Written on May 1, 2008 – 8:27 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The legendary Danish toy manufacturer - who hasn’t played with the colorful bricks? - once again proves to be a modern company. After near-dead experience five years ago, Europe’s largest toymaker has been embracing the new possibilities of this digital era - like crowd sourcing - to keep children hooked to the pirates, knights, ordinary and science fiction figures. Next Web editor and crowd sourcing expert Eric Bun admitted in March that even he was tempted to download the Lego programs and start designing Lego projects.
Lego blogger
During a press conference at the Lego HQ in Billund, Mark William Hansen announced the launch of Lego Universe, a MMOG that lets players create online versions of themselves and interact with each other. It isn’t just some - let’s do something with online games- idea, as Hansen ended up at Lego after writing his doctoral thesis about mass customization.
The PC game Lego Universe will mix real-world style environments with the funny-looking characters and buildings made of plastic bricks. After creating a personalized avatar, users can spend virtual money to buy virtual bricks. Yet they don’t need real money to acquire this online currency. Hansen explained to Reuters: “The more a child plays, they collect more coins and more bricks. The more you play, the more you get to build things. We want kids to come and play together”.
I love this tactic, and hope it will prevent fraud and theft scandals as happened with Habbo Hotel. And if it doesn’t, at least kids won’t spend all their pocket-money on virtual bricks, they should spent that on soccer cards for crying out loud. Or real Lego bricks, and that’s probably what the Lego executives are hoping for.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on March 19, 2008 – 9:44 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Rebecca Jennings, a Senior Analyst from Forrester Research, talked about Social Computing in Europe: Facts & Figures. She asked how well social computing is being adopted in Europe. Why is the adoption and use of social computing different from country to country?
She started of with some examples to show how important social computing gets. Of course she mentioned Lego, the toys company who really gets how you can use your engaged following. For example, they asked the community what kind of Lego thing they wanted to see. The crowd asked for a bit more challenging object to build. So Lego launched the Lego Imperial Start Destroyer, an expensive Starwars space ship (80 euros). It was sold out in five weeks.
So Forrester figured it might be about time to do some profiling. Here’s what they came up with:
- Creators (10%) - creates content, like blogs and Flickr pictures
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Critics (19%) - commenting and participating
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Collectors (9%) - Following RSS feeds and social bookmarking
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Joiners (13%) - Maintain profiles on social networks
- Spectators (40%) - Watch, listen, read
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Inactives (55%) - guess what: none of the above
The percentages refer to the whole European population. When you look at the numbers per country, the Dutch turn out to be the keenest creators - reason for us to start yelling (sorry about that Rebecca). So why is that? Jennings thinks it’s because Holland was pretty early with affordable broadband. Yet cultural reasons do matter as well. Germans for example, are less into sharing than their Dutch neighbors.
Jennings waving at the yelling Dutchmen
If you look at different age groups, you notice that social media is a way of life for young customers. Companies should jump into this trend. A good example according to Jennings is Spine Breakers from Penguin Publishing. It’s a writing community for writing youngsters. The team of Spine Breakers gives their young users what they want, and it a huge part of the content is generated due to that philosophy.
So profiling should be the foundation of a company’s computing strategy. Companies have to ask themselves: What do we want to achieve? Then strategy evolves next. This is becoming more important everyday. “It’s a long term phenomenon. As you know, since I’m preaching to the converted”. In 5 to 10 years, we’ll see ubiquitous social networks, based on developments like open technology, shared identities, an information flow and advertisers who embrace the social influence of the community. And, as Jennings noted, thanks to internet entrepreneurs like us.
Update: check out the graph Ton Wesseling from Dutch blog Marketingfacts made.
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