Articles: Viral Marketing Vanquishes Viewer Boredom
Sell It Online by Word of Mouth!
 Viral marketing is the fine art of saying something so interesting, outlandish
or outrageous that people forward it to their friends.
Recipe 1: Add Sex and Stir!
Sex sells — or at least grabs our attention. Think outside the box. If you
can think of ways that your product or service connects to or enhances people’s
sex lives, go for it!
Example: A dentist capitalized on this notion by writing a booklet: Healthy
Mouth, Healthy Sex. People told their friends, and her business skyrocketed.
Recipe 2: Break Expectations!
Humor grabs our attention — and thrusts us into the unexpected. If you can
think of strange, even ludicrous ways of using your product or service, people
who find it funny will tell their friends.
Example: Blenders are for food, right? Not on YouTube, where “Does it
Blend?” has become so iconic that it has its own Wikipedia page. It started
with a box of matches and progressed to credit cards, golf balls, a six-foot
garden rake, iPhones and more. People contact this blender’s manufacturer
to suggest things they want to see blended on YouTube.
Recipe 3: Exploit the Oh-My-God Factor!
Anything completely outlandish is a ripe candidate for viral marketing. Just
make sure your name is spelled right!
Example: The challenge was to publicize a self-cleaning industrial
toilet. The manufacturer took the notion of “floors so clean you can eat off them” to
an outrageous level: It made a YouTube video of gorgeous models snorting lines
of cocaine off their toilet seats. (Though I’m fairly sure they didn’t
use real cocaine!)
For more about how to take advantage of viral marketing, read David Meerman
Scott’s World Wide Rave and The New Rules
of Marketing and PR. These three
examples are from a presentation David gave at a luncheon meeting of the Women
in Business Connection in Cambridge MA, January 2009.
—October 2009, Issue #8, Wyn Snow
Read more articles and tips
about websites, social media, writing powerful copy, and more.
|
