Learning From Walmart’s Failed Social Network (and Microsoft and Nike’s successes)

Pete Cashmore wrote a good post on Walmart’s ill-conceived The Hub which was closed down after only 10 weeks.  The Hub was Walmart’s attempt to recreate MySpace for their Gen Y shoppers.   The problem is their Gen Y shoppers were having too much fun on MySpace to care one iota about The Hub.  There’s a good lesson here for companies considering creating social networks for customers:   Your customers are not sitting at home waiting for you to create a social network for them.  More than likely they are already quite active with on-line communities.  It is vital that all brands considering social network strategies be clear on both the customer segment they are targeting and on their objectives.  They also need to clearly understand where their customers are already spending time on-line and how a new community might provide a more valuable experience for customers.  A good exercise, for instance, is to put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customers and use Google and other search engines to find relevant communities on pages one, two and three of the search result.  Once you identify where your customers are hanging out, assess the communities to determine their attractions.  This is the only way you can identify potential “open space” opportunities which should be tested with customers before jumping to build and launch a site.  If there are no clear open space opportunities, consider partnering and/or sponsoring an existing community with an eye toward increasing its value and achieving brand objectives.  I believe if Walmart had gone through a planning process — that included testing — they would have quickly learned that The Hub was totally uncool to the kids they were targeting.  They might have pursued a MySpace approach that if executed really well would still be making friends.  There are a couple great cases out there from which can learn, too.  Microsoft’s Channel 9 has evolved in to a social network for developers in my view.  Robert Scoble, one of the founders of the site, says that it attracts 4 million folks per month and that number is growing 20 percent monthly (I think I learned that on this TWIT show).   Nike is quite pleased with their soccer community venture with Google — www.joga.com.  In a short timeframe they have attracted 1 million rabid soccer fans to the site according to one of my contacts at Nike (they are a GCI client).  joga.com used to be “by invitation only,” but with a Google account you can gain  now access and take a look around.

4 October 2006 | Cases, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Social Networks, Walmart | Comments