5 magical conversation elements of #pottermore

Home 5 magical conversation elements of #pottermore

It has all the elements of an orchestrated, buzz provoking conversation starting marketing machine in the making: Pottermore. It might not have come to your attention (you have no kids, don’t read books, hate little boys with glasses, don’t like witchcraft or wizards) but Harry Potter is just… BIG. And in euro’s and dollars, he will be bigger, even after the box office of his last movie stopped breaking record after record. J.K. Rowling herself kicked off the buzz about Pottermore in june already and now fans are hungry waiting in line to get access, while they’re being activated via social channels.

https://youtu.be/oYs1d3jAdG0

Love the above video, although it’s not too authentic. And oh, yes of course, Rowling WOULD like to give a big thanks to her fans. Without them, she would have been nowhere. But it’s always a nice gesture when we see big stars realizing where they came from. The Pottermore site (see this WikiPedia lemma) will be a ‘new story’, with you and the digital generation, as a key roleplayer. Rowling herself will participate. And will reveal stuff about Harry Potter that has been in her head for years, but never got out. The site will sell audiobooks and e-books.

This has…. pretty much everything already a marketer wants. And they didn’t even start the show yet. Here’s (some, not all) 5 magical elements of Pottermore from a conversation management perspective:

1 Tension & mystery
In the night of 15 and 16 june, Rowling revealed… that she was going to reveil something. At numerous fansites, there were hidden clues that for some led tot the name of Pottermore. The website just showed some owls that guided the interested fans to a page on YouTube with a clock, counting down to june 23rd, the day that the above video and more information was published.

2 Speculation
The week of time in between, laid a massive concrete foundation of buzz to build upon. What was Pottermore? Will there be a next Harry Potter? What? Where? Why? How? A gigantic worldwide scream for info. And during the week, there were the “signs” to keep everybody hungry.

3 Scarcity
At the 31st of july, Pottermore launched a contest: the search for the Magical Quill. By answering the questions correctly, people could get early access to the site. The contest lasted until saturday 06 august. Again, a week of #pottermore buzz. This time to create scarcity and an early advantage for the biggest fans.

4 Google
Rowling teamed up with Google to make the books available through Google’s literary products. And the Official Pottermore Insider is being hosted on the Google Blog Platform, see the introduction post here. And of course, all the videocontent that will be published (it probably will be a lot) is going to be put on YouTube. Google as a partner for your bookproject: not bad. Not bad at all… Told you Harry was big.

5 Social Media
Is this magic. Yes, it will be. Although not everybody believes that a high amount of fans and followers on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter is the same as having a lot of traction and engagement: check out the numbers and the little effort so far. Launched half june, the Twitter account posted 32 tweets and no has over 300.000 followers. With doing, practically…. not that much. At Facebook the count at this moment is 30.000 fans. But they didn’t do anything there but setting up a profile picture, an info text of 3 lines and a link to Pottermore…

These social platforms will probably drive traffic to Pottermore in the near future, after the launch. Expect some platform-only stuff, more contests and magic via Twitter and so on, and on. To sum up, some short take-aways:

  • Give people something to talk about by creating something remarkable in the making
  • Give people the platforms where they can connect
  • Spread your content to maximize the online buzz
  • Give your biggest fans more
  • Partner up with resourceful friends, it saves time