Today’s Question of the Day is:
Will history view “Snakes On A Plane” as an example of successful viral marketing?
Add your thoughts and read those of others after the click…
5 CommentsCategory: Viral Marketing
Sometime One Degree Contributor Tara ‘Miss Rogue’ Hunt doesn’t like to play by the rules. She started her career over seven years ago as the first-ever online marketing position in-house at a junior oil and gas firm. Soon, she decided to start her own company, Rogue Strategies.
Last summer, Tara moved to California to become the marketing director at “Riya.com”:http://www.riya.com/.
More recently, Tara joined ranks with Chris Messina and Ben Metcalfe to form Citizen Agency, a consultancy that specifically helps bootstrapped companies and startups connect with their communities. Tara continues to blog at HorsePigCow, is a “BarCamp”:http://www.barcamp.org/ evangelist and leads a community of marketing revolutionaries under the Pinko Marketing brand.
*One Degree: What is “Citizen Agency”:http://www.citizenagency.com/ ?*
Citizen Agency starts with three Citizen Agents – “Ben Metcalfe”:http://www.benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php, “Chris Messina”:http://factoryjoe.com/blog/ and “myself”:http://horsepigcow.com/ – who are grassroots advocates, first, and community building consultants, second. Technology companies hire us to help them connect with their communities, whether established or barely there.
Our process is simple:
I show them how to be part of the community they are serving, introducing them to their community members and building communication channels for them to open up further as well as build bridges for their community to collaborate.
Chris helps them turn feedback and user experiences into improvements in the product and helps them design to become a truly essential product – open sourcing (APIs) and employing web standards along the way.
Ben’s expertise in building developer networks (he built the devnet at the BBC) comes in handy when those APIs are available. An API is no good without developers. 😉
Strategies for customer delight… not customer acquisition. The latter naturally flows from the former.
_(tip o’ the hat to “shipbrook”:http://www.shipbrook.com/ for the “On Notice Generator”:http://www.shipbrook.com/onnotice/)_
One of the biggest no-nos of corporate blogging is creating a “fake blog”:http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/faux_blogs_and_.html, or “faux blog”:http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/category/faux_blogs/ or “character blog”:http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/04/character_blogs.html (all the same thing really).
Blogs are supposed to present the authentic voices of _real_ people. And since made up characters or “amalgams” can’t, by definition be “real”, they are generally (and justly) considered the ultimate sign that “you just don’t get it” when it comes to the blogosphere.
So what happens when _someone else_ creates a character blog that people might think is _your_ doing?
This is not a theoretical question as we’re dealing with this right now at “Tucows”:http://www.tucows.com/.