Viral videos, the craze of internet advertisers and online media groups. If any agency ever promises you they can deliver this, they’re lying to you, as the elements need to be just right.
I’m a big believer in community marketing as opposed to ‘viral marketing’ I’d rather build a thriving communigy of customers, users, partners, and employees than risk all my resources on the potential to get a one hit wonder.
In any case, here’s a great list of the top 10 viral videos. I’ve embedded them below for your ease.
NIKE
“This clip is one of the all time greatest virals ever, with more than 50 million views globally. Featuring world famous soccer star Ronaldinho hitting the crossbar no less than four times, without the ball touching the floor”
AGENT PROVOCATEUR
“Kylie Minogue rides a velvet bucking bronco wearing nothing but lingerie from Agent Provocateur.”
JOHN WEST SALMON
“A John West employee fights a grizzly bear off to land a fish”
QUICKSILVER DYNAMITE SURFING
“How to go surf in a country without waves: a group of young men throw a bundle of dynamite into an urban lake. Whether the clip was real or not was never really discovered, a factor that itself garnered attention.”
BIG AD
“The Carlton Draught Big Ad is an award-winning advertisement for Carlton Draught created by George Patterson and Partners (Young & Rubicam) of Melbourne, which used viral marketing techniques before being released on television.”
TROJAN GAMES
“In 2003, to launch Trojan Condoms in the United Kingdom, the “official” web site for the so-called “Trojan Games” was created with several clips by UK-based The Viral Factory.”
DOVE EVOLUTION
“Already a classic, even though it is one of the newest campaigns in this selection. Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, used time-lapse photography to show the transformation of an normal woman into a glamorous billboard model using beauty stylists and Photoshop enhancements. The clip was released under the slogan ‘No wonder our perception of real beauty is distorted’.”
BERLITZ – WHAT ARE YOU ZINKING ABOUT?
“A viral video campaign featuring a language difficulty in a European coastguard station.”
DIET COKE & MENTOS BY EEPYBIRD.COM
“This campaign was never planned, neither by The Coca Cola Company nor Mentos. It started out as an experiment by Eepybird with a video showing two men adding Mentos tablets to a Diet coke. Watch to see the results. Several videos resulted, which makes it difficult to estimate exactly how many views the campaign has generated so far. But a qualified guess would be more than 50 million in total, including both the original and all the user generated videos.”
MARK ECKO – STILL FREE
“The best virals usually lead to massive attention and, in some cases, controversy and outrage. This is exactly what happened to Mark Ecko. Having started several enterprises around the hip/hop, skater and style scene, Ecko decided to create a ideological statement on the First Amendment. He filmed a session of himself ”tagging” Air Force One and used the following hype to explain why. Did he really spray grafitti on the President’s jet? Judge for yourself by following the link below.”
It’s great to meet the community of social media folks from around the globe.
Mr Brown (a child hood name that stuck with him) is in town here in Silicon Valley. He was attending a few conferences and is doing some footage for his video blog travel show. He was a gracious host to me while I was in Singapore one night, so I was happy to show him around. I introduced Singapore’s biggest blogger to one America’s top bloggers (video below) and we headed to Palo Alto for lunch (pics). While Robert and Rocky were showing him Facebook, we realized we couldn’t access the site, it was down, Facebook says it wasn’t compromised. On the return trip back, we stopped by the garage where HP was started, see pictures.
I’m starting to see this new type of tool and concept emerge as content gets created and distributed into many small and large buckets
Situation
Users are creating content, and often uploading, sharing, or producing to a wide variety of sites: social networks, image sites, movie sites, communication tools, blog software, forum software, etc. They are creating and consuming data on mobile devices, home computers and networks, work networks, and in public spaces. For the corporate brand, this means that media, text, voices, and opinions about a company are spread all across the wide web.
Problem
Information, data, and profiles are scattered around the web, and on different networks. While one person can be involved in many conversations around the web; tracking and managing them are very difficult as they’re scattered
[The desire to track and centralize data and media created on the disparte web is growing for both individual users and corporate brands. The need for Digital Lifestyle Aggregation rapidly approaches]
Concepts
A trend of tools are starting to come around, as they centralize all of those data points into one area, or make it easier to find. In many ways, it’s a dynamic blog roll of all ‘my stuff’. Marc Canter describes it in this early post (2004) as
“Navigating the complex worlds of multimedia, on-line content, communications, ecommerce and Home LAN based products is the key to understanding where we’re headed in the future. Enabling customers (both end-users and enterprises) to connect all of these disparate worlds, products and services together is what digital lifestyle aggregation is all about.”
In this definition, digital lifestyle aggregation is described as:
“A digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA) is a computer software application which integrates and centralizes the user control of all of the user’s information and electronic devices, including personal computers, Home LANs, cell phones, digital cameras, videogames, PDAs, and other forms of consumer electronics devices.”
The future
In many ways, we can expect existing feedreaders like MyYahoo and Google Reader and Facebook to start offering these types of tools. This feature set will become as common as the blogroll (and integrated with it), white label social networks and some solutions will provide password management, yet another form of identity, and yet another reason we need a single trusted form of user ID.
What this means for corporations
First of all, please don’t think you can control your brand, it’s not about that. But you’ll start to need these tools to, track, and centralize one’s brand (and everything associated around it) in a decentralized world. I’ve predicted that the future websites will be community based websites, so aggregating that content in one area helps to make you the first stop for product knowledge.
For further listening listen to this podcast interview between Dan Farber of ZDnet and Marc Canter they discuss the need for open networks, and thinking beyond Google, Yahoo, MS, Apple, and AOL.
Update: be sure to check out Chris’s ideas on Attention Streams, imagine haveing all your data on a single feed.
I answer these questions very frequently, and I encourage our customers to read my blog, here’s an attempt in mass education.
What every corporation should know by the end of 2007:
1) What is social media, and how does it impact their company
2) Social Media is here to stay, it’s not going anywhere, look at the next generation or workers, they are highly connected
3) You’re not in control: Let go/give away to gain more (Update: this really works)
4) Social Media is an overlay for all marketing and announcement activities
5) Some companies are appointing official roles (Community Manager, or Evangelist) to be on point.
6) Start measuring from the start of the program, be flexible with it
7) You’re not alone, every company is going through this in some regard, find a user group, like SMC.
I’m trying to stay more strategic than tactical (as the detailed ‘how to’ list is long). I feel very fortunate, I get to interact with those that are running these programs at some of the largest tech companies in the world. While it was fun when I ran those programs at my last job, it’s more fun watching the trend as companies become enlightened from awareness to overlay.
The Social Media Corporate Evolution
Here’s a common evolutionary path that I see many corporations going on.
1) Awareness
2) Comprehension
3) The internal scramble
4) Getting organized, ego check
5) Seeking information, getting resources
6) Trial project
7) Resources, time, or role applied
8 ) Full scale program launched
9) Integration into different business units / Internal confusion
10) Overlay across all activities, budget, headcount,
11) Customers and employees collaborate on products, marketing, and support
Each of these steps requires a series of activities, and key roles need to be present to make them happen.
So be means of comments, how sophisticated is your culture, what do they know? (first section) and where is your corporation in it’s evolution (second section)
Steve Rubel and I exchanged emails early this morning. I asked him for his thought on how MicroMedia was taking hold. If you remember, Rubel was one of the fanatics of Twitter when it first hit the scene.
What’s really intersting is that Steve is modyfing the strategy on his blog, he’s going to be changing his strategy to accomdiate how media is evolving (well at least this month).
Here’s how Steve is evolving:
“So, net net, what does this mean? Well, by posting less on Micro Persuasion I actually am able to give you more. I am freed of the need to write here daily. This means when I do post on this site it is more substantive and meaningful and it incorporates my learnings from the conversations I have had elsewhere.
Further, micro blogging – especially because it is mobile – makes it easy for me to converse with a good number of you in real-time. This fits perfectly into a busy schedule where many days I use my iPhone more than I do a computer. It also flows with our growing need as a society for all that is brief.”
I, on the other hand, will not be changing my strategy on this blog, but will continue to make this my primary platform and continue to grow out those other tools.
Let’s hear from you, will you be changing your media, blog, or web strategy as things move faster, smaller, and more mobile?
The following is live blogging while listening to the the Best Promo Show radio show.
John Meloche and Jim Turner on a live Talk Radio Show deidicated to Marketing and Making Money on the Internet it’s called The Best Promo Sohw
They’ve giving a series of questions to ask an SEO you plan to hire, be a savvy and armed consumer and know what to look for.
Question to ask SEOs during interview process:
How long have you been in business?If someone tells you they’ve been doing it for 10 years, likely it didn’t exist then. So they may be a fraud
What is your background? Do you have a background in marketing or sales?
Do you have long terms clients? Are they satisfied? Ask them to prove it with case studies and references, and even tried keyword searches
What made your competition get the first seaerch results, what made them get the top search results?
What’s a realistic traffic uptake I can expect? Ask them to provide a breakdown of previous keywords and projected ones in the future.
Finding a good SEO
A good test is to find an SEO that comes up top when you type SEO. Duh!
Getting banned, not good
Tip: Getting banned is horrible for your domain, and you may want to consider shutting it down. Getting into the sandbox is not so bad.
Pricing SEO, what are market prices?
It varies on keywords that you’re aiming for
What really matters?
Organic is what matters, content is king
Brian Oberkirch has become a great social media bud over the last few years, and explains how communities, developers, and people make a big difference. So listen in, learn from his wisdom on the topics of web development, building great products, marketing and small good things.
I’m asked frequently by friends, clients, and others to invite them to events, perhaps the easiest way is for me to just publish them here on my blog. I recommend using upcoming.org as the best way to find out what events are going on, and more importantly, find out which one of your trusted friends are attending:
Tuesday Mr Brown is going to swing by, he’s the top podcaster and blogger in Singapore.
Wednesday I’m going to be interviewed on a Hawaiian radio station, more news on that to come, Then Lunch 2.0 at Facebook, I’ll be going early to avoid the horrendous lines, these events are getting really popular, Facebook will be sure to be a smash.
Thursday I need to send in my slides to the Marketing Profs. I’m going to be hosting a webinar with them on the topic of audio, video, and streaming for marketers in a few weeks.
