Tag Archives: viral

Why Your Campaign Won’t Go Viral

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I was read­ing The Viral Mar­ket­ing Cheat Sheet from KISS­met­rics, which turns out to be not a bad guide to viral cam­paigns. Ana­lyz­ing as I read, I came to the graph of the top ten viral cam­paigns of 2010, and noticed that the list con­sists of gen­er­ally well-known brands. Ones who can afford to drop some coin on a cam­paign that doesn’t adhere to an age-old for­mula, and have it flop. They can afford to experiment.

What about the rest of us, the smaller brands with less name recog­ni­tion? When those brands spend money, they want some assur­ance of return. They want some­thing tried-and-true, and don’t want to pay the cost of exper­i­men­ta­tion. As a result, it’s pretty hard to hit it out of the park. It just doesn’t happen.

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Simple Rules: Creating Viral Anythings

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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

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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.

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Is Your Business Card Failing a Test?

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I’m cur­rently redesign­ing my busi­ness card, because I’ve always hated the one I have. Dur­ing my entire career I’ve had only one or two cards that I thought were really well-executed, but I’m picky. And the next one will blow them all away to atone for past mediocre cards. I’ve been handed a lot of busi­ness cards over the years, and it’s a reg­u­lar occur­rence that you can size up the busi­ness right away by the card you are pre­sented. And some­times it’s a pass/fail test. Con­sider what some of the cards you’ve been handed might say:

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  • Light stock, rough edges: Office Depot tem­plate meets home inkjet printer. Not a seri­ous contender.