Growing up, I loved spending the weekend at my grandparent’s house.  One of my favorite things to do was to explore my grandfather’s vast storehouse of gadgets, tools, and gizmos.  

Between the fencing gear, biofeedback machine, tree pruning tools, and other assorted curiosities, I dominated show-and-tell at my grade school.  Unfortunately, my grandfather wasn’t any better off because of them. In fact, he was worse off - he drained his bank account buying the magic bullet to whatever problem he had.

An interesting trend I am noticing within the higher education world is eerily similar to my grandfather’s situation.  Some groups have bought the latest database software service, others launched a private social networking site, and still others have invested in a robust email solicitation campaign.  However, many aren’t getting the results they expected. 

Why?  Amazing tools, little or no strategy behind them.

Without a doubt, digital communication tools are all around us and many are FREE. There has to be a better way, right?

Look at the latest J.J. Abram movie, Cloverfield.  Take out the 25% of the movie that was filled with CGI wizardry (my estimate wrought with self-serving calculations) and you’re left with a movie shot entirely from one digital video camera’s viewpoint.  That’s a tool you and I most likely have somewhere around the house. 

In addition to telling a great love story (not kidding), their marketing strategy was genius.  How genius?  $46 million in its first weekend genius.  

Their strategy in a nutshell - pique interest, fuel speculation by dropping delicious, engaging morsels of information, let everyone’s imagination run wild, and channel that energy thru the internet to allow people like you and me create more buzz for the movie - like this blog entry.  (For more about Abram’s storytelling philosophy, watch his 20-minute talk at last year’s TED conference).

With profiles on Facebook and MySpace, desktop widgets, and a simple website housing the movie trailer that anyone could embed into their own site, the Cloverfield team implemented their marketing strategy beautifully.  (Just ask anyone who gutted out the motion sickness and vertigo to get to the ending and still raved about the movie - like me.) 

I’m curious about your organization’s experiences with digital communications - more like my grandfather’s or Cloverfield’s?  Was it the strategy or the tools that drove your results?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm and is filed under marketing, strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.