A few weeks ago I told you about the first part of our Win7 launch strategies; MeetUp’s. Today I’m going to reveal the cornerstone of our social media strategy, the Social Media Hub.
What’s a Social Media Hub? The hub, as we call it, is a webpage that serves as an aggregation site for all the social conversation going on across the web and bringing it to one place for people to explore, learn, and share. The Hub launches on October 22nd with our Windows7 launch.
Why a Hub? The most important thing for us in the launch is to share it with our most passionate customers. We’ve had the benefit of over 3 million people using the Win7 beta for the last 9 months and we want to share this launch with them. The best way I know to do that is to let their voice be heard come launch day. So we’ve turned over the conversation to our customers.
How does it work? We built an application on top of a internally developed platform codenamed LookingGlass. The application pulls API feeds from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flicker and RSS feeds from blogs into an administrator tool. As long as the content is tagged Windows7 it will pull in. The application then sorts the content by predetermined categories. Think of the categories like newspaper sections, with so much information you want the reader to be able to sort according to their interests. The categories we determined are on the right navigation so a reader can cut the content to only read what he/she is interested in. There is also a general category that is the default state. Below is a screenshot of what the homepage will look like.
The big number in the top left is the total volume of conversations going on in the social web relating to Windows7. This number shows breadth and impact the product is having.
The navigation across the top lets the reader segment the content by type, tweets, YouTube videos, blog posts, Facebook posts, etc. There is also a tally of how many feeds from each type of content in the middle of the right navigation. I expect Twitter will have the biggest impact but you never know.
This strategy is designed to bring ‘earned media’ media together with owned. Owned media is the digital properties a brand controls, web pages. Once a reader clicks into the content on our hub they are shown the pop up below. The pop up gives them the option to share it, read the original post which takes them to the post Twitter OR gives them contextually relevant copy that will take them to Windows.com for more information. The example below is a gaming tweet that drives the reader to a place within Windows.com that is relevant to the content in the tweet. It allows us to leverage peer to peer conversation and move the reader through the sales funnel by driving them into Windows.com.
This strategy is one step in our commitment to sharing our marketing with our advocates. This hub is not a Campaign Landing page but rather a long term commitment to bringing our customer voice front and center in our marketing. When the Win7 launch is over the hub will evolve for Microsoft.com. The platform investment will continue to pay off as we roll more products into this hub. You can imagine changing the topics to products and having multiple products featured, XBox, Office, Windows, Bing.
More to come. It goes Prime Time on October 22nd.
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Looks pretty cool!