Harry Potter: Interactive Web Presence.

It seems that the fans took to Harry Potter so much that they started creating a huge number of fan websites along with the official movie websites. Along the way these websites became a force to reckon with and also a source of rumors and musings by fans. Finally the author JK Rowling had to start her own official website to dispel some of the misinformation and speculations.

The websites (a good list them available here ) are unique in several ways. Although they can spread rumors about a movie or a book like wildfire, they are also interesting vehicles that let you interact with the audiences and form communities around an event, book or a movie that is not very commercial in nature and also allowing you to tap into the creativity and collaborative imaginative power of these communities to expand your offerings.

AI the Movie and Interactive Presence

One of the first experiments that allowed audiences online to play with the central theme of a product was the Warner Brother's movie Artificial Intelligence (2001). The movie created so much buzz in terms of interactive audience participation that no other commercial product/event had ever done before. (see this article to delve deeper into the AI interactive campaign Artificial Intelligence - Viral Marketing and the Web )

The large difference between this campaign and the Harry Potter online phenomenon is that blogging or weblogs had not caught on as they have done today. Most of the websites that started the audience interaction craze were created by Warner Brothers themselves. Whereas, the Harry Potter fan-sites, except the official movies sites, the official JK Rowlings and Dan Radcliff sites, are created and maintained by fans themselves. Fans in this case got so much involved that one of popular fan sites automatically tracks a number of news sources that allow fans to get all the news at one place.

Audience Participation

Of course, marketers could look at this as an opportunity just to increase sales, but a more intelligent way would be to involve the audiences in extending the product itself without getting too distracted by the audience reactions. On the one hand it could help you promote your product and create more products, but on the other, entails the danger of distracting you so much through speculations and potential possibilities. Think of an author like JK Rowling who wrote her website herself and is ready to learn from her fans, and to incorporate some of the stuff into her Harry Potter series. This also carries the burden of understanding what fans really want, detecting themes that could be included or themes that would water down the desired effects of the product or an event. Audience participation here would mean that the creator, developer, producer learns form the fan whereas the fans themselves spread the word, draw more fans in (what has been called as "rubberneck" effect).

Content Analysis and Audience Participation

Since newer technological initiatives are trying to find ways to analyze content in automated fashion, it will be interesting to see how marketers use these technologies and methodologies to understand the audiences, consumers better. They need not just sell more but arrive at an interesting and engrossing balance, a formula that avoids overselling so that customers do not shy away like they do when they see a survey marketer approaching them on a street corner. Perhaps content analysis and text analysis is the future of suggestive marketing.

The other obvious question to ask is whether this collaborative audience/consumer participation theory will only work for certain types of "products" like books and movies or can they be extended to other products like shoes. It is important to note that media are reporting a blog started under the aegis of Gawker Media and Nike, (Art of Speed ) as an attempt to involve consumers along the similar lines.