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.
Embeddable videos include YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Revver and Vimeo. Pownce has just added additional customization options, too. Read a good review of these new Pownce updates at Jeffro 2pt0.
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Look me up on Pownce @ http://pownce.com/socialmedia
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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.
A reported 258,000 people have donated money to Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. This number is greater than the combined total of people who have donated to either Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain, according to the Washington Post.
Senator Obama has utilized social networking and social media as part of his fundraising strategy. More than $10 million of Obama’s second-quarter contributions were made online, and 90% of these donations were only $100 or less.
What is significant about so many financial contributors donating $100 or less?
As we all know, Viacom ordered YouTube to stop playing Viacom-copyrighted videos (from Comedy Central & MTV) in February. Apparently this was done in an attempt to monetize the video content on Viacom-owned web properties.
However, Viacom’s controlling action has since backfired and as a result, Viacom brands has been negatively impacted instead of realizing increased profits. It turns out that ComedyCentral.com and mtv.com have lost significant traffic since the videos were pulled from YouTube.
The result?
Viacom has yet to effectively monetize the video clips pulled from YouTube, and
