Web Ink Now

World Wide Rave! vs. Unscrupulous and Illegal Viral Marketing Techniques

World Wide Rave: People talking about you and your company and your products.

World Wide Rave: When a community is eager to link to your stuff on the Web.

World Wide Rave: Tons of people visit your Web site and check out your blog and watch your YouTube videos because they want to (and without being coerced).

World Wide Rave: The online buzz that drives people to you, generating interest in your products and services.

For decades, the only way to spread ideas was to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write (or broadcast) about our products and services. But now we have a tremendous opportunity to create a World Wide Rave, generate stuff on the Web that people want to consume and that they are eager to share with their friends, family, and colleagues. A World Wide Rave sells an idea or a product by virtue of its educational or entertainment value.

But David (you might say) it sounds like a World Wide Rave is the same thing as "Viral Marketing"? No.

What is viral marketing?

Many of you have read my recent ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free (published January 2008). Thanks to people sharing it on their blogs and a version that appeared on ChangeThis, the ebook has been downloaded over 125,000 times in three months. Thank you.

Since I wrote and published the ebook, more than one hundred of you have sent examples of viral marketing initiatives to me. I will include the best in a new hardcover book to be published by Wiley in early 2009 called World Wide Rave: Creating triggers that get millions of people to spread your ideas and share your stories.

Unfortunately, in the past few months I've come to realize that viral marketing has a significant dark side - quite a bit more extensive than I had been aware of…

Unscrupulous Marketing Techniques

Many viral marketing examples that people send me are nothing more than traditional advertising techniques that rely on interruption, bait-and-switch gimmicks, inane games, and frivolous contests. It's the old rules of marketing transferred to the Web. These are not examples of a World Wide Rave. Instead, this is trickery and coercion in an attempt to sell products. Frankly, this stuff gives all of viral marketing a bad name.

I've also noticed that a cadre of viral marketing "experts" happily take large amounts of money from naive and unsuspecting companies to create viral marketing "campaigns". Typically, advertising agency-developed viral campaigns involve buying access in the same old ways, such as purchasing an email list to spam people or launching a microsite with a pricey print or TV ad.

Worse, some dodgy agencies set up fake viral campaigns where people who are employed or in some way compensated by the agency create videos or blog posts purported to be from a customer.

Misleading viral marketing techniques have become so widespread that the European Union enacted Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations to protect the public from the most deceitful activities. The Regulations become UK law on May 26, 2008 and The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), the industry body and professional institute for leading advertising, media and marketing communications agencies in the UK, is helping its members come to grips with what this means.

"If advertisers and their agencies ignore the ethics of responsible advertising, the damage to the advertising and marketing industry generally will be considerable, undermining all commercial messages, their effectiveness and the self regulatory systems," says Marina Palomba, IPA Legal Director.

According to The IPA one particular clause in the Regulations will make the following activities a criminal offence:
- Seeding positive messages about a brand in a blog without making it clear that the message has been created by, or on behalf of, the brand.
- Using "buzz marketing" specialists to communicate with potential consumers in social situations without disclosing that they are acting as brand ambassadors.
- Seeding viral ads on the internet in a manner that implies you are a simple member of the public.

Because th term "viral marketing" has taken on dirty and sleazy connotations by many organizations causing marketers and executives to become increasingly skeptical, I've started using the phrase "World Wide Rave" instead. I want to draw a clear distinction between the amazing ways that millions of people spread ideas and share stories online and the bogus crap that people are resorting to.

A World Wide Rave is valuable content that spreads because people want to share. Not because of some silly contest or dishonest activity.

A World Wide Rave—having others tell and spread your story for you—is one of the most exciting and powerful ways to reach your audiences. Anyone with thoughtful ideas to share—and clever ways to create interest in them—can become famous and find success on the Web.

CNN: Time to retire the inane "best political team on television" phrase

I'm enjoying the US Presidential race. As a marketer, it is fascinating to see how the candidates position themselves. And as a frequent keynote speaker at conferences, I also enjoy the snippets of candidates speaking on the stump.

Each primary night, I channel surf for hours as the returns come in.

Is it just me, or is CNN's slogan: "The best political team on television" incredibly annoying? I was watching CNN recently for about twenty minutes and I heard Wolf Blitzer utter the inane phrase three times. So I clicked over to MSNBC because it pissed me off so much. A bit later I came back to CNN and he said it again. Yikes! What’s up with that?

A search of CNN transcripts on Dow Jones Factiva reveals that the phrase has been used on air about 200 times in the past 30 days and 16 times on Super Tuesday alone.

A phrase like "The best political team on television" might be OK as an advertising slogan for billboards and magazine ads, because you want people to give CNN a try. But it is incredibly silly for the anchorman to keep saying it on air during the editorial content of a program - we are already watching!

There is no need to coerce viewers into continuing to watch your coverage. Anyone who is into politics enough to watch primary results instead of American Idol or ESPN or something else on TV has already made up their minds about what channels to watch and who has the best coverage. Don't interrupt our enjoyment with advertising in the form of silly catch phrases during the editorial content.

I'll be watching the Wisconsin and Hawaii primary results this evening.

Attention Wolf Blitzer and CNN: It's time to retire that stupid phrase.

The Truth in Ad Sales

Alert readers of this blog will recall that I really enjoy smart YouTube video spoofs on all things marketing. For example, a few weeks ago I shared the Make My Logo Bigger video.

Today, for your viewing pleasure, is The Truth in Ad Sales.

We're taken inside an Agency in London where we meet the owner of the agency, a bunch of agency staffers, a producer, and the client from "Kiddi Care."

This agency thinks outside box. When the other guys zig, they zag. They think 360. They think integrated communications. They think social networking. Massive ROI.

Hat tip to Tim Dempsey for sharing this with me.

Join me for a free live conversation with Seth Godin and Michael Port to discover the one thing that will make or break your marketing

Alert readers of this blog will recall that last month I reviewed Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin's terrific new book.

Good news—I'll be speaking with Seth as part of his virtual book tour and I would like you to participate. All it will cost you is an hour of your time.

On Monday, January 14th, at noon ET, join New York Times bestselling author, Seth Godin, Michael Port (author of Book Yourself Solid) and David Meerman Scott (that would be me) for a panel discussion.

Seth promises that you'll discover the one thing that will make or break your marketing efforts this year. (I can't wait to find out myself…)

Here are some other things we hope to discuss. (But then again we may just take the conversation down some equally interesting other paths.)
> The most important question to ask when choosing a marketing strategy
> How to increase sales and build brand awareness with less effort
> Why My Space, You Tube and viral marketing work for some, but not for others
> How to effectively generate buzz and word-of-mouth referrals

Can't make the live call? Go ahead and register anyway and we'll send you an email with a link to the recording so you can listen to it on your iPod.

It's free to register.

I hope you can make it.

Say No To Dirt

Imagine you're a marketing manager for a company that makes toilets. Your company just came up with a spiffy new self-cleaning model. What do you do?

Most marketing managers would talk about their "flexible, scalable solutions for toilet cleaning processes using cutting edge technology" or some such gobbledygook.

Not CWS.

Instead of yakking about their product, YouTube shows how it works. A million people have seen this video via word-of-mouse.

Instead of selling, can you find a way to tell your story?

"Make my logo bigger!"

Is your tiny-logo-loving-designer always cramming your beautiful logo into an obscure corner of your ad? Well not anymore with Make Your Logo Bigger Cream!

Boring white space on your website? You can eliminate that white space and fill it with your marketing messages with White Space Eliminator!

You gotta check out this video. Anyone who has worked on a Web site project can relate to the bosses and the salespeople. They say something like "shouldn’t the company logo be a bit larger?"

But what they really mean is: "We want to make sure that our dumb prospects know who we are so make the damn logo bigger you silly pony-tailed geek!"

This incredibly clever Make My Logo Bigger video comes from Agency Fusion, a web development firm who says: "We understand that you are the trained designers and our expertise lies within the geek realms of programming. We are proud to be some of the best-qualified geeks around. We can't keep your client from asking you to make their logo bigger than Texas, but when it comes to websites we can help. Make My Logo Bigger Cream might be fake, but we are not."

Tip of the hat to Kelly for sending me this. Kelly is the publisher of a book that I enjoyed called Spinning Disney's World: Memories of a Magic Kingdom Press Agent. The book is a fascinating inside account of PR at Disney written by Charles Ridgway, the long-time head of public relations for Walt Disney.

Forrester Research misleads CMOs by confusing advertising with marketing in new research report

UPDATE November 5, 2007

This afternoon I had a conversation with Shar Van Boskirk, the author of the Forrester US interactive marketing forecast report that I talk about below and Tracy Sullivan, Senior Public Relations Specialist at Forrester Research. They also sent me a copy of the report.

I want to thank them for reaching out to me. Clearly Forrester is monitoring blogs and engaging bloggers. Good for them. Very few companies that I talk about in this blog contact me.

Van Boskirk provided some additional information and clarification about the research which was designed as a way to do market sizing of social media. As she explained, in many cases (such as YouTube) the only way to measure how much marketing activity is going on is to measure advertising and use that as a proxy for total spend. After all, it’s not like companies have a YouTube budget that could be quantified. Forrester analysts also looked at things like agency fees and spending on technology.

I agree. It is difficult to measure marketing in many social media and advertising spend is a decent proxy for the interest in the area among marketers. However, I still believe marketing and advertising are very different and some aspects of the way the report was described in the news release and landing pages was misleading.

Sullivan said that the press release has been added to the media room pages.

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ORIGINAL POST

Last week Forrester Research "an independent technology and market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology" released a report called US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2007 To 2012, written by Shar VanBoskirk. I have not read the report, but have seen the news release about it as well as the summary of the report on the Forrester site.

Some of the highlights of the report include:
> "Interactive Spend Will Better Align With Consumers' Media Behavior"
> "Interactive Marketing Will Top $61 Billion By 2012"
> "Search Marketing Will Triple In Five Years"
> "Online Video Ads Perpetuate A Virtuous Cycle Of Growth"
> "Social Media Will Drive Emerging Channels To $10.6 Billion By 2012"

While this data is certainly interesting, I am dismayed that the statistics refer to interactive advertising spending. In my opinion, it is misleading for Forrester to use MARKETING when they really mean ADVERTISING.

As readers of this blog and The New Rules of Marketing & PR will recall:

OLD RULES -- buy your way in with advertising and beg your way in with the media
NEW RULES -- publish your way in on the Web for free

As far as I can tell, this report is about the old rules of marketing (buying your way in) but just applied to the web. As I've said many times, marketers have long-term ingrained habits. Many of us assume that we must spend money to play the game. We equate marketing with advertising (as Forrester has done).

However, as many successful marketers know, on the Web, marketing is not the same as advertising. Marketing is all about creating great content. For free. To be successful, you must unlearn what you have learned.

It's not about advertising on YouTube, it is about making a YouTube video. It's not about advertising on social media sites like Facebook, it is about participating by creating profiles, groups and events on Facebook.

I like Forrester's work. In my last corporate job as VP marketing for a technology company, I was a Forrester client. Some of the companies I work with are Forrester clients. I have found their research valuable.

There is something deeply troubling in VanBoskirk's quote at the end of the press release. "These changes will not only affect the budget structure of marketing organizations, but it will also give interactive marketing professionals a more legitimate seat at the marketing table," VanBoskirk continues. "In fact, with interactive marketing gaining executive visibility as much for its popularity with young consumers as for its measurability and cost effectiveness, we see a class of marketers emerging who will involve themselves with a few high-profile interactive experiments in order to catapult themselves into the CMO seat."

In my opinion, advertising people already had their chance in the CMO seat and they've screwed it up. We've already got CMOs who understand the 30-second TV spot and who are skilled at interruption techniques. That's not marketing. That's not what consumers want. That's why the average tenure as CMO is less than two years according to Spencer Stuart.

Businesses certainly don't need trade CMOs who know TV ads with those who know how to run banner ads on YouTube and Facebook.

Instead, we need CMOs who know how to resonate with potential customers. We need CMOs who are skilled at creating products and services that people want to buy. Instead of dreaming up "creative" ads to interrupt people and shout "buy my product," we need CMOs who are Tuned In to their marketplace. We need CMOs who connect with buyers by publishing great content on the Web.

Here's another interesting thing. When I was writing this blog post on October 15 (four days after the Forrester report had come out), I had wanted to point to the press release on the Forrester site to drive any traffic from this blog to them directly. But the Forrester press release is not on the Forrester site, so I am pointing to it on Yahoo.

I entered the phrase US Interactive Marketing Spending To Reach $61 Billion (the headline of the press release) into Google and (at least the time that I looked) none of the top 50 hits pointed to the Forrester site.

While I completely advocate using the news release wires to send releases, they should also be published on a company's online media room. Maybe it was just an oversight on Forrester’s part.

The new rules of marketing and PR is about publishing interesting content that people want to consume and bringing them back to your own site where they can learn more.

Advertising agency websites: Digital masturbation

One of the fundamental aspects of web marketing is that you need to understand your buyers before you create any content. Who are you trying to reach? What are the market problems of the buyer persona that you are targeting? What resonates with your buyer?

David Koopmans asks: "How good are agency websites?"

Well, I'm a representative of an ad agency buyer. When I was VP marketing at several NASDAQ traded companies I controlled a multi-million dollar budget and purchased services from agencies. Now, on the speaking circuit, I am often asked for agency recommendations by potential clients looking for someone to work with.

My answer to David is that most agency sites suck. As David suggests, part of the reason is the heavy use of flash and a focus on "cutting edge creative."

I would add that agency sites are very light on compelling content. Another observation is that many agency sites use the same tired and worn ways to show that they are "hip" – you know, cool introductions featuring a stylized version of their logo; fun, often black-and-white photos of the principles with funky stuff in the shots (fishing poles and Labrador retrievers are good for this purpose). When everyone does flash and everyone does logo gyrations and when everyone does funky photos it ceases to be hip.

I am drawing no conclusions on the ten sites below. However as a way to show a few examples, and to be as fair as possible, below are the top ten advertising agency brands in the United States as ranked by Advertising Age together with a link to each site.

You be the judge…
1. JWT
2. BBDO
2. McCann Erickson
4. Leo Burnett
5. Ogilvy & Mather
6. DDB
7. Y&R Advertising
8. Grey
9. Saatchi & Saatchi
10. DraftFCB

Based on what I see on the majority of advertising agency sites (I've checked out hundreds), which in my opinion is nothing more than digital masturbation, I advise people not to trust an advertising agency to build their site. While some advertising agencies may build great sites, the majority fail big time and their clients suffer as a result. To be fair, one exception is that an agency may be the best bet for certain purpose-built micro-sites focused on a particular campaign.

Here are two reasons why I tell people to avoid the agencies, together with details on why I feel companies should avoid these approaches.

Flaw # 1 > Ad agencies focus on aesthetics over information.

Advertising agencies try to convince clients to focus on the sizzle instead of the steak. Their advice is to pay more attention to colors and graphics than to the substance of the Web site: content. Often Ad agencies push distracting images or generic stock photos throughout a site and clunky Flash Video introductions or pop-ups on the homepage.

= Why marketers should avoid this:

Visitors who actually want to learn something aren't satisfied and sales are lost. The best Web sites are designed by marketers who have learned to think more like successful publishers: It is important to make a book or magazine readable, but not at the expense of providing something good to read. The Ad agency focus on style over substance is flawed. Imagine if Pulitzer Prizes were only given for design, usability, and functionality but not the actual content?

Flaw # 2 > Ad agencies focus on the wrong part of the sales cycle.

Ad agencies often design sites that feature slick, TV-influenced, one-way broadcast messages that feel like advertising. Ad agencies create sites as if they need to grab the attention of visitors for the first time. Many sites designed by Ad agencies sport all kinds of in-your-face images and messages designed to get you to pay attention.

= Why marketers should avoid this:

When a visitor gets to a Web site, you don't need to grab their attention; you already have it! Advertising agencies' strong focus on grabbing attention is rooted in print and TV advertising models, not a Web content-marketing and publishing model. The ad model is flawed, because on the Web, the challenge has shifted from grabbing attention to informing and educating your visitors through content. People who visit Web sites are often further along in the sales process. But most advertising people don't understand this and create ineffective sites as a result. People aren't looking for TV commercials on the Web, they are looking for content that helps them in some way.

US Airways flight attendants paid $50 commissions to interrupt us in flight

I've gone beyond being angry when companies I do business with interrupt me with loud marketing messages that I cannot ignore. Now I just laugh. And blog.

I was on a US Airways flight from Phoenix to Boston earlier this month. The flight departed around 3:00 PM and because of the time change was due in at around 11:00 PM in Boston. Time for a nap. After the movie, about a third of the plane was quietly reading, listening to their iPods or working and the remainder of the passengers, like me, were sleeping. Everyone was mellow.

An hour and a half before landing the lights come up and an announcement comes over the loudspeaker, waking up nearly 100 people from their naps.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I have great news for everyone flying with us today. You qualify for a free trip anywhere US Airways flies just by applying for the US Airways Signature Visa Card…" As people were rubbing their eyes, there was more form the speakers. The whole vibe of the plane changed as a point-by-point explanation of card benefits was run down. And then, just to make certain that everyone was fully awake, the flight attendant passed through the aisles talking up the Visa card and handing out applications.

I took an application and noticed the flight attendant's name and employee ID number is already filled in. Why so much effort at interruption? It turns out the flight attendant makes a $50 commission for each successful sale.

They're finding new and more efficient ways to interrupt us:
> Rhapsody streams ads while we try to enjoy music.
> Shaw’s Supermarket "informational segments" plays on video screens throughout the store and in the checkout aisles.
> Simon Malls blares advertising in the food court.
> American Express tries to sell us add-on services as we call to activate our card.

Why do these companies deem it important to annoy their existing customers, who are the best prospects they have for repeat business? Why do these companies insult our intelligence? Do they think that loud, unwelcome marketing messages are good for their brand? Or is there some rouge marketing genius doing something that the CEO and the head of customer support doesn’t know about? Or is it just me who is annoyed and other people like this stuff?

I'm naming US Airways to a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Interruption Marketing Hall of Shame.

The mass media aberration: What's old is new again

After I posted you must unlearn what you have learned yesterday, I entered into a mind opening conversation with Brian Clark that started on my blog and then went over to email. Brian helped me to realize something that I had been missing.

The new rules really aren't new.

Brian (and others who also commented and sent me emails) helped me to understand that from 2,000 years ago, nothing fundamentally has changed. Many generations ago, people communicated with each other and sold stuff (chickens perhaps) at the town square. Even 100 years ago communications was real and personal and authentic. You asked the pharmacist in your town to make you up a potion to cure your ills and you bought your linen at the local dry goods store. Personal opinions mattered.

Instead of making everything "new," the Web has brought communications back full circle to where we were 60 years ago. On the Web you can finally communicate again in the way that people respond to. What people respond to, and the way they make purchase decisions, really hasn’t changed at all.

The Web is a huge town square and blogs are like people who venture into the town pub. People communicate and share ideas and products are sold.

OK, so what's different then?

After World War Two we had a huge aberration in the form of mass media. As people in the United States focused on just three television networks as the primary way they made decisions about soap and cars and fashion, the world of marketing and PR morphed from being personal and authentic to being generic and message driven. Instead of personal communications, mass media was the "new" and communicators (like me I would admit) went a little silly trying to adapt.

So then what happened?

The whole Madison-Avenue-driven (and PR-reinforced) focus on mass media made perfectly sane people stop communicating and instead become kooky with interruption-based advertising to the masses. Even niche B2B technology marketers adopted the mass media concept and dumbed down their offerings into flexible scalable solutions for improving business process and then advertised the "solutions" in generic business magazines, hired expensive PR agencies, and sent massive direct mail campaigns to convince people that they had a problem that technology can solve.

Watching the new TV show Mad Men reminded me how we've really only been doing mass marketing since the 1960s or so. We built up a big TV-centric economy in just a few short decades and now, thanks to the Web allowing us to communicate again, we're breaking down the TV-centric economy even faster than we built it.

Yes, we still need to unlearn what we've learned in the last half century.

But rather than everything being "new," it's more like we're just going back to the way it was before mass culture made us kooky and silly.

Thanks again Brian for pointing me here. You were right all along.

As long as I'm writing about the post I did yesterday I would also like to add that while I do think that Web marketing is making communications "new" again, there is still room for the tried and true. As Kevin Grossman says, "Traditional marketing and PR is still viable and should be included in your business plan (to what degree depends on your business, target market, etc.)" I agree with Kevin that a mention in the Wall Street Journal is extremely valuable. And I also agree with Matt Gentile that PR remains a people business. "Meeting the reporter (in person) find out what they are writing about and tailor your pitch. Have some fun with the new media, but don't forget the basic principles of PR."