Tag: YouTube

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The Viral Myth – Viral is not a Marketing Strategy

Frequently many companies look to a new strategy to promote themselves: going viral.

They either make a funny video or hire a social media manager with the goal to go ‘viral.’ If that tactic is not combined with an integrated marketing strategy, they are likely to fail.

Viral is not a marketing strategy.

Despite claims that social media democratizes media and communication, a recent study shows that your message still the greatest chance of being spread when expressed by a small number of elite influencers…. whether it’s Robert Scoble, Om Malik, an industry analyst or the New York Times. According to research by Yahoo!, roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20,000 elite users.

In February, no one had heard of Rebecca Black or knew that on Friday everyone was looking forward to the weekend. Yet the 13-year-old’s video went unnoticed on YouTube for over a month. It only “went viral” after it was noticed by an influencer, comedian Michael Nelson, and a link on the Comedy Central’s Tosh.0 website. Then, as other influencers started noticing, Black’s video started gaining traction and now has over 97 million views and being the most disliked video on YouTube with almost 2 million dislikes. 15 years ago, America’s Funniest Home Videos never got that much exposure. Bob Saget must be jealous.

Of course, today the barriers of entry are much lower. It cost just $2,000 for Black’s family to make that video and another $2,000 to secure the rights. It’s far easier to get noticed today than it ever was before. But the field of people attempting to ‘go viral’ is also increasing.

This is why a holistic marketing approach, based on a solid business strategy, and connected by an integrated matrix of marketing touch points – public relations, advertising, email, SEO, MARCOM, and web development … in which some of your material developed are distributed and engaged with via social channels – is more important now than ever.

Because if you hope that ‘going viral’ will just happen disconnected from a holistic marketing strategy, keep hoping. Unless it’s Friday.

This post is crossposted on The Cline Group

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Marketing Lessons from Home Improvement

More Power! No, that’s not the lesson from the 1990s television show Home Improvement.  Home Improvement was a television show that focused on the Taylor family. The father, Tim Taylor, understood content marketing before the age of social media.

In the show, Tim Taylor, along with his burly assistant, Al Borland, hosted the home improvement show Tool Time. Tool Time was more than just a cable television show about how to fix a toilet or repair a fence, though. It was a marketing tool by its sponsor: Binford Tools. Viewers of the show may have noticed the prominent mentions of Binford tools and the Binford sponsorship. The point of Tool Time wasn’t just to plug a leak, but to use a Binford wrench while doing it.

Binford wasn’t going to sponsor Cooking with Irma, a cooking show on the same network, as the target audience for that show wasn’t the target customer for Binford tools. But neither were they going to try to just advertise and not provide authentic content. Well, they did try.

Towards the end of the show, Binford had a new VP who required that Tool Time push the Binford name in the audience’s face. Instead of authenticity, they were asked to fake it — blow up things intentionally instead of due to Tim’s natural clumsiness. Instead of providing value, they chose to be the world’s first spammers and turn off their audience and host.

The result: Tim Taylor and the Tool Time team rebelled and Tool Time (and Home Improvement) ended its decade-plus run … and Binford’s content was now not in front of their target audience. By trying to push the hard sell, they ended up with no sell.

I’ve seen that all too often with so-called “social media gurus.” Most brands are broadcasting instead of engaging. Advertising instead of helping. Too many brands are just tweeting “Buy me” or promoting their latest events, rather then providing content that is interesting and useful to their prospective customers.  That’s not the formula for success.

Instead, provide useful information to help your customers. If you are a tool company, provide videos on home improvement tips. An office building, how about small business networking. Gerber baby food talks about parenting tips on their blog. An Internet security company can talk about how to keep your server safe. A unit testing software company can blog about code errors and writing code for testing. An educational portal can teach their users. A strategic communications and marketing firm can share marketing tips (like this very site!).  The medium isn’t important, except that it should be clear and legible. Certainly, if your customers can’t find your site or your video, it’s not very help and they won’t benefit you. That’s where SEO and proper coding, tagging, and formatting matter. But providing useful, helpful, and informative content is just as – if not more important. That’s what Binford did on Tool Time and what you need to do to your customers.

It’s not about social media or “traditional media” (was the television tradition media before the 1950s and 1960s?). It’s about creating compelling content that is useful to your potential customers. The medium is NOT the message. Tim Taylor knew that on Tool Time. Are you as smart as the tool man?

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The ROI of Social is "Will Your Business Be Around in 5 Years?"

I first blogged the latest edition of Socionomic’s now ubiquitous video about how the media landscape has changed to digital and its social implications back in December. Now, six months later, the world has changed again and Socionomics has come out with a new video called Social Media Revolution 2 (though not the second edition of their video, which has been around for over a year – an eternity in the age of the iPad).

A few facts, from Socionomics:

  1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
  2. 96% of them have joined a social network
  3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
  4. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
  5. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.
  6. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
  7. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
  8. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  9. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
  10. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  11. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  12. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  13. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  14. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  15. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
  16. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
  17. Only 14% trust advertisements
  18. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  19. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
  20. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
  21. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
  22. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
  23. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  24. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
  25. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
  26. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
  27. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

How is your company reacting?