Viral marketing - Guest lecture at Berghs - School of the Year
This Friday I spent the afternoon away from the day to day business of JMW, and once again gave a lecture about viral marketing at Berghs School of Communication, the world’s best communication and advertising school.
The last time I was there, things had just started moving for businesses offering services around viral marketing, like seeding [...]
Content, context and predicting viral spread
Molly Flatt from 1000heads pointed towards an article in New Scientist lately. Spanish researchers José Luis Iribarren from IBM and Esteban Moro at the Carlos III University in Madrid developed a method to accurately predict how quickly and widely new pieces of information, or “memes“, will spread.
“The secret, they say, is to recognise the fact [...]
DDB Brazil and WWF in trouble
There has been a lot of talk these last couple of days about an ad made by DDB Brazil, supposedly for WWF. It even won an award in the One Show. WWF first said they denied approval of the ad, but have later come around and said they did actually approve the ad.
Now, there’s a [...]
The importance of accuracy in viral spread
When starting campaigns, trying to ignite a viral spread, exposing people to the (supposedly) viral agent is the first step. It is important to get people to pay attention. Today, this isn’t easy.
As the title or headline of some content often creates the first impression, the first step is to create a title that spurs [...]
Using strong and weak ties in viral campaigns
This January I was pretty impressed by the new thinking CP&B did with the campaign Whopper Sacrifice. I am not talking about the morality in dropping friends on Facebook to get a free Whopper. What impressed me was that it was the first time I saw (or at least reflected on) anyone actively taking advantage [...]
A recipe for customer service
Recent events have shown, once again, the importance of good customer service. As consumers now can fight back, companies have yet another incentive to provide good customer service - to prevent viral spread of consumer rants on the Internet.
Truth is, people are pretty nice. People give companies second chances. People want to like the companies [...]
United Airlines in trouble
I’m back from vacation, going through my reader, and as I still haven’t gone through it all, this might be repetition for some. Sorry about that.
From what I’ve noticed, United Airlines is in trouble, as they break guitars. Dave Carroll, disgruntled customer, and singer in Sons of Maxwell, spent nine months trying to get compensation [...]
The next level of viral marketing
I have previously written about Fixed and flexible networks.
By “flexible networks” I mean the kind of networks we have around us where we chose who will be included depending on the situation. For example, if we want to know something about a product we are thinking of buying, we ask people we will be [...]
SlapChop infomercial goes viral
It’s really funny to see what happens sometimes when a commercial is taken online. Now, it doesn’t have to be an amazing commercial or anything. Something like the SlapChop (unless you have enormous amounts of time, just give it some 20 seconds - it’s like any average infomercial):
Not particularly interesting is it? But, then a [...]
MILFyourself - a spoof on ElfYourself
OfficeMax got a huge success with ElfYourself (not active anymore) around christmas 2008 (193 million visits).
Being an obvious spoof, the site MILFYourself.com is trying to ride that popularity.
It is clear that they have not made the first of Kodak’s two mistakes on the MakeMeSuper campaign. They have managed to keep the viral loop [...]