Recently, I moved to Boston and began the search for the perfect gym.  I got recommendations from friends, did some research online, and even visited a few in the area to discuss membership options.  But, my instincts told me that if I could just wait one more week, some amazing deal would come along.

Last week that deal appeared in my inbox from Groupon; $24 for 24 day passes, a $480 value, saving me 95%! I couldn’t have been happier.

Sites such as Woot.com, Amazon’s Gold Box, Groupon.com, BeyondTheRack.com,  Ruelala.com and BillionDollarBabes.com have been appearing in recent years in the online retail space and I have to say, my friends and I are in love! We often share sites, tell each other about deals, and spread the good word-of-mouth (and email) to just about anyone who will listen.

Sites such as these offer promotional sales for clothing brands, restaurants, gyms, hotels,  spas, wine, vacations, and just about anything else you can imagine. The key is that they are timed so that the deal expires after a set duration.  And, after some thought and discussion, I’ve decided that the expiration factor (The X Factor) is key.  It’s a new twist on the “sense of urgency” sales and marketing tactic that’s been around for a very long time.

Example: I have this “friend” who considers herself a fairly frugal shopper, and never would purchase a pair of $100 boots in a store, or even online from a site like Zappos, but when she found a pair of $475 boots on sale for $108 on beyondtherack.com, she couldn’t help herself! She easily forked over her credit card information in fear of “losing the deal.”

“Persuasive fear” has emerged in this space and visitors are rewarded for their quick-to-convert action.  Never before have I heard of so many Early Stage visitors going straight to Late Stage in a matter of moments! I’m excited see how these sites continue to change the online retail space and morph the buying stages into a single-stage process. What I wouldn’t give to have a look at their analytics!

The question is, do these types of “buy now or lose out” sites pose a legitimate threat to mainstream retail big-brand eCommerce sites? Or, will they always be niche business that only appeals to spontaneous deal hunters? Sound off, please

On June 18th, I posted a conversion rate exercise on this blog. Two simple exercises to help others understand why they should do business with you. Several people emailed me examples of what they did. However, I did want to point out two companies that took this “free” advice seriously and implemented it.

The first are my buddies from the segmentation, targeting and personalization platform extraordinaire, Monetate. They were at the Internet Retailer Trade show when they saw this exercise and realized how powerful the TwitterVP is in explaining to attendees what they do.

Empowers segmenting of traffic, targeting offers and messages to personalize the site experience, increasing conversion and AOV with zero I.T.

This is pretty solid! But more impressive was the second exercise about the “25 interesting things about you” which they turned into “25 Online Marketing Challenges You Can Meet and Beat with Monetate.” What do you think of this?

It makes me proud to be an advisor to Monetate because they took an idea and just executed it. I did not help them with this exercise at all.

A second example comes from renown photographer and educator Jim Miotke from BetterPhoto.com. He came up with several TwitterVPs and instead of just settling on one, he decided to ask his customers and followers to vote on it. Think that could generate some good word of mouth for his business of teaching photography?

Here are his choices: (if you care to vote, visit his BetterPhoto Jim Twitter profile).

Even if what they tried isn’t perfect, they now have a basis for continued experimenting and refining. But they got it done… have you?

If they are your competitors I’d watch out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, do you think that might have some rather profound effects on Domino’s marketing efforts?  Think you’ll be eating at Domino’s anytime soon?

What’s interesting is that the basic principle behind this was predicted not by some far-seeing futurist working in the technology field, but by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Charles C. Krulak.

Gen. Krulak coined the term “strategic corporal” to refer to the possible strategic foreign policy impact of actions taken by individual Marines in an age of universal media coverage and counter-insurgency warfare:

“In many cases, the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and will potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well. His actions, therefore, will directly impact the outcome of the larger operation; and he will become, as the title of this article suggests – the Strategic Corporal.”

Since the publication of Gen Krulak’s article in 1999, the rise of cell phone video cameras, YouTube, and twitter have further amplified the potential impact of local, tactical actions of seemingly “lower-level” or front-line individuals.

Granted, minimum wage workers operate in a far less dramatic and less-threatening arena than Marines, but the above video offers a stark example of the far reaching strategic impact of their actions.

The Marine Corps response to this has always been to recruit the very best individuals possible and to push decision-making and responsibility as far down the chain of command as possible. Many successful businesses take a similar approach with their front-line workers.  And the results pay-off when the great actions of individual employees hit the social media echo chamber.

What is (or what will be) your organization’s response?

Seattle’s Chow Foods runs six restaurants, and recently sent an email blast with an inventive promotion.  The one-day promotion adjusted their menu item pricing based on the close of the DOW and the NASDAQ – the tumultuous DOW set the food menu pricing, and the NASDAQ set the price of house wine, draft beers, and well drinks.

The DOW closed at 8,979, which brought all menu items to a price of $8.79, and the NASDAQ closed at 1,717, which brought drink prices down to $1.71!  I walked by one of their restaurants last night at dinner time, and the line was out the door and down the block.

Here are the lessons I see in their promotion:

1. Be innovative – basing prices on market closes, which have been painful news lately, actually worked to the customer’s benefit.  I had the promotion forwarded to me, so they also came up with something Viral-worthy.
2. Put some skin in the game – the business took some risk here, and customers sensed that and respond favorably.
3. Tap in to something already on customers’ minds – I guess that’s the point of this whole story.
4. Write great copy – their copywriter obviously had some fun with this (samples below).

What other clever ways can you leverage the economy (or the political races) to promote your business or your site?  Need some support as you innovate?

Tasty copy excerpts:

Dow’d but not Out at CHOW on Oct. 16

CHOW Foods is executing a short term Main Street bailout plan far more delicious than the one the goofs in congress passed last week.

The lower the Dow closes on Thursday, the less your entrée costs–no food on the menu will be priced more than the Dow. If it closes at 8300 (gulp!) then you won’t pay any more than $8.30 for any item on our food menus.

If Chowin’ on the DOW isn’t enough to whet your appetite, keep in mind that our house red & white wine, draft beers and well drinks will be priced at the NASDAQ close for the day.  If it dips to 1250, then our depression era pricing on these libations will be just a buck twenty five!

Check out the video.

Editors Note: While we are talking viral videos, have you seen possibly one of the best “experiential” ads online?

And that makes sense, right? No matter how tightly integrated your business message is with the premise of the video, prospective customers will probably require more than one exposure to remember that business message right?In fact, there’s even an equation for it:

Retention = Salience * Repetition

Salience can be seen as roughly equivalent to emotional impact – and remember we’re talking about the emotional impact of the message, not the video itself. If the video is really cool AND is tightly connected with the message AND the message is important, salience will be high enough to stick in prospects’ minds with only one or two viewings.

But most viral marketing efforts never achieve that level of salience. Either the video isn’t all that astounding, or the business message is only weakly associated with the videos premise, or the business message itself is irrelevant to most people. In those cases, marketers will need to ensure more repeat viewings than the average prospect is likely to give a single video. You might watch a cool video once, maybe twice, but not much more than that. After all, how many times did you really watch “The Conversation” (excluding showing-it-to-others bystanding).

On the other hand, if a video is part of a series, like the Blendtec videos, you’ll probably watch 5-7 of the videos before tiring of them (assuming a half-way decent starting premise and execution). That’s enough viewings for a weaker business-to-video connection to sink in and be remembered or acted upon.

So I’m happy to say that I can add another viral marketing effort to the Blendtec example, and that this effort is indeed part of a campaign: please welcome the “Penny Pranks” series of videos from Office Max.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, the premise of the videos (retailers reluctance to accept payment in pennies) is only weakly matched to Office Max, and only then through a special promotional back-to-school campaign. But even still, on your 2nd or 3rd video, the idea that Office Max will let you buy stuff for just a penny has certainly sunk in – especially for parents of school-aged children!

Click here to view the embedded video.

And that’s EVERYTHING when it comes to creating viral videos that will actually accomplish a business task. If Office Max had only done the one video in the restaurant (it’s most watched to date), it would have been a cute one-off that was forgotten and the business connection would have been utterly forgotten by most viewers. But through serialization, the campaign strengthens the business connection in the mind of the viewer.

• On the first video it’s a funny video. Ha Ha.
• On the second video, it’s not just one funny video about the guy paying with pennies, it’s the “Penny Prank” series.
• And by the third or fourth viewing, it has become Office Max’s penny prank series. The idea that Office Max has school supplies for 1 cent per item has finally sunk in.

Better yet, even in terms of just number of impressions, the campaign crushes the highest single video: 448K views for the restaurant video compared to 1.38M for the series. Which would you rather have? And who is to say that, had they gone with a stand alone video, they would have produced their most popular video on the first try?

Click here to view the embedded video.

While there is some controversy whether anyone can actual design a viral video – the viral part is an effect rather than a design feature – it’s a pretty sure bet that a serialized campaign has a much better shot of both achieving it’s business goals AND in going viral.

Viral videos are, by nature, non-targetable. The message can be targeted, but the delivery is meant to spread in an out-of-control and, well, viral manner. But that’s OK since optimizing the message (e.g., with persona-based messaging) is usually far more effective than trying to control who actually ends up seeing your viral video.

We also need to be careful with the term “successful”. How are we defining success? If a video spreads virally but delivers no benefit to the creator or business, should that be considered a success? I would say no, it’s not. Accordingly, the only successful viral videos I have seen are the “Will it Blend?” videos by Blendtec.

But don’t take my word for it; watch this video to see if an iPhone will blend:

Impressive, isn’t it?

Not only did these videos go viral, but, according to Blendtec’s founder, they brought qualified buyers to the company’s website and drove sales.* Now that’s impressive.

So, here are three must-do ideas to consider before trying this at home:

1.) Viral Videos Must Remain “On-Message.” Yes, they have to be funny, amusing, insightful and wow-inspiring to “go viral,” but the those qualities have to be organic or intrinsic to the commercial message. The humor can’t be gratuitous.

The great Bill Bernbach once said…

Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product. You are not right if in your ad you stand a man on his head just to get attention. You are right if [it’s done to] show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.

Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every word he puts down, every line he draws, every light and shadow in every photograph he takes makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the original them or product advantage he has decided to convey.

Exactly. The Blendtec videos are ABOUT the product: blenders.

2.) Videos work better as part of a campaign… rather than as a single, one-off event. There are at least 10 Blendtec commercials that I’m aware of, and, when they first came out, I probably watched five or six of them. That repetition of message compounded the effectiveness of both the viral spreading and the intended message. If you’re planning a viral campaign, do yourself a favor and plan it as an actual campaign, i.e., as a series of videos.

3.) Know WHERE and HOW your videos fit into the customer’s buying process… and plan accordingly. Watching the “Will it Blend” videos probably isn’t enough to get anyone to immediately buy the product, but it will put Blendtec on a customer’s short list the next time they’re in the market for a high-powered blender. That means their website has to pick up where the videos left off. That means the website has to be findable.

Notice that Blendtec also has a willitblend.com domain set up and has done the SEO work to be the first organic result when the titles of their videos are typed into Google. Notice that Blendtec has not assumed that anyone will be paying enough attention to learn the name of their company. (Viewers are most likely remember the name of the videos themselves. Prepare for that.)

The Microsoft campaign that Dave wrote about doesn’t play by these rules, and almost certainly isn’t as effective as the Blendtec series. Try it for yourself: Google “The Break Up” or “Inspiration, Anyone?” You’ll find the videos, but not any websites where Microsoft even has a chance to convert interest into business.

. .

*UPDATE: Word of Mouth marketing expert Andy Sernovitz reports that Blendtec’s sales increased 500% as a result of their “Will it Blend” campaign.

A friend recently sent me a link to “The Breakup” on Geert’s blog, where I discovered that they released the sequel just a couple of days ago. Check it out for yourself: “Inspiration, anyone?”

I still have to ask how this ties into Microsoft Digital Advertising. Don’t get me wrong. I love the sequel. I love the message. I’ve watched it a dozen times already.

Sure, most of us can connect the proverbial dots, so long as they reside on the same page. But if you watch this video out of context (which is how we watch most viral videos), what is your next step? Sure, they tell me where to go at the end of the film, but how about a few more clues? What should I expect when I get there? The minimalist approach to messaging might work for some, but folks with money to spend need a bit more incentive than just a trail of clever breadcrumbs, don’t you think?

. .

UPDATE: Jeff Sexton explains 3 Things Viral Videos Must Do to Make Money.

Seriously, the oceans are in horrible shape, and it’s your fault. You did it, Supply, Demand, Pollution and Overfishing. And if we don’t take ownership now, our brands, our children, and our collective appetite for seafood may never forgive us.

I’m not trying to bum you out, but the next time you feel the need to impress clients or co-workers with your sushi-ordering skills, you should at least know whether you’re eating sustainable fish. (Either way, you’ll have to kiss your Chilean Sea Bass goodbye.)

Perhaps you’re wondering, “What’s all this hippy, save-the-Earth stuff got to do with online and multi-channel marketing optimization?” Great question, and I’m glad you asked.

By now, you’re familiar with the environmental catch-all term “green marketing,” but what you may not realize is that “blue marketing” is a relatively untapped way to differentiate your brand while raising awareness for an urgent problem that affects everyone. Besides, it’s not easy being green, because, when everyone’s doing something “green,” it loses meaning fast. (Seth Godin has a great post on the coming backlash over green marketing.)

A quick anecdote to make my point: The other week, I saw two containers of soy milk — original flavor, same brand, same size — sitting next to each other in the fridge at my corner store. One of the containers had a green cap, the other didn’t. I picked up the container with the “green caps for green energy” promotion, turned it around, and saw that they were promising to donate 30 kilowatts of “green power” (solar power?) if I entered the number from under the cap into the database on their website. Pretty smart, right? Well, yeah, but when the first words I read are, “Can one little green cap change the world? Just maybe.” I have my doubts. Even if their campaign is a great idea, it’s lost amid the over-branding of “green.”

It’s sad, but as much as we care about the planet, Broca is tuning out.

Making Waves

World Ocean Day happened on June 8 and, if you’re like me, you didn’t think to commemorate it. Still, I have been paying attention. Did you know that if we don’t curb overfishing, pollution and global warming trends, there will be no more (edible) fish in the sea by 2048?

It’s true. Here’s how I found out:

The URL at the end caught my attention, so I went to Oceana.org/matingseason.

Oceana is the world’s leading ocean conservation group, and their website is full of blue ideas. You can become a WaveMaker, tell your grocer to buy sustainable fish, find out why you should say no to shark fin soup, and you can even download a pocket seafood guide so you always know if you’re ordering something sustainable and low-mercury.

Not concerned with saving the fish? How about saving the humans? As the climate of the ocean changes, so goes the rest of the world. Anyone who’s lived through the East Coast heat wave these past several days will find it easy to believe that 11 of the warmest years on record have happened in the past 13 years and ocean temperatures are rising.

How to Avoid Drift Net Marketing Tactics

Whether your eco-friendly marketing initiatives are focused on land or sea, here are a few ways to build trust, encourage word of mouth, and keep it financially sustainable (read: the other “green”):

1.) Be specific — What’s the exact dollar amount you’re trying to raise? What’s the exact percentage you’re donating, and to whom? Why are you donating to that cause and that specific non-profit?

2.) Campaigns are best — It’s so much easier to track and manage special promotions at the campaign level than it is to track it across the entire organization. By focusing on campaigns, you can see very closely how and why your customers and clients are responding to your environmental marketing efforts at each touch point across channels.

3.) Don’t guilt trip — Nothing is a bigger turn-off. People donate because they want to, not because you’ve nagged them to. Be careful not to come off as holier-than-thou about whatever cause you’re promoting. (I was at an event to raise money for drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa the other night, and the CEO of the company that was hosting the event was yelling into the microphone, acting as though attendees — who’d already donated $100 just to be there — were being cheap if they didn’t raise their hands to sponsor a $5,000 well, and literally shushing the crowd like they were in a grade school library. Whatever the online equivalent of that is, don’t do it.)

If Sharks Were Marketers…

Ideally, giving to a great cause should be the icing on the cake that encourages fence-sitters to convert to happy customers. Whatever you do, don’t go the drift net route and merely advertise your brand’s inner green- or blue-ness as though it’s self-evident. Each year, tens of millions of sharks are killed by drift nets while marketers like us roam free.

Hmm… If sharks had better marketing support, maybe we wouldn’t have an irrational fear of them.

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.

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?

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[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.]

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.