It is one of the hardest thing to do for a marketing guy.
How do you talk about all of your customers and market momentum in a way that is intuitive, innovative, and plain and simply — not just a boring list of names and stats? (i.e. “30 of the fortune 50 use our product”, or a web page with 1000 logo’s on it … yawn)
We all know the age old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” — but again how do you do it with customers, and in many cases those that for a variety of reasons don’t or can’t be mentioned? One great way to show this is through a demographic map. Political campaigns have been doing it for years by coloring towns, counties, and States with their respective parties color as they get poll data to suggest voter preference. But again, without costly polling and surveys how does a company use data it has to project real-time maps of its customers.
Well I came across a really interesting idea when researching this problem. Sun wanted to show momentum for its free Solaris O/S program and created a visual map to show all of the SYSTEMS that were using the product. It hit me over the head — wow 80,000 plus users and it was interactive so I could see which neighbors and regions were in fact using the product. In other words … they sucked me in.
To do this they used a mapping tool that superimposed a red dot every place an installation occurs … right down to the street data (for privacy the really only show it to a zip code level). You can then scroll out for a world view or zoom in for a specific regional view. It even does the math to tell you how many systems are represented in a given view. What is truly innovative is how they automatically track the users by correlating subscribers to their software update service to the mapping system — providing real time/automatic charts.
This is a great example of using data your customers are willing to provide (when they register for a download or auto update feature), applying web technologies to graph the data, and then use cyberspace (in this case Suns CEO blog) to tell the world about it.
For more details on how this map was created they cover it here.
Again, another great example of using technology to tell a marketing story that is simple, powerful, and best of all something that people will remember.
