Some people have been asking us: why are you building uberVU? How did you come up with the idea? What are you hoping to achieve?
These are sensible questions. To get a better grasp of the need we felt when we started to build uberVU, here’s a quick case study of how a company might use uberVU:
ACME is a hypothetical enterprise that is a leader in the sports equipment market. ACME is really interested in the running community. A lot of their products are made for this market, so they are looking for ways to connect with this community a lot more.
They host the ACME Marathon, they have lots of events where they gather people in some environment and engage them in talks and activities related to running. But they’d like to continue this relationship throughout the year, online.
One of their problems is that the conversation about running takes places in a distributed way, on hundreds of sites. What they need is a platform where they can track and join conversations about running across any platform. All they want to do is meet the people, talk about running and share information, without the hassle of managing lots of accounts or posting the same messages on hundreds of sites. uberVU is this platform.
ACME have lots of knowledge in the field of running so they decide to contribute to the community. They start a blog about running, they build a Facebook page and a Facebook Group about running. They post pictures from their events on their site and on Flickr. They can manage all this activity from inside uberVU.
They have just created a series of articles about how to improve your running. They post the articles on their blog from inside uberVU. uberVU automatically posts links to the articles on their Twitter account and on their Facebook page. Soon enough, comments start pouring. They can see who commented, who Digged their articles, who wrote similar articles and who are the people that commented on those similar articles, all in one place, from their uberVU account. Once they have this general view about the discussion around their subject (improving your running), they can join the discussion in several places. They can also respond to conversations that are taking part on other blogs.
This way, they can see who are the people that are the most passionate about running and that are contributing the most to the community. They can foster a relationship with them. And the analytics part of uberVU can show them the reach of their messages across all platforms.
By looking carefully at the conversation, they spot 2 opportunities:
1. A group of young people that set a goal of completing a marathon within one year
2. An energetic mother that has created a track running club for kids in a small town.
The ACME team realize that the ACME Marathon is 11 months away. They talk to the young people and get them to sign up for the marathon. ACME offers them discounts for equipment and promises that, if they do complete the ACME Marathon and thus achieve their goals, ACME will give them special prizes. ACME also encourages the teenagers to take photos of their everyday training, and upload them on Flickr, so that the whole community can see their progress. The pictures they’ll publish on Flickr will be contributed to the distributed community by using uberVU.
ACME also follows the blog of the Track Running Club. They joined the conversation and they find out that the club wants to organize a track running day in their small town, but they lack the money for that. ACME gives away one pair of top running shoes to whoever donates 50$ to the Track Running Club. This way they help the club, they make people try their products and get acknowledged as a company that is truly passionate about running and runners.
