Nike is one of the companies on the forefront of using social networking ideas and applying them to drive true value for the user. Nike’s partnered with Apple to create the Nike +, a comprehensive product and website that just works; simple, practical, efficient, elegant. Grant McCracken’s insight focuses on how the social aspect amplifies the private and public value of the product and the company:

One way to understand this innovation is to look at the private and public value it creates.

Exercise is lonely, painful, and boring. And this is enough to discourage most people from doing it faithfully (or at all). Nike + can’t actually do anything about the painful part, but it gets at lonely and boring very effectively. It allows everyone to devote their miles to challenges.

This means, for instance, that everyone on the South side of Chicago can now use their miles to compete against everyone on the North side of Chicago. The Nike + works as a vast spread sheet. It sums all the runs. At the end of every day, you can watch your run uploaded and you can see who’s winning the challenges you belong to.

That’s an incentive that may launch a couch potato out of the house. If our runner is just running for himself, well, the temptation to remain housebound is strong. But if he is now running for everyone on the South side of Chicago, and his team now happens to be just a few hundred miles from acing those North side numskulls, it’s a different proposition altogether.

The private value is that I exercise more. The public value is that I now “belong” to and participate with collectivities that would otherwise not much interest me. This is a kind of mechanized networking of the kind we see more and more of.

Well, in my own experience, it just went from being another sports supplier to an enabler that has changed the way I think about exercise and the way I participate in it. More than that, Nike has found a way to amplify my accomplishments…and then broadcast them.

Talk about engagement. Talk about partnering with the consumer! Talk about brand and consumer cocreating. Geez, Louise, this is good marketing.

Just one example, read the rest of the article for more. Social networks are not just about marketing and engagement, but can be used to enhance the core product and create new value for the consumer…

Article link: http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2007/10/nike-and-the-cr.html