Viral Marketing
Johnny Bunko Sure Knows How to Market a Book
The other week, Holly wrote about using video to build better customer relationships. But what if you have a specific product to sell?
Here’s a great example of using video to sell a book online:
Riverhead Books and Penguin Books hired Lindsey Testolin to make made the words of Daniel H. Pink and the illustrations of Rob Ten Pas come to life in the shape of a film trailer — complete with gratuitous needle-dragging-on-record sound effect to suggest a sudden change of expectations. There’s a strong call to action for the book’s website and it insists at the end credits that Johnny Bunko is the best graduation gift of 2008.
Poor Johnny may not know where his career’s headed, but he sure knows how to market a book.
ERRATUM: Turns out that the publisher had nothing to do with the creation of the trailer. Hmm… No surprise there, really. Publishers, take note. This sort of content is worth your money.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
How Guinness Might Have Converted One Million
They say it’s better to be born lucky than rich. Guinness stout definitely has the rich part down (pun intended), but it seems they were a bit short on viral marketing luck this St. Patrick’s Day.
Guinness made a valiant attempt to make St. Patty’s a national U.S. holiday with their Petition 3-17 campaign. Their argument: Since there are nine times more Irish-Americans than there are people in all of Ireland, and since people of all ethnicities already miss work on March 17th in celebration of all things Irish, all citizens should be allowed to commemorate the day from the comfort of their favorite watering hole. With “a pint of Guinness stout or two,” of course.
To present it to Congress, Guinness needed 1 million signatures by the 16th. On March 17th, they had about 300,000 — a few parades-worth of revelers off their goal.
No worries. 300k signatures of loyal brand advocates is a huge achievement. And there’s always next year, right?
So, let’s take a look at how Guinness.com was feeding the campaign’s micro-site, Proposition317.com, and see what they might do to convert a million in 2009.
Guinness Means Business!
It’s evident that Guinness means business, as a Proposition 3-17 banner owns the Guinness.com homepage:
The banner is clean, simple, and straight to the point. Unfortunately, this falls slightly flat on this landing page:
Once here, visitors aren’t efficiently persuaded to follow through from the driving point (in this case, the homepage). The homepage was exciting and bold, but it didn’t say much about the campaign, which makes this landing page especially key. Since Guinness’s site exists to support its beloved brand, we can assume that most people who visit the site are already fans of the product.
They just need to keep visitors on track to sign the petition.
Testing is Good for You
If Guinness were a client, here are a few things we’d have them test:
• Tone — Rather than leading off with a “raise your pints!” attitude (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and party pictures, they may have benefited from speaking to personality temperaments other than Spontaneous (i.e., Humanistic, Methodical, and Competitive). Other parts of the site do speak to Humanistic visitors by explaining why it’s important to make St. Patrick’s Day an official holiday, but that sentiment isn’t clear on the landing page. Perhaps they could borrow a line or two from the other pages to make the why-you-should-sign argument stronger. (Is your site speaking to each temperament?)
• Better placement of content — Eyetracking studies also show that staring faces distract visitors. People immediately look to the center, then the flashing signature moves the eye to the right, then down to the quotes and pictures of other supporters. Meanwhile, the “Sign the petition” Call to Action is all the way on the opposite side of the page.
• Make the Call to Action eye-catching — The Call to Action needs to persuade and entice people to sign-up, but theirs is encased in a dark gray button and overpowered by the total signatures. Saying something less generic, like “Make it official,” might yield better results.
• Try counting down instead — This last one’s more of a hunch, so I’m curious to know whether any of you might find it more persuasive to sign the petition if they had it counting down from 1,000,000 (a pretty daunting number) rather than counting up. Example: “Only 650,048 signatures needed to make St. Patrick’s Day official. Don’t just sit there, tell your friends!”
Could Guinness have met their goal? I guess we’ll have to wait until next year to find out, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the meantime.
Proposition 3-17 may have missed the mark, but it wasn’t a failure. Anyone else fancy a pint?
. .
[Editor’s Note: Anyone familiar with the so-called “luck of the Irish” knows that success requires hard work and dedication. Such is website optimization. You should test your luck.]
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Written by:Peter Lee
How to Elf Yourself Out of Millions
One might think having the year’s biggest viral marketing hit would be any business’s dream come true. Unfortunately, though, not all Web traffic is equal, and popularity contests don’t pay the bills.
According to Advertising Age, 26.4 million people spent a total of 2,600 years at ElfYourself.com, turning themselves and unsuspecting family members and coworkers into virtual dancing elves. But chances are that unless you’re a marketer, blogger, or anyone else who might have bothered to notice in the first place, you’ve likely forgotten that OfficeMax was behind the “Elf Yourself” campaign.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask anyone who’s aware of Elf Yourself — and pronounce it carefully when you do — whether they can recall who sponsored the campaign.
Most of the answers I’ve gotten thus far (”Starbucks?”; “Barnes & Noble?”; “Wasn’t that Staples?”) have been guesses.
As OfficeMax VP of Marketing and Advertising, Bob Thacker, sold it to AdAge,
“We were looking to build the brand, warm up our image. We weren’t looking for sales. We are third-place players in our industry, so we are trying to differentiate ourselves through humor and humanization.”
Really? Not even looking for sales? Wow. If that’s the case, why even bother linking the campaign’s site to OfficeMax.com?
The article goes on to suggest that since many of those who searched for Elf Yourself around the time used the phrase “OfficeMax,” that must somehow mean their branding effort paid off. And that makes sense — so long as you ignore that it seems most people discovered the dancing elves via email and instant messenger, not search.
Get Elastic’s Linda Bustos sparked some debate about all of this, asserting that,
“Brand awareness is extremely valuable and important, especially in OfficeMax’ competitive industry. It might not result in immediate sales, but it should impact long term market position. Social media marketing (including blogging, podcasting and interactive viral campaigns) is a long-term strategy. It’s not a newspaper circular, it’s not PPC advertising, it’s not email marketing. Like celebrity endorsement or a Super Bowl ad, it won’t necessarily drive sales during a specific time period.”
Absolutely. But should the successful use of cute gimmickry — so long as it attracts a large, albeit random, audience of people who aren’t in buying mode, to a site that links to homepage, for a business that sells office supplies — be considered an automatic win?
So, millions of people go to a site that has little (no offense, elves) to do with the brand. No attempt is even made to engage would-be customers in a buying scenario (”Elf Yourself and save 10% on last-minute holiday treats when at OfficeMax.com”). No… nothing? That’s branding!?
One of the folks who commented on Linda’s post makes a telling point about the SEO logistics at play:
[…] this is search engine dynamite! The domain elfyourself.com (which is linked to by nearly 30,000 other websites) links directly (and only) to the officemax.com homepage. Conventional internet marketing dictates that this will have a huge impact on officemax.com’s ability to rank in Google on competitive terms. I’d love to see their stats - I bet it’s a big win.
Rank well on “competitive terms” — for whom? Elves? In a lot of other circumstances, this would be a great point, but in this case, it’s yet another example of why “conventional internet marketing” wisdom is misleading. Getting the extra traffic feels nice — and often impresses the boss — but there’s one thing that always feels better: Money.
Still, let’s see how much traffic Elf Yourself is driving to OfficeMax.com:
Not much of a traffic boost, is it?
But, hey, this wasn’t about traffic or revenue — it was about fun, right? Not for Toy New York, the agency that developed Elf Yourself. Nope. As Linda pointed out to me in the comments on her post, they’re the ones who are probably benefiting the most from this.
Looks like she’s got a pretty good point…
How about shareholder value? Kevin Horne points out that this is the second year in a row that the elves stuffed coal in the OMX stock price:
[…] in 2006, the company actually reported a decline of some $7 million in retail sales in its fourth quarter, 11 million “elf visitors” notwithstanding. Or notwithclicking either, apparently. Talk about squandering an opportunity. Two years in a row.
Oh well, at least OfficeMax got some national press coverage out of this. Let’s see what happens in this clip from Good Morning America:
Don’t get me wrong. I like the elves. It just seems that, since they’re already such hard workers, why not put them to work? (Even Santa’s got that figured out.)
Before you elf yourself out of millions in missed revenue from a viral marketing campaign, ask yourself: What good are millions of visitors if they don’t buy millions in goods?
Sometimes it takes better planning.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
