The New Internet Marketing Shift

Synopsis

Once a voguish women's shoe designer was seeking a way

to obtain more business and there was already a favorable

buzz surrounding the brand. Their shoes were being

featured in fashion magazines. All the same, the designer

had only a set reach, so taking advantage of the existing

word of mouth by constructing a social media buzz made

complete sense.

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Create

Buzz

The construct was simple. In a "Where Do Your Shoes Go?"

contest, users were expected to post pictures of themselves

in intriguing locations wearing their designer shoes. Users

voted for their preferred pictures and the victors got a year's

supply of designer shoes.

The outcome? Gobs of fresh Facebook fans, tens of thousands

of intermeshed users, a grounded social-media buzz, and the

origination of many useful brand enthusiasts for the

industrious designer label. How to do it?

Figure out the particulars of the contest. Find and get a

prize that's relevant to the concerns of your brand. Plan for

a particular launch date for the contest to become active,

and a deadline by which all contestants will have to enter to

be eligible to get the prize and any other contest particulars.

Get a social media account free using Twitter, Facebook,

Myspace, etc. The social site will allow contestants to show

their interest in participating.

Announce the competition. Update your social page to advise

your visitors that a contest is being held. Include all of the

info that the potential contestants will need to know prior to

entering the contest. Make your visitors cognizant of the

prize, and let them know that they'll need to participate

through your social media site. Upon picking out the winner,

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e-mail him seeking the details of where you are able to send

the prize. Pick out runner-ups in the event that you don't

hear back from the initial victor of the contest.

Run the contest and pick a winner. Sort through all of the

entries you've been sent, and pick out the winner based on

the contest rules.

Give out the prize and declare the results. Send off the prize

to the winner of the contest, and once he's received the prize,

declare the results of the contest on your social media site.

This will see to it that none of your visitors are left ceaselessly

wondering whether or not they've been selected as the

winner. As well, this will bring people back to check for the

next contest and stir interest in your brand and your main

web site.

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Chapter

2:

Give

Aways

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Synopsi

s

If planning and carrying out an online game or competition

seems intimidating, you are able to always come back to

basics and appeal to a general human reality: individuals

love free junk.

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Free

Stuff

There is another success story with an online photo processing

service who wanted to establish a fan base and tug at user

engagement via Facebook. What they did was use a monthly ezine

to promote an easy game related to an old classic photo

game. In the e-zine, 2 subtly dissimilar pictures were featured,

and the 1st groups of users who named and posted the

deviations on Facebook got a $25 gift card. The photo

processing company got more Facebook fans than ever - or

since.

In a like promotion, an alcoholic beverage company

discovered a creative way to capitalize on extra canvas

carryalls sitting around their office. Instead of stuffing the

bags in a storage closet, they utilized the bags as prizes in

a competition designed to drive user participation on

Facebook.

To acquire a carryall, users were asked to place pictures of

themselves drinking the beverage on the brand's Facebook

page, a comparatively effortless request looking at the

number of drinking photos on

Facebook. Needless to say, the canvas carryalls went like

hotcakes, and brand cognizance expanded exponentially.

The price? An uncluttered office.

If you're just beginning and not making any income yet on,

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then you'll have to decide whether or not you prefer to

spend money on a giveaway or not.

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What should you give away? Gift cards are forever

popular. But a different great idea is to target it to your

chief audience. Give something away that will associate

with your product or service.

Don't prefer to spend your own income on a giveaway? You

still have alternatives. Attempt asking business owners that

you know if they'd like to sponsor a giveaway. You'll have to

pitch your site, so make certain you tell them how many

visitors you get or expect. Tell them who you readers are and

what kind of products that they'd be interested in. And tell

them how you'll market your giveaway. Do make certain to

tell them that they'll be responsible for sending the prize to

the winner however. It is so much simpler than having them

ship it to you and then you sending it to the winner.

Another way to discover sponsors for your giveaways is to

ask your contacts on Twitter and Facebook. Another good

way to discover sponsors is in the Etsy forums. Etsy is a site

that craftsmen sell their handmade goods on. Just post that

you're seeking sponsors for a giveaway on your site, what

type of site you have and your contact info. Likely the easiest

way to pull in sponsors is to begin praising them on your site.

Do you love a housecleaning product? A gizmo? Playthings?

When you give good reviews, individuals will take notice,

particularly businesses. If a business contacts you to sponsor

a giveaway, they'll more than likely offer you a gratis product

to review. Then they'll provide one or more of that same

product for you to have a giveaway with.

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All right, now you have your giveaway prize. Begin dropping

hints that you'll be featuring a giveaway soon. This peaks

interest and keeps people coming back. When you're ready to

submit your giveaway, make certain to make it an amusing

post. Ask people to leave a comment about the product, what

they admire about it, something like that. Then provide extra

giveaway entries. For example if they discuss your giveaway

on their blog, they receive an extra entry. If they tweet about

it on twitter, a different entry. Utilize your resourcefulness,

but make certain it all leads back to more views for your site.

Besides promoting on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, email

it to your friends and family and post it on Online-

Sweepstakes.com (OLS). OLS is the largest and best site

listing for online giveaways and you'll get a lot of traffic.

Choose the winner and send out Your Prize.

Contact your winner and get their mailing address. Ship

their prize without delay, and include a courteous card

thanking them for entering your giveaway.

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Chapter 3:

Gain Loyalty By Providing A Stake In The Brand

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Synopsi

s

When the company Vitamin Water chose to set up a

fresh flavor, it chucked the labs and focus groups and

marking authorities and addressed social media

networks.

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Intrigue

People

Throughout the summertime of 2009, the company pursued

and grew its Facebook fan base by asking for ideas from users

concerning the name and promotional material for the fresh

flavor.

More than a million fans took part in the contest, and famous

persons were intermeshed via video clips to prod interest. In

the long run, once "Connect," the fresh flavor, arrived on the

shelves, there were a 1000000 potential purchasers on the

market far more likely to gather up a bottle than they had

been prior to interacting with the competition.

Word of mouth advertising has forever been the best (and

less expensive) form or advertising and now with social

media tools like twitter and Facebook, it's even easier to

help individuals spread the word for just about anything,

even your products and services.

In a survey a while back by Nielsen online, they

demonstrated that thirty-four percent or respondents wholly

trusted something when it came from a testimonial from

somebody that they knew. Think about it, if your

acquaintance come in speaking very positively about a service

or product and you have the slimmest bit of interest in it, you

will likely ask who makes it or where do I get one. I know I'm

like that.

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And so if your company or business has a product or service

and individuals talk about it off line, then I would be to your

benefit to get them to talk about it online likewise. Suppose

you own a restaurant and you meet the clients and they have

a fantastic meal. Let them know your restaurant is on

Facebook or Twitter and share the page with everybody that

comes in. Immediately, your buyers may share their

experience with you and other buyers online. Now their

acquaintances will see it and be thinking, “Perhaps we should

go to that restaurant John was talking about last week…”.

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Chapter

4:

Build Credibility By Helping Others

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Synopsi

s

It lifts the spirits to do good things, and if you are

able to inspire other people to follow suit, even

better.

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Help

A well know shoe brand has made it its mission to provide a

pair of shoes to a youngster in a developing country for

every pair sold. To maximize its donation, the shoe company

inspires users who purchase shoes online to share the word

of their purchase on Facebook when the sale is done.

It's not surprising that the shoe makers messaging technique

works as well as it does. When I purchase an e-book from

Amazon or add a film to my Netflix line up, I've little interest in

alerting the individuals in my life. If you ask me to alert them

about something large-hearted I've done, my concern ramps

up.

When I buy a pair of the shoes online, not only do I prefer to

brag about my beneficial deed, I likewise want to encourage

acquaintances to follow suit. The shoe company wins by

making it simple for me, and anybody else, to do simply that.

Choose on what type of contribution you're going to make.

This helps narrow your charity options. You are able to donate

food, revenue, vehicles or playthings to different

organizations. Work out what you want to donate and discover

a charity that takes that item.

Choose a cause that's significant to you. A simple way to

choose a charity is to donate to a cause that has directly

impacted you in some way. For instance, if you have lost a

family member to breast cancer, you might wish to donate to

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the Susan G. Komen Foundation or the American Cancer

Society.

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Utilize the Charity Navigator site. This resource measures

individual charities and may help you give to a charity that's

known to utilize its money with wisdom. It likewise separates

charities by category for simpler navigation.

Think about a church donation. A lot of churches will take in

donations from its parishioners and put the revenue towards a

lot of charities.

Determine how what part of donations really goes towards

the cause and how much is expended on administration.

The Charities Review Council advocates that charities

expend no more than thirty percent of their monies on

administration, while some other watchdog groups put that

estimate as high as fifty percent.

Donate to a region in crisis. If a natural disaster has

happened in a country, send a monetary contribution

through the Red Cross.

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Chapter

5:

Have Some

Fun

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Synopsi

s

Do something fun and amusing to get people’s

attention.

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Humor

Not to come off like a broken record by giving this following

example, but it still rings true: if you do something amusing

people will pay attention. There is a concept: that run tests on

whether or not a simple item will blend, video it, and shows it

to the globe. Will It Blend?

It is a viral marketing campaign comprising of a series of

infomercials presenting the Blendtec line of blenders,

particularly the Total Blender. In the show, Tom Dickson, the

Blendtec founder, tries to blend various items in order to

flaunt the power of his blender. Dickson began this marketing

campaign after doing a blending effort with a box of matches.

Popular fan petitions for the show include blending either a

different blender or a crowbar. It's highly unlikely that

either would blend and this likely means that neither would

even be tried, because of the nature and purpose of the

show—promoting Blendtec products. A demonstration video

sporting the anticipated crowbar was cut off by a cell

phone, to which Dickson replies by stuffing the entire crew's

cells into the blender and blending them instead. The show

has tried to blend increasingly unlikely items, like a six foot

garden rake and a sealed can of soda pop.

The phrase Will it blend has become a net meme on sites

like Digg. Dickson has said that the campaign has been a

good success for Blendtec. The campaign took off almost

at once. They have definitely felt an affect in sales. Will it

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Blend has had an astonishing impact to the commercial and

retail products.

Blendtec now sells Will It Blend? Products, including a spoof

shirt with the slogan "Tom Dickson is my Homeboy".

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Dickson has made a lot of national television appearances,

including

NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, on which he blended a

rake handle in bare seconds. Dickson likewise made his

appearance in the History Channel serial publication Modern

Marvels. In the episode World's Strongest III the show ends

with a special Will it Blend to prove if he may blend the

channel's longest running series in the form of a portable MP3

player.

As far as honors, Will it Blend has been put forward for the

2007

YouTube award for Best Series, winner of .Net Magazine's

2007 Viral Video campaign of the year and winner of the

Bronze level Clio Award for Viral Video in 2008.

Also amusing: will it float, and will it bounce.

Be politically correct. This one is non-negotiable, while it

might go against the grain of a committed "humorist."

Somebody writing stand-up comedy will tend to be "nervy."

You don't want that in promotion. Standing back from any

demographic slips or unintended estrangement of a group

of individuals is a huge part of making a humorous ad blitz,

and occasionally takes work as marketers comb through

their concepts for any possibly dangerous material.

Avoid gloomy or harsh humor. Again, this sort of humor is the

stock trade of some novelists and comedy authors, but it

doesn't belong in promotion. It turns individuals off when you

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want them to be charged up. For a good utilization of humor,

visualize the opposite of dark, a sort of peppy, shiny humor

that will draw individuals into your work.

Attempt light situation comedy. Many marketers and gadget

companies particularly, have been making wide use of this,

with all of the funny family spots involving cells, for instance.

This sort of genuinely amusing family comedy is a huge draw

to buyers, who then associate the product with functional,

felicitous families, even if the roles in the ad aren't exactly

"happy" with their cell bills.

Consider what sort of humor your particular target audience

may find amusing. Are you selling men's or women's products?

To what age bracket? These questions are forever at the

forefront of promotion and apply to the use of humor likewise.

Don't let humor overpower your message. Make certain the

product is forever front and center. Some advertisers push the

envelope and abstract this rule a bit; as viewer reactions

become more advanced, the product may be set back a bit,

and a bit more humor or concept can still draw a buyer base.

But don't get carried away.

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Wrapping

Up

Sometimes when the topic of social media comes up, a

collective moan ensues. What if they don't like our product

or service? What about damage control? We need to

command our message! And so forth.

What's the bottom line for brands concerned about getting

social media incorrect? The train is departing the station

with or without you. Conversations about your brand are

going to occur, irrespective of whether you choose to

participate. Don't sit down on the sidelines. Embrace the

conversation and engage.

Even if you take nothing else from this book, let me leave

you with this: when it bears on social media, recall the

golden rule. If you would be put off by a promotional tactic,

your audience likely wouldn't like it, and if you find

something so exciting you want to share it with all your

acquaintances, there's a great chance your audience will,

also. Use good sense, and remember that social media

networks mirror how we interact in real life.

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