Subscribe to the RSS feed?Oh heck yes. Well played sir/ma'am, well played.
Managing a viral campaign is a both an art and a science. To increase your success rate with viral marketing, make sure your campaign has all the following elements:
Timing - Often the most overlooked of all viral elements. Timing can make or break a campaign. You have to make sure that your idea is novel and that it’s different than other things (viral or not) happening at that time. Similar ideas or executions can lessen your impact and slow your spread rate, reducing your chances at success.
Incentive - This is why people will invest their time/attention/money in your idea. With all the clutter out there, campaigns and ideas that don’t offer any perks will be swept aside or ignored completely. The benefit itself can vary greatly, it can range from a discount to the fact that people look cool or “in the know” for discovering and sharing it with their friends.
Mystery - This generates the excitement. Unraveling your plan slowly keeps people interested, and it keeps them coming back as well. The key here is to give them just enough information to get them hooked, and then slowly release more as time goes on. The tricky part can be finding the balance between mystery and obscurity.
Ease - If it’s not easy to spread your idea, then it won’t be viral. It’s that simple. You need to do everything in your power to make it easy, or sometimes even necessary, for your idea to be passed along. Put in links for E-mailing, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Facebook, and anything else you think might facilitate sharing. Make it easy to talk about and explain.
At this writing, over 25,000 people subscribe to Darren Rowse at Problogger.net. According to Technorati, Seth Godin’s blog is the 12th most popular on the internet. They are web-celebrities. The rock stars of our age. Yet when you write them an email, not only do they write back, but usually within half a day. They must get hundreds or thousands of emails a day, yet I get responses quicker than when I email most of my friends.
If someone cares about you/your company/your blog enough to write you an email, then you should care enough to write them back as quickly as possible.
To end this with a question to all of you: How accessible/responsive are you? How long does it take you to respond to the average email? Do you treat business letters different than fan mail/comments?
Part of being a good New Marketer is seeing around the corner. That means getting on trends, technology, and cool new stuff early. I’ve been invited to the Pownce (a “twitter-killer” from Kevin Rose of Digg among others) and I have a handful of invitations to pass along. If you’d like an invite, email me and let me know. Sorry, I don’t have any more at the moment. I’ll let you know when I get more.
A lot of local advertising makes me either cringe or shake my head. Their attempts at humor or gimmicks usually fall flat, and in the end, they usually do more harm than good.
With the large number of people receiving marketing or advertising degrees every year, who is there to work with the local advertisers?
Someone needs to sit down with small businesses and tell them to forget about the gimmicks and just be informative. We know you don’t have a big budget, so just focus on the message.
Working with these local businesses isn’t high powered and sexy like a Madison avenue agency, but there might be a lot more opportunity.
Since this blog started (about 4 months and 38 posts ago) it’s come a long way. Hopefully you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing. It’s been an interesting, and trying, journey thus far, and I’m excited to see what the future holds. That being said, I thought I’d take a minute to outline the ways that you can connect with ANM, because marketing is as much an art as it is a science, and any feedback or input is always appriciated.
(NEW!) The Email Feed
As you can see on the left side of the page, I’ve recently opened up email subscriptions for the site. If you’re interested in keeping up with ANM, but don’t want to use the regular RSS feed, then just type your email address in the box and follow the instructions from there. (Don’t forget to verify your subscription!)
The RSS Feed
The trusty standard RSS feed. You can subscribe with any RSS reader by clicking the big orange RSS logo to the left, or by clicking here - A New Marketing RSS Feed.
Comments
As I said before, marketing thrives on interaction. So if you see something you disagree with - Let me know. Or if you have something to add to the discussion - Go for it. It’s easy, fun, doesn’t require registration, and contains no Trans-Fats!
Contact Me
I’d love to hear from you. If there’s something you’d like to discuss, a question you have for me, or if you just want to say hi, feel free to email me at MattJMcD@gmail.com
NBC has begun running the following commercial for it’s new show Chuck. The commercial, which intentionally appears subliminal, runs about 30 seconds. See what you can pick up.
It’s a great shot at viral marketing. My guess is that they intended for people to TiVo or DVR this commercial, slow it down, and watch it again and again to try and figure it out. When a company gets you to voluntarily watch their ads, I’d say thats a success.
Here’s the video slowed down so you can read the captions.
You can go to www.chuckssecret.com and watch the same video, but this is where NBC falls short of a true viral campaign. Underneath the video is a link to the NBC fall preview page that gives you an entire two minute trailer for the show and explains everything. The right amount of mystery is what makes a viral campaign really work, and by giving it away already, NBC takes a lot of the momentum away.
If I were running this campaign I would have started three months ago with just a ten seconds of a blank frame except for the words “Chucks Secret”. I would run that for a month and stir up some interest and then add www. and .com to it, so it would read “www.chuckssecret.com” where the video would be playing. Then I would open up and start playing the thirty second spot on TV and then a month or before it airs, I would run the whole trailer.
NBC shows a good effort towards some new marketing ideas, but gets a little trigger happy with the exposure, canceling a lot of the viral effects.
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