www.nickhodge.com

You are a Mar­ket­ing Man­ager. Your budget has been cut dra­mat­ic­ally. Solu­tion: look for a mech­an­ism to get your “advert­ise­ment” shown to as many people as pos­sible, without pay­ing for TV placement.

Enter: video viral mar­ket­ing. Copy an idea, write a short script, film with act­ors. Pop onto You­tube, ini­ti­ate the viral campaign.

The only dif­fer­ence from tra­di­tional TV advert­ising is the cost. Pro­duc­tion out­lay, and that is about it. ROI: easy: sav­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars on TV (and poten­tially radio) advert­ising. In the case of xxxMan (not going to provide too much juice), nearly 45000 views I would con­sider as epic fail.

On the face of it, if you present this advert­ise­ment as a bit of fun; make it slightly obvi­ous it’s not real. Cool.

But this is not social media. Or pos­it­ive in a shar­ing cul­ture. There is no people to people con­nec­tion between the com­pany and it’s cus­tom­ers. Sure, it may gen­er­ate both pos­it­ive and neg­at­ive com­ments in You­Tube and the inter­net. The agency may respond and behalf of the cus­tomer. This is not social media nor a shar­ing culture.

People trust and like to speak to people. Put the best people in your organ­isa­tion up front, and sup­port them.

Viral is not Social, it is just a Virus.

Oh, by the way: Laurel is right on this mat­ter.