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• What Professional Services Firms Can Learn From Avatar (that would be the film, not the earthly deity)

  By Burkey Belser

  Posted on January 13, 2010 at 5:23 pm

  
  
  

  Image Credit: Twentieth Century Fox Corporation

  Avatar has been a runaway blockbuster hit of the holiday movie season. Of course it is a film with spectacular visual effects, amazing new technologies and an original story, but we marketers also find it notable for its smart use of social media.

  Avatar isn’t the first film to promote itself on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace—far from it. Every movie these days has its own Web site with rich video, Twitter handle, MySpace presence and more. What Avatar did that was unique was use these platforms in ways BETTER than anyone else has and APPLY LEARNINGS from other films.

  For example, nearly all films run trailers online—it helps to drive traffic to the site and introduce the content to a broader audience. Avatar, however, did this twice as well: Not only did it roll out three different trailers (including one interactive one), but when fans re-mixed one of its trailers and mashed it up with other movies, the movie house stood by and let the fans have at it. It trusted its fans with the brand and permitted passion to spread and grow.

  While service firm sites will never see the kind of adulation and interaction as a movie or consumer brand site, lessons abound for professional services firm CMOs and their events, thought leadership efforts and other promotional efforts:

  1. Use your digital presences in concert with one another. Each site/page/link should fit into the larger constellation of the Web presence you currently manage, and you should have a clear strategy for how they play off one another.
  2. Even if you are not the first to market in using social media, the opportunity to use it better than anyone else still exists. Professional services firms lag sorely behind in social media use, never mind using it for differentiation. That’s an opportunity.
  3. Web 2.0 by definition encourages interaction with your brand. Embrace it. Monitor it, but jump in. Allow—nay, encourage—your employees, clients and prospects to interact with you in the online space, be it through reviews (both good and bad), citations, links, etc. The conversation will happen anyway—you may as well be a part of it.
  Tags:

  Facebook, MySpace, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0 

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