Web Ink Now

Meet Greg the (software) Architect

The good people at TIBCO Software have a great series of videos about Greg the Architect. TIBCO is one of those enterprise software companies that has a difficult marketing challenge – how to make what they do interesting. The About page says: "TIBCO Software Inc. provides enterprise software that helps companies achieve service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) success."

This is my favorite from the series. I've known a lot of B2B software salespeople, and man do they nail the types here in this video. But it's all in good fun. Watch how the sales guys work over poor Greg.

Watch more videos and meet the cast here.

Hat tip to Erin Smith, Director of Marketing Communications at Axeda for pointing me to Greg .

Understanding an audience and creating great content

At every speech I give, I suggest one of the best ways to create great Web content is for companies to hire a journalist, either full or part time, to create it. Journalists (print or broadcast) are great at understanding an audience and developing information that buyers want to consume.

At a recent speaking gig in North Carolina, I met Kathy Boyd who works in corporate communications at Neighborhood America, a company that creates enterprise social networks for organizations to reach consumers.

Kathy is exactly the sort of person I'm talking about. She studied Mass Media Communications and Broadcast Journalism at Florida State. Upon graduation, she spent a few years as a TV reporter for WFTX-TV, the Fox affiliate in Ft Myers, Florida.

After Kathy honed her journalism skills as a TV reporter, she joined Neighborhood America and now works on the company's corporate newsletter, produces some stellar videos, and develops customer case examples.

Here are two videos Kathy created that you must check out.

The first one is a video case study of Adidas, a Neighborhood America client Adidas Goes Mobile At NBA All-Star Week 2007. Note how different this approach to a case example is compared to most written case examples that are either a) dreadfully boring or b) prattle on about the product or c) both.

This next video Mission Impossible: So, What Does Your Company Do? is Kathy’s video riff on my Gobbledygook Manifesto. After hearing me talk about gobbledygook, Kathy thought it would be fun to cleverly capture interesting information about Neighborhood America in a fun and approachable way. It works, don't you think?

Well done, Kathy. And kudos to Neighborhood America for taking a chance on hiring a journalist to do marketing instead of the "safe" route of hiring someone with a traditional marketing background.

How about your company? When will you hire a journalist?

Video mashups: Easy to create and informative for visitors

Alert readers of this blog know that I am a believer in the power of YouTube videos for any organization to show the world what they are doing. Video, done well, is great marketing.

Many people (particularly those from large companies) push back and say things like: "We can't do a video like Blendtec's Will it Blend – that seems too difficult. Besides, we’re a _______ company." (Fill in the blank with conservative, B2B, nonprofit, famous, startup, or some other excuse for not doing videos).

Well, there's an option. Why not do a video interview program that's essentially a mashup of the audio from a telephone interview with someone of interest to your market, with some in-house video.

WebProNews does a great job with this format. Kara Ratliff interviewed me on the phone for about a half hour and then condensed the conversation into just under four minutes in the studio.

Watch WebProNews Publicizing Your Blog

I've had many people tell me they’ve seen the video and there are 16 comments as of this writing. Clearly people are interested in this format.

Here's another example, WebProNews Reporter Kara Ratliff takes a look into how you can make money from blogging through syndication. She talked with President of Newstex, Larry Schwartz about benefits and disadvantages, along with other various topics of syndication.

Kara uses audio from Larry plus some video footage of him from the BlogWorldExpo conference and a bunch of screen shots. I syndicate my blog through Newstex (and, disclosure here, I am on the board of advisors of Newstex). Despite being affiliated with Newstex for several years, this is probably the best explanation of blog syndication I've ever seen and the video mashup format is what makes it work.

So if your company is considering some YouTube videos but you think that the funny viral stuff may not be for you, consider a video mashup like these from WebProNews. You can interview people in your industry, perhaps some customer, partners, and analysts, add in your own analysis, and pop the videos up onto YouTube.

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.

The New Rules of Viral Marketing - free ebook!

The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free

> Imagine you're the head of marketing at a theme park, and you're charged with announcing a major new attraction. What would you do?

> What would you do if you were a vice president of marketing for a technology company and you were ready to find a new opportunity to advance your career?

> If you were a marketing executive for a big, famous company, how could you quickly put a human face on your organization?

> Or think of a marketing program that you might initiate if you suddenly had to launch a startup technology and services company targeting marketing professionals, Web designers, and business owners interested in improving their Internet marketing. How would you do it?

The answers will surprise you. The smart marketers profiled in The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free tell you exactly how they used viral marketing and provide advice in their own words.

Download The New Rules of Viral Marketing now! It's free and there's no annoying registration requirement.

You and I are incredibly lucky.

For decades, the only way to spread our ideas was to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write (or broadcast) about our products and services. But now our organizations have a tremendous opportunity to publish great content online—content that people want to consume and that they are eager to share with their friends, family, and colleagues.

How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free!

Word-of-mouse is the single most empowering tool available to marketers today. I wrote this e-book so you can take advantage of the power of viral marketing too. In it, I share ideas that will help you create your own viral marketing strategies and campaigns. These are the "new rules" I've used to create marketing programs that have sold more than a billion dollars' worth of products and services worldwide.

It's not easy to harness the power of word-of-mouse, but any company with thoughtful ideas to share—and clever ways to create interest in them—can, after some careful preparation, become famous and find success on the Web.

Please download my new ebook. And if you find it interesting, please share it with whomever you believe would benefit from reading it. Thank you.

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?

An open letter to Warner Music Group: Lighten up! Your fans are promoting Led Zeppelin for you… for free

Dear Warner Music Group Executives:

The BBC reports that twenty million people wanted to purchase tickets to the historic Led Zeppelin show held at the O2 Arena on December 10, 2007. With only 20,000 tickets available, needless to say there were many disappointed fans who couldn't be there when the band took the stage for the first time in 19 years.

Immediately after the show, grainy, low fidelity clips appeared on YouTube and were eagerly watched by fans. I wanted to see how different the band looked since the time I saw them at Madison Square Garden in June 1977. Alas, you had already started to pull down the clips, claiming copyright infringement.

Your actions completely underestimate the power of a rabid fan base to help sell legal recordings, which is, after all, what you want. I am absolutely confident that the buzz generated by the concerts is selling millions of dollars of Led Zeppelin recordings.

The availability of YouTube clips enhances your sales and you shouldn't worry about these low quality fan tributes. I, for one, am replacing my vinyl recordings with Led Zeppelin CDs and I'm sure many other people are as well. All because we’ve been exposed, briefly, to the power of this band (which many of us may have ignored for several decades) via fleeting images of a concert we would have traveled halfway around the world to see if tickets had been available.

Yes, I understand the paid content world. My book publisher, Wiley, was supportive when I made parts of my book available for free on my blog and on many other blogs and in magazines. We know that it sells books (nearly 30,000 as of this writing) when people have a taste of what they will be buying. The free publicity that's generated by viral, word-of-mouse marketing can be worth millions of dollars and you’re missing a tremendous opportunity to harness that power.

I encourage you to re-think your knee-jerk legal-eagle impulse to clamp down on fans with draconian measures and consider the power that the Web has to sell your artists music.

Sincerely,

David Meerman Scott
Author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR

"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.

Lights! Camera! Sales! Welcome Wall Street Journal readers

I am quoted in a terrific article in today's Wall Street Journal by Raymund Flandez titled Lights! Camera! Sales! How to use video to expand your business in a YouTube world. The article includes many examples of viral videos and is worth a read. We also filmed a television segment for the Wall Street Journal Report where we discussed how small businesses can create online videos that can increase their exposure on the Internet. Thank you for speaking with me Raymund.

If you've found your way to my blog via The Wall Street Journal, thanks for stopping by. I am an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist and through my books, seminars and speaking I show organizations how to harness the amazing power of viral marketing.

Here are a few things I've written on this blog about viral marketing using YouTube videos that you might want to check out:

8 tips to make your YouTube video go viral

Viral Marketing with Jerry Garcia's toilet

IBM's terrific "Mainframe: Art of the Sale" sequels now available on YouTube!

Video on the Web to reach your buyers

You may want to check out my bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR. I provide much more information about creating content, including YouTube videos, that people want to consume.

My ideology: marketing and public relations is vastly different on the Web. The old rules of mainstream media are about controlling a message and the only ways to get noticed is to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write about you. The new rules of marketing and PR (on the Web) are completely different. Instead of buying or begging your way in, anybody can publish their way in using the tools of social media such as YouTube videos and other online media (blogs, podcasts, online news releases, ebooks).

IBM's terrific "Mainframe: Art of the Sale" sequels now available on YouTube!

If you've seen one of my keynotes or one-day seminars in the past year, you've seen one of my favorite viral videos: IBM's wonderful Mainframe: Art of the Sale (lesson one).

The first series of three videos was selected as one of Comedy Central's "Staff Favorites."

For all of you Mainframe: Art of the Sale fans I have good news to share that was just passed onto me by Tim Washer who has the way cool Web 2.0 title of "Manager, New Media Web Video" at IBM. There are three brand new installments of Mainframe: Art of the Sale fans available now!

If you've never seen Mainframe: Art of the Sale, you might want to start with lesson one which is right here.

You can check out the other installments in the series by visiting the Mainframe blog. The newest three are done in a "Webisode" format. Besides the classic lesson one, I really like Mainframe: Art of the Sale (lesson 5).

For more information on how to create videos of your own, check out my article from the recent Pragmatic Marketer called Viral Marketing: Let The World Tell Your Story for Free. One of the coolest things about the Web is when an idea (such as a YouTube video) takes off, it can propel a brand or company to fame and fortune. For free!