People are your partners in communication

When you think about your potential customers as a target, you also make a massive error in attitude. Target infers that all we need do is reach them with the right message at the right moment and it will drop into their eagerly waiting minds. This simply isn't the case – an opportunity to see is also an opportunity to miss.

So we need to do more than present them with our sales pitch – we need to find ways to engage them in what our brands are doing. Not only are they not simply a target, they are potentially our most powerful allies.

Human beings have an inbuilt desire to spread their own ideas. There are compelling anthropological reasons for this. We pass on our ideas in order to modify the minds of people we interact with, to make them more like ours, because this delivers an evolutionary advantage: there is safety in numbers.

Propagate ideas

So people are already primed to propagate ideas. However, the mechanisms that created this urge to pass things on are set up to favour our own ideas, not other people's ideas and certainly not brand ideas, unless people have been given, in some way, ownership of them.

Propagation planning is a model for communications that takes this into account. People are our partners in communication. Not a target audience and not just nodes for further transmission, but partners in the production, modulation, development and distribution of brand ideas.

In order to give people ownership of brand ideas, and therefore give them a reason to propagate them, we need to provide tools and assets, give them permission to remix and re-imagine the ideas.

We need to stop thinking about creative products and think about opening up the process. When the Sony “Balls” television launched we observed that people were remixing it and putting their efforts up on YouTube. We paid attention to our partners and put that learning into practice when “Paint” launched.

Working with a team consisting of clients, Fallon, Freud, Tonic and OMD we carefully planned, orchestrated and executed a campaign to turn the television commercial into a social object, leveraging the power of the our partners.

Different channels were loaded with different information and the process of making the film was opened up to interested parties in a way that added intrigue to the commercial.

News of the director was leaked to the press, as was the location of the shoot to the local media.

Transmedia narrative

People were thus invited to participate from the outset, attending the shoot, capturing it on cameras and camera phones, footage which then went straight onto Flickr and YouTube, two of the pre-eminent propagation platforms.

By building a transmedia narrative around the commercial, and dripping developments online, a specific attempt was made to engage people in an open and transparent conversation with the brand. Bloggers responded well and built up anticipation for the ad.

The film was first released online and then screened on television. Online, the assets of the film were made available for remixing. The campaign intentionally engaged those consumers that are most interested in being involved in the process to turn a single television commercial into a six month campaign.

A variant on the same model has been employed in the launch of the final episode in the trilogy, that launched recently on the newly created site www.colourlikenoother.com with teasers being leaked online and key bloggers being given exclusive access to the behind the scenes footage.

People are primed to pass things on. In a world of social media, content is communication. Forwarding something is like a phatic poke, saying hi without saying anything. When we start thinking of people as partners, we'll let them tailor our content to make it theirs, and let them do the talking.

• Yakob is the guest international speaker at the ‘Brands in the digital world' conference being hosted by Knowledge Resources in Johannesburg on 30 October 2007. Bizcommunity.com is the online media partner to this anticipated event. For more information on the conference, go to {www.colorxtreme.co.za/Knowledge%20Resources/Digital%20World/index.htm}} or email .