Viral Marketing

This thing on?

Ping-o-lisciois Insurance Marketing

Shared by Steve
Interesting read from Seth Godin. With all the hoopla surrounding viral YouTube videos, and other such ads, which frankly I can’t see they get a lot of real traction. Traction in this context, meaning people actually taking an action that generates revenue for the viral ad creator … Here’s some examples of viral "products" and "services" that went ballistic because the viral component was built in by design.

Enjoy,

Steve

Viral marketing is an idea that spreads–and an idea that while it is spreading actually helps market your business or cause.

Two kinds of viral marketing: The original classic sort in which the marketingisthe product and which a self-amplifying cycle occurs. Hotmail, for example, or YouTube. The more people use them, the more people see them. The more people see them, the more people use them. The product or service must be something that improves once more people use it.

A second kind has evolved over the last few years, and that’s a marketing campaign that spreads but isn’t the product itself.Shepard Fairey’s poster of Barack Obama was everywhere, because people chose to spread it. It was viral (it spread) and it was marketing (because it made an argument–a visual one–for a candidate.)

Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.

Marketers are obsessed with free media, and, as is often the case, we blow it in our rush to get our share. We create content that is hampered or selfish or boring. Or we create something completely viral that doesn’t do any marketing at all.

I wrote the first mainstream book about viral marketing. It’s free (still) eight years (and millions of downloads) later.

Download 2000Ideavirus.pdf

I haven’t updated it or made it pretty, but I think the core ideas stand up pretty well. (I even talk about the Zipf’s Law and the long tail, but didn’t realize it at the time).

Here’s how the book itself is an example of viral marketing:

1. I posted the PDF for free. Three thousand people downloaded it on day one.

2. The file is small enough to email to your friends. I encouraged people to do just that.

3. Some people mailed it to fifty or a hundred people. It spread.

4. That’s just viral. The marketing part? I released a $40 souvenir hardcover edition. People knew the idea but didn’t like the format or my design skills. So they paid a lot for a book they had already read. It went to #5 on Amazon (#4 in Japan). We sold the rights in dozens of languages. And thepaperbackrights. And it helped me get speaking gigs.

BUT! 5. That’s not why I did it. If I had done it as a clever way to sell books, it would have failed. It would have failed because I would have somehow tried to track it, or added friction, or tried to profit in some way from the idea. I was way too dumb at the time to have done it right if my goal was to do it ‘right’.

The critical element of viral marketing is this: it’s built in. It was built into Hotmail and built into YouTube. The more people used the camera on their cell phones, the more the idea spread, the more people wanted a camera.

If you want to do viral marketing, you can try to come up with a viral ad, but you’ll probably fail. You’re better off building the viral right into the product, creating a product that spreads because you designed it that way.

Viral marketing only works well when you plan for it, when you build it in, when you organize your offering to be spreadable, interesting and to work better for everyone involved when it spreads. If I don’t benefit from spreading it, why should I spread it? I won’t. If you don’t benefit from your users spreading the idea, it might spread, but it won’t help you much. So both elements have to be present.

The reason for this post is that viral marketing is getting a bad name, largely from clueless marketing agencies and clueless marketers. Here’s what they do: they get a lame product, or a semi-lame product, and they don’t have enough time or money to run a nationwide ad campaign. So, instead, they slap some goofy viral thing on top of it and wait for it to spread. And if it doesn’t spread, they create a faux controversy or engage a PR firm or some bloggers and then it still doesn’t work.

Being viral isn’t the hard part. The hard part is making that viral element actually produce something of value, not just entertainment for the client or your boss.

Be sure to visit Seth’s Blog for more insightful info – great blog !

Shared by Steve
John Assaraf’s blog is pretty nifty stuff. Here’s a post I came across of his that’s very timely.

There’s just a never ending blitz of data coming at business owners daily about ONLINE MARKETING – especially about SEO [Search Engine Optimization] tactics.

This was just a refreshing piece that I enjoyed, and illustrates one of the benefits of using a tool like the Ultimate Referral Marketing System.  Online technology for Offline Relationship marketing.

The Business Insights Blog from OneCoach – 14th Edition

The world of the Web is truly amazing, but let’s not forget about the offline world.

It’s easy to get sucked into Web traffic solutions and search engine optimization, but there’s still a massive audience, if not bigger, who’s not on the Web, with deep pockets, who might want your product. Don’t cut yourself off from that offline world, because it holds opportunities to enlarge your power and extend your reach.

Direct mail is still possibly the most powerful and persuasive way of doing business no matter who you are. The most obvious obstacle with direct mail is the cost. But if you implement a piece that really penetrates your market, then the results can be very lucrative. In order to create that stellar piece, you’ve got to conduct testing to find out which one of your sales letters is actually going to work. Because of the potential high cost for such a campaign, you must test before you dive in.

In addition, your direct mail piece doesn’t need to be a postal-size Rembrandt – you don’t need stunning imagery or a big sales letter or brochure. A simple postcard can be very effective; it gets read by everyone including the mail person delivering it. A specific type of postcard marketing involves a two-step approach by putting a teaser on the card which is answered on your Web site (getting your message out there and increasing site traffic).

With this two-step approach, you can ask a question that the recipient can only answer by visiting your Web site or going to your directed resource. This is an example of hypnotic marketing. It’s also the perfect situation for presenting a hook to get them to visit and read your longer sales copy.

You may want to do a little market research to find out the average number of direct mail pieces that people receive in your target area. Some regions are so flooded with direct mail that people aren’t even scanning or glancing at these piles but sending them directly to the trash. When you really need to stretch your marketing bucks, it’s smart to look at areas of low competition first. This is also an opportunity to take on college marketing interns to personally deliver your direct mail pieces right into the hands of your ideal clients, such as managers versus administrative assistants.

All in all, you can look at your marketing campaign as a fishing boat. Each marketing element – newsletters, news releases, radio spots – can be considered a line in the water. And with every additional line in the water, you increase your chances of catching a big one.
Next in this series: How much time to spend on marketing.

This post is the sixth in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with copywriter Joe Vitale, author of The Attractor Factor and Life Missing Instruction Manual, The Guidebook You Didn’t Get at Birth. For more information about Joe Vitale, visit his site atwww.mrfire.com.

Venture Beat:

Everyone loves talking about Twitter’s business model — because there isn’t one yet, and they’ll keep talking about it until there is one.

But it’s becoming more clear that while a business model is of course important, Twitter is perhaps the perfect example of a company that can afford to take its time in finding the one that is perfect for it.

That’s because other businesses are building so much on top of the micro-messaging service and using it for their own services.

Less altruistically, some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers.

Dell says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

Photo byTwitter.

One of the tools that took Facebook into the stratosphere … virology, appears to be at play here for Twitter, users, followers, tweets .. whatever

Word of Mouth Viral marketing circa 2008 … Tweet Tweet!

Check out the last sentence of this interesting blog post. Then, checkout how you can use it similar web 2.0 technology on your site[s] …

Go Viral Young Broker, Go Viral <– click and check out how these guys create a Viral Tidal Wave …

Enjoy,