniques that have yet to be invented? These are new paradigms that interest and engage people on a mass scale in ways never thought of before. I do run across new examples of this from time to time.

An Example, Or Two.
There are two recent examples of this type of innovation from the music world. As some of you may know the music industry and their distribution model have been brought to the Internet in a haphazard and less-than-elegant way. Had music companies been innovative and not resisted change, their fate today might be different–but we digress. Our  two examples come from the band Radiohead. The band earlier this year released their latest album “In Rainbows” first, and only, on the Internet. Other bands have done this before, but what Radiohead did was to allow people name their own price, and then download the entire album. Many people thought they were crazy to do this. Would people actually pay? Or would they just run off with a freebie? The feedback that I read reported that, on average, people paid what would be considered the price for a new CD. So, overall the experiment worked. Some people paid little or nothing, others paid a bit more and the result was proof of a new way to release an album for a major music artist. Radiohead then went to release the album on a traditional CD a few months later.

The second experiment involves remixing a song from their new album–the song is called “Nude.” This is not the first time an artist has done this on the Internet, but this time Radiohead is charging 99 cents per track to download. People then remix them to create a variety of new versions of the song. People can then upload their mixes and the public then votes on these mixes to arrive at the most popular version.  To date there are over 1600 remixes submitted to the website.

It will be interesting to see what the final results are from this second experiment. What ways can you engage your prospects, clients, fans using digital technology? What examples do you see within your industry or others that get you thinking of ways you can give people a reason to engage?

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