Credentials:
Scott is a marketing strategist, seminar leader, author and evangelist for the new rules of marketing and PR. He was vice president of marketing at NewsEdge Corporation and held executive positions at the electronic information division of Knight Ridder.
Big Idea:
Forget everything you know about how to market products or ideas and learn how to get others to do it for you really cheaply
Book:
World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers That Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories, published by Wiley, March 2009
After reading David Meerman Scott's new book World Wide Rave, I decided I had to sign up for Twitter. Within minutes I was getting automated e-mail messages saying that various people I know were "now following my updates on Twitter." All of a sudden I felt the pressure to start tweeting, saying something clever, funny or just plain old sarcastic to build a following. Up until this time I had the impression that most tweeting was taking place between teens that wanted to tell their friends what they were doing in 140 characters or less. But Scott made me realize that many savvy business people are using Twitter and other forms of social media to create buzz-or as Scott refers to it, a World Wide Rave.
Traditional metrics just don't apply when trying to gauge the success of a World Wide Rave. Measuring ROI leads marketers to "become too cautious and boring," says Scott. It usually means that the company is not investing in creating a Rave, but is sticking to traditional activities such as direct mail programs. "Take a chance," says Scott. "Make the assumption that if millions of people are sharing your ideas (that's a number you can measure), then some percentage of them will buy your products."
One company created a huge Rave with a series of humorous YouTube videos they created. Blendtec, a small company that makes household blenders, got enormous attention for the "Will It Blend?" videos they created using their product to blend some unlikely items, including an iPhone (the video has received over 6.6 million views on YouTube), golf balls (over 4.6 million views), glow sticks (over 4.4 million views) and marbles (over 3.5 million views). The people that watched these gadgets blended to dust, sent links to their friends, who sent links to their friends. That's how Raves get going. The company also encourages participation at its Will It Blend website by asking people to suggest new items they'd like to see pulverized.
Another video series that was successful was The Art of the Sale, a spoof of corporate training videos created by IBM. Unlike traditional in-your-face marketing, you don't know who produced the video until it ends. Hundreds of thousands of people have watched theses videos on YouTube (Lesson 1 has garnered close to a quarter of a million views) and "humanized" the company in the process, says Scott. A blog at the San Francisco Chronicle said the tone of the spoof video "is in keeping with the kinder, humbler image IBM now seeks to project." What PR team wouldn't be thrilled to read that about their company!
The video was inspired by an internal video created in 2004 for an IBM sales meeting. The external videos were posted to YouTube in 2006, linked to from the IBM Mainframe blog, and included in one of the IBM sales newsletters, which helped it go viral. Bloggers and mainstream media also picked it up, creating still more buzz. Says Tim Washer, manager of new media web video at IBM Communications, "There are often a lot of barriers to doing this kind of thing within organizations, but to be successful it is critical this not be done by committee."
Not all viral marketing is done with videos. Some other methods include writing an e-book, creating a clever interactive tool, becoming active on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, blogging, devising an online contest, publishing great content on your website, and offering proprietary data and metrics for free that others would find valuable.
