Cerado

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Executive Summary:

Strategy Grows Community to Over 1,000 Members In Less Than One Year

Gettin’ Iggy with IT

What does a mobile phone virtualization software company like Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) have in common with a small green iguana?  Everything!   A code name for a previous software release, “Iguana” was the perfect corporate mascot for this forward thinking company.   Today, Iggy Wanna plays a starring role in OK Labs branding efforts, to build and engage its community through social media, both on and offline.

Small in size, but mega in footprint, OK Labs develops technology that operates in over 300 million mobile handsets all over the world.   Like its parent, the well-traveled Iggy has racked up some serious frequent flier miles during the last two years when he was first introduced.   From Boston to Berlin and back, Iggy has been captured on film, drinking a pint in an Irish pub, rubbing elbows at an OK Labs meet-up in Sydney, hanging out in the booth at an Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose and everywhere else in between.   (Check out his Photo Gallery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25042263@N04/sets )

Who Are You?

Young and innovative, OK Labs was founded in 2006 and was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2008, and a Red Herring finalist in 2009.  The company develops open source virtualization software for mobile devices, consumer electronics and embedded systems. Mobile phone virtualization extends the capabilities of isolation, portability, security and hardware efficiency – typically associated with the server and PC markets – to mobile phones.  OKL4 technology allows handset OEMs and semiconductor suppliers to incorporate the next must-have features into new mobile device designs, faster and more cost-effectively.

OK Labs was spun out of the National Information and Communications Technology Research Centre (NICT) in Australia.   The Chicago-based company’s employee base of 40 people includes a team of executives and a Sales and Marketing group in Chicago, as well as a Research and Development group in Australia.

Why Community?

OK Labs software is designed into the mobile solutions upon which it runs.  This means the company must connect with and educate embedded systems developers on the front end of the product development cycle.  So when OK Lab’s Vice President of Marketing, Marti Konstant, joined the company, she had a very clear goal:  build a 1,000-member community of embedded system developers with whom to engage, influence and build the OK brand.  And do it in less than twelve months.

“Our software is deployed in mobile phones — HTC,Motorola and Samsung, to name a few,” notes Marti. “However, the genesis of our company depends on engineers researching us online and learning about what we bring to market.  As the head of marketing, I needed to understand the behavior of these key influencers.   How do they use technology?  What sources do they tap to get product information when designing a handset?”

Bingo

A Google search for a company that could help OK Labs build its community led Marti to a vendor she considered hiring.  “After further research, we determined that were more focused on technical community development systems and platforms than on community development strategy,” she noted.  Fortunately for OK Labs, the vendor referred her to Cerado, which offers mobile and web-based solutions and services to help organizations better understand and engage with their customer communities.  It proved to be a perfect match.

“When I first met the Cerado team, I knew instantly that these guys had the creative savvy to do what I needed,” Marti Says.   “In addition, they had experience with complex firms like Accenture and Xerox so I was confident that they possessed the right pedigree to tackle our situation.”

Let’s Get This Party Started

The first strategy session between Cerado and OK Labs was held in Chicago, in December 2007.  The purpose was to conduct an internal audit of what OK Labs had done to date to build a community.   Cerado’s approach in helping OK develop a social media strategy was to engage the 3 Ls:  Listen, Learn and Leverage.   During the first meeting Cerado took a careful inventory of the OK’s existing internal assets.  To get the right input from the right players, Marti made sure that every group within OK was represented at the two-day meeting, from engineers to the CEO.

Enter Social Objects

Iggy Pop

After the session, Cerado presented OK Labs with a list of 25 recommendations, which were based on leveraging those internal assets that best represented the company.  One of the suggestions was to inject social objects into the marketing mix and make them viral.   And thus, Iggy Wanna was born.  Iggy portrayed OK Labs as an emerging growth company with a large footprint.  “Since we traveled all over the world, it just made sense to adopt a little mascot like Iggy that we could take along with us and photograph.  That one of our software releases was named Iguana made Iggy the perfect partner,” Marti said.  “We ordered seven stuffed iguanas off of eBay one afternoon and Iggy took off! Iggy is a playful guy who likes to experience the world.  He represents a serious product like ours, in a fun, organic way.”

Privileged Mode

Another Cerado recommendation in the world of social objects was the introduction of the tagline, “I Operate in Privileged Mode” in bold white letters on black t-shirts.  “Privileged mode” is a technology term that pertains directly to the software that OK develops; it also works beautifully as a t-shirt slogan.  Originally, the phrase was mentioned casually in conversation at a meet-up.  It resonated beautifully with what OK does, and it stuck.  Cerado ordered 6 of the shirts, one of which was sent to OK Labs’ Chief Technology Officer, who wore it in a YouTube video.  The tees quickly became the OK Labs signature uniform at trade shows and meet-ups.

According to Marti, their developers were quiet about the idea of the shirts at first. “Now, we can’t get the shirts off of their backs,” she says.  Again, the idea is simple, yet powerful in its ability to brand OK Labs.  The shirts are funky and creative.  They cleverly invite people into the trade show booth and are a great conversation starter.  The simple act of sporting the Privileged Mode logo online exposes OK’s digital community to the company in a subtle, yet memorable way.

Engineers Gone Wild

At Cerado’s suggestion, OK has videotaped many of its employees, including product managers, wearing the tees and doing outrageous things like discussing the benefits of OKL4, the company’s flagship product, while talking to and feeding an alpaca on an alpaca farm (the alpaca actually talks back, by the way).  The shock value of these zany acts is high, and certainly not what one would expect from a shy engineer type.   Aussie accents contribute to the interest factor in a big way.  The alpaca video is available at: .
http://www.ok-labs.com/community/geektv/a-man-an-alpaca-and-okl4/

OK has also introduced “GeekTV” where engineers provide informative tutorials on topics like, “What is Paravirtualization?”  The company’s CTO, Gernot Heiser, is a colorful personality who can also be seen on GeekTV offering up his opinions. GeekTV is available at: http://www.ok-labs.com/community/geektv

Blogging

In addition to social objects, OK Labs also posts an active company blog with over 10 employees participating in the discussion.   Gernot is one of the company’s most prolific bloggers and like Iggy, travels all over the world.  There’s a section on the website called “Where in the World is Gernot,” where people can literally track Gernot’s travels at any point in time…again, a simple effort on OK Labs’ part to connect with its community in a fresh, informative manner.  “Where in the World is Gernot?” can be found at: http://www.ok-labs.com/blog/whereisgernot

Staying Connected

Other ways that OK stays connected to its community are by sending out Alerts to subscribers on a regular basis.  Alerts are opt-in and include information on company news, upcoming webinars, fun blog postings, (i.e. “What did Rob Eat for Breakfast?”) and updates on Iggy’s whereabouts.  Alerts offer immediate answers to pressing developer questions about the company’s products.  They are a place where developers can share knowledge about issues such as work-arounds, as well as learn tips and tricks in an open environment.

There is also an OKL4 Developer’s Mailing List for which researchers and developers can register.

Sky’s The Limit

What Cerado has encouraged OK Labs to do is to push the envelope in brand new ways, and to create opportunities to meet up, both on and offline, in an authentic way.   By validating OK’s existing internal assets and turning them into social objects, OK has developed a hugely successful social media strategy.  The nimble company achieved its goal of creating a 1000-member online community two months earlier than projected, a milestone that Marti attributes to Cerado’s guidance and expertise.

Simple and inexpensive, OK’s social media efforts have been heartily embraced from the top down, which has fueled their success.  Iggy and other initiatives have humanized the high-tech company, resulting in innovation and profitability, even in a down market. To date, they are the frontrunner for mobile phone virtualization and the only competitor in their space with commercial deployments. In April of this year, OK Labs launched the world’s first virtualized mobile phone, proving that size really doesn’t matter. (With the exception of their very small OKL4 microvisor; in this case the smaller the better.) Stay tuned!