How does someone come up with an idea like this. Starting in 2003, way before viral became the huge term it is now. Simple, and daring as a concept, combined with the silliest dance ever, is Matt Harding's perfect recipe for 10 million views.
Source: Speak Media Blog
It is hopefully clear that Viral marketing success is really not easy and certainly not cheap. There is no way a company can think that Matt Harding's dance would go viral, and hence there is no way for a marketer to replicate this.
Stride chose the next best thing and sponsored this trip. They got a very insignificant mention in the end. Little does the traditional marketer who just cares for a bigger logo, realize the significance of the insignificant.
Stride just supported a guy to achieve a dream, something on his bucket list perhaps. It struck a chord like nothing else ever will.
The video series got enormous media attention. Also take a look at the number of diverse videos on youtube alone, ranging from queries like "Where is Matt?" to "Matt impersonators and fans". There is also a website called Where the hell is Matt
The series got a whopping 10 million views and is going strong. The positive rub off on Stride is obvious once you have seen the entire video. Take a look and judge for yourself.
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Want consumers to talk? Viral is in!!
Ok Lets get this done with it. Even the world's best marketer cannot market a bad product. Really!!
Especially if its to be sold on the interent using social media marketing, viral marketing and buzz marketing tactics. You know that you have to revamp your product when bloggers just about refuse to write about you. There is a reason why so many websites are launched every day and why most of them languish.
Of course, If you have tons of money to spend on TV, then the story is a little different. You can attract hoards of first timers onto your website or to try your product, but their loyalty is going to be a huge function of switching costs associated with dumping your product and jumping onto the next bandwagon.
When I say your product has to be great, it includes both the product and the promise. In other words known as the story or positioning of your product. Many startups do not understand that your positioning is paramount and the product features are actually a result of the positioning. If your positioning differentiates you, then its logical that your product is the result of the same differentiation.
To understand why the story is really important read ' Technology vs Story '
If you as a marketer don't believe a product or startup will make it, do everyone a favour and don't promise the sky. I wont promise to market a product until I believe it can really solve a need in a manner better than all other products out there.
Likewise if you are a startup and want to market your product / website, don't shrug the marketer's advise to rejig your product. There might be some value in what they suggest. Difficult to find perhaps, but trust me the good ones will not ' faff '. Finding the good ones is another task by itself
Dell Idea Storm was created to interact with passionate consumers and one look at the number of people on these sites will tell you how involved consumers can get.
The objective is to get worthy ideas from users and worthy ideas surface because other consumers promote or demote the ideas, very similar to a digg methodology. Post - Promote - Discuss. The step added to this is "See" - See the company respond to worthy ideas & what they are doing to implement them.
The herd effect necessary to promote the ideas might result in no trend setting futuristic idea actually making it to the top. Consumers are after all never great crystal ball gazers but you do get to hear their views on simple things like Dell's excessive use of plastic. What might have been thought of as a necessary packaging element might come under the scanner thanks to this idea.
Dumb mistakes of someone in the organization also surface like the printing of the logo upside down.
An open conversation with your consumers can scare the wits of most companies, and it can expose many of your silly practices as is evident from these posts, but aren't companies much better off with consumers revealing their frustrations with the product.
The problem with this approach is that the marketing team alone cannot engage the consumer in conversation. They have to get the other departments within the organization ready to change according to popular consumer appeal. (actually this is market research for free)
For eg: the movement towards Open Office got a whopping 138479 votes. Most companies would give anything to have so many engaged consumers and what does Dell do - Nothing!! A very highly debated topic and difficult to give one company stance, but you have to take one when so many people are waiting to hear it.
These are progressive steps taken by Dell to join the conversation and in fact control it at some level by bringing it under their wing. They still need to sustain this initiative by adding it to the DNA of the company. This can no longer be just a good initiative, it has to be a way of business.
P.S - If you think the engaged consumer only exists in the case of high involvement goods like electronics, Starbucks created My Starbucks Idea with a similar objective. Check out what happens when you get some coffee fanatics together in one place.
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Consumers are talking !! Are brands listening?
Its the Conversation economy dude!!
Marketing 2.0 vs Marketing 1.0
What a silly question is the first thought that comes to your mind. Maybe I can salvage myself by saying "Of course it does". This post actually discusses the strategy used by startups pre funding vs post funding. Are they different and should they be?
Poor => Make people talk
As a poor startup, one cannot afford to undertake large campaigns which will reach millions of consumers. Startups normally choose the next best alternative, trying to reach passionate users in the hope they will talk.
They even entice the key bloggers by giving away limited invites, build a story around the product & founders to eventually make the startup talk worthy.
When one blogger talks, you could potentially be reaching a 1000 readers. Its not just effective, it is more credible than anything you can do to communicate directly about your startup.
Social Media Marketing is tried in any form that helps spread the story far and wide.
Money => Acquire consumers?
Once money flows in, something changes in the mental makeup of a startup. They no longer focus on getting people to talk. Its now about adwords, promos, strategic tie ups, all of it ending in acquiring one profitable consumer.
Sometimes making your communication and product talk worthy takes a back seat and every spend on marketing is directed towards getting another buyer.
Not sure if that one consumer is more worthy of your attention than the 1000's of other bloggers who are waiting for an interesting story to talk about.
Who would you target, the one who buys or the one who talks. Don't say both, that just helps you justify what you are doing irrespective of the objective.
This was featured on Pluggd.in as a guest post. Thanks Ashish
Image Source: David Wong's Photostream
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Media Evolution
It wasn't too long ago when many of us sat waiting for Doordarshan* to air the saturday evening movie and irrespective of who acted in it, watched it. The whole family & the whole country could be reached by airing a single spot during this time band. For someone with money this is an easy option. For startups of course, this situation would be a nightmare.
Opportunities for entertainment and media options have evolved greatly since that day. From one TV channel and millions of viewers we have moved on to 100s of TV channels and a niche set of viewers.
Segmentation of audiences by the press, magazines targeted at niche audiences are all obvious indications of the world being continuously segmented into audiences with different interests and preferences.
Add to it the internet which is emerging as a leading entertainment destination amongst the youth. The consumer could be visiting any one out of over 50 million registered domains depending on his interests and this further confirms the theory of The Long Tail (a book you have to read, if you haven't already)
Image Source - Free Thought Canada
Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail" aired a quote " Every abundance creates a scarcity" in a fantastic post and ever since I have been dreaming of writing about it. Have finally got down to doing it.
Media Proliferation and infinite entertainment destinations on the web have clearly created a scarcity of consumer's time and attention.
Greater Segmentation => Lesser Wastage
Greater media segmentation both simplifies the marketers life and complicates it at the same time. The Doordarshan ad is a simple decision, while choosing amongst media options today is a full fledged job.
Marketing rules on the internet further complicate lives by adding an interactive element to the traditional ad. If done right, targeting and reaching your TG is much cheaper and the proportion of advertising wasted on an audience that doesn't remotely care is less.
Simultaneously the ad rates chargeable to reach this already segmented audience increase and sometimes by around 10 times. Chris Anderson's post comparing ad rates on Social networks like Facebook vs networks like Ning establishes the same.
* Doordarshan is the public television broadcaster of India
The reason everything is wrong with traditional marketing is that it talks down to the consumer. It tells you what is right for you and not necessarily engages you and lets you decide for yourself.
Why should I waste my time trying to explain it, when this video does all that and more
There is a reason why this blog is called Marketing Amnesia. The reason is, if I talked to my wife like I chose to in a traditional advertisement, she would stand up, punch me in the face, kick me in the b%$#s and walk away.
Now that could be a wee bit painful...
Instead of being forced to forget traditional marketing, why not choose to do so.
P.S - Marketing Sucks when its not done right. If you would like to stay updated with the best techniques, do subscribe
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Its the Conversation economy dude!!,
Consumers are talking !! Are brands listening?,
Marketing 2.0 vs Marketing 1.0
This post is for everyone who is wondering what to do with Twitter and how to leverage it as a marketing tool for your startup brand. Twitter is about conversations with real people. How can a brand invade the space and hope for followers of its brand.
Follow and you Shall be Followed
While experimenting with Twitter on my first attempt at getting scores of followers for a website, I did the usual thing and followed around 400 users. A quick analysis revealed that around 8-10% returned the favour and I was delighted.
Twitter Spam
Its only when you get a taste of your own medicine, do you realise your folly. When my personal profile got followed by another brand, I immediately viewed the act with suspicion. A click on their profile displayed a dismal following to follower ratio and you realise that at some level this is twitter's method of spamming you. Somehow you know that the website has no genuine interest in you and is following you in the hope of you following them.
Do your research
Search for twitter conversations on Summize (update: acquired by Twitter) which match what you have to sell. Just imagine what would people write about if they were remotely interested in your service.
A fashion site, would look for people who have talked about their latest purchases of what constitutes fahion in the land. Unfortunately I am not into fashion and can't give any great examples :).
If I were Nike I would seach for keywords like running, basketball, cricket, football etc. and follow those who seem to be inclined towards sport. Hope you get the drift
Add those with few followers
Those with fewer followers are more likely to notice an additional follower and reciprocate, compared to a guy who has no clue why so many people are following him.
Twit Ban
Add people but be sure to ban them soon after if they don't bother following you. There has to be a conscious attempt prune the non followers to try and attract new followers. The key is to keep a high ratio of followers to following at all times.
Content Please
Give people a reason to follow you. Update them on relevant content, news about your brand, ask questions, conduct surveys, free samples, sneak peeks etc. Make sure they interact and stay engaged. After all Twitter is just a great huge conversation
Success on Twitter cannot happen overnight. Take it easy and you will have long term successful Twitter presence.
Let me know if you have tried something and it has worked.
Follow Ishwar on Twitter
Image Courtesy : ComicBase
The eternal debate between Finance and Marketing teams in every organization is the calculation of a return on investment for the marketing spend.
This has led to many marketers focusing on Conversion - wherein every ad is measured in terms of either a lead generated or sales. The concept is that, if you have got the consumer to buy now, then the ad must be truly engaging.
The problem with this approach is that marketers try to give the consumer a hook to purchase now and that hook is very often a promotion / freebie.
Conversion as the basis of marketing spend justification is a very narrow approach. You are targeting the one consumer who has seen your advertising and no one else and he buys your brand partly because it has an offer attached.
Nothing earth shattering about the fact that great brands are built when people talk positively.
A new measurement has to be used to track marketing spends. Social Media has allowed conversation to spread rapidly on the internet and at the same time allow companies to track it. Conversation tracking could well be the measure we are looking for.
Once tracked, Should you control it is another question and another post.
Conversation tracking does seem like the way forward to measure marketing spend. How do you attach a value to the conversation generated is the question?
P.S Just wondering if Conversation Economy is an original term that I can claim as my own. Have you read about this anywhere else?
Update: I am not a genius after all :)
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Consumers are talking !! Are brands listening?,
Marketing 2.0 vs Marketing 1.0
What is wrong with traditional marketing
Concept of Conversion vs Conversation derived from The 3 philosophies of Word of Mouth Marketing
Every now and then I like to dish out some basic stuff. Today is one of those "Now and Then" moments
While discussing Marketing 2.0 with a fellow brand manager, I was dishing out some of the regular stuff on Web 2.0, the conversation age, how to get consumers to talk and more importantly why you should encourage conversation with the consumer.
A simple question asked goes like this - Till a few years ago, the marketing team of any organization controlled any mass communication on the product, why will the brand manager encourage consumers to talk when he is unsure of what they will say.
How can control be established over the brand communication. How can one message be communicated to all.
It is not as easy as it was in a non interactive media world. TV, Radio and Press lent themselves to consistent messaging. The internet is more complex, banner advertising can have a single message but how can conversation which is supposed to be breed further conversation also be controlled?
Initial thoughts suggest that marketers have no choice but to track conversations using a number of tools. The most obvious tool is google alerts followed by technorati for tracking blog conversation. Another useful tool for tracking conversations especially on twitter is Summize. Tracking is insufficient, you need to participate too.
What would you suggest? How do you track conversation on the net and what would you do to control it? Would you control it at all?
Update: Get Satisfaction allows you to express your love and hate for a company and even encourages companies to get involved with their consumers. A tool which every company should use.
This post is a result of an interesting discussion with Nithya of Muziboo fame. Muziboo is a young startup, which reaches out to the musician in everyone. Finally there is a space which goes beyond encouraging just young bands to encouraging individuals interested in music. More on Muziboo in another post
This network is based on common interests in music, and not necessarily on an existent friend network. In such a situation, it is not necessary that you know an individual on the site in person, but you might still want to be updated on new music or live events planned by the musician.
To remain updated there are really 3 options that Muziboo can provide - "Add as Friend (like Facebook), Follow (like in Twitter) or Become a Fan (like in Stumbleupon)
Add as friend seeks reciprocation, while the other 2 do not. Add as a friend seeks to strengthen bonds, while the others allow weak bonds to co exist.
Which one do you think is most appropriate for Muziboo? If you used this platform and found a cool musician which option would you choose to connect and why?
Update - Tracked Evan Williams the Co Founder of Twitter on Twitter. Have requested him to air his views on "Why Twitter chose Follow as its option to connect users, when other available options were Add as Friend or Become a Fan"
He is a busy guy and he might not have the time to reply, but if we get one, I am sure it will be insightful.
