Many times before a company launches a product or service, they will roll it out to a test market. You do this to see how viable that product or service will be in the mass market prior to a the full roll-out. This can be a very expensive process but it can also be worth every penny. Would you be willing to spend $1 million to help prevent you from losing $10 million?
I came across another version of this today being run by National Lampoon, the makers of Animal House, the Vacation movies and much more. They have a potentially polarizing feature length film that they are contemplating releasing. It’s called 72 Virgins and it tells the tale of two idiot college students unwittingly join an Al Qaeda cell in order to get the 72 virgins promised to terrorists when they die. This started out a viral film on their website and they now are asking their fans – Should we make this into a feature length movie?
I have seen this spreading through the social networks like Digg and people getting involved in the conversation there as well. Is this the most accurate metric to find out if you should launch a movie? Probably not because anonymity makes it too easy for people to game or influence. But it is a good way to get a quick, easy and inexpensive gauge of how your potential audience or customers may react to a new product or service.
For National Lampoon’s this type of outreach was a no-brainer for a few reasons:
- The idea was built around a film made for the web – so why not solicit feedback on the web
- No need to worry about someone stealing this idea – its too unique and would be too easy to prove that it was stolen
- Get people on a mass level engaged in the debate. Whether they are for it or against it, they will be talking about it. This means more traffic to their website, more links and more publicity.
Interestingly enough, at time of writing – voting was 3 to 1 in favor of NOT making the movie…
Bookmark this post:
3 Responses to “Social Media Test Marketing”
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
genius on their part. i’ve always been a fan of the brands, artists,bands, etc. that build a following before they even existed, and this is just the next level.
Chris,
Thanks for bringing this to the fore; I’d not heard of it yet.
I think it’s a great strategy to use social networks to gauge sentiment in a target market. With various networks you can really tap into a target demographic and get the feedback that you need.
As far as “gaming” the voting, I would think that they have some system of IP tracking etc to determine where and how many votes one has place – but surely there must be a huge “fudge factor.”
I’m glad that the voting was 3 to 1 to NOT make the movie. It’s appalling – even if it’s a gag on the terrorist organization.
The cool thing out of all of this too is if they do actually make the movie, the social communities who participated in the feedback are going to feel like “they were part of something BIG!”
To me, that is what social networking is all about. It’s like a free place to conduct a focus group- something companies pay MILLIONS for.