Digital meanderings and conversation starters

Last Friday saw me present at the inaugural SMX London on the panel Linkbaiting & Viral Marketing. A number of people asked me to share my presentation online, so I’ve uploaded it onto SlideShare. Meanwhile, as you can’t click through from SlideShare presentations, I’ve presented the various individual slides, with notes, below.

For those wanting the full version, please read on.

The topics I was looking to cover in the presentation were:

• A definition of viral marketing: when talking about a topic it’s important to understand exactly what the term means. This is especially true when the seminar is on two different topics (link bait & viral marketing) & some may confuse the two.
• A case study showing how Altogether created a viral campaign to promote a lap-top manufacturer.
• How a blender manufacturer used YouTube to makeblenders cool.
• How to piggy-back the success of others’ viral marketing campaigns and also how not to do viral marketing.

So what is viral marketing? Wikipedia defines it as:

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.

This of course is standard marketing nonsense. So what does viral marketing really mean?

Cool stuff that people want to share. And whilst ‘cool stuff’ is often assumed to mean funny, it can mean educational, informative, engaging – so long as people connect with it and feel compelled to pass it on.

When they bought IBM’s lap-top business, Lenovo came to us with a problem.

They wanted customers to know who they were, that they were not going to drop IBM’s commitment to making quality products &, if possible, wanted people to think of them as a company with a personality. We came up with the Lenovo Tapes.

The Lenovo Tapes site looks like it was built on FrontPage by someone with no coding skills, which was entirely intentional. The idea is that the creator of the site had been sharing a flat with someone who was working in Lenovo’s R&D department and that when they had moved out the author had found some videos of what Lenovo were doing in that department.

These videos showed lap-tops creating holograms, producing exo-skeletons to ward-off spilled coffee & even hovering. We purposely made the films more & more outrageous so that we could leak them in such a way that people wouldn’t be sure at first whether they were real or not.

The videos were soon picked up by Marketing Pilgrim.

By the time we went to seed it to engadget they had already picked up on it.

By this time, the Lenovo Tapes site was getting so many links that it had started to rank on page 1 for a brand search on Lenovo.

Those links, and the coverage they came from, meant that traffic was coming in from all of Lenovo’s target markets: Europe, North America, Australasia. etc..

Before we had started the campaign we had mapped out what we could consider to be a success. We felt that only 1 or 2 branded virals got to the region of 5 million views and that if we could get to 500,000 we would have done a very good job. As it was we hit over 3 million!

The campaign even made it into the pages of Business Week. In the end Lenovo estimated that the coverage they had received was equivalent to $10 million of advertising/PR. All in all we felt that it was a great success and proved the effectiveness of setting out with clear aims. As we’ll see later, we have a tick-list that we use when attempting any social media or viral campaign & whilst it doesn’t guarantee success, it sure helps.

Next we’ll look at a company that has nothing to do with Altogether. BlendTec make blenders & I have assumed that the reason that they carried out the following campaign was for three main reasons.

1. Prove their USP: their blades are so strong & sharp that they can blend anything.
2. Make blenders cool: I would imagine that the average blender buyer would not be that young, and so they wanted to reach out to a new potential audience.
3. Sell loads of blenders: at the end of the day, nearly all marketing is designed to boost sales.

Let’s look at how they did it.

BlendTec started to post videos on a YouTube channel showing their blenders blending all sorts of unlikely objects. Personal favourites include the one where they slowly feed the handle of a rake into the blender; it’s really quite surreal. As the videos started to build up a cult following, the star of the videos, BlendTec’s Tom Dickson invites viewers to suggest items that he should blend.

Unsurprisingly, considering the amount of hype surrounding its release, the audience suggested an iPhone. And within two months of proving that a BlendTec blender would indeed blend an iPhone, the video had received over 200,000 views. And in the two months since I put this presentation together that has gone up to more than quarter of a million.

But whilst getting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube is all well & good, what does it mean in real terms? Well the chart above shows that when the iPhone video was released their was a surge of traffic to WillItBlend.com, the site BlendTec set-up to host all of the YouTube videos.

What’s even more impressive is that there was a similar pattern in traffic to the main BlendTec site, where the blenders can actually be bought. And according to a report in The Guardian recently all of this activity has resulted in a 650% uplift in sales. Not bad for a bunch of films that must have cost hundred, rather than thousands, of dollars to produce. Again, this is a great example of planning your strategy with clear objectives, and then picking the best channel, as opposed to saying “What can we do on YouTube?” and working from there.

This is exactly the system that we use when planning such campaigns.

• People: Who are you hoping to talk to? Where do such people congregate online? What is their internet/social media profile?
• Objectives? Listening to, talking with, energizing, supporting, or embracing your customers and their ideas?
• Strategy: Build your strategy so as to consider how you wish to change your relationship with your customers, or to engage new ones.
• Technology: Only at this point should you choose the appropriate technologies to implement (YouTube or blogs, etc..)

But what if you don’t have the budget or creative talent to come up with great viral marketing? Well why not try to piggy back on someone else’s ideas or campaign? You can often find things that are going viral on social networks and utilise methods to grab some of this traffic for yourself, at no cost.

I’ll give you an example from my personal blog, Sample as that, which is about music, and specifically cover versions & samples. Whilst watching the Glastonbury festival on TV last summer, I saw the Arctic Monkeys performing a cover of Shirley Bassey’s classic Diamonds Are Forever.

I figured that a lot of people would be looking for information on it & that it was more than likely that some enterprising young sould would already have ripped the footage and made it available on YouTube. Having found the clip I then wrote a post about the cover, making sure to optimise the text so as to make it likely that it ranked highly in the search engines.

The interesting thing here is how I chose which clip to use from YouTube. I selected one which had nothing showing in the section marked Links, which appears just under the video. Because I managed to drive a relatively large amoiunt of traffic to my post, and from there to the main video on YouTube, I hoped that my site would be selected as one of the links to be shown. As it turned out I received two of the five possible links & started receiving traffic back from the page on YouTube.

So, if there is a video, or an ad, or anything that is relevant to your industry (especially something on YouTube), it’s often worth trying to optimise content around it, in order to ’steal’ traffic.

If you do however have a bit of budget, there is still nothing to stop you piggy backing existing virals, especially by spoofing them. Anyone who has been in the UK over the past few months will be familiar with the Cadbury’s Gorilla ad, and over the coming few months I would expect almost as many people will become familiar with Wonderbra’s brilliant spoof of the ad.

In it a woman, wearing nothing more than a Wonderbra & a pair of jeans, mimics the gorilla’s actions, right down to curling her lip. The only real difference is that she does so in front of a yellow background, rather than a purple one. Within one week of being uploaded it had received more than 200,000 views & I would be very surprised if the sale of Wonderbras doesn’t go up this Christmas (along with the sales of drum kits!) However two things confuse me about this campaign.

Firstly, the ‘director’ of the video (a barondrew – hint, it’s an anagram) disallowed the embed code, meaning that people could not put the video on their blogs or social network profiles, which thousands would certainly have wanted to do. This immediately limited the viral nature of the campaign. Secondly, they have now taken the video down. However, due to the very nature of YouTuibe, there were duplicates posted within days, and these have the embed code allowed, and the most popular of these now has 235,286 views of its own.

There may have been problems with the rights which is why they didn’t allow embed, and have since removed it; alternatively, it’s possible that they simply wanted to find out what the ripple effect would be if they put something in one place for a limited time before removing it. Either way I think they have every right to be very happy with the results.

UPDATE: A message on YouTube suggest that the video has been taken due to issues with the rights to the song. Whilst we totally respect rights issues, we can’t help but feel that Mr Collins could los a lot of male fans over this!

UPDATE: Luckily it seems that Mr Collins’ lawyers understand the web almost as much as they do how to get men on their side; this site still has the ad up (although I wonder whether posting this will kill it).

We’ve looked at some succesful campaigns, let’s now take a look at a campaign which went viral for all the wrong reasons.

When P Diddy signed a partnership deal with Burger King (the king of fashion & music with the king of burgers apparently) he decided to anounce this momentous occasion by, in his own words, buying a channel on YouTube. Unfortunately, what he, and his partners at Burger King failed to realise, was that you can’t buy a channel on YouTube (or at least there is no real reason to). Also, no-one actually cared that he had signed a partnership with a burger chain – it meant nothing to the community on YouTube.

Diddy had failed to consider Altogether’s first theory of online consumer intent, which states that in terms of brand activity online, most consumers have an attitude that could be summed up as Entertain me or f*** off! And unfortunately that’s exactly what most viewers told Diddy to do. The comments on the slide above have been carefully censored to weed out the really offensive ones.

Because the video failed to consider what people really wanted on YouTube (not pompous self-advertising) and therefore patronised the intended audience, it resulted in a backlash; such a backlash in fact that at one point the video was taken down – but not before many other people had copied it and posted it themselves allowing the ridicule to continue. I’m not quite sure why Diddy ever decided to put the video back up, but fair play to him for that at least.

So, how can we summarise the various lessons here?

• Build it and they will come? Not necessarily: just because you have a big name or brand, you can’t assume that anyone will care unless you can entertain (or educate, amuse, inform, engage, etc..)
• Viral doesn’t just happen; plan & execute (creative, seeding, etc..): consider People, Objectives, Strategy & Technology
• Dull product? Make it interesting: there is almost always a way to make something interesting out of an unlikely or seemingly dull product or service.
• No budget/ideas? Talent imitates, genius steals: spoofing & piggy backing can be very succesful ways of gaining traffic. Monitor what’s hot to find something you can latch on to.
• Don’t patronise! Because your audience will make you pay!

I hope that you found this interesting; there were also excellent presentations in the same session by Jane of SEOmoz (who has promised to publish her presentation soon) & Thomas Bindl.

If you have any questions on social media, viral marketing or any other aspect of digital marketing, then why not drop us a line?

| November 20, 2007 | CONFERENCES, SOCIAL MEDIA, SOCIAL NETWORKS, VIDEO, VIRAL MARKETING, YOUTUBE | comments (11)

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