The Cox Box - The skewed view of ecommerce
It’s not easy, being a person who remembers Julius LaRosa, and trying to fit in with the MySpace crowd. It is hard for me to think it’s okay to show your tattoo of your hot second grade teacher on the Internet. – you know, the one that covers the whole right cheek of your gluteus max.
For me, interactive shopping was either, going to the store, where what I wanted was sold, or using a mail order catalog. Mail order was okay; it worked, except when I tried to write the whole catalog number for the Daisy Air Rifle in the little tiny space they gave us on the Sears Roebuck catalog order page. Speaking of Sears or Montgomery (Monkey) Ward and their order pages, I never really understood that thing where they sent you a catalog that was supposed to last for about six months, but they only gave you one page of order forms. It’s not like we had copy machines in those days.
Anyway, I was trying to come up with some marketing strategy to promote a client’s website had that sells faithful reproductions of that potato that looks like Dan Quayle, or was it Jesus. Whatever. I’m talking to this marketing guru, who looked like he hadn’t washed his hair in about a month and he kept it in check by simply adding more mousse on a daily, if not hourly, basis. It resembled, ahh, that potato that looks like….you know.
He said I should try viral marketing. I told him that viral things were something I tried to avoid, since I fully understood that viral was the active tense of the noun virus. For a guy who knows that Julius LaRosa was a singer, who appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts Radio Show in 1953, viral means I could catch my death, as grandma used to say No, he says, viral is a good thing nowadays. It means that you approach the market like a virus approaches a warm body that has had too little sleep or lives on cold pizza and warm beer. He says it’s a process by which you introduce your product or service by entering the market through a path of least resistance or opportunity – like on a juicy tomato if you will.
Thinking back, I can recall some viral things from the past, like disco. I’m pretty sure that nobody would have bought a single disco record had it not been for the viral marketing campaign that occurred when they keep pumping that silly music into movies like Saturday Night Fever and who can forget The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh.
That viral invasion sold us a lot of silly looking clothes and some really bad hair styles. Fortunately, as most fads go, it was short-lived. Meanwhile, back in the viral jungle.
The guru says, you don’t need to produce a big movie like The Fish or spend big bucks on an ad campaign to take advantage of the viral strategy. Because we have so many channels of communication there are options. I love options, choices, not feeling trapped—like when Lara Croft scans the scene and seeing that little rope hanging from the tomb ceiling.
The guru says take a video of yourself and put it on YouTube. I say, what’s a YouTube? He says it’s a place where people put videos on the Internet and other people come a watch them, it doesn’t cost anybody anything. He says you put up a clever video, the more outrageous the better, and you can really get some attention for you brand. He says it doesn’t cost anything, except the cost of making the video, which could also be free.
So I checked it out. (YouTube.com). I saw several videos of people playing Scrabble, a couple Elvis imitators, and a cat adopting a rabbit,. There was another where a really heavy girl was doing her Britney Spears imitation—wait, maybe that was Britney. But I also saw a cool series of fly fishing videos and some others on gold panning. They all linked to sites selling stuff like fishing tackle and prospecting gear.
I found a few other video sites like MetaCafe, Google Video, Bright Cove and others (here is a link to a site that links to 50 of the best video sites http://www.jackhumphrey.com).
So how do you get a video up on a site? On the Google Video site, for example, you simply click the “upload video” button and follow the rules. You have to register—give you name and email address at least—and click a thing that says you will follow the rules.
My greasy guru friend says that video sharing or video blogging, a close relative on your mother’s side, is the hottest marketing tool in the world right now. Sure your video will be one of, oh I don’t know, a billion, but amazingly people of like mind will find your little piece digital pretentiousness and then they’ll find your website and that’s what you’re looking for now, isn’t it?
To be successful with your viral video it needs to be interesting, at least marginally (the cat adopting the rabbit had 118,000 views). It needs to be relevant and original. Don’t rip off footage from a world record bean spitting contest from Mexican Hat, Utah and tack your logo onto it—the market will be onto you in a heartbeat.
There are plenty of resources through which you can learn more about this “word of mouse” marketing strategy. The New Rules of Viral Marketing by David Meerman Scott is a good tool. Marketing Terms is a sire when you can learn about many things marketing but there is a page where you can learn a lot about things Viral. The search term “viral marketing” will bring an avalanche of sites with something to say on the subject.
Of course, my guru pal says, there is more to viral than videos. He said he would explain, but he had to add some mousse—the hair tower was leaning.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: viral, viral marketing, You Tube, video, video blog.
