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From Hackers to Brand Evangelist; Tormod Askildsen tells a story about LEGO

Posted on 02. Feb, 2010 by AdamWallace in Community

From Hackers to Brand Evangelist; Tormod Askildsen tells a story about LEGO

When I (Adam Wallace) was recently in Amsterdam representing the Roger Smith Hotel at Enterprise Social 2.0 I had the pleasure to meet Tormod Askildsen and hear his great story of how they created an extremely loyal community of fans, by during around a situation that initially seemed very negative for the company.

Tormod Askildsen is the Senior Director for Community Development at LEGO.  He tells a story of how LEGO’s software got hacked in the 1990’s and the way that this threatened the company.  Eventually they started to realize that they could leverage this excitement and new use of their tools that their fans were doing.  They made a big turn around and ended up engaging their fans and creating a whole vibrant scene and community of LEGO enthusiasts.

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  • What a great case study and warning, too, to those brands that hope to ignore the "noise" of their customers. Lego was faced with what I call a "hostile embracing" situation. As adoption of social media marches towards ubiquity, I believe that many other brands will be faced with "hostile embracing" too, if they don't form strategies and plans to interact with their customers. I think AT&T is going through this right now. Here's a blog post from a month or so, during "Operation Chokehold". http://ow.ly/18TWr. Thanks for sharing, Adam!
  • Hi Aaron - Thanks so much for the comment. It really is amazing how much the world of communications has changed so quickly and what this means for relationships between businesses and their customers. Interesting article on AT&T, definitely some struggles they are going to have to deal with. Thanks for reaching out.
  • very cool
  • bsimi
    Nice job Adam to get the interview and what a cool story. Amazing they waited and turned it into something good!
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