Read it, it’s good!

Here’s a few quick tips to maximise the effectiveness of your Viral video campaign.

Bigger isn’t always better.

People have a short attention span online, so keeping your video short is the best tactic. By all means have a long version of the Viral that the most engaged viewers can seek out, but use a concise version to take to the masses. We reckon a minute is a good target to aim for.

Be entertaining / interesting

If your content interests people, they’re far more likely to keep watching and ultimately engage with your brand. Seems obvious, but it’s amazing how many people will create a ‘viral’ that is actually just a dry sales message. Whilst this approach can work for TV advertising, online viewers will just stop watching if they aren’t engaged. Online video campaigns generally work better for branding campaigns rather than explaining your newest product’s features.

Start with a BANG!

Get your key message across in the first 10 seconds of the video. People will make up their mind pretty quickly if they are gonna keep watching, so its key to grab their attention from the start. You should also plan for a drop out towards the end of the video.

Leverage the Love

If people have enjoyed your video they will be more open to engaging with other marketing content. Include a call to action at the end of your video – drive traffic to your FB page, YT channel or website. You can also offer a click through link in the video description (or as part of the VAN viral player)

(image via http://thingsthataretotallyawesome.wordpress.com/)

I’d like to show how social media can complement Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing strategy. I’ll break it into the same four stages of:

1. Making friends
2. Changing your friends to customers
3. Maintaining customers
4. Changing customers to brand ambassadors

image by TracerBullet999 on Flickr

Part 1 – Making Friends

At the Viral Ad Network, we often find ourselves helping brands try to make friends. Making friends can be quite literal and measurable (i.e. adding to a brand’s Twitter / Facebook following) or can be a more abstract objective to develop a willingness in someone to engage with a brand’s content and conversation.

Much like in real (offline) life you need a reason to engage with people you don’t know. But first you need to decide who you are trying to reach?

You should research and determine what groups and niches are valuable to your brand. Where do you want to interact with them? Do they have any awareness or preconceptions that you need to consider? You can monitor the buzz around your brand using online tools.

Next, you must consider what is it that you want from this group?

You are (at this stage) just trying to make friends with your target audience, however you must think about your long term relationship. How do you intend to change these new friends to customers? What sort of voice is your brand going to use with these friends? There’s no use in approaching people on a comical, lighthearted level, only to ditch that as soon as you have their attention and ‘friendship’.

So, what does your marketing offer them?

You need to have a reason for people to listen or participate in your social marketing campaign. Your brilliantly shot and well edited infomercial may sum up your brand perfectly but if people don’t want to seek out this info, it will not be of interest to them. For them to engage with you there needs to be some benefit to them for listening. This can be in many forms:

- You can entertain them (for example, creating a viral video) ;
- You can solve a problem they have (for example the excellent myskystatus.com); or,
- You can offer them something of value (like Groupon).

You should also consider how will you quantify success of your campaign? Are you after a number of views on YouTube, Twitter followers, Facebook likes or another metric?

]]> http://www.viraladnetwork.net/blog/2011/how-can-social-media-be-a-part-of-your-permission-marketing-pt-1-making-friends/feed/ 2 http://www.viraladnetwork.net/blog/2011/always-coca-cola/ http://www.viraladnetwork.net/blog/2011/always-coca-cola/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:30:32 +0000 Ally Stuart http://www.viraladnetwork.net/blog/?p=2374 The Superbowl (#brandbowl) always provides a nice assortment of ads.

I was forced to attempt to watch the online versions of the ads due to the UK coverage of the Superbowl being on the BBC, but I still managed to catch a diverse spread of videos varying between the brilliant and a little dry. I’m not gonna go through them all here as there’s lots of other places to see them, but I thought I’d give W+K’s coke ads a quick shout out – it’s always nice to see something positive and uplifting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I thought I quite enjoyed American football; it is violent and exciting enough to keep my attention! However, I was soon fed up with the stop and start nature of the show. I think my mistake was watching it on the BBC where most of the program was pundits explaining the basics of the game and desperately trying to fill the time.

In the US, these gaps would have been ad breaks. The Superbowl is famous for its ads, so maybe this was what I was missing! With CBS charging about $2,700,000 for a 30 second ad, I was expecting the ads to be pretty high quality. Here’s a couple of my favourites…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

$2.7m is a lot of money for an ad space. However, the Superbowl has an estimated 100 million viewers, so it works out at $0.03 a viewer – Pretty good value?

Perhaps on the surface, but are these viewers all engaging with the content? These viewers could be making tea, paying the pizza delivery guy, or if they are female, completely disengaged by the huge number of male-orientated ads!

To counter this drain of U.S. ad spend, here at the Viral Ad Network we are running a special offer. For February only, we are doing a deal on U.S. targeted campaigns. We’re giving 2500 away views for free when you spend $999 on 5000 views through the network.

Check out our offer here

Click here to view the embedded video.

(by Del Campo, Nazca Saatchi and Saatchi via Adverblog)

Following on from my previous post on how your profile can be used as a marketing tool, I have recently encountered an interesting use of this…

http://oneideaaday.tumblr.com/

A job-hunting junior strategic planner will be posting an ‘idea a day’ on his tumblr until someone hires him. This is a great example of someone marketing themselves as a brand. It shows that he gets social media (each idea is under 140 characters so can be tweeted) and the ideas vary between medium so potentially appeal to lots of different branches of advertising.

I am looking forward to following his plight. It will be interesting to see if his ideas stay at a similar standard, get worse if he loses his inspiration for the project, or if they get better as he gets feedback and finds a more efficient creative route!

Good luck Nathanael!

(thanks to Indi.Ca on Flikr for the photo)

There has been a growing chatter surrounding the idea of people as brands. Be it ‘Brand Tiger’ and his recent form of brand deception (see Jim Prior’s Mad Comments), or people selling themselves to get ‘the best job in the world‘.

I think that this is an interesting notion. Platforms such as facebook open us up to reconnaissance research into each other: be it for job interviews, university places, or even just to ‘Link In’, we now need to be aware of our public facing persona.

This makes me wonder about the recent appearance of http://niccageaseveryone.blogspot.com/

This site is (possibly) a clever new Viral Campaign promoting Nic Cage: the Brand! It shows his diversity in the roles that he would have been perfect for, and his versatility.

It’s also a good way of losing 10 minutes. Fair play to Nic though, it does seem to be picking up momentum – there have already been 98 new additions this year!

thanks to Eric Verkamp for his Nic Cage as Hurley

WOM legend insists that a good experience will be shared with 5 friends whereas details of a bad experience will be shared with a circle double the size. This blog article on Influential Marketing
looks at steps you can take to limit damage from a ‘blog crisis’ (NB- Prevention is better than cure!)

On seeing this I had wanted to put this onto the Rubber Republic blog, but think the article is probably pertinent to all our companies.

In short, here’s what Rohit suggests:

1. Identify the participants.
2. Evaluate the conversation.
3. Respond authentically.
4. Publish your point of view.
5. Monitor and respond to the conversation.

(Number 3 being the most important) (Or is it?)