- Mar 09
- 9
A Muppet Viral Marketing Case Study
- Posted by David Concepcion
- Published in Online Video, Viral Marketing
I have always been a fan of the late Jim Henson, ever since I was a child. So I of course had to click on the YouTube link a friend of mine sent of Beaker singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” If you’ve seen this already, you know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t and are a Muppet fan, I won’t ruin it for you suffice it to say you need to see it; and if you aren’t a Muppet fan, shame on you. I played that clip a bunch of times for a good laugh, and I even got my six-year-old into it. So what does my fanboy Muppet status have to do with brand integrity and viral marketing?
Beaker singing “Ode to Joy” is not a redub or reedit of old episodes of “The Muppet Show.” It’s one part of original web content featuring various characters from “The Muppet Show” created and produced by the Henson Company. Some of them include “Classical Chicken” with Gonzo, and “Rolling with the Skateboarding Dog” with Rowlf the Dog. What I find unique about the clips is that they update the Muppets to the digital age while retaining the character of Muppets as they have been since the ‘70s. The “Rolling with the Skateboarding Dog” has Rowlf with the skateboarding viral video bulldog and trying to do his own trick. At the end of some of the Muppet clips, we see Waldorf and Stadler peering into their own “web cam” criticizing the clips (W: How many hits did that receive? S: Unfortunately not enough to kill it.). Much the same way “The Muppet Show” parodied, as well as celebrated, the form of the variety show, these web clips use the viral form for as much of the comedy as well as the delivery of the message. In that sense, it is self-referential and thus keeps the brand name and brand quality intact. Continue reading »
4 Comments- Feb 09
- 3
Obama Is Truly the Internet President
- Posted by Matt Peters
- Published in Online Video, Social Media
In my American History class back in high school I remember hearing that “Kennedy was the television President,” and I remember watching footage of the first televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon. To a classroom filled with teenagers of the so-called MTV Generation, it was painfully clear which candidate was at ease with the new medium and which one was not. In fact, Kennedy was more than just at ease with the medium, he embraced it, he made it work for him.
I have absolutely no doubt that my children (hypothetical in this case…I don’t have kids yet) will learn that Barrack Obama was “the internet President.” Like Kennedy was with television, Obama is with the web. The internet is the defining communications medium of our time, and the skill with which President Obama has embraced it absolutely dwarfs that of any other politician I am aware of.
I have developed a fascination with our new Commander-in-Chief’s use of the digital realm. Last week, I wrote about the White House website rollover, and since then I have been closely following new White House presences online. One of my favorite finds is the White House YouTube channel, where the masses can have instance access to President Obama’s weekly video address, and a slew of other content like Vice President Biden’s new video. For anyone who’s interested, the TubeMogul blog has some cool demographic stats on the White House channel.
Evidently the Obama Administration isn’t stopping its video distribution strategy with just YouTube. Social Media Playground pointed out that the White House also has a channel on Vimeo. Now the White House just needs to get a Twitter account and they’ll be running on all Web 2.0 cylinders. (Note: the twitter account @thewhitehouse is not official.)
I suppose the real question here is what all this social media will amount to. We already know that the Obama Campaign all but revolutionized use of the internet for campaign fund raising, but it is far too early to know whether the Obama Administration can that tech savvy to revolutionize governing. It seems to me that in a democracy “of the people, by the people, and for the people” any system whereby there is a more immediate connection between the electorate and elected officials is a positive thing. Will President Obama’s White House 2.0 be that conduit of the democratic promise? In this question each and every one of us has a say. We, as citizens, must choose to use these new information channels for them to amount to anything. If President Obama is leading the charge towards a more connected democracy, success will only be reached if we follow.
No CommentsOr “How NOT to alienate your core fans by marketing media”
Imagine you’re a marketing and media manager of a popular television show with a loyal (dare I say ‘fanatical’) following. The fans of this show eagerly await each new piece of media you deign to drop their way the way a pack of hungry dogs awaits a dangling morsel. These are the fans that you see posting thousands of posts on the show’s official boards and traveling thousands of miles to score a single autograph: saying they’re “engaged” doesn’t even begin to capture the level of loyalty they possess that is just waiting for confirmation and recognition.
Imagine now all of the amazing things you, as a savvy marketer, could accomplish with these loyal fans on your side. Whether you create a detailed, crowd-sourced, social network that persists between seasons; an army of user-generated videos on sites like YouTube, Metacafe and Break.com; or a word of mouth marketing effort to spread the show’s message virally, the options for marketing media powerfully over the long term are endless when you have such an congregation ready to preach the show’s evangel.
Now imagine one final scenario: you’re the person in charge of marketing with media’s most loyal fans. Imagine that, due to a shortsighted outlook, hasty decision or pressure from your superiors, you made a decision that backfired. A decision that, no matter how much you tried reverse, spin or explain, alienated a significant portion of these perfect evangelists. More specifically, imagine that you put a lot of investment and effort into giving your fans high quality, exclusive media to enjoy between seasons and something you did in the process not only turned away some of your fans, but also made it hard for the rest of your fans to access and experience this exclusive media.
This would be a terrible use of these loyal fans by our imaginary media marketing manager, no? If I were that manager, I would call up Monster.com and begin marketing my resume the very next day.
The reason I’ve taken you down this imagination rabbit hole for so long is to remove branding associations and other distractions from a very recent, real-life scenario from which I derived the above story. As an open and unrepentant (dare I say “fanatical”) Battlestar Galactica fan, it is particularly disappointing for me to say that this egregious error of marketing media was committed against me and my fellow BSG fans by the Sci-fi Channel.
After taking almost a year off in the middle of the final season of the show, the Sci-fi Channel released 20 BSG webisodes titled “The Face of the Enemy” designed to satiate the hunger for more BSG media and to combat the negative effect they had already caused with the needless hiatus (10 webisodes and 10 “enhanced” versions of the webisodes with writer commentary).
The webisodes clearly required a lot of care and investment as they are as intricate, emotional and CG-heavy as the series that spawned them. Totaling approximately 60 minutes of perfectly-crafted content, the webisodes were pitched as “a series of revelations you won’t see on the show”. This is the kind of content that makes a fan like myself go crazy and immediately begin the armchair quarterbacking that often goes with being a disciple of such a mysterious and multi-faceted show. In short, I’m the target audience for this type of content.
Enter the marketing error so egregious that it has spawned it’s own ‘media marketing fail’ blog post: marketing other media, before the desired media with pre-roll advertising. Nothing makes a loyal fan feel less important than having to watch the same 30-second trailer before each of the 20 four-minute webisodes. To remove the math from your day, that means watching 10 minutes worth of the same commercial in an hour. That’s watching the same commercial every four minutes for 20 iterations.
To put it another way: Would you have an anniversary ring made specifically for your wife/husband and require that they sang 30 seconds of the Barney the Dinosaur theme song before they put the ring on each day? If you’re answering ‘no’ (and for your spouse’s sake I hope you are), why would you create expensive, specialized, micro-targeted content, then impede the exact group you spent such care catering to from enjoying that content 110%?
Is the Sci-fi channel so in need of dollars that they can risk alienating the best fans of one of their two successful shows? Can anyone in any creative or marketing position justify taking that risk?
This is indicative of a larger issue that I touched last year at the bottom of a post with a seemingly irrelevant title: Viral Marketing in the Fabric Industry? Then, the idea was crystalized as “pre-roll ads are dead”. Now I’m expanding the conclusion to “marketing media by interrupting other (desired) media is dying.” It’s not elegant, but it’s a point that needs to be made.
In an on-demand platform (the internet), if I’m trying to watch something specific and have to sit through other media first (irrelevant media of your choosing), you’ve already lost me. If you have the audacity to make me watch the same piece of media over and over before the media I’m looking for, I don’t care how awesome your content is purported to be, I’ll pass or wait and find that content elsewhere.
Not only is this marketing tactic offensive to your best customers, it’s lazy. “Cram more advertisements in” shouldn’t pass the wise marketing decision bar anymore. The internet has evolved passed its first iteration and now has sufficient variability to allow for brain cells to be expended in the form of creativity when attempting to win the business of your fans.
Or as Seth Godin puts it to Verizon in regards to Verizon’s mobile advertising strategy in late 2006, “Do you really want to alienate millions of users [fans] by giving us something we don’t need and don’t want?”
While nothing short of force majeure will stop me from watching the final episodes of BSG starting 1/16/09, nothing will get me to sit in front of Sci-fi’s botched effort to make a few extra bucks at the expense of their best fans. The sooner companies abandon this half-baked strategy of marketing media, the sooner they will be able to fully leverage their evangelists and completely monetize their content.
2 Comments- Apr 08
- 9
Going viral with YouTube
- Posted by Jiannis Sotiropoulos
- Published in Online Video, Viral Marketing
One of the major riddles in the fields of online marketing is the YouTube platform and its public. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it doesn’t have the form of the major social networks (digg, stumbleupon, sphinn, etc.) but neither does it have the structure and rules of blogs. Indeed, decoding the marketing potential of YouTube is a very complicated process. But if we take a more attentive look at its users and videos, we might gather some valuable information.
In this article, we will concentrate on the variables, which specify the popularity of a submission in YouTube.
The Peculiarity of YouTube
The viral potential of YouTube cannot be studied like the other popular social networks or blogs. YouTube is a combination of both.
- It encourages and promotes self-submitted content (other social networks are against self-submission)
- A YouTube channel should not update regularly to be successful (in comparison to blogs)
- It uses other social networks to increase popularity (like blogs do)
The studied videos, their submitters and their YouTube Network
We will study 3 of the most viewed videos of all time and 1 less popular for comparison. The videos are:
- The evolution of dance, by judsonlaipply
- Lo que tú Quieras Oír, by kaejane
- Hahaha, by BlackOleg
- Homenagem a Isabella Nardoni, by jeholiver011
Judsonlaipply is a YouTube member since March 23rd, 2006. He has submitted 2 videos and has viewed 859.
His channel has 23,432 subscribers and 1,130,903 views. He has 2,326 friends.
Kaejane is a member since 18th January, 2006. He has submitted 3 videos and has viewed 1,883.
His channel has 2,597 subscribers and a total of 151,191 views. He has 0 friends.
BlackOleg joined YouTube on November 01, 2006. He has submitted 6 videos and has viewed 25.
His channel has 3,560 subscribers and a total of 257,587 views. He has 287 friends.
Jeholiver011, joined YouTube on 2 April, 2008. He has sumbitted 1 video and has watched 10.
His channel has 228 subscribers and 11,737 views. He has 1 friend.
A first observation we can easily draw is that the number of friends does not play an important role in promoting a video. This is a very interesting conclusion, which goes beyond what we already know about social networks and the attention economy.
Kaejane has no friends and still his video is the 3rd most viewed of all-time. The same applies to Jeholiver011. His submission was top of the week and he just joined YouTube, having only one friend.
Popularity of the videos in other social networks
One of the main factors, that defines the success of a YouTube video is its submission in other social networks.
The evolution of dance got more than 2000 diggs and 200 stumbleupon reviews. It is natural since it got dugg by msaleem, one of the top Digg and SU users. It is no wonder it became so popular in YouTube.
Lo que tú Quieras Oír, on the other hand got only 2 stumbles and 2 diggs.
Hahaha, also did extremely well on other social networks. 62 reviews in StumbleUpon and 3536 diggs (again submitted by a top digger, MrBabyMan).
Jeholiver’s video had no luck in social networks.
The role of the popular social networks for the popularity of the YouTube videos is very clear. Would “Hahaha” and the “evolution of dance” have reached such view counts, if it weren’t for Digg and StumbleUpon?
Nonetheless the riddle remains: why the other videos became popular with such a low presence in social networks?
Conclusion and other variables which define YouTube popularity
Our observations so far suggest, that – in comparison to the other social networks we know – having friends on YouTube doesn’t necessarily mean popularity. Instead, having friends in other social networks can help promote the video.
But lets try to solve the riddle of the other videos, which became popular without being submitted in other social networks. What other factors can define the success of a YouTube video?
- demographics: the average age of the users, their location, their gender. We have for example two Spanish videos, which became popular without the assistance of any other social network. How big is the Spanish community in YouTube? Do they watch only Spanish videos?
- the interests of the average user: like other social networks, videoblog platforms concentrate on specific topics. Others on humor, others on animation/art, etc.
- the quality of the content: I think this is very important in YouTube. Thousands of people subscribe to a channel with just a couple of submissions (see judsonlaipply’s channel), with the hope to get some more quality flicks. Quantity is not important – YouTube users subscribe massively in channels – quality is.
- time of submission: this is a minor factor, but I believe it still plays a role. If you submit a video when the most users are offline, it will probably get lost in the archives.
I’m interested to see how you assess YouTube. What other factors could define the success of a YouTube video?
8 Comments- Feb 08
- 22
The Rise of Social Media Marketing
- Posted by Matt Peters
- Published in Online Video, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Viral Marketing
I’ll be honest, it has been a while since I studied dinosaurs. But if memory serves, they pretty much ruled the world for about 160 million years. Seriously, for a good long time it was not that great being a mammal. Then, about 65 million years ago, something happened and almost all dinosaurs and a boatload of other animals became extinct. This event is referred to as the “Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event.” (At this point you can either be impressed with my paleontological knowledge or realize that I just looked up the term on Wikipedia.)
Theories differ as to what caused the event, but it’s clear that one really good thing came out of it: us. When all the big things died, it gave all the little things a much needed chance to get a foothold and start their own journey towards world domination. So what does this have to do with social media marketing? Everything.
The forms of “new media” and “new media marketing” with which this blog concerns itself are still exactly that: new. The vast majority of marketing and advertising dollars is still spent on mainstream, mass-media marketing. Even online marketing spending is still heavily weighted towards pay-per click, in-stream, and other traditional marketing methods shoved carelessly onto the digital world. “New media marketing,” is a small mammal in a world still run by dinosaurs. But that’s changing. We can see it happening all around us, and the topic has been discussed on this blog and others before. I write today specifically because I found two separate reports which, while not the harbinger of the traditional marketing apocalypse, certainly signal a shift in power that is already taking place.
Let’s begin with traditional off-line advertising:
In the results of an Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research study released today:
- 62% of marketers say traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years.
- More than 50% of advertisers said that when half of all TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12%.
- 87% of respondents said they intend to spend more ad dollars on the Internet this year.
These stats are amazing. Over 60% of marketers are now admitting what we have all been feeling for some time: TV commercials just aren’t working like they used to. If half the advertisers say they will cut TV ad spending by 12% when DVR penetration reaches half of all households, then that’s somewhere upwards of 4 billion advertising dollars that will be looking for a new home. Couple that with the number of marketers who will be spending more ad dollars on the internet this year, and it becomes clear where those homeless billions are going to go when the time comes.
Now let’s look at online advertising.
This is the part where traditional online advertisers say, “Hey, what makes you think any of that money is going to be spent on new media campaigns?” It’s true that pay-per-click style advertising is still the largest subset of the online marketing industry. But, I would claim that these PPCers and pre-rollers and post-rollers are just as susceptible to the coming extinction as the dinosaurs of traditional marketing. All these PPC banner ads and rich media ads are simply the digital incarnation of the traditional marketing models of interruption and top-down thinking. I think people make the wrong distinction when they think that traditional marketing will die while internet marketing will thrive. That is drawing the line in the wrong place. It is traditional marketing models that will die, and new models that will thrive. A rich-media in-stream ad before an online video is not “new media marketing” simply because it is attached to online video. It’s still an interrupting nuisance that just shouts a message at me rather than conversing with me.
It is not just theoretical or ideological problems that these PPC marketing strategies must face, however. There are hard numbers that show one inherent problem with such marketing. That problem is click fraud, and ClickForensics has some new data out showing an increase in the already woefully-high click fraud numbers.
Look at these stats taken directly from the report:
- The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That’s up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.
- The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That’s up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007.
- The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.
I think click fraud is just the precursor to larger problems that will plague these forms of interruption-based online advertising over the coming years. The more I read, the more I study, and the more work I do with social and viral marketing, the more I deepen my conviction that the approach to marketing must change in order to reach consumers. You can no longer demand their attention, you must earn it. And if you have to earn their attention, then you have to engage them more than most marketers are used to. Marketing is becoming a conversation, not a sermon, and the rise of social media marketing is upon us.
For more on this topic, make sure to subscribe to our feed. Next week I will be publishing a follow up post entitled “The Rule of Reciprocity” that will discuss the importance of the “conversation” that must start taking place in order for marketers to continue to engage consumers.
TechnoratiTags: social media, social media marketing, marketing, online marketing, traditional marketing, online advertising, advertising, click fraud, new media
4 Comments- Feb 08
- 21
Reviews #1: Tide’s “My Talking Stain”
- Posted by Brennan White
- Published in Online Video, Social Media, Viral Marketing
Abstract:
Introduced with a Super Bowl commercial, Tide’s newest social media effort takes the form of a destination website. The site, located at www.mytalkingstain.com, not only hosts the original commercial, but also provides visitors with the ability to create a customized stain and commercial.
The Scores:
- Value to Consumer: 65
- Engagement: 88
- Creativity: 73
- Ease of Use: 83
- Viralness: 87
- Forwards: 4
Category Drill-Down:
Value to Consumer: Anyone playing around on this site for more than three minutes will realize that the main value added to the consumer is entertainment value. Having spent 30 minutes on the site myself, I must say it is definitely more entertaining than I expected. Uploading my photo, recording my voice and sending the absurd result to a friend actually is fun. While, in the end, I learned nothing about life, love or even Tide, there was definitely entertainment value to be had.
Value to Consumer Score: 65
Engagement: Interestingly, My Talking Stain offers many levels of engagement. If you want to upload a photo and watch the commercial, you can do that for a quick bit of fun. If you want to record your voice, send the commercial to your friends and enter to win some prizes, you can. If you want to make your own talking stain vid, you can do that too. Simply choose your level and rock out. This is a great feature as many people aren’t interested in playing with all aspects of the site to write an accurate post about it. Some people only want to play a little bit and Tide clearly considered this. The brand is present, but not offensively so. The addition of My Talking Stain branded content for ringtones, MP3s and buddy icons allows Tide to engage consumers where the consumers choose to live rather than demanding the consumers come to them. This shows a nice understanding of the social media space.
Engagement Score: 88
Creativity: The idea of the talking stain is definitely amusing. Building a social media experience utilizing a pre-made commercial, a destination site, customizable sounds and faces is a great way to expand upon the commercial. However, the customization of the talking stain is basically one small technological step above Elf Yourself and could have been better.
Creativity Score: 73
Ease of Use: The site is very easy to navigate; your options are clearly defined upfront by the stains on the shirt. The site is very well made and it’s very easy to make yourself a spoof video. Calling in to record your voice does require having a phone around, but that isn’t too much to expect these days is it? I wish they streamlined the “get famous” section of the site more, but the “spoof toolkit” is a big step above the “make one and post it online” that I was expecting. I’d bet 99.999% of people visiting don’t even seriously consider making a video but every .001% convinced to engage further with your brand via making a video is a huge win. This is especially true when applied to the very large numbers of people aware of the site due to Superbowl exposure.
Ease of Use Score: 83
Viralness: The site provides various opportunities for sharing and spreading the video online. While the medium is inherently not as viral as a video, they’ve offset this by prompting people to create their own videos and by facilitating a quick upload to Youtube. I was prompted multiple times to share, all in non-offensive ways. I was pleasantly surprised that they included, prominently, an embed option for your custom-made commercial; most companies would overlook this move. The lack of social news/bookmarking sites (think digg/del.icio.us/etc) was the only big mistake I saw.
Viralness Score: 87
Conclusion:
From the composite score (80) we can determine that Tide’s ‘My Talking Stain’ website provides a very solid forum for users to engage their brand. While some areas could definitely be improved slightly, no one area carried the marketing effort. The combination of usability, viralness and the utilization of multiple consumer engagement points allows this social media marketing campaign to promote the brand very well.
BONUS: the video I made
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Technorati Tags: Social Media, Business, Marketing, Advertising, Viral Marketing, Social Media Marketing
6 Comments- Feb 08
- 20
PandemicBlog Introduces the “Reviews Series” for Social Media Campaigns
- Posted by Brennan White
- Published in Company News, Online Video, Social Media, Viral Marketing
At Pandemic Blog, we try to provide quality content to people looking to learn more about viral and social media marketing. To further this goal, we’re starting our ‘Reviews’ series of blog posts. In this series, we will review online marketing efforts from successful businesses, summarize their key features and assign scores in six categories. From these categories, we will arrive at a final Composite Score. This will result in a relatively standardized rating system that can then be used to accurately compare different online marketing efforts. The end goal, as always, is to further valuable discussion and to gain insight to viral and social media as they come into being, progress, succeed or fail.
The scores will be presented as follows:
- Value to Consumer: 1-100
- Engagement: 1-100
- Viralness: 1-100
- Ease of Use: 1-100
- Creativity: 1-100
- Forwards: 0-Infinite
Composite Score: Calculated by adding the scores of sections 1-6 and dividing by 5.
Category explanations:
Value to Consumer: This category represents our belief that a successful viral or social media marketing efforts should bring actual value to the consumers that experience them. This value, as I’m defining it, is pretty open and can be anything from entertainment and interesting discussions, to information and helpful resources. Since an online consumer is not captive to the marketer in any way, the marketing effort needs to bring real value to the consumer’s life if the marketing effort has any hope of being watched, engaged with or passed along. This category’s score ranges from 1-100 (100 being the best possible score).
Engagement: This category represents the ability of the marketing piece to engage the consumer with the brand. More than just “time spent on site”, this metric takes into account how much the consumer actually gets to “play” with the brand behind the marketing effort. A video can be very engaging, but destination sites, games, and blogs have even more potential for drawing the users into the “world” of the brand. Campaigns that combine multiple “new media” elements can be more engaging still. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.
Viralness: This category measures the ease by which someone can share the marketing effort with their network and any incentives that they have to do so. Are consumers prompted to share the marketing piece via social networks, email or embed tags? Is it even possible for them to do so? An important factor when discussing the ROI of an online marketing effort will be the ability of the effort to disperse easily on its own and reach a significant number of consumers. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.
Ease of Use: This category represents the ease of use or user-friendliness of the marketing piece. Can people see/play/download/upload/etc what is necessary to make this piece engaging in a quick and effortless way? Marketing efforts that are too involved and require much work on the part of the consumer will not spread optimally. The more time or tech savvy required to successfully experience the marketing message, the smaller the group of consumers using it will be. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.
Creativity: This category is relatively self explanatory. Something has to earn the consumer’s attention and the more interesting and different the marketing effort, the more easily that attention can be earned. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.
Forwards: This is a more concrete, “the proof is in the pudding”, category that simply reports the number of times I, personally, forwarded the marketing piece before sitting down to write a blog post about it. I figured, rather than trying to come up with a more subjective measure, why not simply record the number of times I ACTUALLY forward the piece and weight that number significantly less in the overall calculation. This category, barely affecting the Composite Score, almost amounts to a “bonus” category and can only shade the final score slightly in one direction or another. This category’s score range begins at zero and could theoretically be as large as the amount of connections I have in my network at any given time.
Composite Score: This number represents the overall assigned score to the marketing effort as a whole. With the first five categories equally weighted and the final category (Forwards) weighted significantly less, the composite score provides an easy way to compare otherwise disparate marketing campaigns. The range of the composite score is theoretically infinite, but the score of the campaign should be considered as if it were on a 1-100 scale.
Our Reviews series will hopefully provide a platform for discussion about actual viral and social media efforts that are currently online. Acting as a bare-bones case study, our readers will be able to see not only how each marketing effort stacks up against other efforts, but also what factors go into creating a successful viral and social media campaign. After reviewing multiple campaigns, important trends, strategies and techniques will be discussed.
As always, email us directly or comment if you have questions, improvements or social media marketing campaigns that you’d like to see reviewed.
1 Comment