Viral marketing vs. advertising
by Fred Roed on 03/09/07 at 1:02 pm
4 comments
Amazing how the term ‘viral marketing’ is becoming so pervasive. Being a partner in a web marketing company, I hear it thrown around in meetings all the time. Consider this advert (click on the movie below), for Outpost.com, a member of the ‘Dot.Bomb’ list of start-ups that failed in the e-commerce gold rush a few years back. The advert’s hilarious. Unfortunately, their adspend was too, and these guys spent all their seed funding on buying expensive ad placements during the Superbowl and other primetime slots. These days, I wonder how much better they’d have done by leaving the ads on YouTube, and letting us do all the work.
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View more ads here, including the “Gerbil Cannon” and “Tattoo Day Care”.
Go on, you know you want to.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.
Liza
Sep 3rd, 2007
Viral is the bomb. I am still trying to figure out how facebook can work for my small localised business. I have a congregation together,
but how does one evangelise effectively on Facebook?
Fred
Sep 3rd, 2007
The “Facebook for Business” question is a hot topic of conversation. I think that with any viral campaign, the key thing is your message. Is it funny? Is it irreverent? Is it political? If the message strikes a chord, it will fly. This may sound obvious, but it’s helluva hard to do. I know because I’ve consulted on a few viral campaigns. The same applies to Facebook – if you want your message to fly, identify a message that resonates with your audience and watch it spread…
Liza
Sep 4th, 2007
I’m more referring to marketing to people you know. Suddenly I find myself on Facebook with 50 plus friends.
All of them are already sold on me.
So I guess the exact question would be: How does one
effectively/subtly use Facebook to brief people you know what you are up to so they can bring you referrals?
Fred
Sep 4th, 2007
I was thinking about the very same thing in the car this morning…
It was Eric Edelstein who said at our previous Heavy Chef Session that Facebook can be a great way of letting people know what you’re up to… A-list blogger Robert SCoble invited everyone to become his friend on Facebook, and now he has 7000 ‘friends’ who he can market to by just changing his profile status. Not too subtle, but pretty effective…!