Want to Create Shareable Content? Make Your Customer the Hero! …Here’s How Intel Did It

Many companies focus on ‘thought leadership’ content that makes the company look great. That’s about you.

Here’s a better way to actually get your audience to participate and share content: make your customer the hero.

Your products and services aren’t the hero – they are the weapon – or maybe the superhero sidekick – that enables the hero to do amazing things. Help your customer tell that story of their superpower. How does your product or service help unlock this power?

Sounds simple, right? So why aren’t more companies doing it? It requires a shift in the way a lot of companies approach content. Who doesn’t want more word of mouth, engagement, and social sharing? When your customers can take your narrative and add onto it – and make it meaningful to them – that’s when stuff spreads. With humor and smart content that entertains and educates, your audience will forward content that they helped to create and content that makes them look smart and feel good.

This is where voice of the customer meets a better kind of storytelling.

How Do You Create Content that Gets Shared? Unleash Your Customers’ Genius

Your content needs to answer these questions:

How do your products and services make your customers heroes to their customers?
How can I make my audience feel smarter so they want to share?

Celebrating Your ‘Inner Geek’ Makes You the Innovator

While this isn’t rocket science, Intel has done some cool stuff in this area to celebrate technology and the smart people who use it, create it and build great stuff with it. That defines Intel’s online audience. Intel knows it has a smart following of geeks who are proud of their geekdom! So Intel, too, celebrates its audience’s “inner geek.” Intel also understands that its technology enables innovators to do their work – they are the brains that enable geeks to change the world. Yes – Intel makes the stuff that makes geeks heroes to the world.

At Social Media Today’s #socialshakeup conference in Atlanta in September, several Intel managers talked about a campaign that focused on its audience’s “inner genius.” In addition to creating content that was entertaining, smart, and funny replete with geek inside-jokes, Intel has also increased its focus on the innovation of the people who use Intel products.

In one campaign, Intel put microprocessors in peoples’ hands and asked them on video, “What does this mean to you?”

“It runs the equipment that helps me save lives” – said an ER doctor
“It helps me be unleash my creativity” – said a musician and artist

It’s never about the technology – it’s always about what the technology can enable people to do. So forget features. With Intel’s new content focus on “you,” you’ll find social posts about how Intel’s new technology will enable geeks to do amazing things (see the post below).

Make Customers Looks Smart

Focus your content not on how smart you are – focus your lens on how smart your customers are because of what your products and services allow them to do. Make customers the ‘hero’ – celebrate their creativity, intelligence, humor and awesomeness.

When customers are the focus of the narrative, they feel connected to it – and a sense of ownership over it. And that means they are more likely to engage and share it.

Hey, if b2b behemoth Intel gets it, so can you. That’s what ‘keeping it human’ is about.

What do you think? How does your content make your customer the hero?