Archive for the ‘Advice and Tips’ Category

  • Jul 08
  • 3

What Napoleon Can Teach Us About Marketing

Napoleon on horseIn 1793 Napoleon Bonaparte was a young officer fighting a gruesome battle at the Siege of Toulon. He had not yet become the great general or Emperor that we all know today, but nonetheless, even as a young man, he displayed a shrewd and calculating knowledge of how to lead men and affect their actions to further his goals.

Napoleon, a 24-year-old Captain at the time, had set up a gun battery in a forward position. In fact, the battery was so far forward that Napoleon’s superiors said he would never get anyone to man it. The battery was so close to the enemy and so exposed that to take up the post meant guaranteed death by enemy artillery. Indeed, the first men ordered to the post refused. Undeterred, Napoleon had one of his sergeants create a wood placard with a message on it and place the placard on a stake near the gun battery. The message on the placard read: The Battery for the Men Without Fear. The position was manned day and night from that point on by soldiers eager to prove their heroism, and Napoleon’s battery dominated the city’s harbor. The resulting withdrawal of the British Royal Navy led to French victory and the start of Napoleon’s illustrious career.

So what does this teach us about marketing? Speak to people’s deepest emotions in order to succeed.

Here are some of those deep emotions which, when activated, lead people to take action:

  1. Pride (specifically in one’s background, country, religion, etc…)
  2. Manliness or femininity
  3. Feeling of safety

Of course, the idea of appealing to these elements within people is not new. You can see each of the three above examples in any Chevy truck commercial. If you drive a Chevy truck you are not only safer than others on the road, but you also manlier than non-Chevy truck drivers, and also more proud of America. Chevy hits as many of your emotions as possible. But wait, what about Ford? Ford’s commercials say their trucks carry more weight and make you more manly. And then there’s Dodge, and Toyota..oh damn, they all say they are the most manly. One can pull a train, one can stop an airplane, one can drive off after a 3-ton rock is dropped in its bed. This is the equivalent of Napoleon having four gun batteries and placing the same placard in front of all of them. It wouldn’t have worked. A superlative is, by definition, an exclusive thing. There can only be one best, manliest, sexiest, bravest, —–est.

So, continuing our truck example, we have four pickup trucks lined up in front of us. Each truck has a wooden placard in front of it saying: Truck for the strongest men.

Confused, we all stand in a clump staring at one sign then another then another. Noticing our apparent confusion, the makers of Dodge, Chevy, and Ford quickly decide to tap into a different emotion. We watch as a new sign is posted in front of each of the three trucks saying: Truck for men who really love America.

Hmmmm…

Well, now we’ve pretty much turned away from Toyota because we all want to support America. But, we still stand in confused clump, unsure of which truck to choose because they all claim the same superlatives. Noticing this, the makers of the trucks go to great lengths to show us how strong their truck’s frames are, and how they perform in crashes. They each post a third placard in front of their trucks saying: For men who love their families.

I’m sure you can all see the pattern here. I will not go further into the unending stream of wooden placards shown to us. The point, I’m sure, is obvious. If everyone is “the best,” then no one is.

So what does this teach us about marketing? I think it teaches us that what was revolutionary for Napoleon is now commonplace. Napoleon “thought outside the box” and chose to approach his men though different channels than just passing orders down the chain of command. Today, however, Napoleon’s tactics are very much “in the box.” As such, it is important that marketers pay special attention to how the competition is appealing to consumers; not to mimic it, but to intentionally take a different course.

This is especially true in online marketing where the ability to target consumer micro-segments is unprecedented. Find the people you want and then hit their emotions in ways that they haven’t been hit before. At first it is likely scary, just like it would be scary to tell Ford to stop fighting the “I’m more manly that you are” fight. But, if you take a second and step back, move outside the traditional marketing dogma under which you were trained, you will see the true genius of Napoleon: Approach people differently than they are currently being approached.

Be different. Prove your superiors wrong. Lead people to the actions you want them to take. Market like Napoleon.

3 Comments
  • Jun 08
  • 20

How to Wiki: Wikis as Marketing Tool?

wikipedia-logo.jpgThe Wikipedia definition of Wikipedia reads: “Wikipedia’s articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and nearly all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Having steadily risen in popularity since its inception, it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited web sites worldwide.

In fact, Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, according to Alexa, with 52% of its page views coming from the English version of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the worlds biggest and most successful wiki, but there are thousands of niche wikis out there and due to their collaborative and social nature, they should be part of any social media marketing strategy.

Marketing on Wikis

  • Many wikis let you make updates anonymously. Ideally, you should log-in and create an identity. Be honest and be yourself.
  • Don’t use wikis for self-promotion. It is not intended for that and your entry will end up being deleted or at least edited.
  • While you want your business or brand to be added, it is better to build out complementary and appropriate information as part of adding your business. For example, if you are a professional social media marketing consultant, you’ll want to add content to the definition of social media or the definition of marketing.
  • It is OK to correct mistakes, it is not OK to remove competitors.
  • When you add a new page, make sure you start with the template that is appropriate. If you make mistakes, other people will fix them, and if you spam with inappropriate content, other people will remove you.

It is important to have a clear picture of what wants to be achieved with wikis. The main professional aim on Wikipedia or other important wikis should be tracking and managing what is said about you, your brand or your company. At least in the case of Wikipedia, their links are far too influential for anybody to ignore its content, especially given the public’s misunderstanding of its liberal editorial policies. It is also a very good way to contribute your knowledge of your market or the focus of your business to the community. Wikis should not be looked at as a tool to generate links or to increase a website’s page ranking. In fact, all links on Wikipedia are “nofollow”, meaning that they are not counted as a link by Google or the other search engines, which use links as part of their ranking algorithm.

Wiki Etiquette

There is a set of unwritten rules that will ensure a successful use of wikis as marketing tool.The bottom line is that any significant wiki community will be very vigilant and strictly opposed to biased information. Any effort to enhance a Wikipedia listing should make sure that it aware of and follows the established guidelines. That said, here’s a guide to creating a new page in Wikipedia.

Niche Wikis

This is a short list of niche wikis, which can be relevant to specific businesses or brands:

  • WikiTravel: the wikipedia of travel.
  • Dealipedia: a business wiki for mergers, acquisitions, venture investments, IPO and other deals.
  • LyricWiki: all the lyrics you can handle.
  • WikiMapia: collaborative mapping.
  • Wikia: community supporting the creation and development of wiki communities on any topic people are passionate about. Currently, they support over 6000 communities in more than 70 languages.

While wikis allow very little deviation from the established rules and customs, if you pay attention and follow the rules, wikis offer an extremely powerful forum for enriching the community and associating your online brand with intelligent and useful content.

12 Comments
  • Jun 08
  • 11

Viral Marketing to Generation ‘Why?’

Marketing to a generation that doesn’t follow orders, hates ads and throws a wrench in your strategy.

Read Write Web recently fielded a great article that caused interesting debate within our viral marketing company, and I thought it would be worth sharing. The article focused on how Generation Y (born between 1982-1997) is going to “change the web” and what makes a Gen Y-er different from the previous generations. Some of the notable (debatable?) facts about Gen Y when viewed from a social media marketing perspective:

  1. TV Isn’t King
  2. They Don’t Care About Your Ad, They Care What Their Friends Think
  3. Marketing Has to Change

I agree so strongly with these three notes in particular that I formed this business based on them! But the discussion that followed the article brought up some points that I thought worth getting blogosphere feedback on.

  1. If TV isn’t king what is? Stats show that TV quality content is still extremely popular (might we say king?) online. If this isn’t King, what does something need to do to be ‘King’? My main feeling is that TV as a medium is dying due to one main factor: Interruption marketing. What is the first thing a DVR/TiVo owner does? Skip all commercials. One of my colleagues asked “why?” when this point was brought up. I think the better question is “now that the possibility for freedom is there, why does anyone EVER WATCH TV commercials?”
  2. Gen-Y (and many older folks) are supposedly of the opinion that “your ad doesn’t matter”. I would have further refined this point to be “your poorly-targeted, uninteresting ad doesn’t matter”. Look at the viral success of some interesting, funny or amazing online ads. Are they THAT hard to understand? Are they random, unrepeatable anomalies? I say no. They all engage the consumer in a way that the consumer WANTS to be engaged. Putting a TV commercial online and then complaining that viral marketing is failing is like putting a Mustang in the ocean and telling Ford their cars don’t work! I think ReadWriteWeb had it slightly wrong. Gen Y-ers like relevant, engaging ads. They watch the Superbowl for the ads, they forward amazing online ads. Gen Y is responsible for the huge success of some viral campaigns. It’s the overwhelming failure on the part of the ads to understand the medium and earn attention that Gen-Y disagrees with, not advertising in general.
  3. “Marketing has to change” is about as timely and insightful an observation as someone showing up to the D-day beaches on June 10th, 1944 and proclaiming “something big just went down”. Maybe they were being “simple” for simplicity’s sake, but think comments like that reassure marketers in a terrible way. With that comment, we’re askin g people to ignore and delay the inevitable. “It’s OK, other people who ‘get it’ are just beginning to understand this new wave of marketing. I can spend five more years of marketing budget before I turn my brain on.” So much content is available online now (print, radio AND Television content) that advertisers who aren’t wising up don’t have much more time as the space is rapidly being conquered by the forward thinking outfits who are willing to “brave” the lands where consumers are in control of what they spend their time on.

I would say I think very much like a Gen Y-er. I can’t stand being interrupted online and I hate irrelevant ads, but I LOVE good viral videos and I love targeted ads. I realize that TV isn’t king anymore (or more specifically, for much longer). I realize that in an increasingly on-demand world, marketers can’t demand attention of Gen Y, they can only earn it.

If you’re a marketer seeking Generation Y’s dollars, ask yourself if you’ve honestly considered the changing landscape and changed your actions accordingly. It’s like they say, repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. How will you change your approach today to win Gen Y dollars tomorrow?

15 Comments
  • May 08
  • 23

How to Build a 1,000 True Fans Base

Understanding how your target group (readers, customers, viewers, etc.) thinks and reacts to information is the first step in building a steady fan base.
A couple of months ago, Kevin Kelly wrote a very thought provoking post about the long tail and a base of 1,000 true fans. He states, that:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A true fan is – according to Kelly – someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce.

This post makes a very good point on the role of these 1,000 fans, but does not discuss how can one build such a core of fans.
While reading Barry Schwartz’s book “The paradox of choice; why more is less“, I discovered valuable information which helped me approach this intriguing question.

Adaptation

Adaptation is an evolutionary theory referring to the way individual organisms gradually change and get more suited to their environment.

However, the theory of adaptation does not only apply on studies of evolution and the origin of species…it also applies to human behavior.
To put it simply, we get used to things and then we start to take them for granted. Repetition brings adaptation.

To a degree, this is necessary to create a sense of coherence and security; people need repetition to develop a feeling of safety.

But an interesting paradox has been observed: when people get used to a source of pleasure it stops being a source of pleasure.
For example, the pleasure degree of your first joy ride was much higher than the one of your 100th joy ride.

How to Build a Steady Fan Base

What can we learn about marketing from adaptation?

Balance is the key.

On the one hand you should follow a pattern. This could mean:

  • using the same style of expression (e.g. same writing style, same directing style, same music genre, etc.)
  • creating expectation (each broadcast should promise a new one)
  • keep a steady publishing structure (e.g. new content every Monday and Thursday)
  • refer to previous publications; your fans will be happy to find a point of identification (”Hey, I know that!”)

On the other hand you should renew sources of pleasure. For example:

  • make something different once in a while (if you write a blog, post a video or a podcast). This provokes the expectation mentioned above.
  • develop and expand your methods and them implement them to your pattern. (like in TV Shows: a new character is introduced and the becomes a regular member of the cast).

Conclusion

Building a base of 1,000 true fans is a very cumbersome process. It requires complete engagement, passion and vision. But as Kevin Kelly said, once you have this base you can make a living out of it.

Learning from the functions of adaptation and its paradox, can help you expand. Nine Inch Nails is probably the best example. Remember what they started almost a year ago, with ther ‘Year Zero Project‘? They got out of the norm by providing something completely different (an interactive campaign, where fans search for clues and participate in projects) and they have now implemented this pattern to their whole campaign, by providing new ways to the fans to participate. Now NIN fans expect new ways to participate in upcoming NIN projects.

Certainly, this equilibrium between repetition and innovation does not guarantee success, but is surely a major step to this direction.

We will be returning with additional posts on this subject so please subscribe to our feed to stay connected. As always, your feedback on the subject will help us expand the discussion.

So what do you say, are there other ways to build a regular fan base?

1 Comment
  • May 08
  • 21

How to Facebook: Essential Basics for Your Survival

Let’s start out with some of the Facebook basics because if you’re part of the uninitiated, it’s likely that your account will be shut down.

Facebook has a special initiation…namely ‘follow our rules or die’.

If you don’t know how to use Facebook you need to be “in the know” before you get started in order to avoid any unpleasantness and hassles. This saves you a great deal of time both now and in the long run. Invest a little of your time now in discovering how to properly use Facebook so you avoid losing massive amounts of your time later dealing with account issues and warnings.

Here’s where you get initiated and kept out of the Facebook black hole:

One of the big reasons people use Facebook is for networking. Especially for business, it makes sense because it is a protected environment. This can be a very good thing because it keeps away spammers.

Less Spam = More Attention

This being true, your communications to your friends have a better chance of being read and responded to (which is what you want). Of course, you’ll need to know how to build your friend/contact network. Don’t worry, I’ll talk with you about that and give you tips on how I obtained 2211 friends.

Unfortunately, many new users get caught by the Facebook spam moderators and get their accounts shut down. These guys mean well but unfortunately sometimes the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.

Even many seasoned Facebook users have had their accounts disabled and banned. Robert Scobleizer (a long-time and experienced Facebook user) wrote about how his account got shut down. He later got it reinstated but why make yourself go through the hassle. After the effort it takes to build up 500, 1000, or more friends, you want to protect your account and the time that you’ve put in.

There are some basic rules that you want to follow. When you are sending friend requests always include a personal message and only send the same message to 8-9 people before changing it up and sending a different one.

Realize this is a general guideline and Facebook changes their algorithm periodically. They also have human administrators that check things out when a filter is triggered.

To be ultra safe at the start when you first signing up and are getting comfortable with the Facebook laws and user community you may want to send only 5 of the same personal message each day.

This ‘message’ field is available when you do a friend request. To be clear here’s a pic of what I’m talking about:

Facebook Friend Request Screen Capture

Facebook won’t tell you exactly what their filter is but right now it seems if you send 10 or more of the same messages on the same day it triggers one of their filters and you’ll get an account warning. If you exceed the limit for account warnings (seems to be between three and five), your account will be disabled.

So the thing to remember is to vary your messages when you’re sending friend requests. I recommend, and I practice this method, that whenever you’re requesting a friend you include a personal message of how you know them or if you know one of their friends mention that name and what kind of business you are in along with your contacting them. Or if you found them through a common interest group mention that in the message because it is an instant commonality and bond you share with them (which raises the chances they’ll accept your friend request).

Also, when you are e-mailing friends you make within Facebook, you must vary your message here as well. I don’t recommend emailing people you aren’t yet true friends with because it can lead to trouble. Facebook likes to enable communication between friends and has a filter that you could ‘trip’ by emailing random users. So, if you are coming out with some new product or some new cool website you want to set up an event to notify all your friends instead of attempting to e-mail them all individually because that will cause your account to get shut down. Events are one of the Facebook applications that I’ll talk with you about further later.

You now know some of the basics of the Facebook community and how to interact with people without getting your account shut down. Follow these basic guidelines and you’ll have a good Facebook experience.

Basically, don’t send the same friend request more than 10 times per day, and don’t send the same email to your friends more than 10 times per day. I’m talking when you’re doing cutting and pasting. These are guidelines that are working right now but to be ultra safe you could do only 5 of the same per day.

Now for another huge bugaboo…mass emails. You know the ones that are sent to you and 100 other email addresses in the ‘to field’

Here’s an example:

Facebook Mass Email

As you can see there are many email addresses that this was sent to and this makes people (especially Facebook people) angry. You’ll often get angry messages back in response and even some hate messages. Also, many of those people may unfriend you. This can hurt your ability to make new friends. It’s just not worth it. So stay away from this. The right way to do it is by using the Events application. Setup an event and invite all your friends to it through the events invite function. That’s the only way to do this correctly.

Email is a 1-to-1 communication and you should always think of it as you have a face-to-face conversation with someone sitting across the table from you or next to you on a couch or in a chair.

Next time we’ll talk about powering up your networking through a huge time-saving tactic.

________________________________________

This is a guest post by Alexander Alaric. Make sure to show him some love because he’s got a lot more to come in this series.

9 Comments
  • May 08
  • 15

Viral Marketing Secrets: Using the Whole World

earthMost of you know that this blog is edited and maintained by the founders of the viral marketing company, Pandemic Labs. It has been our goal from the very beginning to create an online destination to provide insight, information, and discussion about viral marketing and social media marketing. It has occurred to me lately that much of our ongoing experiences with clients give us some unique insights that we can share with the community here. To that end, this is the first post in an ongoing series talking about some secrets of viral marketing.

Today’s post comes straight from our most recent viral video. For any who are interested, you can check the video out here. This video is for our client who is holding a contest for the best user-generated commercials. The video (along with our other efforts) is targeting people who have the ability and desire to create and upload their own commercials. The video has been up for just over two weeks and has already received over 1.5 millions views, made the front page of Digg and the front page of Break. We have been very pleased with the results. However, as we were tracking the spread of the video, we noticed something interesting.

Screenshot for our Viral Video

As you can see from the screen capture here, this particular seed of the video on YouTube has received a ton of views from Poland (every link in the above screen capture is a Polish site). Now, the contest we are promoting is only open to residents of the U.S., so our first reaction might have been frustration that our video was viraling around another country. Some might wonder what good it is for our video to be one of the top videos in Poland. But, situations like this should be treated as a welcome surprise. Here’s why:

  1. The internet has no borders…so trying to force borders will just make you angry.
  2. Views are views. For instance, this seed received the vast majority of it’s views from Poland, but its quickly rising view count gave us a good story with which to approach American bloggers about our video which was obviously really popular. This led to an easier time getting American bloggers to feature the video and thus helped us get the video in front of more of our target demographic.
  3. It’s a two way street. Just as our english video gained a lot of traction in Poland, so too can popular things in other countries gain traction here. In this case, we know of two American video game blogs that featured the video after they had found it on Wykop.

Looking forward we can also hypothesize about some possible viral marketing tactics to use in the future. Basically, if there are Digg-like sites around the world that have the potential to drive lots of views to a video, and are easier to get onto the front page, then a smart viral marketer could leverage otherwise useless popularity in other countries to pump up the video view count and help the video make it to the Most Viewed page here on the good ol’ U.S. YouTube.

In conclusion, make sure that you don’t get mad if your efforts gain steam in areas of the world that you don’t really need. There are always benefits to more views and more popularity and the smart viral marketer can see these new benefits and use them to their fullest potential.

6 Comments
  • Mar 08
  • 31

Why You Shouldn’t Stumble Yourself

More than a month ago, we featured a post about the paradox of self-promotion. This paradox describes, that although social media frowns on self-submission…

[...] the sheer numbers of new videos, posts, sites, pictures, and stories appearing each and every day, [means] self-promotion is a necessity for anyone starting out and hoping to gain any sort of foothold.

Debates occasionally emerge, discussing the narcissistic and moral aspects of self-submission. While several social networks do not officially accept self-submitted content, it has been argued that self-submission is not wrong and in fact necessary. I’m not interested here in these aspects of self-submission.

Instead I want to concentrate on the logical reasons to refrain from submitting your own content.
These of course depend on the social network you are participating and submitting content. But if we take StumbleUpon as example, we will see that letting others submit your content is a much better way of promotion.

StumbleUpon Logo

The Algorithm

First of all, let’s take a look at the algorithm of StumbleUpon. Although this is not verified information, it has been noticed that when the same user repeatedly submits articles from the same blog, the posts will not get promoted. So if you practice self-submission regularly, after a while you will notice that your traffic will not show any pretty peaks. Tim Nash writes:

[...] the number of times the domain is stumbled by a user is a factor therefore the initial stumblers audience score is affected by the number of times they have previously stumbled the domain. If this is done for both the initial stumbler and all stumblers thumbing the page up or down it would explain why mailing lists and friends stumbling the same domain has less and less effect.

Clustering

One of the basic rules of social networks – in fact, of networks in general – is clustering. In simple terms the rule says that most people’s friends are also to some extent friends of each other.

Every time you stumble something, the people that mostly see your stumble are your fans and mutual friends. In most cases, these are the ones who will continue promoting the submission. If you often promote your own work, the articles will be recycled among you and your friends – your strong ties; your content will never go beyond your network, due to the principle of clustering.

On the other hand if you leave your post to take its own course – to be discovered by someone else – it will appear in different circles. Never disregard the strength of weak ties (see Mark Granovetter’s research on weak ties for more information. It’s a *.pdf file).

Being Social

As mentioned by Matt, social networks are about being social.

You never know, next month you might have twice as many subscribers and realize that TheNanny612, Zaibatsu, and DoshDosh all think your stuff is great. You wont know if you don’t stop for a second and take a look.

If you don’t let other people submit your work, you are just giving a monologue. Let social networks become a part of the dialogue and learn from it. If you are interested in improving your site and promoting your content more successfully, stop submitting your stuff and start observing its development:

  • See who submits your content. They might be loyal readers, that you didn’t know. Check out their work, make a contact with them. You will notice, that they will return to your blog with a stumble.
  • Study which articles are being stumbled. Not every post is appropriate for every social network. Observe which posts get stumbled and which ones get popular. If you have a sharp eye, you will manage to direct the attention of stumblers to every post you write.

Conclusion

I don’t think there is any moral obstacle in self-submissions. If you don’t overdo it and choose wisely which post to submit where, it is a practice necessary to make yourself heard. But it is also a very easy and certain practice; you have daily 200+ pageviews and you call it a day.

You will notice much more satisfactory results when you think beyond this strategy. Refraining from self-submissions is a learning process. You learn more about your readers, about the content they like, and how to draw their attention. You are also facing a challenge, which alone motivates you for further improvement.

Of course, that’s my humble opinion. Do you let your community do the submitting? Are you analyzing the submissions and submitters to improve your work and your network?

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