So strange to wish that this man would blend something of mine
Actually the point of this post is to marvel at the longevity of the idea behind the Blend Tec line of videos. They started over a year ago blending unlikely things like garden rakes, marbles etc. But now they’ve realized they can continue to stay relevant by blending newsworthy items. This is the perfect viral marketing mechanism because it’s a simple formula that can be continually repeated with items in the news. The will it blend iPhone video is number 4 on the viral video charts, and that’s quite an impressive feat for the 55th video doing essentially the same thing. Check out the WillItBlend.com website.
Another recent culturally relevant blending was of course of a Transormers.
For the ordinary couch potato, “Godsend” was just another episode of the TV series Heroes. But for vigilant viewers, the three-second glimpse of a business card from shadowy Primatech Paper was an invitation to step into the show’s universe. If you called the 800 number on the card, you quickly found yourself headed down the rabbit hole of Heroes’ first alternate reality game. Those who made it through learned a secret about a key character in the show.
I think the concept of ARG’s that run parallel to, and extend the traditional narratives are fascinating, rather than being just a marketing tool they are actually extending the art of the narrative and engaging people’s creativity, curiosity, and skill. In many ways the ARG’s that run along side shows like lost and Hero’s are a distinct kind of ARG, kind of like a Meta-Game, or Meta-Narrative.
There’s been lots of talk on the interwebs about Ben, the 8 year old who totally nailed a Guitar Hero song on hard mode without missing a note. Jeremy at Livedigitally suggested that the game developer should hire Ben to use him in their marketing campaigns, which I totally agree with, except he’s already marketing them. His “perfect song” video has been watched close to 250,000 times.
Even more interesting, if you calculate the number of views for the 20 related guitar hero videos that youtube places beside this video you get a total of: 6,376,714. So that’s 6 Million plus views of user generated videos of Guitar Hero, wow. Very exciting, but I guess not every game can be as fun to video as Guitar Hero
I have to plug one of my fav t-shirts from Tcritic, it’s called Cowbell Hero, now that game is going to rock!
Coke is working with new marketing company Crayon to launch a competition in Second Life, the name of the project is VirtualThirst and involves the general public and residents of Second Life designing Coke vending machines that deliver “experiences”. As it turns out you can submit ideas as written descriptions, images, videos, or of course jump in world and design “drop” your design off at their location in SL. I’m pretty sure that this will do better than their video competition megaflop “the coke show”, to start with they have gone to a place where people are creating stuff already, and are trying to connect with “creatives” there. I’m not sure this passes my “who cares” test, but I guess that will depend on the output of participants. In many ways “design a new coke vending machine that vends experiences” smacks of something that sounds great to marketers, and a huh? from the general populous… maybe.
"imagine a world in which a simple vending machine could dispense - not Coca-Cola - but the ESSENCE of Coca-Cola: refreshment, joy, unity, experience"
Seriously? who talks like that and who believes that the essence of coke is refreshment, joy, unity, experience; apart from the vp of marketing.
Anyway, what have they done right:
They’ve gone to where people are creating
They’ve involved the community in the judgeing
They are going to let people use the winning in Second Life for free in their homes etc
the publicity they get from just doing something in Second Life will be an additional return on investment
If you are responsible for the creative output of a marketing department or an agency, then this post is for you. What I aim to outline is some of the key differences between viral marketing and traditional marketing, that might spark some ideas on how you can augment your creative process, and where to invest your time and effort.
Control, success, and execution are all very different in viral marketing and worth paying attention to. The traditional approach of refining ideas internally until you have the one that will be the campaign is doomed to failure, because viral marketing, like lightning is very unpredictable. Even worse than that, in viral marketing what worked last time will absolutely not work this time, think of it like inoculation, once people have been exposed to an idea, they build an immunity.
Clearly marketers are trying out viral marketing with with varying degrees of success, and more often than not these forays end in failure. I don’t think these failures come from marketers not being smart, lack of investment, or bad execution, I think it comes from thinking like a marketer. What I mean by that is traditional marketing theory and methods developed over the last 50 years are antithetical to Viral Marketing.
So why is viral marketing different from traditional marketing? Let me throw out some ideas:
Success bares no relation to investment - Traditional marketing there was generally a relationship between how much you spent and how many people saw your message, there is no such relationship in Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing does not have a timeline - Traditional marketing calendars, and even the traditional marketing plan is irrelevant when executing and responding to viral marketing efforts. Viral marketing is just not that predictable, which calls for a different kind of planning
Number of views bare little relation to reach or impact of Viral Marketing - As viral is something that is shared from person to person, you can be sure that many more people hear about it than view it (a little esoteric I know, but I talk about subserviantChicken constantly, and yet have only been to the site once)
So what are the 3 rules for Viral Marketing, well maybe less rules, but more of a philosophy or an approach: Experiment. Monitor. Respond.
Experiment
Viral Marketing should be treated as an innovation exercise and you should be focused on building a portfolio of social media experiments. A crucible of creativity through blogs, vlogs, podcasts, widgets, social networks; tools that are easy to engage with and are easily shared. Remember, failure is not only an option it’s a requirement, so “fail faster so you can succeed sooner”*.
Monitor
Social Media put a plethora of tools in marketers’ hands that allow real time measurement and monitoring of your ideas in the marketplace: technorati, delicious, blogpulse, pubsub are just a couple of tools that can be leveraged to see what ideas are being shared, and what ideas are taking off. Monitoring is not just about measurement though, it’s about listening. A great example of this is the Agency.com subwayrfi tag on delicious, where they have collected links to all the blogs talking about their viral. Paying attention to the conversations, responses, and mashups give you a rich source to draw from when you respond.
Respond
When things take off you had better be ready to respond, participate and engage in the ensuing conversation. Can you amplify what’s happening, can you on capitalize what’s happening, can you reflect what’s happening?
Smirnoff failed with their teapartay viral (lazy sunday rip off?), because they have no response, in fact their web site says “teapartay coming soon”.
“Coming soon” is a great message for the half million people that have watched the video.
agentpaprika makes a comment on youtube:
too bad the URL they list at the end goes to a site w/ generic smirnoff content and a little tiny tea partay banner ad that goes nowhere (it just says “coming soon”).
i mean, so i’m supposed to come back some other time and hope they got the new content up? it was sorta entertaining, but not so much that i’ll come back again and again…
So what next
Have fun, have a sense of humor. I actually think there is only one rule of viral marketing and that is don’t take yourself too seriously.
So anyway, that’s my hypothesis, I would be very interested in other ways that viral marketing is distinct from traditional marketing, or even why it’s the same. I would love to hear from you.
Coke is working with 
