Social Media Lesson's From Microsoft? What You Can Learn From Microsoft Kin

Disclosure prior to joining Qworky I was a Product Planner at Microsoft working within Television, Music and Video one of the groups that gave birth to the Kin. While I did not work directly on the Kin, it’s ‘codename’ was a semi-frequent resident of meetings and product plan discussions. This post is cross posted from Mikal Lewis’ personal business blog because of its relevance to Social Media, a core component of Qworky’s growth strategy.

Color me impressed. And it seems I’m not the only one impressed by the Kin.

When the Kin by Microsoft launched Microsoft demonstrated a few things, the most important is that it still remains an organization that learns- even if it learns slowly. The Kin demonstrated both that Microsoft could launch a product geared towards a specific audience, and that it can successfully launch a consumer product.

What is the Kin?

To use Microsoft’s language, Kin is a ‘social phone’ built using Windows Phone OS.

Ok.

So simply put kin is a new smart phone that emphasizes social network integration that hyper social 15-25 year olds desire most. Fittingly, this is a target market previously served by the T-Mobile Side Kick. The makers of which, Danger, were acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $500M.

Why is it Unique?

Well, I think this video highlights it best but simply put Kin is more people centric and incorporates sharing and micro-blogging in a way not yet seen of any mobile OS. Think about it this way if you’re the type of person that is addicted to foursquare and has over 10,000 twitter status updates this phone might be for you.

Microsoft attacks competitors head on in consumer spaces, competing primarily on features (Microsoft Zune V1 and V2) and occasionally on features and price (See Windows Live OneCare Antivirus software). Now granted many of the Microsoftees working on the Kin product envision themselves squarely in the hipster, How to Make it In America, subculture Kin targets in their videos – so I give Microsoft partial but not full credit on their ability to segment market and target underserved niches.

Where Microsoft aptly deserves full credit is in their social media strategy.

Read more for the full social media case study on what you can learn from Microsoft Kin

Kin, A Case Study in Social Media

To examine Kin’s social media strategy let’s look at in three components: Integration, Outreach and Narrative.

Integration

Integration highlights how well all social media touch points and product touch points are tied together into one strategy. For example, if I’m a Facebook fan I like a business on Facebook how well does that business funnel me to their other social media channels for continued engagement?

Grade: A

First off, I truly believe Kin’s press center is the best I’ve ever seen. I think it sets a new benchmark and while hosted on a Microsoft.com domain remains consistent with Kin’s branding. Under the related links’ section they have links to all of Kin’s social media properties. For just about every social media property they’ve also secured Kin as their name. For example here are their social media addresses:

• Twitter.com/Kin
• Facebook.com/Kin
• Youtube.com/Kin
• Myspace.com/Kin

This highlights a prioritization of social media platforms. This is both fitting for Kin’s target market and a new strategy for Microsoft. We’re talking about a company that still doesn’t own LiveSearch.com even when that was effectively their product name (before Bing) for two years.

The reason Microsoft achieves an A is its integration of Kin brand elements across all touch points and except their twitter presence, encourages you to connect with Kin across all social media addresses.

Outreach

Outreach is the breadth of a social media presence. For example does the business have a presence on all the social media channels you would expect? And if so is the community presence active or token?

Grade: B-

Microsoft does a great job in maintaining a presence on the standard social networks one would expect: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace. However, some of the channels seem a bit devoid of the social. Kin’s MySpace page has over 2500 friends but only 37 comments. It seems to serve primarily as a commercial for its YouTube videos. YouTube with fewer subscribers has over 100 comments and over 250K views.

The problem is while Kin maintains presences that are aesthetically pleasing, many of their social media platforms are devoid of true social media interaction. For example in the midst of comments on both YouTube and MySpace a comment about the next Teaser drops in almost as if it is an untargeted ad.

Which I think brings to the final point. Kin’s presence really begs for more community. In my opinion, it currently seems like Kin is hosting a great party but instead of collaborating on the playlist they are dictating the music played regardless of what people came to hear.

Kin’s social media presence is begging for a ‘User Voice’ or ‘Get Satisfaction’ presence to engage, interact and answer questions. For example, while there appears to be literally hundreds of comments via Facebook. Kin’s only comments are faux-engagement: ads in the form of questions encouraging people to watch more videos, no true engagement.

The one area Microsoft seems to abandon these rules is Twitter, which appears to be a rapid response to people discussing Kin or @replying Kin on Twitter.

In my view, this is missing out on an opportunity to have true conversations and dialogue where people are specifically reaching out for more interaction on the Kin.com website, and the YouTube, Myspace and Facebook channels.

(And why is there no Kin blog?)

Narrative

Narrative is the story told (or engagement offered) through the social media journey. For example if I follow all your social media presence. Where does the journey lead? What do I gain from following on Facebook + Twitter? A different experience? A new narrative?

Grade: A

For Kin all roads of the narrative point to video, both product videos and a creative social media video campaign that looks like it could be an MTV television pilot. So let’s discuss.

If you go to Kin.com you can see no shortage of slickly produced ‘trailers’ of people enjoying life and being connected with Kin. However, where Microsoft really shines and gets creativity points is in the aforementioned video campaign which originally compelled me to write this case study.

Microsoft gave Rosa a Kin “the Windows Phone built to handle your social life” and gave her travel budget to visit a few of her 824 friends. ‘The Journey’ is the slickly produced video narrative of her travels. Here is the first video in the series:

What makes this narrative excellent, is how it’s been integrated in the advertisements. On both Facebook and MySpace, I’ve seen slickly crafted ads that really compel people to view the narrative.

How powerful is this advertisement + video narrative combination? Ten days ago Kin had 41K Facebook fans now they have over 90K.

To put this in context Yahoo has 119K fans, MSN which is using its homepage to attract fans through has 111K fans and Zune has 63K. A brand introduced to the world a month ago is rapidly gaining on one of the top five internet properties in the US in terms of number of Facebook Fans. Impressive.

This is great execution on Microsoft’s part and proof they’ve touched a nerve with their ‘Journey’ campaign. I think this campaign could benefit from using properties like Kin.com put back story and other information related to Rosa, Kin, and her journey.

Intangibles: B

Kin.com does direct you to a mobile site that doesn’t incorporate flash, which shows a more holistic view than is typically taken with social media campaigns.

Final Verdict: A-

A well executed product launch built upon a strong and creative video narrative but falls short in true community. I have to say though, I’m impressed, and doubly impress this has come from Microsoft.

What can we of meager budgets learn?

(1) Find a narrative that Juices the Orange. The million dollar value of this campaign comes from creativity (creating the Journey video campaign) in contrast to raw dollar output. In order to garner attention businesses need to succeed at Juicing the Orange. What is interesting about your business, your product or your service that is worth talking about or staying tuned for? The will it blend team discovered theirs. And going further. How do you discuss it differently across platforms? (Annie has some well articulated thoughts here, maybe she’ll share in a blog post)

(2) Facebook’s ads, if you have the budget, seem to deliver results. We have yet to experiment in this realm so take with a grain of salt but Kin’s fan growth is no doubt noteworthy.

(3) Pay attention to your Facebook landing page. Again an area Qworky will need to improve, but if you go to Kin’s Facebook page you immediately land on interesting content without having to wade through discussions.

(4) And lastly integration, the people you’ve convinced to engage with your brand once are the ones most easy to convince to engage again. Across all platforms encourage your audience to connect in multiple ways- and always offer unique value on each platform for which they’ve connected.

Thank you for reading!

What are your thoughts? Where does the campaign excel or fall short?