Role: As CEO/President and co-founder of Brickfish®, Nichole oversees all facets of the company. Nichole has a proven executive management record, with over 20 years of experience successfully building technology companies. Under her leadership, Brickfish has received the prestigious Red Herring Award as one of the Top 100 Global technology companies in the world, an OMMA Award for Best Viral Campaign and a Forrester Award for best social program.
Background: Nichole is a serial entrepreneur, having helped build many emerging technology startup companies ranging from educational technology, business automation systems, multi-media video delivery software, Web-based Ecommerce sites, Internet based software products and a social media advertising platform. A company co-founder, Brickfish represents Nichole’s seventh career startup. Since its inception four and a half years ago, Nichole has successfully taken Brickfish from an emerging social media company to an award winning Social Media SolutionTM , used by top agencies and brands around the world.
As a member of the IAB’s Social Media Committee, Nichole was the Chair for the Social Media Buying Guide. Nichole has spoken at numerous events including OMMA Social, Advertising Week, CES, Digital Hollywood, the Illinois Research Institute, Stanford University, Social Media Strategies for Brands, IAB Professional Development Workshops and many others. Nichole holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Computer Information Systems with a minor in Economics from the University of Montana.
What lessons have you learned about building communities for brands?
The community has to be authentic to the consumer. They will see right through any false sentiment. Giving them opportunities to participate with the brand through user-generated content really helps communities thrive through authenticity. In one of our recent campaigns, we created a space for people who eat Barilla pasta to post their dinnertime moments as a part of their Share the Table program. This works because Barilla is giving their community the opportunity to express themselves. In doing so, they remain authentic to their brand image as a company that values dinnertime. Communities thrive on that because they can so easily connect to it.
Another social media campaign we did was for Coach. Coach looked to their consumers to create new tote designs that embodied a younger demographic. Over 3,200 unique totes were designed for this campaign for the chance at having Coach produce and sell the winning tote. Coach’s brand evangelists were given the opportunity to be brand designers. All other Coach consumers were given the opportunity to provide feedback in the form of reviews, sharing and voting about which tote they liked best and why. The word spread beyond the core group of brand evangelists, because once someone designed a bag, the designer could use the Brickfish viral sharing tools to easily share and track their designs through their social connections. This resulted in over 6.5 million consumer engagements around the topic of designing a tote for Coach in just a 6 week period. Both campaigns gave the community a chance to express themselves and participate with the brands via peer to peer interaction and sharing on the social Web.
How do you leverage an established community to keep it growing?
Communities on the social Web have multiple touch points. I like to think of it as Social CRM. Brands have their owned channels such as email, company site, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter Profile, Company blogs and the like. Each of these channels is a micro community within the brands overall Social CRM system. It is important to first realize that we have entered an era where distribution of the brands community is a reality and we can no longer focus on just the number of email names a brand has in their CRM. It is also important to recognize that consumer sharing about a brand experience has a far greater effect than just a brand sharing direct with a consumer. At Brickfish, we have developed a cross social platform that will allow a brand to leverage and interact with all of their social CRM touch points and harness the power between peer to peer sharing throughout each consumers’ social graph. We help brands identify their key brand evangelists across all social CRM touch points. That core is the group that will best move your message out. Growing your community through them is very authentic and effective. According to a recent Nielsen survey 90% of consumers trust WOM advertising from someone they know. An astounding 70% of consumers trust product reviews and opinion from strangers. This makes taping in to the core brand evangelists a critical part of building and keeping a community thriving.
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