Why It WasWeb and Marketing

Unless you have been living under a rock you would of heard about Twittter which is a wonderful tool for marketing. Twitter describe themselves as micro blogging. The concept is that you constantly update it with 140 character message with what you are currently up to. This can be done several ways. More then just you going there occasionally and updating your status like you do on FaceBook, it allows for a lot more. It’s flexability and abilty to integrate with thrid party apps make it a bit of a marketer’s dream. A another good article, by Sarah Milstein, describes How Twitter Can Help at Work.

Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for conecting to people who are just interested in what you are up to. Yes this is very late Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z. You can connect to family, friends, strangers, colleagues, clients, bosses etc. Though you might want to keep in mind that people might not quite be interested in the fact you are taking the garbage out. They however may be more interested in developments or something new you can share with them like a cool link to a website. Why not make this easy for your readers?

Quick Tip

You can let readers add your website to their twitter by have a link to http://twitter.com/home/?status=<<type your website address here and message>> i.e.

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=I am reading about Twitter on http://www.whyitwas.com”>Add to Twitter</a>

Micro Blogging

Micro-blogging is basically providing little short updates on your world. The main two is Twitter.com and FaceBook’s status updates. Twitter allows for users to create their updates via their website, SMS, and third party apps, which you can integrate into your website.

For Marketing

It’s API allows for website (and desktop) designers to include tools into their website that take advantage of Twitter. These tools can either receive or post updates from/to Twitter. A couple of webmasters have used the ability to receive updates to analyses trends of links people a Twetting about. They then post the links to their websites and the names of the users posting them. http://twitturls.com/ and http://www.microblogbuzz.com/ are both sites which do this. People interested in these sort of sites then visit the site which are Tweetted.

How to make the most of Twitter for marketing

1. Use something like Twitter tools for your WordPress site. Set it up to post updates to Twitter when you post something new on your blog. This is used on both ToolNames.Com and whYitwas.Com.
2. Include a twitter-posting-script into your site for non-wordpress pages like on ToolNames.Com for the tool wall.
3. Use Twitter buttons on your site for people to click so they can add your site to their Tweets. This is really simple (detailed below).

You shouldn’t just limit yourself to the above, there is FaceBook, MySpace, Fark and many more you can setup to send links and updates to.

Create a Twitter button

1. Find an icon that you want to use like to use like this one
2. Decide on a message you would like the reader’s Twitter to say like I really think this website http://ToolNames.com is cool
3. Create a link <a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=I really think this website http://ToolNames.com is cool“><img src=”http://www.milkaddict.com/images/buttons/twitter-button.png” /></a>

Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights) is a great little tool from Google in the Beta stage at the moment. You are able to look at the latest Google search trends going on around the world. You can narrow your search down to dates, regions, and category. For instance, your company wants to do a new campaign for the aging population, alzheimers is the most searched for item related to aging and health care and memory walk is the fastest growing searched topic. Or if you want to connect to over a billion people, blog about India’s cricket.

In Australia in the past 7 days the top 10 searches are:
1. games
2. youtube
3. facebook
4. google
5. myspace
6. ebay
7. weather
8. hotmail
9. yahoo
10. news

If we dive deeper into the games topic we see that Monday’s there is very little searches for game related topics and on Thursday there is a growing interest, to Saturday where it peaks. We also know people are mostly using generic terms like game, games, cheats etc. So you have a game, advertise your game on Thursdays to Saturday and use game and games in your meta data etc.

What is really interesting is that there is an indirect corralation between game related searches and fitness. Fitness is most popular on Mondays, maybe to much eating out over the weekend and little exercise lead to guilt.

What is also interesting is the top searches which are still in the top 10 which were in the top 10 in 2004.

Wii fit is a very hot product at the moment. As of June 2008 it has sold world-wide 5.27 million copies. The Wii Fit is a lot of fun, especially playing in groups, with the exception of having to exit right out to swap players. People move around their lounge-rooms looking like fools and everyone has a great laugh. The Olivia Newton John Wii Ad is a far cry from the actual experience of Wii Fit. What you see in the ad is two aging women mildly being entertained by the Wii Fit.

[kaltura-widget wid="eggn9u97ny" width="410" height="364" /]

The ad follows on from Olivia’s frist Nintendo Ad for the DS Brain Training, which is little to be inspired by. The basic outline is Olivia playing the game and ignoring her assistant.

So what could Nintendo of done different? Some people have come with some innovative ideas.

Tinsley Advertising decided to make a viral ad. The ad is using a long proven formula that sex sells. Of course the claim is that the boyfriend made the video without his girlfriend’s knowledge. Who cares!? The couple are getting their lot of fame and enjoying and getting blogger and vloggers attention.

[kaltura-widget wid="5ctcmhrknw" width="410" height="364" /]

Matt Downham & Matt Spill took a different spin with his viral ad. Going for comedy.

`[kaltura-widget wid="d03k8s8kas" width="410" height="364" /]

But it seems not everyone is a fan of the Wii Fit. Sarcastic Gamer, who has made plenty of parodies has ripped off the original USA Wii Fit ad. Using wit and a fair bit of rational SG has managed to produce quite a funny video.

[kaltura-widget wid="7ifrvemw4g" width="410" height="364" /]

Will it blend?, is a totally interesting concept. BlendTec, a real blender manufacture takes popular products and blends them to show the strenght of their blender. The infomercials are sort of like the knifes that can cut through a frozen tin of soup. By blending popular products like the Wii Remotes people come and watch the infomercials.

[kaltura-widget wid="m1von1uq9c" width="410" height="364" /]

The guys from G4 have made a great viral ad for Wii, which is still playing on the sex sells concept.

Finally one from SG again on how to kill your brand.

[kaltura-widget wid="d1e4jt1ivc" width="410" height="364" /]

Mother by Coca-Cola (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvgIopzPflI) have managed to produce an ad which makes anyone in marketing go “what were they thinking?”. The ad starts off with saying they got it completely wrong and fired everyone and to buy a new one. What happen to the great old “new and improved taste”. It seems that the “new and improved taste” of new taste ads is in this case is not an improvement.

Watching the ad anyone would get the impression that the message is “we got it wrong the first time (an insult to anyone who liked the original), but we would like all the people suckered in to trying it the first time to give it another go”. This is an example of one of the worst brand management ads.

[kaltura-widget wid="97fj0a6okq" width="410" height="364" /]

We all know viral marketing is hot, if you can get it to work. When a great viral ad comes along it’s spreads across the internet like wild fire. Technologies like YouTube, blogs, wikis, and forums have been great avenues for viral marketing, in some cases it is the advocates of your products which are producing these ads. That is something money cannot buy. True advocacy is the Again & Again Apple Mac Music Video by Dennis Liu. Dennis also maintains a website featuring other viral videos he ads produced (http://www.dennisaliu.com/)

[kaltura-widget wid="dz3ea96wls" width="410" height="364" /]

Dennis is promoting Apple, The Birds and The Bees, and Adobe all in the one video. He provides links for people to find out a lot more about the products.

The Gruen Transfer (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruentransfer/) (which is like crack for anybody in marketing or adversing) in one of their first season episodes displayed the Cadbury Gorilla Ad. The ad is by Fallcon London and had 500,000 hits on YouTube in it’s first week. Though the ad was commissioned by Cadbury they have enjoyed the success of advocates creating their own versions on the ad, either using the orginal ad and remixing it to other songs or recreating the ad with stuff toys.

[kaltura-widget wid="oos0hav1s4" width="410" height="364" /]

A few years back the boys from the Chasers (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/) did a viral ad with Sunrise (http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/sunrise/) which one of the boys tried to ask his wife for a divorce. The ad did the rounds and a lot of people thought it was real even after the boys annoucned on Triple J (www.abc.net.au/triplej) that it was a fake.

[kaltura-widget wid="z8v1x2r1y8" width="410" height="364" /]