Engagement and the Galaxies

I came across Galaxy Zoo earlier today. Basically, the site uses volunteers to catalog different types of galaxies that can be found outside of our own. In their own words, Galaxy Zoo is "the project which harnesses the power of the internet - and your brain - to classify a million galaxies." It launched in July, 2007, and so far has well over 100,000 active volunteers (one estimate I saw in doing a little research put the number at over 150,000). Their user Forum on the Web site, has only 8,000 registered and active users. So far the volunteers have cataloged, well, let's just say more galaxies than the founders could ever have hoped for. Speaking of the founders, a number of peer reviewed papers have been published based on the results.

And they have done this without any advertising, having basically built a brand by simply engaging a community (that they weren't even sure existed when they launched?) in something meaningful and useful.

Earlier today, I was reading an article by Bob Greenberg, chairman of R/GA in Contagious Magazine (an incredible publication I'm planning to post about in the near future). Basically he put forth in the article that "consumers have demonstrated time and again that they will quickly adopt whatever they find useful and meaningful in their lives - with or without advertising to prompt them." In the article, he was mainly talking about consumer technology products and how the really meaningful (and successful) technology product campaigns are focused on the utility and use of the product (Apple's iPhone) , and have moved away from (less successful) emotional and metaphorical themes (Motorola's Razr). Other examples would be Google, which has become the #1 brand in the world with absolutely no consumer advertising, or Facebook, which has 100 million users, and I don't think even has an ad agency.

Not that I want to disagree with Mr. Greenberg, but in my mind, what these products (the successful ones at least) all have in common is engagement, which is at a much deeper level than the 'utility' of the campaigns mentioned in the article. Everyone that I know who has gotten an iPhone (and I think I'm the last person I know who doesn't have one) is so 'involved' with it. It's not just a phone to them - they feel and have stated out loud that it has changed their lives. Likewise with Facebook. How many times a day do those of us who have accounts check them, and update the status, or upload photos? The people who use it are so involved with it, constantly searching for and finding more and more 'friends.' I know that both my wife (the divine Miss J) and I sit and watch TV, she with her laptop, me with mine, and are both on Facebook, sometimes even having FB IM conversations with each other (yes, I know, no comments, please).

So, the question is, what is your organization doing to to engage with your customers? Are you just selling a product or service, or are you providing something deeper and more meaningful to the community that is out there? As a marketer, what is it that you are doing to not only try and find, but to then engage this community, just as GalaxyZoo did (and did it so successfully that they didn't even need to advertise)? It's not an easy thing to do, I know. It's something I think about every day, about how do we (at Sapient, my employer) fully engage not only our disparate client communities, over and above the actual services we are contracted to provide, but also non-clients. Over the next few months, we are going to be trying a few things, so I'll let you know how they work out.

But if you have some ideas, 'friend' me on Facebook, and then send me a message from your iPhone.