Marketing
Issue No. 47 - June/ july
New rules for new media
by Dr David Corkindale and Dr David Corkindale
Web 2.0 and 3.0, Adwords, Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, iPhone Apps… what are they for and how should we use them for marketing in the digital media age? Our ability to digitise and communicate information to miniaturised devices which are IP-addressable and location-identifiable means we are at the start of another industrial revolution. From a marketing point of view this is probably bigger than the coming of mass
television.
The Goldcorp Challenge
A banker took over a small Canadian gold company,
Goldcorp. However, his geologists could not pinpoint where any gold was precisely enough for production to start. He wondered whether to hire yet more geologists or just close the company down. Observing how rapidly online social networking was being embraced, he had an idea: maybe people elsewhere in the world could help him.
He invented the GoldCorp Challenge. A prize of $500,000 would be available to whoever could tell him:
(a) does GoldCorp actually own any gold and, if so (b)
where it is. Then he did something unheard of: he published all GoldCorp’s geological data on the company website. With the prize as the noteworthy topic he used conventional and the peer-to-peer, new ‘social media’ like Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube to get the word out and to stimulate collaborative ventures.
An Australian computer graphics company built a 3D model and won first prize. Entries came from a range of professions, mathematicians and chemists as well as geologists, from all over the world. Some who also won a prize were collaborative efforts embracing several disciplines. In all, $3.4 billion worth of gold was found and the value of Goldcorp went from $90m to $10bn.
The marketing lesson is not so much that new media were partly used, but how they were used. It also illustrates the principles of worldwide networking and collaboration and how ‘social’ networking can lead to
‘social’ production.
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