7 Tipps for viral marketing

The post is a little older, but nevertheless interesting. Thomas Baekdal lists 7 tipps for successful viral marketing. Since we were just talking about this in the agency, this reminds me of a certain serendipity effect. (Accidentally finding something when you’re in the right mindset.)

The 7 tipps are as follows:

1: Make people feel something
2: Do something unexpected
3: Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)
4: Make sequels
5: Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding
6: Connect with comments
7: Never restrict access!

Of course there is explanations and examples to each one of these, so click yourself through here and take a look. Summarising, he writes:

There is a common message in all of these tricks. It is that you need to make it right – or not do it at all. Only the best viral marketing campaigns make it – the rest literally sucks.

This is very true and it is most likely the point which is the most difficult to sell to clients…

(hat tip to Todd)

Popular Web 2.0 Tools for B2B Marketers?

This is a headline I read at marketinvox.com. And this is the info you get there:

B2B marketers have adopted blogs and RSS more than other Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, according to the report; moreover, smaller marketers – the Davids among the Goliaths – are at the forefront: Some three-quarters of surveyed marketers that have deployed Web 2.0 tools are in companies of 10,000 or fewer people.

Some other findings from „The B2B Web 2.0 Tools Report“:

  • Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents use blogs, 58 percent use RSS feeds, followed by podcasts (54 percent), videocasts (43 percent), social networks and communities (42 percent) and wikis (19 percent).
  • The most frequently noted blogging services were WordPress (35 percent) and Blogger (30 percent), followed by TypePad (19 percent).
  • Users‘ favorite RSS readers are those offered by Mozilla Firefox (23 percent), MyYahoo (20 percent) and Bloglines (17 percent).

Fascinating news. So I went to the website of the tools report. On this site you get the results, and you can also participiate in the survey:

Tools are ranked according to the number of mentions by qualified B2B marketers. The number of ‘Votes’ is tallied in the second last column of the table.

If you sum up the votes, you can see that there are only 61 votes sofar. In my opinion this is hardly a solid number for issuing such a press release! Don’t get me wrong: the findings will be interesting, once there is a substantial number of participants. But don’t start with such a bold headline on such a small number of findings!

Regarding the statement „qualified B2B marketers“: the survey can be filled in by anyone. There are qualification questions, but you can fill in anything you want. I am sure there will be quite a few people filling in this survey in any random way, only because they are interested in receiving a full copy of the results.

Let’s wait and see what the results will be in a few weeks.

„Users“ as a target group are dead. Everyone „uses“ the web.

Max Kalehoff writes about „the death of the user„. The user as such is „dead“ because all people are users now. In the US it’s 80%, and even in Germany, where I am from, the majority of 62% of the population are „users“.

Let’s just call people what they are: people. The problem is that inaccurate buzzwords and overused vernacular, like users, distance us from our true intentions and interactions with customers and each other. Not just in technology, but in marketing, media, advertising and the Web — everywhere, really.

Interesting thought. If you start thinking not about users, but people who use your site, your web application, your whatever tool/marketing gadget, you’re instantly led to think about uses and different usage of things. That should help you thinking more in favour of different target groups and their needs.

One benefit that came from focusing on the person and not the user has been being able to easily see that people have different desired uses and reuses for the data, information, media, etc.

(Joe Jaffe, btw, has been saying that for a while in his podcasts.)

Entropia with Crytek Engine – how realistic will graphics get?

Now this might well unsettle Second Life: Entropia has licensed the Crytek 2 Engine. I have already written about Crytek 2 in March, it offers the most fascinating graphics I have seen in a computer game! You can click through to golem.de to see what I mean.

Funnily enough I wrote back then:

I wish second life was only nearly as realistic as anything the new cryengine can show!

Well, it looks like Entropia made the race…