The Engaged Consumer

Have you ever been so steeped in something that you see it everywhere you look? Standing in the middle of the Powered-sponsored Mashable party during South by Southwest Interactive, beer in hand and exploring the various rooms of the Six night club, I started to think about Facebook Connect. Yeah, this is how bad it's gotten.

Facebook is a party. It's a huge place where you can share content and news, play games together, engaging in many of the activities you do with friends in the offline world. The problem is that the party, up until now, has really just been for Facebook itself and its users. If you were any entity with commercial interests, the best you could do is give Facebook a banner to hang somewhere for you. This would be like if Powered sponsored the Mashable party but we could only hang a banner inside the bar. How effective would that be for our marketing, over the din of the music and rumble of conversation?

With Facebook Pages, now you can attend the party. You're just like I was at Six, a sponsor floating around the crowd, having a few conversations and talking about Powered. This is much more effective marketing-wise than a few banners (at least I think so!), but still I'm just one guy and although there were a few other Powered employees our impact at the event was still limited. This was compounded by the reality that people didn't always want to talk about Powered, a fact that is even truer in the personal-conversation world of Facebook - which is about as far away from an industry party as you can get.

Facebook Connect is really where things get interesting. It allows you, as a brand, to have your own room in the bar. By that I mean you can build your own communal experience and attach it in a meaningful way to the Facebook experience. People can walk into your room, find the people they already know, and message people outside the room about the cool things going on there.

Word-of-Mouth Traffic Flow

This doesn't absolve brands from creating an engaging experience in their own community environment. You still need to populate your room with interesting content, people, and programming. But it really helps with one of the main problems branded communities have, which is getting people in the door. There is only so much you can do with email marketing, media promotion, and search. Here, Facebook runs the party, and you just hook into their flow. You are instantly rewarded for creating engagement, versus having to create engagement and then work hard to get the word out.

The Power of Context

The reasons why you would build your own room (Facebook Connect) versus just attend the party (Pages) are similar in both the online and offline world. With Connect, you gain context. Everything that happens in your community is in the world of your brand, versus the world of Facebook. Context is extremely powerful in the user's mind, and it has a lot to do with building people's brand affinity, advocacy, and loyalty. Does reading this blog entry on the Powered blog make you attribute the value to Powered, or to me (Wick, Doug Wick)? How would that change if you read it on my personal blog? If you walked into the Powered Room at the Mashable Party, how would this be different than just meeting someone from Powered?

Learning Ability

Also, with Connect comes data. Your ability to listen and learn as an organization is significantly enhanced when the technical handoff between Facebook servers and yours happens. What if the Mashable party went on indefinitely (I felt like it might at some points) and you never adapted your room to be more reflective of partier's preferences or need - or even just freshened things up a bit? If you don't have the data, you won't have the visibility into individual behavior on a quantitative or qualitative level. You won't learn or adapt as effectively, and you'll start sounding like that boorish guy who's always at the party saying the same things. Yes, we've heard that story about how you went bungee-jumping in Cancun eight times, thank you very much.

So now that you've been invited to the party, will you get in there? Or will you sit at home and let other brands have all the fun?

Austin is buzzing right now as people arrive for the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference, and we at Powered are pumped to bring our own flavor to the event!

We have several things going on - including a sponsorship of Monday night's Mashable + Blurb SxSW Bash '09, and we'll be sporting our custom tees that sing the praises of both dogfood and content (pictured here, look for us!).

The Engaged Consumer blog will be rolling out its own red carpet. We'll be seizing the opportunity, with so many social media mavens present right around our corner, to gather their collective brain share and hear their thoughts on social networking and brand-managed online communities.

Coming off the success of our own Aaron Strout's “45 in 45” blog series which features interviews with 45 social media luminaries in the 45 days leading up to SxSW -  Susan Bratton, founder and CEO of Personal Life Media and Powered advisory board member, will be conducting interviews with social media thought leaders including: Patricia Martin, Guy Kawasaki, Angela Benton, Chris Brogan, Peter Fasano, and Cathy Brooks.

The interview podcasts will be held throughout the conference and will be available right here on The Engaged Consumer beginning at 12:00 p.m. CST on Monday, March 16.

Please come back throughout the week to pick those up and to enjoy our ongoing SXSW coverage. Welcome to Austin, Everyone!