Internet Marketing Blog

Citizen Branding On The Campaign Trail

The viral videos just keep coming for Barack Obama. The most recent is Baracky: The Movie in which Obama and Clinton are injected into the storyline of the movie Rocky, to amusing effect. This is another example of candidate branding by someone other than the campaign iteself.

By inserting Obama into the Rocky roll, he is being portrayed simultaneously as the challenger and the champ. In the movie, Rocky plays an upstart but everyone knows he ends up as champion. It's a nice bit of work:

An Ode To Digg (And Its Supporting Online Campaign)

Kina Grannis loves to Digg.

  Two Weeks For Kina 
  Originally uploaded by kasuya

She loves to Digg so much, in fact, that she's written a very clever and catchy song about her Digg love. Clearly, Kina's not alone.

But she's taken it another step by entering her song, Gotta Digg, in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl music video contest. The grand prize winner gets their music video aired during the Super Bowl and gets a recording contract with Interscope Records.

[UPDATE: Two kind readers have helpfully pointed out (see the comments below) that Grannis entered another song to the contest, not Gotta Digg.

I'm a bit disappointed because I really like Gotta Digg, but the fact that she composed that song for her online campaign only makes the campaign itself all the more brilliant!]

Kina's clearly got some marketing savvy in her corner because she's running a pretty sophisticated online campaign to solicit votes for her video.

In addition to asking for votes at her official web site (which is very professionally done, by the way), she has a separate web site for the contest itself: TwoWeeksForKina.com. It is this site that she promotes from her YouTube account and her MySpace page, where she has 2,820 friends and her Facebook page, where she has 850 friends.

She's hosting her contest campaign photos at her Flickr account , where, as of this writing, her 93 contest campaign photos have been viewed more than 900 times. Her only slip at Flickr is that she's wearing a Michael Vick jersey. Oops.

Naturally, her video has been submitted to Digg five times and, as of this writing, has been Dugg 10,734 times.

As of this writing, since Grannis uploaded her Gotta Digg music video to her YouTube account on December 23, the video has been viewed 124,234 times, boasts four out of five stars from 1,438 raters, has been marked as a favorite video by 729 YouTube users, and received 462 comments.

Those numbers are not surprising because the video is number 3 on YouTube's Top Rated Video this week, is the 11th Most Viewed music video this week, and the 42nd Most Responded to video today.

As of this writing, Google Blog Search lists 267 blog posts citing "gotta digg," most of them posted within the past 24 hours. That's pretty remarkable, considering the time period is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Technorati, meanwhile, lists only 18 posts within it's universe of registered blogs, but among those are highly influential blogs like TechCrunch,  Neatorama, and Buzz Machine. These posts are likely to inspire many more posts about the video down the long tail.

Kina Grannis is either one Internet savvy kid or she's got some very smart online marketers working on her behalf. Regardless, I would not be surprised at all to see her win the contest.

Oh, yeah; here's the video:

New Word Of Mouth Networks - Teens Talk Online

I haven't fully digested the new Pew Internet & American Life Teens & Social Media report, but the summary makes clear that teens' online behavior is creating new networks that will require online word of mouth marketing to be an increasingly crucial tactic within overall Internet marketing strategies.

The Pew study shows that they are prolific online content creators:

• Of the 93% that are online, 64% of them have created content online.
• 39% of online teens share their creations online.
• 33% create or work on others' blogs or web sites, be it for friends, groups they belong to, or classroom assignments.
• 28% have created their own blog.
• 27% have a personal web site.
• 26% create mashups.
• 55% have created a social networking profile at sites like Facebook and MySpace.
• 47% have uploaded photos.
• 14% have posted video online.

Teens share their online content and that sharing builds the foundation of their word of mouth networks because that content is a virtual conversation starter. The Pew study found:

• 89% of teens who upload photos say that people post comments about those photos at least sometimes.
• 72% of video posters say those videos elicit comments at least sometimes.
• 76% of teens who use social networks say they leave comments on other people's blog posts.

It seems clear that teen marketing for the short term, and, as these kids grow up, overall Internet marketing for the long term, will depend upon tapping into these online word of mouth networks.

Google Trends Gets MUCH More Useful For PR Pros

Google's tool for tracking search term popularity, Google Trends, just got a lot more useful by updating their search term data daily rather than monthly, reports Mashable.

The upgrade to Google Trends also includes a Hot Trends tracker that shows you the 100 most popular search phrases for a given day and even look deeper at individual search phrases. 

For example, the third most popular search phrase on September 24, 2007, the eve of the Halo 3 video game release, was "g4tv.com/halo." By clicking on that phrase's link on the Hot Trends page, you can see the details of the search data for that phrase.

The upgraded Google Trends also includes a Hot Trends gadget to add to your iGoogle start page and an RSS feed for Hot Trends so you can subscribe to them with your RSS reader.

The most useful new feature is the ability to change dates on the Hot Trends so you can view historic data. This feature will give us the ability to track the life cycle of searches and search types as well as to better understand search behavior, particularly event-driven or media-driven search surges.

I've noticed, for example, that people search for football-related information on Sundays and Mondays, the days of the games. The last two Sundays have a high proportion of NFL players' names among the most popular searches.

The September 17, 2007 Monday Night Football game pitted the Philadelphia Eagles against the Washington Redskins. The top searches for that day included "hyperbaric chamber," "andy reid," and "charles barkley."

Andy Reid is the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and the Monday Night Football broadcast team discussed his sons' recent legal problems. The broadcast team also mentioned that one of the football players playing that night used a hyperbaric chamber to help with their game. And finally, former basketball great Charles Barkley was "in the booth" of the Monday Night Football team.

Clearly, viewers were turning to the Web for further information that they heard about on the broadcast.

Google Trends is now an invaluable tool to help Internet marketers and public relations professionals gain insight into how offline media and events affect search behavior.

Music Marketing Through Blogs, or How I Tuned Out & Discovered New Bands

05.26.06 @ The Wiltern, Los Angeles CA
Originally uploaded by voxtrot

I was trolling Upcoming.org last night to see what shows were coming up and it occurred to me just how important MP3 blogs have become for marketing music and bands.

As a frustrated musician, I love music. As those of us who are passionate about our music can attest, there are few things better than discovering new musicians and bands. And though I don't get to as much as I'd like, I love to see bands live.

Back in the day when I played in bands and had a ton of time on my hands, I'd devour newly discovered  bands, listen to as much of their music as possible, memorize the lyrics to their songs, watch for their videos on MTV (yeah, that was back when MTV actually aired music videos).

There were three primary ways you'd learn about new bands back then: 1) friends, 2) radio, and 3) MTV. Nowadays, I find new music through MP3 blogs.

I've tuned out of music radio because I have no patience for the commercials. With the exception of stuff like talk radio-sports or otherwise--and live events, I just don't listen to radio. When I do listen to the radio for music, I listen to The Current, Minnesota Public Radio's ad-free modern music station. But even The Current has annoying pledge drives to give me a reason not to listen.

When I want music, I turn to my trusty iPod and that gets filled from the MP3 blogs to which I subscribe. Some of my favorites:

• Stereogum
• IndieFeed
• I Am Fuel, You Are Friends
• An Aquarium Drunkard
• The Yellow Stereo
• Large Hearted Boy
• The rest of my bookmarked MP3 blogs

So I learn about new bands not from traditional sources but from my favorite MP3 sites, MP3 search engines like Hype Machine and elbo.ws, and music sharing sites like last.fm. I think I'm becoming the rule, rather than the exception. Plus, I spread my love these bands among my friends and coworkers. They laugh because I have a "new favorite band" every week.

Back in the day, when I wanted to go see a band, I'd go to the Entertainment section of the Sunday Star Tribune, our local newspaper, or I'd get a copy of our free weekly alternative newspaper, The City Pages. Or I'd hear about upcoming concerts on the radio.

Now I go to Upcoming.org, or, occasionally, the web site of a nightclub that has live music like First Avenue or The Fine Line. I'd rather pay ten to twenty bucks for a far superior performance in a nightclub for a relatively unknown band than $200 to $350 for an inferior concert by an international superstar in a cavernous auditorium.

But for MP3 blogs, though, I would not have recognized three-fourths of the bands with upcoming gigs that were listed on Upcoming.org.

In addition to MySpace and YouTube, MP3 blogs have been a boon to music marketing, especially for the unsigned musicians and bands.

I may have only downloaded the one or two promotional MP3 songs that Voxtrot or Spoon released online for blog fodder, for example, but now I know who they are and am more likely to buy a CD or go to a concert. Were it not for the MP3 blogs, their names would not have jumped out at me on Upcoming.org.

From a music lover's point of view, too, MP3 blogs have made a vast amount of music far more widely available than ever before. I'm constantly amazed at the amount of great music out there.

And that is what we Internet marketers do in fact call, "A very good thing."

Read More: Music Marketing

Product Placement In Second Life

William Gibson Reads From His New Book In The Virtual World

  William Gibson live reading in Second Life 
  Originally uploaded by r3db0x

I am fascinated with Second Life. For the uninitiated, Second Life is a popular virtual world.

Wikipedia describes a virtual world as "a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars. This habitation usually is represented in the form of two or three-dimensional graphical representations of humanoids (or other graphical or text-based avatars). Some, but not all, virtual worlds allow for multiple users."

Second Life is populated with actual people and organizations. You can buy and develop real estate and property with the development tools that are provided for you. You can conduct actual transactions in Second Life. From the Second Life web site: "commerce is handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges." The company that runs Second Life is Linden Lab, thus the Linden Dollar.

While fascinating, I don't link Second Life is yet ready for prime time. You have to download and install software to use it, there is precious little guidance about what to do when you enter the world, let alone find any interesting destinations, and the graphics are clunky. But when they improve on those things and get the game to run in a browser so you don't have to install software, Second Life has fantastic potential.

The marketing opportunities an easy-to-use and widely popular virtual world presents are limitless. Organizations such as Reuters, BBC Radio 1, and Wired magazine, Microsoft and Dell and Sun Microsystems, and Major League Baseball have set up shop there.

Right now, unless you've got tons of cash to spend on development and real world marketing, Second Life seems good for generating earned media, such as Duran Duran's presence there. The 80s band had been all but forgotten until they generated publicity through Second Life.

  William Gibson Reads From Spook Country 
  Originally uploaded by Head_First_Only

I recently ran across the video below on YouTube that illustrates the public relations dividends of a Second Life presence.

William Gibson is one of my favorite authors. He's been called a cyberpunk novelist because his stories take place largely on "the grid" and visualize a dystopic future in which the distinction between online and off is practically meaningless. (My favorites of his oeuvre are Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. ) Gibson coined the term "cyberspace."

A reading by William Gibson from his new book Spook Country, then, is a perfect fit for Second Life and a perfect opportunity for product placement within that virtual world. But the event also, as demonstrated in the video below,  is given a "second life" online, as a viral video that promotes the new book.

Product placement can work in Second Life but it can't be forced; it's gotta feel natural. In this case, with William Gibson, it makes eminent sense.

William Gibson Reads From Spook Country In Second Life

Communications 2.0 - Establishing Expertise With Yahoo! Answers

This is the eleventh part of a presentation Ann Treacy and I gave on Web 2.0 technologies, called Communications 2.0. We presented to a nonprofit communications class at Hamline University.

The eleventh segment discusses establishing your expertise by marketing yourself or your organization by providing answers using services such as Yahoo! Answers:

See also:

• Communications 2.0 - The Theory Of Web 2.0 - Part 1
• Communications 2.0 - Flickr Photo Sharing Marketing - Part 2
• Communications 2.o - Podcasting & Podcast Marketing - Part 3
• Communications 2.0 - Viral Video Marketing - Part 4
• Communications 2.0 - Social Bookmarks Marketing - Part 5
• Communications 2.0 - RSS Marketing - Part 6
• Communications 2.0 - Blog Search Engine Marketing With Technorati - Part 7
• Communications 2.0 - Microblogging & Text & Instant Message Marketing With Twitter - Part 8
• Communications 2.0 - Marketing With Google Docs - Part 9
• Communications 2.0 - Event Marketing With Google Calendar & Upcoming.org - Part 10

Cisco Viral Video Marketing Campaign

This is a fantastic viral marketing campaign. I found the following video at IFILM YouTube under the simple and direct title Businessman has a meltdown in hotel lobby. The video, as as you'll see, is an entirely legitimate-looking security camera footage of a long and wince-inducing public meltdown of a businessman:

The closing domain, DontHaveAMeltDown.com, is entirely too compelling not to visit. When you reach the site, you're greeted by a virtual life coach/psychologist explaining such fictitious ailments as Post Traumatic Beep Disorder, Getouttamyinterfacia, Saxophonia, Mono Transmission Disorder, and Schitzophonia.

After she explains these disorders, you're taken to another video about the Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator, which, of course, solves all of the problems she had just discussed.

This viral campaign is so effective because it features compelling content that memorably illustrates problems that the product solves. It effectively balances cringing drama with lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek humor.

NBC Finally Offers Embedable Video Clips...Sorta

I've been fairly critical of NBC in the past for making what I believe to be short-sighted decisions regarding distribution of their content online, namely their inclination to shut down people's enthusiasm for their content by prohibiting from being displayed on sites  that they do not control.

NBC has now taken a baby step into the Web 2.0 world of conversational media by providing code to allow bloggers to post video clips of their content to their sites. Here's an example of the content NBC is making available:

That's fine as far as it goes but it does little to facilitate online discussion about the company's television programming. When people talk about television shows, they usually discuss one particular scene. Providing clips of scenes from shows would facilitate online buzz about individual shows.

Digg It - Social News & The Network Effect

Last week I mentioned that Netscape had launched their redesigned, Digg-like home page. It looks like they've stumbled out of the gate by offering to pay top digg users to switch services. The controversy highlights the one element that makes social news sites like Digg hum: a critical mass of community members. In this case, the focus is on Netscape's lack of such a community.

Briefly, if you're not familiar with social news sites, here's how they work: You submit a story to them and then the community can vote them up or down. The most popular stories make it to the front page. A blog post, for example, that makes it to the front page of Digg can result in a massive surge of traffic to that blog.

Social news sites demonstrate day and and day out the network effect that these new community-centric technologies propagate. A little popularity goes a long way, especially if a story is picked up by the right people, those who have a large circle of online "friends." SEOmoz.org points this phenomenon out in a blog post that demonstrates that the top 100 Digg users are responsible for 56% of that site's home page content.

You'll notice that, like many blogs, mine includes links to make it easy for people to Digg my posts (see the "Add to" links below). It's worthwhile to include such links with your posts but, as the SEOmoz.org posts points out, the more you actively participate at Digg, the more likely your submissions will make it to the front page.

Membership, it turns out, has it's privileges.

P.S. Digg recently launched two tools to watch stories on the site in real time. Digg stack displays popular stories as they are "dugg" and allows you to see historical data on a given story to see how many "diggs" it got over time.  Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as they're "dugg."

Yahoo! & Netscape Get Facelifts

If you hadn't noticed yet, both Yahoo! and Netscape have unvield their redesigned home pages.

Yahoo! is going with the highly customizable, AJAXy Web 2.0 approach.

Netscape, on the other hand, is taking an entirely different approach with their digg-like interface where users can submit news stories and actively promote or demote what stories get top billing. As with digg, this is another potential traffic-driver site.

The Numbers Behind Joe Mauer's Rising Star

Minnesota Twins starting catcher Joe Mauer currently sits atop Major League Baseball's hitting leaderboard with a .392 batting average. A former Twin, Hall of Famer Rod Carew flirted with a .400 batting average toward the end of his amazing 1977 season when he ended with a .388 average, which is the closest anyone has come to Ted Williams' record season average of .406 in 1941.

That's how hot Joe Mauer and his .392 average is right now. There's every reason to believe he could maintain that type of production in the second half of the season, considering that he's been a steady rather than streaky hitter.

We've been charting the online buzz Joe Mauer is creating for our client, Quickswing, and the data gives an interesting glimpse into how search traffic and Internet buzz surges and wanes with events.

Joe Mauer Search Queries

As a small market team in a division that has been dominated by the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers the past few seasons, the Twins don't garner a lot of attention. Joe Mauer's national awareness suffers as a result. Couple that with the fact that he was injured for much of his rookie season and had a good but not astounding full season last year, and it should come as no surprise that the volume of "Joe Mauer" related searches should be relatively modest. The following Google Trends chart shows Joe Mauer searches from 2003 to 2006:

You can see that the Joe Mauer search history has thus far been one of spikes and flatlines. That first spike was no media coverage of the Twins picking him first overall in the MLB draft. But, as you can tell from the 2006 data, he's starting to garner a lot of attention. During the past 90 days, there were 364 Joe Mauer-related searches, according to Wordtracker data. The following Google Trends chart shows Joe Mauer searches for January through June, 2006:

Though Joe Mauer related search volume is gaining, the real buzz is happening in the blogosphere and it has really taken off during the past few days as Mauer's batting average approaches .400. The following Technorati chart shows "Joe Mauer" blog mentions from May 31 to June 29, 2006:

A Second Life For An Advertisement

Sometimes, like Michael J. Fox, you need to go back in time to see the future.

I recently started to see the Seinfeld/Superman "Webisodes" pop up on video sharing sites such as YouTube. I'd fogotten about them but they were very much ahead of their time and now they are enjoying a renewed interest in a broadband, web sharing era.

Quick history lesson: In 2004, American Express launched an online campaign by recruiting Jerry Seinfeld to star in two five minute movies with an animated Superman with plots centered on the American Express credit card. The two pieces were directed by Barry Levinson (Wag the Dog, Rain Man, Good Morning, Vietnam). Read more and watch the "webisodes" at my video blog.

It's clear what's going on here. Superman-related search traffic is surging due to the upcoming movie Superman Returns and that interest has unearthed the old American Express Webisodes. It certainly has nothing to do with anything American Express has done to promote the videos recently. The old address at which the Webisodes were hosted (americanexpress.com/jerry) no longer exists. That speaks volumes about the shortsightedness of most coporations and the percieved shelf-life of their marketing assets. And the Seinfeld/Superman pieces were a huge hit at the time.

Last month I wrote about how advertising must adapt to this new broadband, time-shifted environment by evolving from an interruptive medium to an entertainment vehicle in an of itself.

It seems to me that American Express created the model I'm talking about in 2004. The Webisodes were clever, entertaining, and featured the product solving a consumer problem.

If American Express had launched a similar effort today, we would be calling it a Video Marketing campaign. As it is, their video assets continue to work for them, riding the unexpected wave of interest in Superman. And they haven't lifted a finger.

But the only reason this fan propelled branding is possible is that they created advertising that is enterrtaining in and of itself. That's the kind of stuff that people like to share, and now they've got the tools to easily share them.

Technorati tags: superman | seinfeld | seinfeld superman commercials | superman returns | american express | advertising

Consumer Generated Music Videos

Every musician and band should be urging their fans to create their own videos for their songs and to show them off at YouTube. I am constantly being amazed at the depth of creativity that is being unleashed through such distribution platforms as blogging and video sharing sites. Somone calling himself Scotbot has created this mashup music video for the Alice Cooper song Generation Landslide by setting the tune to extremely well edited vintage commercials and military propaganda films.

Technorati tags: alice cooper | alice cooper video | generation landslide | video mashup | music video | youtube | military propaganda video | vintage television commercials

Chevy Tahoe Citizen Marketing Campaign

Last night I got an email from a friend that he'd received from a friend who had entered the consumer generated ad contest by at ChevyApprentice.com and promoted on The Apprentice. The promotion invites you to create your own TV ad for the Chevy Tahoe, using a very slick web site where you can drag, drop, and edit multimedia assets such as video, music, and text to create your ad.

The email, which had originally been posted to a few lefty nonprofit email formus, contained links to spoof or political commentary Chevy Tahoe ads at YouTube, mostly SUV-bashing anti-global warming messages.

Some of them are amusing and some are just preachy. Here are some examples:

What Would Jesus Drive?

W.M.D.

Hosted at the ChevyApprentice.com site:

• You Keep Buying Them

Conventional wisdom seems to be that GM made a colossal mistake with this citizen marketing campaign. Nightline did a segment last night on the campaign that captures that angle:

Adrants makes the point that "if left unedited, [this Chevy Tahoe campaign would be] one of the better consumer-created marketing promotions...If all we saw on that site were glowing praises of the vehicle, the promotion would simply be seen as just another lame attempt at capitalizing on a trend and a giant corporation trying to thrust it's twisted version of reality upon us."

I agree. And it appears that the folks in charge of the campaign anticipated ads that would mock the product. A New York Times article on the campaign quotes  Chevrolet spokeswoman Melisa Tezanos,  saying "We anticipated that there would be critical submissions. You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space."

I think the positives far outweigh the negatives in this case. Think about it. The most biting anti-ads are those that have to do with global warming and the people with whom those ads resonate aren't going to buy a Chevy Tahoe. No way. No how. They'll never be potential Tahoe customers.

I'm more their target consumer. I drive a gas-guzzling Jeep Wrangler, so if I were looking for a new ride, I could be a potential customer. And you know what? I don't appreciate the holier than thous telling me I'm immoral for buying an SUV. I doubt I'm alone. In that sense, these anti-ad might even innoculate Chevy a bit against the anti-SUV sentiment.

On the plus side, GM has garnered a ton of free media from the campaign. A lot more people know there's a new Tahoe out than they did before and if the controversy has piqued their interest enough, they've probably watched it in action.

Even before Chevy has picked the winning ad.

How many times have we read stories about Corporation X sending cease and desist letters over things they don't like. Even if it's begrudging, GM is getting points for not trying to censor the negative ads.

Finally, the campaign has also created a lot of online buzz, with people blogging about it or posting to YouTube.

For an awareness campaign, you can't get much better than that.

Technorati tags: chevy tahoe | chevrolet | chevy tahoe ads | the apprentice | chevy apprentice | citizen media | citizen marketing | consumer generated media | tv ad | television ad | youtube | video | melisa tezanos | new york times | suv | jeep wrangler | gm | general motors | buzz marketing

Webcam Stars - Product Placement At YouTube

Bowiechick is a silly teenage girl who has become an online video  star of sorts. Last night, in YouTube's Most Viewed section, I found a video of her talking about breaking up with her boyfriend, which was quite amusing because she superimposed a gas mask and other things over her face. In another video she complains about her friends being mad at her because her videos are so popular on YouTube!

And that's the thing--her videos routinely get thousands, to tens and even hundreds of thousands of views. Amazing!

So I found it especially interesting when I saw her video demonstration of her Logitech Quickcam Orbit MP:

Ah, product placement! And another example of citizen marketing. Either Logitech got very lucky or they've got some very savvy people emailing Bowiechick and asking her for a webcam demonstration. Eitherway, Logitech got a great product demonstration/endorsement in front of--as of right now-- 40,260 sets of potential customer's eyeballs.

Technorati tags: bowiechick | webcam | youtube | product placement | online video | citizen marketing | online video | logitech quickcam orbit mp

Comcast High Speed Internet Commercial - The Slowskys

This is a superb example of how to extend a television commercial online. You've probably seen this spot for Comcast high speed Internet featuring their spokesturtles, Bill and Karolyn Slowsky:

It's a cute ad that effectively makes the point that cable broadband is faster than DSL broadband. As a television commercial, it's an excellent piece of work that stands on its own. But the message is extended at the close by telling the viewer to go online to TheSlowskys.com.

The web site is the personal blog of Bill and Karolyn Slowsky that extends and reinforces the points made in the TV spot. As a viral marketing tool, blog let's you send virtual (belated, of course) greeting cards. You can watch the TV ads from the site. You can even IM them and a real person responds.

The blog promises an online chess game. You can browse Bill's photo album, a collection of pictures of speed bumps. A post from January 29 congratulates the Chicago White Sox on winning the World Series...in October. Everything on the blog reinforces the idea of slowness.

The ad has been uploaded to Google Video and YouTube and, as of this writing, has been viewed 1,027 times at YouTube during the past week. This viral marketing campaign extends the commercial's value even further at virtually no cost at all.

Live Action Simpsons

This is a superb example of a corporate viral marketing campaign that works because it is done so well. Fox Broadcasting has produced a live action version of the introduction of their long-running animated show The Simpsons and uploaded it to the video search engines. I found it at Google Video where you can download the clip for your PSP or iPod or you can email it or grab some code to paste into your blog, which I'll do, because it's done so well and it's funny. And that's why their viral campaign is creating buzz.

UPDATE 3/9/06: I was wrong about the source of the Simpsons video. I assumed it was Fox because that was the name associated with the Google account that uploaded the video. But Reuters has a report today crediting UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB with the viral campaign. Interestingly, the article states that the video was released as "as part of a word-of-mouth brand building exercise." It doesn's say which brand it was intended to build, but if it was for BSkyB, I'd say that for all it's success, the campaign was a failure. If it was for their parent company, Fox, it was a success.

Technorati tags: viral marketing | buzz marketing | blog marketing | the simpsons | fox broadcasting | simpsons video | video

Mobile Computing

This sure smells like a viral marketing campaign. First there was news of an Origami Project website, then there were pictures of Microsoft's alleged handheld video game console slash mobile computing device, and now a video promo of the device at YouTube and Google Video.

The device is apparently Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPod Video, Sony's PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo's DS with a bunch of other stuff thrown in for good measure. I'm inclined to believe the gadget is legit because it makes a ton of business sense for Microsoft to have it's own handheld entertainment device/mobile computing platform, especially considering how wildly successful the iPod Video has been and the strong sales the portable video game consoles from Sony and Nintendo.

Regardless of how this viral campaign shakes out, though, the following video is the best demonstration I've yet seen of where ubiquitous, mobile computing is headed and thus where online mobile marketing must inevitably follow:

Technorati tags: viral marketing | origami project | origami project video | video | microsoft | apple | ipod | ipod video | sony | playstation portable | psp | nintendo | nintendo ds | handheld | video games | mobile marketing | online video | google video | youtube

Joe Mauer Plays Off Joe Green In New Twins Ads

The