Guest Post (3rd of 5): Andre Yap on Using Micromarketing to Power #GoogleHaven

Andre Yap, Ripple100

As part of our commitment to bringing you information and opinions about the future of technology, this guest post features Andre Yap, founder and CEO of Ripple100, the micromarketing App|Agency. Ripple100 uses video microsites to turn marketing into bite-size stories that move people to action.

Andre’s series focuses on the story behind New Haven’s recent bid to become a pilot city for Google Fiber (more). Continued from the 2nd of 5.

Eleven months ago I sat in Clayton Christensen’s couch at Harvard, talking innovation with the dean of innovation. The key question, as we prepped for late-evening call with an Asian client: what makes for disruptive innovation? Answer: when entire new customer segments hire a product to do a job they wouldn’t otherwise have the the skills or money to do – that’s disruptive innovation. More here.

Productizing jobs: it’s a simple framework that informs how we’ve approached GoogleHaven.

At Ripple100, our product’s job is to grab a big marketing campaign – such as mobilizing the New Haven community to tell Google to choose us over 1,099 other cities – and break it down into bite-size pieces (hence we call it micromarketing). Our app uses video microsites to get the job done – to turn big marketing into stories and personalities that move people to act. It’s a big job that small businesses, nonprofits, political campaigns and grassroots initiatives like GoogleHaven need done, but have neither skills nor resources to do. Ripple100 gets that job done: story-telling.

The result is 10 Days: The Story of How New Haven Became GoogleHaven. We did a campaign a day in the 10 days left to Google’s March 26 deadline. We held no fantasies about mobilizing New Haven as a monolithic bloc. Instead, we micro-mobilized so that on Day 1 we pitched to residents, Day 2 to entrepreneurs, Day 3 to nonprofits, Day 4 to women, Day 5 to schools, and so on – one audience, pitch, and call to action at a time. Or, as we say, one ripple at a time. Each one a story.

This is how each story happens:

1. Cast of characters. Each day’s pitch had a different audience, so we picked between 1-20 people from the day’s target audience. E.g., to pitch to nonprofits, we chose 3 members of that community.
2. Tell the story. Good stories start from questions that need resolution. In this case: how is the web commonly used in their constituent group? and thus, how would 100x faster internet change their game?
3. Pack into bite-size pieces. We used video microsites for a short (elevator) pitch that prompted audiences to watch the video, hear the story, and respond (click) on specific calls to action. Key is to keep it short and sweet, because of #4.
4. Share the story. We gave the video microsites to each target audience who saw one of their own telling their stories, which increased resonance and conversion rates.
5. Measure. Each story had ripple effects, which we tracked, how many views, shares, actions taken, connections made.

The best thing about stories is they tell themselves. Here’s a sampler of what we found: 3 Big Reasons and a Song, What Women Want, and a 60-Second Hero. GoogleHaven is a story that didn’t end with Google’s March 26 deadline. It’s still being written and we are, all of us, its authors.

Next Up: The Birth of #GoogleHaven

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