prequel: youtube marketing
You can't.
(cont via viral marketing los angeles) The concept of launching a marketing campaign that "goes viral" is a 2005 thing. It is. The smartest Harvard Medical School PhDs can't even predict how much penetration a real virus like H1N1 will impose. So anyone who offers you a viral marketing campaign is either inexperienced or happy to defraud.
There was a time that you could send your kids to their rooms and say, "no video games either!" While you were comfortably watching tv thinking that your kid was reflecting on what he did wrong, he was logged onto a site you'd never heard of: Youtube. Youtube was the richest medium at the time. And kids were the most likely to forward and share their favorite videos.
Hulu changed all that.
But let's not swing to the other side of the palm tree. There is a set of best practices and ingredients that are common to all the marketing campaigns that have achieved global buzz on a shoe string budget. We've outlined them below to help with your marketing efforts.
1. Identify Your Target Market Online
This one sounds like a no brainer. It's not. The smartest people with MBAs don't know how to do this. The reason they can't is simple. When they got their Harvard or Stanford MBAs, There was no Twitter. There was no Facebook. Chances are, Google and definitely Youtube weren't even around. The way the old-media marketing firms identified their target market was by reading a sheet of paper found in a publisher's media kit.
New media like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Posterous, Tumblr, and Digg don't have old-media style media kits. You identify your target market using completely different methods (link TBA).
2. Don't Try to Create a Viral Campaign
When I was just a lowly designer at a major Ad Agency in Southern California, my creative director gave me a morsel of priceless advice, "don't try to win a design award. We are here to create sales for our clients, not to make ourselves stand out." You can see why this falls into the "priceless advice" section of my memories.
Inexperienced marketeers will equate notoriety and "going viral" with sales. There's no direct relationship - None. Consider one of the most aggressive viral campaigns of the modern age: Jehovah's Witnessing. They come directly to your home. Movies, comedians, and talk show hosts mention them on prime time TV. As nice as they are, how many of your friends have converted? There is no direct relationship between notoriety and conversion.
Don't try to create a viral campaign. Focus on creating sales.
3. Reevaluate the Medium - Constantly
In the ancient days, about 5 years ago, if had a successful marketing campaign through an ad in Time Magazine, even the best ad agencies and marketing directors wouldn't reevaluate their marketing by considering People Magazine. If you love the LA Times, you wouldn't reconsider the New York Times on a weekly basis. Car and Driver vs Road and Track; Wine Spectator vs Food and Wine; NBC vs FOX; KROQ vs KISS FM etc. That's because reader loyalty and retention was as immobile as the rock of Gibraltar.
Find a way to make your product relate to a social phenomenon that's pregnant with explosion
Now, by filling in your email and password, you can jump ship from Myspace to Facebook. You can leave DIGG for Reddit. You can uninstall Gowalla and Download the Foursquare App. NBC, FOX, and ABC can supply content to Hulu.com and Youtube's traffic takes a nose dive into a puddle of water on a NYC sidewalk. Your target demographic scatters and migrates faster than you can say BP Oil Spill Related Bird Migration Disaster. And, the way you go about identifying your target market again requires completely different methods (See #1).
4. Differentiate Between Your Viral Marketing Content and Your Sales Driver
Advertising legend David Ogilvy (who launched the most memorable ad campaigns and slogans of the 70's-90's) was once inducted into some marketing hall of fame or something like that. He refused. He explained, "I do advertising. I don't know the first thing about marketing."
Do not confuse marketing with sales. Marketing is not designed to produce sales. Marketing is designed to market your products or services. Sales is designed to sell. If you create a viral marketing campaign designed to produce sales, it will fail (unless you have a zero resistance product). Even if your viral campaign goes to Japan and back, jumps from Facebook to Cyworld to Orkut and back, if your marketing is designed to produce sales, it will fail.
5. Design Your Viral Marketing Campaign to Lead to a Point of Purchase
What makes a viral campaign viral is that no ulterior motives are visible. What makes a viral campaign viral is that no ulterior motives are visible. What makes a viral campaign viral is that no ulterior motives are visible.
It's a new phenomenon. Even if your audience is itching like crazy to click the "Share" link, if your viral marketing campaign has the slightest hint of an aroma of you benefiting financially, they will blackball it. No matter how witty, funny, or socially important your message, if Joe's forwarding your message to his friends will make you rich, you'll get stonewalled. Misery and poverty both love company.
6. To Go Viral, Find a Horny Host
Every virus needs a host. Every epidemiologist knows that the most viral viruses are the ones that are symbiotic with their hosts. If a virus is too strong, it will kill its host before he has a chance to sneeze in an M. Night screening.
When Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream," it wasn't just his dream. He was infecting millions of strong resilient hosts whose season had come. When Lance Armstrong sold yellow rubber bracelets to the world, he was talking to millions of resilient aging baby boomers who, for the first time in their lives, were confronting the reality of their own cancer risk. Every single viral phenomenon was nothing more than a single match lit precisely in the center of leaking barrels of oil.
Find a way to make your product relate to a social phenomenon that's pregnant with explosion. Find a message that billions will want you to champion. Nobody wants to listen to why your product is better than your competitor's. Everyone wants you to champion their dreams. Find a way to relate your product to something your market has been dying to get off their chest - enmasse.
Find out what Guy Kawasaki, Union Square Ventures, Andreessen, and Y-Combinator are investing in
7. Let the Web Venture Capitalists Pay for Your Marketing
When Google first bought Blogger, I started blogging. Every single one of my posts got thousands of views a day. That's because Google put every Blogger post on page one of every search. When Google first bought Youtube, my videos racked up 17 million views. That's because Google was spending millions promoting Youtube. I was the guy who married the girl who won the lottery the next day.
Find out what the big venture capital groups are spending money on. Find out what Guy Kawasaki, Union Square Ventures, Andreessen, and Y-Combinator are investing in and jump aboard. You'll get all the benefits of venture capital without having to dust off that 80's power tie.
BONUS: Use Youtube or the Richest Medium Available
We have a saying in the old-school advertising business, "if you can put it in writing, say it out loud. If you can say it out loud, say it in person. If you can say it in person, shake their hand."
So if you can write direct response sales copy for your website, produce a video. Do not try this at home. Get a professional to produce it for you. It won't just double your efficacy, it'll make the difference between effective vs embarrassing. SEE: How to Produce a Viral Video for Youtube
There are 17 more do-or-die ingredients to the Viral Marketing Formula. We'll send you the 17 ingredients only via email. Enter your email in our Viral Marketing Strategies: Members Only List...
Or, if you hate paint-by-numbers recipe books and would rather have an experienced chef cook up your very next marketing campaign, call Bob at 310 598 1606 or email bob.wan.kim@gmail.com - http://twitter.com/journik
How to Get Into the News Media and Pull Big Bloggers Like Guy Kawasaki With 
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