Recently in Branded Identity/Communities Category

Keep in mind that these videos are not merely informative, but vehicles for building value in the brand of each YouTube personality, especially for a YouTube personality like Renetto. He is marketing himself and his "special" status to the corporate community and to the YouTube audience.

He and others are also acting as a kind a quasi-market test for the corporate entities that they have contact with.

Renetto is a "normal" guy from Ohio, who apparently came on to YouTube as one of the mass, but has built a kind of brand identity as the un-official spokesman for YouTube users - with the accompanied scorn and support of YouTubers.

He obviously leverages this to establish relationships with corporate entities as well as other users. This is for his own advantage, and that has a negative connotation for some on YouTube. So there is an aspect of "credibility”, that is unique and complicated in this format of distribution. YouTubers tend to poo poo polished content, or content that is not "real" as much as they tend to go into a frenzied delight over the controversy. It is a distribution channel with its own content expectation and delivery style tensions. How credible serialized content is depends on a delicate interplay of reality and verisimilitude.

You might not have heard of social networking company Community Connect. It's a small, rapidly growing outfit that has built three MySpace-like sites, MiGente.com, AsianAvenue.com, and BlackPlanet.com, that target Latinos, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans, respectively. The sites are successful, with a total of some 16 million registered users.

The number is a fraction of MySpace's 100 million registered users, but Community Connect Chief Operating Officer Court Cunningham says it is the third largest social networking company in the U.S. in terms of revenue (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/28/2006, "Niche Networking by the Numbers").

With a growing market and more competitors entering the fray, Community Connect is aiming to take the social networking world by storm, one niche market at a time. When it launches its gay and lesbian-targeted site, Glee.com, by the end of 2006, Sun says his company's target market will grow by 40 million to 50 million, which is what he estimates the U.S. gay and lesbian population to be.

"That's almost the population of France, so our strategy of going niche isn't going too niche, since there are still big markets to conquer," he says. Next up: another niche site geared toward evangelical Christians, scheduled to launch in January, 2007. That site doesn't have a name yet.

"Some other sites are consumed like news info, but the Community Connect sites are more suited for integration of promotions and micro-sites," says Albert Thompson, director of interactive services for UniWorld Group, which handles online advertising for AstraZeneca (AZN), Ford (F), Lincoln, Burger King (BKC), and HSBC Bank (HBC). "There's a huge difference between banners and getting involved. It's the natural law as it pertains to rules of engagement," he adds.

"This is the second wave of social networking," says Greg Sterling, founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on online consumer and advertiser behavior. The first wave, Sterling says, was typified by Friendster, where people found the sites fascinating, but where there was no clear business model, though there was some flirtation with selling classifieds. The second wave coincided with the rise of MySpace (NWS), which was organized around interests in music while developing a huge user base—more of a portal with a range of different revenue streams.

Community Connect co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ben Sun says social networking is still in its "primordial ooze phase" and that, as dating sites did in the last several years, the business will continue to undergo differentiation, and even the big players will veer away from serving the masses. "More and more competitors will work to super-serve the needs of the niche groups," says Sun (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/12/06, "Buying Sites with a Built-in Audience").

Sterling says sites that rely on user-generated content are becoming common and have been surprisingly hard to monetize (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/19/06, "Social Networking's Gold Rush"). That's why Community Connect's business model is well suited to changing market tastes. When the dot-com bust forced Community Connect to diversify its revenue stream away from just advertising, it chose personals, at least partially due to the success of dating sites like Match.com and others.

"Our BlackPlanet users said 'all the black community is here, give us tools to find other African-Americans who are serious about dating and relationships, and we'll pay for it,'" says Sun. Community Connect soon replicated the service for all three of its sites.

Today, 15% of Community Connect's revenues come from online personal subscriptions. Advertising comprises 50% of its revenue, and 35% comes from job postings. The success of the job posting component of Community Connect resulted in a partnership with Monster.com (MNST), one of the largest job listing sites on the Web.

Monster.com had been unable to help its thousands of corporate clients develop diversity recruitment programs, since isolating minority applications would violate equal opportunity law. By partnering with Community Connect, Monster was able to secure résumés for clients from a database of job-seekers, 95% of whom were minorities (see BusinessWeek.com, Fall '06, "Hand in Glove").

There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach.  One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 34 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of corporate mandate.  Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system. 

I am not suggesting that the gaming generation, of which I am a part, is somehow untethered to history.  Instead, I want to emphasize that the boomers polemic between left and right overlooks how truly different this generation is.  To paraphrase David Brooks, this generation has simply moved on from the culture war in many respects.  Other commentators have illustrated how the game generation has put its resources into transforming corporate America in a similar way its predecessors channeled its own energy into political and social movements.  Some, like John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in Got Game have gone so far as to say that the dot com era was an example of this corporate revolution and symptomatic of the game generation's predilection for role playing, in other words, Sims taken beyond the confines of the console.

The evolution of brand and branded communities is provocative in another respect.  Multinational corporations have growing political and commercial leverage that is unfettered from the confines of the nation state.  That phenomena presents a challenge to the polis but also changes the way constituents, if only subconsciously, organize themselves.  In a commercial world, branded communities, become social organs as much as a commercial one.  The notion infuses the gaming generations unique identity and illustrates another way in which they have ostensibly moved on from the polemic that sets art against commerce.

In the new world, media and technology must play to these sensibilities if they intend to reap the rewards of the younger demographic.  I would not be surprised in ten years if movie and home theaters became virtual environments equivalent to branded paintball.  Gamers demand a heightened sense of reality and want to be engaged with their media in a way far more intense than the boomer's relationship with television.  Virtual Laguna Beach is in my mind symptomatic of the beginning of this transformation.

Advertising Age - Digital - How MTV Plans to Let Anyone on 'Laguna Beach'

Excerpts:

"Think of virtual Laguna Beach as a cross between Second Life, the online virtual world community that opened in 2003, and popular computer game The Sims. "

"MTV Networks figures that a single "resident" of its virtual world can translate into $150 of incremental revenue, based on estimates from existing virtual world There.com, whose technology fuels VLB -- or "Virtual Laguna Beach." And that doesn't count revenue from potential advertising. MTV is already in talks with marketers Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Cingular and Paramount about developing campaigns for the virtual version."

They use the keyboard to walk or run around the island and a toolbar along the bottom of the computer screen offers more functions and can adjust their physical appearances -- from hair color to face shape to complexion. They can go shopping, exchanging MTV dollars for, say, new clothes or a surfboard (they earn MTV dollars by spending time in the world and interacting with brands).

"MTV promises advertising will be much more than billboards on the side of the virtual sidewalk or product placements and said the opportunities for behavioral targeting are "incredible." They also haven't worked out the ad rates -- in part because no one's exactly sure what the ad model will end up looking like."

"'We didn't back into revenue expectations,' said Sean Moran, exec VP-MTV 360 ad sales. 'This is a case of you can't put the cart before the horse.' (For context, however, in the kid- and brand-friendly virtual world Whyville, cost-per-thousand rates range from $6 to $30 and onetime sponsorship setup fees range from $25,000 to $250,000.)"

"Michael Wilson, CEO of Makena Technologies, which created and powers There.com, says the virtual worlds are a breeding ground for focus groups and consumer research."

"'There are a lot of unsafe places online, and we wanted to make this a safe place for our audience and our advertiser partners,' said Jeff Yapp, exec VP-program enterprises at MTV Networks' Music Group."

"MTV developed the project primarily in-house, using about 20 employees over four months. So if it doesn't work, Mr. Toffler said, it's not like the company went out and spent $50 million on an acquisition that bombed. (MTV execs wouldn't outline exactly how much the initiative cost, but earlier this summer Viacom Chief Financial Officer Mike Dolan said broadband channel Overdrive was built with an investment of $5 million over eight months.)"

"VBL is the first step in a series of virtual communities MTV hopes to build around music and lifestyles -- look for a Logo-themed world to launch in 2007, for example."

"Soon VBL will include an e-commerce aspect (the first step will be working with the actual stores in the real Laguna Beach before expanding it out to other national retailers) and launch a second-tier subscription-based service for residents who want the ultimate virtual lifestyle -- who want to live in a waterfront beach house, for example."