Now, let’s see the power of music

If you were in Hangzhou, China, on March 20th, 2017, when you were waiting for a subway train, you might come across a special train decorated with posters of comments from NetEase Music. That was a campaign started by NetEase music—a music and video streaming platform in China. Two days after NetEase Music launched the special train, the campaign became the hottest topic on China’s social media. How successful was it? Let’s see some data.

According to WeChat Index, the keyword “NetEase Music” has a sharp increase on March 20th and reaches a peak on March 23th. The data indicates that during that period, a large number of users on WeChat were discussing NetEase Music.

From Baidu Index, we can also find that during the campaign (from March 20th to March 27th), the searching of “NetEase Music” is more than before.

The success of this campaign on social media not only attracts more users for NetEase Music but also benefits the financial state of the company. In the book of Groundswell, we have learned that on the Internet, traffic equals money (p.37).  The campaign generates such a huge success on social media that it significantly affects the stock price of NetEase Music. The total market value of NetEase increases about 2 billion dollars in 24 hours.

After reading the information above, you may be curious about how this offline marketing campaign finally leads to the success of creating large traffic on social media. What is the connection between the campaign and the groundswell? Don’t worry! In the following paragraphs, we will discuss how NetEase takes advantage of groundswell and finally creates such a wonderful campaign.

Superficially, the campaign of NetEase Music seems to be an offline one. However, the essential goal of the campaign is to encourage people to take pictures of these “comments posters,” share them on social media and discuss them with other people on social media platforms. The core point of this campaign is to hit the hearts of people who see the posters and make them feel resonated. Then how to do that? The answer is taking advantage of groundswell.

1.    Groundswell Thinking
As Li and Bernoff mentioned in their book, groundswell thinking is to understand the groundswell and work with it. You need to harness the power of your opponent for your own advantage (p.17). In the case of NetEase music, they harness the power of their users. Before they started this campaign, NetEase did a survey to see how users think about the comments to songs. And it turned out that most users felt touched and resonated when they read the comments. Thus, from the very beginning, NetEase music understands that they need to listen to their users’ opinions and figure out what kind of content that people may be interested in. Based on this idea, they started the campaign.

2.    Resonate people’s impulse and emotion
In the book of Groundswell, the authors argue that people participate in the groundswell for different reasons, and one of them is the validation impulse (p.60). In this campaign, NetEase Music nicely captured a tool from groundswell to spark people’s emotional impulse—the comments to songs. These comments are UGC (User Generated Content). When users are listening to music, and are resonated by the music, they may write down their thoughts and stories in the comments area of the song. Then other people also can read, thumb up, and comment these thoughts when they are listing to the music. The most popular comments will show up at the top of the comment area. In this way, NetEase Music successfully builds a community for people to express themselves.

You can imagine that when you are listening to a song, suddenly, you feel touched by it. You really want to share your feelings with other people. Then you open the comments area and see that there are people who share the same feeling with you! At that moment, you know that you are not alone. This is how NetEase Music raises people's emotional impulse. Now, let’s go back to the campaign. What they did in the campaign is the same thing. They listed the top 500 popular comments and selected 85 of them to print on posters. These comments express people’s emotion of loneliness, sadness, and happiness. When you see these comments, as long as you are resonated, you will be willing to share them with other people. Since these comments can hit the hearts of the most users, it will be able to touch more people in the campaign.

3.    Correctly using the POST
Although the manager of NetEase Music may not know about the POST method in the book of groundswell(p.67), what they did in this campaign does follow the method. First of all, they know their customers. They know what they want and what will be the most efficient way to touch them. Then, they clearly know their objectives. What they want is to let more people know them. Besides, they use the correct strategy. By using the comments from UGC, they intend to resonate the emotional impulse of potential users. The technology they use is not complicated, but it is efficient to convey their idea to the target audience.

The success of this campaign is the best proof of how powerful the groundswell is. Our users’ thoughts and ideas do matter to us. Thus, we should listen carefully to them, harness power from them, and take advantage of them.