Guy Kawasaki, co-creator of aggregator juggernaut Alltop.com, has created an incredibly informative post on how to leverage twitter as a marketing tool. He goes in depth with specific tricks to maximizing “tweet” visibility, and discusses his successes using twitter for alltop, as well as highlighting the ways companies like Amazon and Wholefoods utilize twitter to maximize customer interaction.

For small businesses trying to reach consumers, Twitter, if used correctly, is undoubtedly one of the best tools available, and it’s free. For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it is essentially a mini-blogging tool, that allows users to create posts up to 140 characters in length. As a user one can post “tweets” as well as follow the posts of others in the twitter community. The value of this relational tool for marketing is really quite extraordinary, due to the exponential connectivity of Twitter followers.  Here is the most poignant example of Guy’s usage in numbers:

177 people agreed to repost all Alltop news as their own tweets. This took automated tweeting to a historical new high—or low depending on who you asked.

Then my new book, Reality Check , came out, and I made an offer of a free copy of it to anyone who signed up for the Alltop Twitterfeed. Another 280 people signed up—bringing the total to approximately 450 people.

We counted, and these 450 people had a total of 140,000 followers. This meant that whenever we announced a new topic, the 140,000 followers of 450 people received notification. These 450 people had followers in common, so their tweets didn’t reach 140,000 different people (see next section), but this was the Mother of Retweeting.

The post explains how to find followers, how to build a profile, everything you need to know about getting started with Twitter.

Social Networking, Web 2.0 Social Networking, Web 2.0

This week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine delved into the marketing and advertising world in today’s media saturated culture. They assembled an elite group of some of the top New York marketing people and had an open discussion about marketing centered around the theme of “screens.” The idea being that today’s consumer spends much of his or daily life interacting with information presented on screens, be it on a computer, a cellphone, tv, etc. and that this has changed the nature of advertising from a narrative created by the brand itself to one controlled by the consumer. What everyone on the group agrees on is that the static nature of television content and the tradition format for advertising ther is a dying trend. The rate at which the average consumer can find the exact information he or she seeks on the internet is far more rapid, and thus far more appealing.

The consumer’s interaction with the brand has thus become paramount. As opposed to testing advertising campaigns in focus groups where opinions can be easily skewed, Youtube has created a democratic sounding board for new campaigns. Advertisers can get instant feedback, and as in the case of the Tiger Woods EA Sports glitch, can incorporate such feedback into their marketing efforts:

EA Sports, the video-game company, is a good example. On YouTube, someone posted a clip of himself playing the company’s Tiger Woods golf game. He put it up as a joke, laughing at EA Sports, because he had discovered a glitch in the programming that allowed Tiger to walk right out onto a pond next to the golf course and shoot his ball from there. So the company saw the video, and in response, it uploaded this ad to YouTube that said: “It’s not a glitch. He’s just that good.” The ad showed the real Tiger, in live action, actually walk on water and shoot a ball. That’s a great example of responding to how consumers interact with your brand.

The challenge then is to interact with the consumers with the same immediacy that they interact with everthing else in the digital space, or at the very least providing the tools to facilitate such interaction. Companies are shifting money away from tv spots and focusing more and more on innovative ways of reaching consumers, everything from mobile apps and flash games to creating niche market products marketed directly to very specific groups.

This article raises a few questions that I’ll be thinking about in the coming weeks. How can marketers continually come up with innovative new ways of reaching consumers? At what point does the consumer become too wary of all the innovations, and realize that content is just a means to promote commerce? There is definitely an ideal balance, as by now almost everyone has come to expect some ammount of advertising in combination with content, but how much is too much?

Web 2.0 Web 2.0

Seth Godin, author of Tribes, just wrote this very insightful article pertaining to the publishing industry. He makes a good case for the dynamic nature of ecommmerce, and how the market doesn’t owe anybody anything. Reaping the rewards comes from adapting to the climate, and not the other way around. Read the article.

Web 2.0 Web 2.0

Viral Marketing, an aptly named internet phenomenon whose term seems to have lost all sense of irony, is one of the great mysteries for the modern day marketer.  If anyone has an exact formula for how to achieve it I’d be happy to hear it, but for now it’s about all I can do to talk a little bit about the phenomenon itself, and perhaps glean some insights into what key factors might contribute to viral success.

 The term was first coined in the mid-90’s by Harvard Business School professor Jeffrey Rayport in an article for Fast Company.  The analogous relationship between a pathogen and viral media stems from the voluntary or perhaps involuntary spread of the media itself. When someone forwards you a funny video, that video can be considered viral. If you consider that video to be funny enough in turn to forward it to one of your friends, you have played host to and transmitted the “virus” as well. The marketing aspect of course comes into play when a certain brand or corporate message or idea is inserted somewhere into the mix.

There doesn’t seem to be any kind of definite rule of thumb about how the insertion takes place, save to say that it is different/original in each case.  Here are a couple of examples of successful viral videos. The content of the first, a Cadbury commercial featuring a Gorilla playing the drums to a Phil Collins song, literally has no connection whatsoever to the brand it is endorsing. Yet the video is so funny, original, and different that the viewer can’t help but associate some element of the gleeful experience of viewing with the brand itself. Conversely, the Smirnoff Raw Tea video incorporates the brand identity directly into the content, but juxtaposes preppy characters with rap video stereotypes to create another funny and memorable video.

These videos both share humor, which seems to be one of the most conducive qualities to viral media. They are both relatively short, and they don’t attempt to go into a great deal of depth about the product itself. Essentially they do nothing but associate an entertaining experience with the brand, which is what many ads do in the mainstream media. However the difference is that there is something definitively offbeat about them. These aren’t ads you would see on American television. Both of them make the viewer sit back and say “what is this?!” at first, and then the payoff comes. This element of initial bewilderment is fundamental aspect of successful viral media. It is the veritable x-factor that makes you want to send it to someone else. It is a common theme that will be the focus of many further posts.   

Viral Media Viral Media, Web 2.0