OnionSoup

Anyone who works in creative design will find this amusing.

 http://makemylogobiggercream.com/

This is a viral campaign my company is running for AOL at the moment. It’s never too early to get festive now is it?

 Santa’s Ski Jump Game

I recently read some commentary about the business building side of social networking. Really I feel attempting to define such a process is pretty futile, perhaps even limiting.

What such success stories as the recently sale of preteen social networking Club Penguin to Disney for £172m have at their core is entrepreneurism, and entrepreneurism is easily stifled by processes and methodologies developed through research and analysis. It’s more about people getting out there and allowing themselves to be driven by their enthusiasm and gut instinct. Don’t get me wrong, I believe methodical planning and risk control is critical at various stages of a business’s development, but I do think if entrepreneurism’s what you need you simply have to embrace it and let your ambition drive your actions.

When my business, fish in a bottle, was in it’s most entrepreneurial, fledgling state many years ago we decided to approach the BBC (whom we now have a wonderful relationship with) because “we do cool stuff and so do they” – I should quickly add that our sales strategy has developed somewhat since them. How does a start up 3 person with absolutely no track record or business experience get in with one of the UK’s most sought-after corporate clients? Well we simply rang the front desk. Any business development professional worth their pay cheque will now be on the floor in hysterics at our naivety. But the fact is that, crazy though it seems, it worked. We hit upon a sympathetic receptionist who happened to like the nice person on the end of the phone (who wasn’t me incidentally) and did a bit of work on our behalf. It took just that one phone call and rest happened organically.

The result was the big break we needed. Had we known as much about business development and sales as we do now I’m sure we’d have never tried that route. Of course have no idea what would have happened had we tried the conventional route into the BBC, but I do suspect that, in that instance, we’re better off with the path we took.

I recently wrote a mini article for an industry newsletter about viral mareketing. It went out to a few thousand marketing and advertising professionals. The idea was to wave the flag a little for viral marketing and encourage people to consider the benifits and relevancy of it as an activity in the commissioning phase. Seems to have gone down well, so I’ve added it below.

The Truth about Viral Marketing

So online’s where it’s at. But where does viral marketing sit in your marketing strategy toolkit? The answer is probably at the bottom, if it appears at all. Are you missing a trick?

Many marketeers still think of virals as a mop up activity for the bit of budget that’s left over. The truth about viral marketing is that it’s often out performing TV, radio and print, as well as pushing other online activities to the back of the queue. Whole campaigns are run for less than you can buy cable time for a DRTV campaign, yet they’re delivering much more. Virals aren’t just about exposure, they’re being used for targeted data capture and driving people to websites as a targeted alternative to search marketing.

Of course viral marketing can’t be everything to everyone – arguably it’s still best positioned as a complimentary activity, but a powerful one nonetheless. Critically, it’s an unbeatable tool for engaging savvy youth. A good viral is a powerful touch point – welcome and personal. A huge volume of personal recommendations pass through our viral servers in the form of send to a friend messages. That’s people sharing their experiences with their friends. We’re not just marketing brands, we’re delivering kudos too. That’s incredibly powerful.

Of course creative design is as important here. But only that coupled that with seeding, measurability and management will delivery full potential. Seeding, effectively online PR, is critical. “Build it and they will come…” just doesn’t hold true. Many brilliant virals have been crippled by low (or no) budget seeding. Measurability is important too and services like our own ViralBite (www.viralbite.com) provide realtime viral tracking. But watch out for misleading statistics. Quality is always more relevant than quantity alone. 5 million impressions with 95% coming from Lithuania isn’t going to be a success for most campaigns.

I hope the information here will inspire you to consider viral marketing as a more prominent activity in your strategy toolkit for your next campaign.

Welcome to my new blog. The old one’s still lingering about with just a few broken images to show for its age.

So I finally moved onto Word Press. My previous iteration was a custom coded attempt. To tell the truth I was really enjoying developing, it was coming on a treat. But time catches up with everyone eventually and what with running a business and being a new Dad, I find myself short of the time needed to finish a pretty major hobby project.

So by way of a declaration of intent, I would like it known that I intend this blog to be an informative, relevant and topical read for anyone who’s interested in running a busines,  making the internet work better for people or is perhaps curious about stammering and how to make life great if you have one.