Simple Rules: Creating Viral Anythings

Aside

There’s a sim­ple rule about rules for cre­at­ing viral any­thing, whether it’s viral video or tweets or pho­tos or what­not. The rule is this: any­one who tells you how to do it in a step-by-step way is just blow­ing smoke. If they could do it that eas­ily, they wouldn’t be talk­ing to you about it, they’d be off using their pixie dust to com­mand obscene amounts of con­sult­ing fees — and there’s no way they’d give away the secret sauce for free.

Mean Joe Greene & the Old Spice Manly-Man

Isaiah Mustafa in Old Spice ad Jian Ghomeshi’s Q on CBC is run­ning with guest hosts dur­ing the sum­mer, and the August 3rd show was hosted by Terry O’Reilly of Age of Per­sua­sion fame. (lis­ten online) The first 20 min­utes are Terry’s explo­ration of the Old Spice cam­paign with Isa­iah Mustafa that’s get­ting a lot of press after going viral and run­ning a hugely suc­cess­ful real-time social media dia­logue with their spokesper­son.. Amid the inter­views, Terry talks with the pair respon­si­ble for the cre­ative on this project and con­sid­ers how the cam­paign is out of char­ac­ter for par­ent com­pany P&G — the whole seg­ment is worth a listen.

The Customer Has the Podium

united-airlines-logo.jpg Cus­tomer ser­vice will never be the same, thanks to the Inter­net. Those who deal with the pub­lic — espe­cially in the com­plaints depart­ment — need to remem­ber that fail­ing to impress the cus­tomer at a crit­i­cal moment could back­fire in a very big way. In Inter­net time it’s already old news, but the after­math of United Air­lines declin­ing lia­bil­ity for a gui­tar they broke is going to cost them far more than the cost of a gui­tar. Even a custom-built one. Maybe they didn’t know that Dave Car­roll was going to launch a viral video. Maybe they weren’t pay­ing atten­tion to Terry Heaton’s visit to Com­pUSA. In con­trast to United, Tay­lor Gui­tars responds with help­ful infor­ma­tion about trav­el­ing with your gui­tar — they’ve also offered to repair his dam­aged Tay­lor 710ce, and have given him his choice of a new guitar.