Lego’s revolution will be tweeted–just check out LEGO CL!CK, the company’s new social networking Web site. Now, even though anyone who’s every spent time with the bricks knows they don’t actually go “click” when you put them together, it’s a pretty cool site. A little sparse for now in terms of content, but the plan is this: players and thinkers from all over come here to share ideas (Lego-related or not) in the form of tweets, videos, photos, and blog posts. The animations are fun enough on their own, but here’s hoping the content gets that way too.
Companies jumping into the social networking kiddie pool are a dime a dozen, but Lego’s story is interesting because its audience is so singular and so diverse at the same time. People who drink Coke won’t necessarily call themselves Coke-drinkers, but chances are if you’ve played with Legos even once, you identify with what makes the product great–and you’ll play with it again. Lego fans are lifers. And, Lego hopes, they’ll all find their way to this site.
After the company hit bottom in 2004, in the red by $344 million, it pulled itself up mainly by cashing in on lucrative Hollywood tie-ins (Indiana Jones, Star Wars…), but even though it saved Lego’s ass, replicating movie sets doesn’t scratch the same itch as building your own spaceships. So it’s nice to see Lego tapping back into that idea, and courting crowds beyond the Star Wars demographic. So now we have architectural Legos, Muji Legos, Lego electronics, even an iPhone app that turns photos into Lego-brick mosaics. This new commercial (pretty well-written, I might add) sums it up:
And LEGO CL!CK is more of the same. Which, for this Lego Lifer, is more of a good thing.
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