It’s truly exciting to see how cutting edge marketers like Nike are running with Marketing as Service. Here’s a brief from MediaPost on the efforts by Nike 6.0 to support action sports enthusiasts with a branded community on Loop’d:

Members of the Nike 6.0 community can create profiles, share photos of themselves in the midst of skating, biking or surfing, and compete for commercial sponsorships. They can also interact with all of the other communities within San Diego-based Loop’d Network, including the Monster Army and the PacSun Team.

As part of the launch, Nike 6.0 has rolled out a mashup campaign, allowing Loop’d members to mix and match their favorite videos, sports clips, photos and Nike-supplied content. The mashups, powered by Mixercast, can be ported to member profiles on other social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Having worked with Panasonic for the last 4 years targeting the actions sport community, I can assure you that Nike’s approach is far more effective than traditional advertising which this target is particularly skilled at tuning out. In fact, advertising is typically seen as “too corporate” and the athletes on ads are always at risk of “selling out.” Engaging this target requires proving that you not only understand their needs but also are a relevant part of their community. You can’t do this overnight and “posers” need not apply. Nike has learned this lesson the hard way and only recently has gained traction with skate boarders by inviting them into the design process. Enabling this group to “commune” online will further enhance Nike’s credibility since actions, especially in the actions sports world, speak louder than words.

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