David Dalka mentioned on his blog that folks at SES Chicago 2007 were discussing video marketing’s potential for marketing boring products (today!). I was immediately reminded of the Howie Hard Drive videos. Even though data security is not the sexiest of topics, the video is a solid example of creating buzz for boring products.
I wrote short list of (what I consider) success factors for businesses creating viral videos as sales tools. Please feel free to debate these or add your own in the comments.
Todd Malicoat gave examples for types of linkbaiting hooks:
attack
humor
contrarian (contrary opinion)
news
resource
ego
picture/movie
He also listed top title ideas and other social media optimization tips.
Rand Fishkin explained social media marketing and said that the social media marketing goal is to build friends and relationships in the blogosphere and at online social sites. Your target social media marketing audience is not same demographic as your customers.
Nic at Marketing Neophyte just posted the second episode of Howie Hard Drive. Howie seems to be fairly well-intentioned but unfortunately lands himself in bad situations.
This video is a great example of using buzz marketing for boring products. In fact, I’ve never empathized with a 500gb hard drive on such a deep level. Nic, please let us know how this campaign progresses.
You can visit check out a live DrupalED installation to see how it’s set up. It’s podcasts, wikis, groups, FOAF functionality, bookmarks…. plus any other functionality available through the hundreds of contributed Drupal modules.
I’m very excited about this. If anyone has a DrupalED site setup that they want to showcase, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!
In all fairness this research was only performed in the Canadian market, but it seems logical that universal findings would prove similar.
Frequent online shoppers are people who are comfortable navigating the internet. Since social media and social networking tools are engaging, interactive elements of the web, people who use social media and other web 2.0 technologies probably spend more time online than those who simply visit static websites.
More time online… more online shopping?
The study also examines the direct effect that social networking has on online purchase decision-making:
Create your podcast using any phone. Listen to the most recent episode of any podcast through your phone.
So far podcasts have mainly been used to create content in a radio show format. A podcast usually refers to a 20-80 minute episode of audio content. The process of recording a podcast is an actual event itself. Since podcasting requires a certain setup of gear and know-how, most people don’t record podcasts that reflect micro-updates.
What if podcasts could be used similarly to a syndicated voice message sent to people who you have given the appropriate permissions to receive them?
Why do we love Twitter? Ask Dave Winer and he’ll say (paraphrased) it forces people to create posts that *cut out the crap* and scream the *less is more* anthem. In other words 140 characters or less.
Why not apply this same lean-post principle to podcasts too? Enter the TwitterGram. Not quite a polished publicly-accessible web service, the conceptual TwitterGram is building increasing momentum.
You can contribute by linking your Twitter post to your own uploaded audio file (200K or less). More details on scripting.com.
