When you do post though, how do people find your posts?  Even if you are a personal blogger like Paolo Jr, you at least have a small group of dedicated readers… be it your immediate family, circle of friends, or Second Life buddies. But, how do new people find your posts?

In your blog design, you need to make it very clear how people can subscribe.  Look at the big RSS button with “subscribe” next to it there on the right.  You could be doing that.  I have to like your site a lot in order to check back frequently without simply using a subscription option to tell me when something new has been posted.  If people are not subscribed to your blog, it is easy for them to forget about it and stop checking in.

Now that you have subscriptions displayed prominently, you need a better way to bring in new readers than simply just waiting for the search engines to crawl your new material and then hoping that someone’s search brings them to your site. If you are on Twitter, and you should be if you are a blogger, you need to tweet links to your most recent posts. If there is anything Twitter is good for, it is spreading news quickly.  If you have 500 followers, 50 that click on your link, and 1 or 2 (also with 500 followers each) that retweet your link, how many people do you think you can get reading your new blog posts?

Sadly, I see too few bloggers who take advantage of news aggregators like Reddit, Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Stumble Upon, etc.  This is seriously how often some people check these sites for new things to read.  My personal favorite is Reddit, but that is because I like the stripped down UI, the customization options when it comes to topics, and the general vibe of the community.  Digg is the big dog in the arena though and should not be overlooked even if it is impossible to get to the front page.

Ideally when you post something new, your readers will submit you to news aggregating sites because your post was just that great! Why not help them out and include buttons for them to do so… like the Sphinn button at the bottom of this post or the set of buttons on Self-Promotion for Smart People.

Regardless of whether readers would submit new posts to news aggregators or not, I usually beat them to the punch, making it even easier for them when they come to read the post because they only need to vote it up or down. A solidly formulated title and a good post can easily explode your daily visits and pageviews by 2000% of your average.  I have had it happen.  You can too.

Let’s say that you average 100 visits/day, but you rework your design to display subscription options and news aggregation buttons, and then, you use Twitter to get 1000 extra people to visit your new post and Reddit to get another 2000.  If only 1% of those new visitors subscribe and you formulate compelling titles and great posts once each week, you can see how you can quickly get your news spread around.

So, how quickly does your news spread?

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.

On top of this, the advantages to posting it as a YouTube video have clear benefits to the company. When I showed it to my daughter, she wanted to see some of the other Muppet “boxes” (which is what she calls them). Each link led to another, including those clips, redubs and reedits of “Muppet Show” episodes. She loved a bunch of the clips of the show itself and it brought back fond memories for me. Because of that I was looking on Ebay pricing DVD packages of the first and/or second seasons of the “Muppet Show” to buy for my daughter. Now, this seed alone of  “Ode to Joy” received 4.5 million hits. Suppose that only 10% of those start to do what I did and look up the Season One DVD of the “Muppet Show” and 10% of that 10% decide to buy the DVD set– roughly 1% of those who saw the clip. That would be still 45,000 units of Season One “Muppet Show” DVDs sold. Even at the Amazon.com rate of $33.99, that means over $1.5 million in revenue for the company ($1,529,550). If they shopped around and got a deal at $23, that’s still $1 million and change for the company ($1,035,000). That’s mostly revenue for pushing existing stock of inventory for one season of DVDs. Even if the cost of one of the viral videos is close to $100,000 or more, the cost to profit ratio easily justifies the expense of the video. Take those numbers and extrapolate them across all other instances of the video and other videos (mentioned above) and we have a serious needle-mover.

Even if it didn’t lead to a sale, it leads to more recognition of the existing brand and continues the legacy of the show and company to a new generation, which is often immeasurable. Separating the quality product from the inferior is essential for any company, especially for children’s programming. Using the online community resources to help plug your product can mean the difference between not only profit and loss, but between obscure fad and sustainable memory that can survive generation gaps.

I firmly believe we are on the way to a pandemic (sorry for the self-promotion), and SMM will rule modern marketing. Yes, we are infected (in a good way) and there is no vaccination. However, I still feel the virus is just showing its symptoms, and a few things need to happen before it settles in and becomes reality. Let me give you the reasons why I believe we will get irremediably sick, why that is a very good thing, and what I think will have to happen for us to get there.

There are plenty of reasons to explain why SMM will be huge. I know everyone has favorites, so I will dare to give you mine:

• Word of Mouth: Every marketer’s dream (especially traditional marketers) is for their product, brand or campaign to generate WOM. It is one of marketing’s basic rules for success. The best way to get the message through effectively is by having people recommend it to one another. The problem has always been the cost of generating high volume WOM. With the internet, this problem is pretty much solved. One example of this is bloggers, who have become a trustworthy source for information. If you get a big blogger to talk about your product, the impact this may have on sales can be greater than a regular TV campaign.

• Targeting: So far I have not seen a more effective targeting tool than the internet. Advertisers are confident their message is reaching relevant audience, which makes each hit more efficient in delivering a message.

• Engagement: With the possibility of better interaction with the audience, marketers now have the obligation to change the way they approach their target market. New marketing has to be engaging for the audience to stick with it. And by engaging, I mean it has to add value to the consumer either by being funny, instructive, informative, or whatever it is that makes it worth the audience’s time.

• Cost: Please bear in mind that by cost I don’t mean cheap. However, SMM is not exclusively for deep-pocketed advertisers. SMM can be ideal for any kind of budget. Advertising is now within reach of everyone, and for the first time quality will be what differentiates good marketing from average marketing.

It would look like infection is imminent. However, I think some things need to be accomplished for SMM to settle in as one of the most important trends in marketing:

• Involve Traditional Marketing: For SSM to become big, it is imperative that the big brands get involved with it, understand the benefits of using it, and help to further develop it. SMM has been making big efforts to differentiate itself from traditional marketing, but I fear this has also led to traditional marketers not understanding this new language and therefore not engaging with it.

• Metrics: The SMM community needs to agree on the way impact is measured. Just as traditional media’s metrics are standard (GRP’s, SOV, TRP’s, etc.), Social Media needs standard ways to measure the impact of different campaigns. We need to be able to tell advertisers how their money is doing, and they need to be able to compare these results both against what their competitors are doing, and against what other agencies offer.

• Academia: It is important for this new trend to start teaching and researching; to unify concepts, debate them, and generate new ones. Social Media Marketing can no longer be an empiric subject, and we need to make sure we get it into universities and colleges.

Well there it is; my vision of Social Media Marketing. Again, I feel we are infected, and it will keep on developing to be very big. But then again, the challenges are big and it is time for the SMM community to start having these discussions. I open it up to you to share your thoughts…

Back in June, Brennan White wrote a nomenclature post about the definition of viral marketing and described our viewpoint on the meaning of “viral” in viral marketing. Brennan notes, “To me, ‘viral’ denotes the specific distribution strategy of a piece of online media.”

Kujawski addresses a similar nomenclature issue. Rather than defining “social,” however, he clarifies the differences between “social marketing” and “social media marketing.” Let’s look at his definitions.

For his definition of social marketing, Kujawski uses a quote:

Social marketing is a process that applies marketing principles and techniques to create, communicate, and deliver value in order to influence audience behaviors that benefit society (public health, safety the environment and communities) as well as the target audience.” – Philip Kotler, Nancy Lee and Michael Rothschild (2006)

The Wikipedia entry for Social Marketing confirms this view:

The primary aim of ’social marketing’ is ’social good’, while in ‘commercial marketing’ the aim is primarily ‘financial’. This does not mean that commercial marketers can not contribute to achievement of social good.“

Kujawski goes on to define social media marketing, but the definition of that term is not the issue here. My primary issue here is the changing use of the term “social marketing.” Kujawski no doubt wrote his post to clear up what he saw as a misuse of the term social marketing. But, I’m not so sure it social marketing means what it used to.

In my experience (and I would love for someone to show me a contrary example) types of marketing are named for methodology and medium, not for their goal. “Direct marketing” is marketing directly to individuals. “Email marketing” is marketing using email for distribution. “Television advertising” is advertising using television for distribution. Each of these examples shows the adjective preceding “marketing” to refer to the method or means.

This, then, leads me to wonder why the term “social marketing” was ever used to refer to marketing for the purpose of social good. It is in contrast to the overarching (though unofficial) naming conventions of marketing types. By this convention, “guerilla marketing” would be marketing to or for the benefit of small groups of combatants who like to ambush a lot.

Linguistically speaking (and I dredge up my college days here, so cut me some slack) humans like to keep to set language patterns, even if unconsciously. Just think of the linguistic convention of putting “e” in front of things. It is not an official rule, but we all know that, much like e-mail, putting “e” in front of something means it takes place on the internet. If someone told you that eMarketing was something other than online marketing, you would likely be a little confused.

It is for this reason, our collective tendency to adhere to linguistic patterns, that I think the term “social marketing” is quickly moving away from the dogmatic definition prescribed in Wikipedia. An increasing number of people are beginning to use the term to mean marketing using social methods. “Social methods” casts a wide net and could encompass everything from street teams to viral marketing…anything where interaction, conversation, and other social elements are at work. It is easy to see how this marketing ideology differs from billboards which shout messages and commercials which are 30-60 second monologues whether you want to see them or not.

Personally, I prefer using the term “social marketing” to encompass various forms of new, conversation-based marketing. It makes sense…it fits the naming pattern that I am used to. I do not deny that the term has been used differently in the past, but I think the times are ‘a changin’ and people who blindly cling to their old definitions will quickly find themselves scrambling to redefine.

One of the world’s biggest publishing houses, HarperCollins, went even further and built a book trailer studio in their offices that will have the capacity to create 500 book trailers a year. This is a sign that established players in such an old-fashioned and non-technical industry like book publishing are recognizing and unleashing the potential of viral videos.

Perhaps one of the best examples out there for a successful book trailer is the short movie that came out of this idea for the book “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein. When she finished writing this book about the “secret and dark history of capitalism” and how governments have used the aftermath of every major crisis in history to induce radical political measures, she sent the book to Alfonso Cuarón, the Mexican award-winning director of Children of Men. Teaming up with him and his brother Jonás Cuarón, they created the short film/book trailer “The Shock Doctrine” that even landed a couple of film festival award nominations in Venice and Toronto. The book’s website ShockDoctrine.com is rich in social media elements and leverages the success of the book trailer, making it a central part of the online presence of the book and the author.The short movie itself is not an ad for the book, it’s more a short documentary that explains the central thesis of the book. Representing a good recipe for a viral video, “The Shock Doctrine” engages the viewer in the think process of the author and leaves him begging for more.

In this case, the attributes of an excellent filmmaker combined with an interesting thought proposition, resulted in a successful viral video effort that has more than 600,000 views in YouTube and contributed to drive sales for a traditional-media product: a book.

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.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” -Revelation 6:8, KJV

As many of you know, I am an avid reader of Kevin Nalts, who writes on his blog WillVideoForFood. I’ve been following him since before I started this company, and I have discussed some of his thoughts on viral videos before. It’s been some time since I last mentioned him because, unfortunately, I only bring him up when I disagree with him. Nalts: if you’re reading this, sorry for that. Everyone else: I highly suggest you check out his blog and follow it closely.

In all truth, it is not Nalts’ most recent post, entitled Video Sponsorship Trends: “Cashing In” or “Selling Out”, that I really take issue with. His post is really more like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Well, it didn’t really break my back, it just gave me the nudge I need to write this post which has been simmering inside me for a month now.

The Crux

The central theme here is the debate/argument over the relative virtues or evils of paid advertising (often in the form of product placement) that tries to seem like it is not advertising. If your favorite video blogger on YouTube talks about the new camera they are using, they might have been paid to do so by the maker of that camera.

(insert cheezy horror music here.)

How are you to know if it is a genuine product mention or a paid plug?

(insert confused face of an actress in an infomercial here.)

Many would have you believe that this situation represents a serious problem, tantamount to danger for the helpless, unsuspecting consumer.

The Views

Nalts’ article discusses another article written by Jennifer Hollett called Viral Video: Cashing In or Selling Out? I recommend reading it as well. The article brings forth different views on the matter. Nalts says, “It can help creators derive revenue, and therefore the quality of videos should improve. I think it’s great for brands because they can now access the audience in different ways than a pre-roll or a banner.” Then there is Kalle Lasn, editor in chief of Adbusters magazine and author of Culture Jam, who says we are already hit with 3,000-5,000 marketing messages every day. “I really don’t think we need 5,001,” he says.

This last view is tame compared to many that I have heard of late. As a digital marketing professional, I attend my fair share of web 2.0 conferences in the Boston area, and there are some times when I feel that I am almost not welcome. How dare I, a marketer, besmirch the purity of web 2.0! How dare I talk about how Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool for large companies! How dare I talk about the possibilities of hiring web video stars to create great content for your brand! I’ve heard people say that new media marketing is a black-hat endeavor. Frankly, I don’t agree.

The Spark

At this point the savvy among you are saying, “So Matt seems to agree with Nalts’ point of view…why did Matt say he disagreed with Nalts at the beginning of the article.” Fear not, we have arrived at the much awaited point of contention. Now that we have set the stage, identified the issue, and seen some viewpoints, we are ready to go.

At the end of his post, Nalts gives some predictions for what will happen around this issue in 2008. In those prophecies he says:

I wish there was a law that required film makers to disclose any paid advertisers, even though I know much of the ‘product placement’ is offered free by directors. Federal Express, for instance, does not often pay to have its boxes appear in a film. The directors want the film to feel authentic, and seek permission not pay from FedEx to avoid needing to distract viewers with a Garbagepatch Kids-like bastardization of FedEx (FoodEx). In the end, however, I feel like the video creator owes me, as the viewer, disclosure. If you’re getting paid to hold a Mountain Dew, more power to you. Just let me know, so I don’t feel like you’re being sneaky every time your camera pans a mall and I see logos.”

It is on this point that I wholeheartedly disagree. My viewpoint follows…

My Stance

I think that any law (or even regulation) that required disclosure of advertising efforts is not only unnecessary, but also counter-productive. I do not feel that the content creator owes me anything of that sort, nor do I label you as nefarious if I notice you are drinking a Coke. I will try to delineate my arguments here:

1. Squashing Creativity: I think that anything where content creators of any type are forced to disclose behind-the-scenes elements of their creation does nothing but stifle the free reign they might have to “go nuts” and create some really entertaining stuff.
2. It Doesn’t Matter: There have been a bunch of viral videos that we have all watched and we likely weren’t aware that some of them were paid plugs. I just learned from Kalle’s article that the Guy’s Backflipping Into Jeans video was a Levi’s spot. Now that I know that…nothing has changed. I am not angry that I didn’t know that before. I do not feel violated because a corporation entertained me without my express permission. I do not see the damage caused by these marketing methods (i.e. product placement, branded entertainment, etc…), and therefore I do not understand why there is such a fuss about it.
3. How Far?: How far would this regulation stretch? We all know that Tiger Woods is paid to wear Nike clothing on the course. But what about the random guy in the middle of the pack who is wearing an Adidas shirt? Maybe he isn’t good enough to warrant sponsorship. Maybe he is just wearing a shirt and the logo is there like it would be on any other average person. But, maybe Adidas is paying him. In this case we can’t know and we might be duped by marketers. So does this mean that under new regulations all sponsored shirts on the golfers would have to say “sponsored by: Nike” on them? If full disclosure were required in one form of advertising, wouldn’t it have to be required in all?
4. Good Will Out: I believe in the power of a complex system to fix itself. In this case the “fixing” will be rather simple. The content creators out there who are just marketing whores and never provide value to their audience will quickly lose that audience. It’s like evolution. Audience (attention) is the scarce resource and the content creators will have to compete to get that resource. Done correctly, the help of money made from working with marketers could help a content creator thrive. But if that is abused, the audience will dry up real quick, leaving you alone to wither an die. It is survival of the fittest. We already see it taking place with blogs. When is the last time you saw a blog worth a damn that did frequent sponsored posts? One of the fundemental tenets of the evolution of the internet is that it allows for a bottom-up flow of information rather than a top down. So, it a bottom-up world there would be no need for top-down laws.
5. Maybe It’s Better: I think there is tremendous potential in product placement and branded entertainment and other forms of so-called “sneaky” marketing. If Coke pays my favorite video maker so that he can put out a great webisode every week I am fine with it. Especially poigniant here is the possibilities for the extinction of the terrible and badly targeted TV commercials we current have to put up with. If Tampax pays to sponsor the “women’s interest” channels on various video sites, and therefore I never again have to see a tampon ad on TV, that would be worth it. If Viagra sponsors funny videos about aging and sex and therefore my girlfriend never again has to see an six ED ads during her favorite show, that would be worth it.

Conslusion

As always, I welcome and encourage discussion and – dare I say it – disagreement. As a new media marketer who believes wholeheartedly in Web 2.0 ideals, I am a little tired of being blamed for ruining all that is good about Web 2.0. I simply don’t see it that way and obviously there is a lot more talking to be done. No one really knows what works yet and what the future of marketing is going to look like. This is why we have blogs this…so we can learn together.

What does the ‘viral’ in ‘viral marketing’ actually mean?

I’ve recently run into some confusion when talking to the viral and social media marketing crowd. While the issue wears many guises, it boils down to a disagreement regarding the definition of the word ‘viral’ in the term ‘viral marketing’.

Most recently in my own life, the confusion surfaced during both a client discussion and in the comments of my most recent viral marketing post. Both instances of miscommunication occurred for exactly the same reason: I had a different take on the word ‘viral’ than the others involved. This confusion raises a legitimate question: Does the ‘viral’ in ‘viral marketing’ refer to a result or a strategy?

Max Gladwell (@maxgladwell on Twitter), in the comments of a recent PandemicBlog post, pointed out that by referring to Pandemic Labs as a “viral marketing company” we were misleading people and that “Viral is an outcome, not a strategy.” I found this very intriguing for two reasons:

1. I have previously heard the opinion that viral refers to an outcome yet I personally don’t see it that way and have never used it in this manner.
2. He followed up his objections with thoughtful explanation which helped me understand the crux of the issue, understand his argument and question the validity of ‘viral’ being used at all.

As Max pointed out, the term “go viral” is often used to refer to a huge, blowout success; a pandemic. This phrase, more than anything I’ve come across thus far, seems responsible for some of the confusion. As this phrase is equating ‘viral’ with success, Max’s opinion is clearly a legitimate conclusion.

That said, my own understanding of ‘viral’ is distinctly different. To me, ‘viral’ denotes the specific distribution strategy of a piece of online media. Based on the precedent set by other types of marketing (online marketing, television marketing, email marketing, etc), I built my business around the idea that ‘viral’ described the means by which the marketing uses to spread the message.

By my logic, when referring to a viral marketing effort, you know the piece of media will largely be spread around by online word-of-mouth, email and other person-to-person means. Understandably, the viral itself requires person-to-person spread like it’s namesake the biological virus. The individual-to-individual contact inherent to the spread of a virus is the important difference between viral marketing and other forms of “blast the consumer from one source” marketing (television, radio, print, etc).

Viral marketing does not guarantee success. Indeed, there are no forms of marketing or advertising that do. It is simply a newer strategy that has recently become available to marketers that has been named after a pre-existing biological process that it closely resembles. I do not think “viral marketing” should have unreasonable expectations laid on it just because the term “go viral” has gained a certain meaning in our modern lexicon.

My own opinions aside, Max’s point still stands and this leaves us, the marketing community, at a crossroads.

1. Do we standardize on one of these definitions for clarity?
2. Do we recognize going forward the validity of both and make sure to clarify when important?
3. Do we seek another name for this person-to-person type of marketing to avoid the confusion altogether?

Personally, I feel ‘viral’ is an unfortunate but accurate moniker for what we do. The spread of a piece of viral media is very similar to the spread of a biological virus. The similarity lends itself to sharing a name. However, the shared name is what is limiting people’s thinking and causing confusion (this isn’t even taking into account the aversion people have to anything ‘viral, but that’s another post entirely).

When next the marketing community invents a type of marketing, might we give it a name entirely its own and skip the confusion?

Thanks to Max Gladwell for inspiring this post.

I’ll continue the discussion in the comments as usual. I await your thoughts.

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?

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.

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.