by Matt Rhodes on 22 January, 2010 - 10:02
LEGO is a brand that many people are very passionate about, a brand people love and we’ve written before about how they use segmentation to engage their consumer base from children to enthusiasts in an innovative way. Now they have continued their innovative approaches to engagement and embraced social media. In a big way.
They have launched LEGO CLICK, an online community that brings together innovators, designers, artists and creative thinkers to develop new ideas related to toys. The site is designed to bring together ideas in written form, images and videos. They want to capture and catalogue ‘lightbulb moments’, ideas that are relevant to toys and to the market LEGO serves.
Unlike other ideas communities, LEGO CLICK does not (at least not yet) allow users to rank and rate the ideas. It merely allows you to suggest your idea or to share ideas that you see and like or are interested in. What makes this site particularly interesting, though, is its use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr as a way of generating content for the site and promoting participation.
The LEGO CLICK community is a great example of the hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement. Users can contribute their ideas by tweeting with the hashtag #legoclick. They can contribute images by tagging their Flickr contributions with the same tag. And they can suggest ideas by video by tagging on YouTube in the same manner.
This is an interesting use of social networks to drive content to a community. In parts it is not dissimilar to the California Governor’s use of Twitter to harvest ideas for MyIdea4CA in 2009. It relies on contributions from users of other social networks and then brings them together in a single hub where different types of content from different sources meet.
What will be interesting to watch as this site develops is the amount, and the relevance of content that is created and added to LEGO CLICK. Currently there is a lot of content being dragged into the site that is discursive about the concept rather than the kind of ideas that the site is designed to harvest. It is getting a fair bit of content that is more like this particular blog post than an idea of lightbulb moment. This is one of the real problems with using tagging and a feed from other social networks to populate any site, but an online community in particular. You could end up with a lot of irrelevant content.
One of the things that MyIdea4CA did, and that it will be interesting to look for as LEGO CLICK develops, is to use rating and even commenting in the community as a way of sorting and prioritising ideas. The most popular or interesting ideas are likely to get the most votes or comments. And so these will rise to the top on the site, leaving the less relevant comment much further down.
But even without this kind of feature, LEGO CLICK is an interesting site and itself an innovative use of social media. Really driving the hub-and-spoke engagement model. Now we just need to watch to see what happens.
Image by Kaptain Kobold via Flickr
Original Post: http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2010/01/social-media-case-study-lego-click/
This blog reflects the personal opinions of individual contributors and does not represent the views of Futurelab, Futurelab's clients, or the contributors' respective employers or clients.
RSS
Rory says:
19 Aug 2010, 23:15
I think Rachel is right and LEGO is very aware of the value of outliers when gathering thoughts and ideas. These outliers are a core output of their own LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology. The ranking process could eliminate some of the more radical but also potentially valuable ideas so I would imagine that they may prefer to hear the dialog and the "open discussions".
Andy Smith says:
23 Jan 2010, 03:12
This sounds like a really amazing idea, albeit one with a few bugs to be worked out. For starters, I think the fact that the "Lego" brand is attached to the strategy. For people of the generation that will be offering new ideas on Lego Click, Lego was probably one of their first experiences with the creative process. As such, the name carries with it the innocence of childhood which might allow people to feel less self-conscious about throwing out ideas. I was curious about the potential of copyright conflicts, however. Is there anything in place so that ideas on new toys might flow freely without the concern that ones innovations are going to be "stolen." Or, more pertinently perhaps, will people hold back in sharing their ideas out of concern that someone else will profit.
Rachel S says:
22 Jan 2010, 18:07
What an interesting idea! I can understand qualms about having an over-abundance of "irrelevant content" falling outside the stated goal of gathering toy-specific light bulb ideas. However, the optimist in me sees the potential for innovation in an environment that allows (or, even encourages) discourse surrounding "irrelevant" content. Perhaps from those side-discussions we will see useful developments in tangential, but related, areas. To me, it is the open-discussion platform provided by social media that holds promise for future leaps forward.
Add your comment