Lessons in WOM from Brief Buddy

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This came in mail today. The image you see above of Brief Buddy. And the little write up below, under the sub head BRIEF BUDDY.

What struck me is the eminently sensible technique used here to leverage bloggers to spread the message about an impending product launch. The creators simply made the blogger's job easy by providing the write-up of the product and the necessary image to accompany the post. (Websites do it all the time to aid media professionals by having a media section with logos and company profiles. Maybe that's where the idea stems from.)

I must try this for one of my clients. That said, what is Brief Buddy?

BRIEF BUDDY

Worlds First Creative Brief Cracking (Smart Phone) App

Brief Buddy is a smart phone application in development, aimed solely at helping advertising industry creativesʼ crack creative briefs.

The app claims to feature a multitude of brief cracking techniques, tips and insights from many top creativeʼs as well as a number of examples of creative executions.

Brief Buddy will be officially launched late June 2011, and will be available on the App Store for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch as well as the Android Marketplace.

Me thinks 'brief cracking' is best left to the mind, unaided by devices. But if distractions out weigh your mind and singular, delicious, old-world 'brief cracking' is a bit too old-world for you, you might want to give Brief Buddy a try.

Here's how Brief Buddy could have made this novel PR/WOM exercise of tapping bloggers better:

• Create a website that actually tells you more. It doesn't presently. There is no actionable link, just a text box to capture e-mail IDs. It fails to deliver on the promise "know more".
• If this is the world's first initiative of its kind, let the excitement show! Have a well made video and snippets from minds in the industry contributing to the project, to begin with.
• Craft the copy of the PR document before mailing bloggers. Remember that they will have to believe in the product themselves first.
• Revisit creative and check if the message being conveyed is unambiguous. The image above says "Coming soon to iPhone Android", which in effect tells me that there is already a platform of the application on the WWW - but there isn't.
• As a corollary to the above point, rephrase "Worlds First Creative Brief Cracking App" to "Worlds First Creative Brief Cracking Smart Phone App". Make the communication perfectly clear. We're talking about a world's first product here.

Brief Buddy launches late June 2011.

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