Popular Viral Marketing Campaigns

Viral marketing includes marketing strategies that leverage social media to swiftly propagate and explode marketing message to millions of prospects in no time. Viral marketing campaigns are an ideal choice for creating a titanic buzz and brand awareness in a cost effective manner.

Here are some popular viral marketing campaigns that caught maximum eyeballs:

Simplicity Works!

Take a look at this ‘How to Sell a Soap’ video that shows how implementing viral marketing can transform a tough marketing challenge into a cakewalk! The video was a grand success for the Germany based company that promoted it.

What’s Free?

Anything, from information to coupons, services to software, customers love what is free. Attaching freebies to any campaign is the simplest way to catch maximum eyeballs. Take for example, the case of Hotmail. Way back in 1996, Hotmail pioneered what is viral marketing today. Each email sent from a Hotmail account included a small, subtle ad for Hotmail- a strategy that yielded 500,000 registered users. The number reached 12,000,000 users in less than a year’s time. As the user-base expanded into the millions, Hotmail had millions of these free ads floating on the Internet across the globe!

Surfing to Attention!

This staged video on dynamite surfing brought a whopping 10 million views for Quicksilver and did a great job by making the brand immensely popular in no time.

Go creative

In a unique campaign to promote a tax website, marketers staged a theft of Nascar with the website’s address and managed to get almost $1 million worth of exposure on television, absolutely free of cost within a few days.

The Celeb Touch

The Nike video showing Ronaldinho taking a delivery of a new pair of boots and performing some amazing football tricks brought 23.5 million views.

Interact and Instigate

The Burger King - Subservient Chicken is one of the oldest pieces of viral marketing around. The unique interactivity of writing in a message box what you wanted the chicken to do and it would seemingly do it was an instant hit and within 24 hours of launching the campaign received a million hits. The number reached 20million within a week. In a year the viral received around 14,000,000 unique visitors and helped promote the new sandwich. Here’s a video of the interactive chicken:

The rules are simple- be creative, clear and compelling. Instigate something that arouses interest and see your message transform into a gigantic viral for promoting your brand.

Twitter Tips for Content Marketing

Twitter presents a great opportunity for smart marketers to meet the needs of information hungry customers. By sharing relevant and convincing content through Twitter, marketers can succeed in creating strong brand relationships with their prospects. But, Twitter is vast and if your content is not strong enough, it may easily get lost in the crowd.

Here are some easy tips to strengthen your content marketing efforts on Twitter:

Scribe Concisely

Tweet with brevity to deliver greater value. Remember that you have only 140 words to express yourself. Share your best ideas with brevity and clarity.

Get Talking

Be a part of all relevant discussions about your industry, products and services. Twitter provides tools like TweetGrid and TweetDeck which can be used to monitor ongoing conversations in real time and respond to them instantaneously.

Go Trendy

Staying current is critical. By using Twitter Search and Monitter you can keep an eye on what’s happening right now in topic areas that are relevant for you.

Form Groups

Create and become member of groups that are relevant to your business. Within the group, you can focus on specific topics that are important to your prospects and customers. You may use Tweetworks to create ad hoc groups on Twitter.

Tweet Your Blog

Promote your blog posts on Twitter through Twitterfeed, a tool that can seamlessly publish your latest blog post to Twitter.

Follow the tips and leverage Twitter to communicate with your customers and prospects differently. It’s time to move beyond simple selling of products and services and deliver tangible benefits to your target audiences through content that matters to them!

Most Popular Social Media Icon Sets

Heart: A Free Social Icon Set

The Leaves Fall: A Social Icon Set For Bloggers

Social Icons Hand Drawned

6 Free New Social Icons

Free Twitter Bird Icon Set

Free Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set for Bloggers

Cheers: A Free Social Icon Set

Set of Social Icons

10 Most Popular Corporate Blog Designs That Blend Simplicity and Sophistication

Professional, responsible and sophisticated- are the key factors that define corporate blogs.  Different from generic blogs, corporate blog designs are more classy and uncomplicated.

Here is a collection of ten most popular corporate blog designs that are a perfect blend of style, simplicity and branding:

Yahoo

Google

Nike

Dell

Cisco

Walmart

Design Matters

Johnson & Johnson

McDonalds

GM

How to Save Your Blog on a Bad Hair Day

Blogging is a raging web trend and with more and more people trying hands at it, sailing through the cut throat competition gets tougher by the day.  The key to survival lies in implying technical innovations that pull the blog through a down phase.

When you see your blog traffic slipping, don’t panic. Instead, imply this five point strategy to perk up your blog during a slowdown:

Socialize your posts

Link, Digg, Tweet or Stumble some of your posts to create a buzz. Share your posts through your network on social media sites and attract viewers to your blog.

Revitalize the dead headings

Even the most engaging articles may fail to attract eyes if they suffer a poor heading. Slowdown is the best time to analyze posts that were not well received and give them a facelift with a new heading or introduction. Be a SEO pro and use keywords in your headings and intros that rank your blog high during relevant searches.

Follow suite

Check out what is selling the best and follow the trend. Simply following what readers are liking and blogging about it can be a very effective traffic booster. Whether it is an outfit, person, place or concept, if it’s a hit, it should be on your blog too.

Blockbusters that weren’t

You perceived some of your posts as stalwarts, but your readers thought otherwise. May be it was a case of wrong timing, may be you did not use the right key words, or may be you simply chose a wrong subject. Dig your blog archive for such posts and refurbish them. Give them a contemporary touch and calibrate them with the SEO tools.  Edits may give some boost to these posts, as well as to your blog.

Set the timing right

Survey and analyze the time that people tend to spend over reading blogs. It could be weekends or working days. See what the trend for your genre is and set the frequency of your posts accordingly. Coming up with a new post every weekend is a good idea. This would not only cover the weekend visitors, but also help in developing a long term habit in your readers for checking your blog every Monday for something new.

Go Social…Internet is No Longer Only for Geeks!

With the whole world flocking to the social media sites like Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn, making your business visible on them has become extremely challenging. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is your only chance to remain afloat in a swarming pool of competitors. SMO is novel marketing strategy that has rapidly gained popularity in recent times. The concept is simple, get your website refurbished so that it is easily linkable to social media sites, is found on all popular blogs and podcasts and is extensively bookmarked.

Why Social Media?

A marketing study conducted by WhitePaperSource.com reveals that marketers are increasingly drawn towards social media marketing because it yields better results with lower investment. According to the report, the primary benefits of promoting your business through social media are:

• enormous attention from prospects
• increased number of qualified leads
• fruitful business partnerships
• reduced marketing expenses

Who doesn’t want to see their business grow by leaps and bounds in minimum cost? Social media is a fabulous opportunity for doing this and you should just not miss it!

However, only knowing about it and creating accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn will not get you the desired results. Marketing through social media needs extensive planning and effective SMO to ensure that your business is visible wherever your clients may look for it.

How do I make my SMO activities effective?

The answer is simple- proper planning and a well executed SMO strategy. Optimizing your website to ensure that it qualifies all parameters of social media marketing, coupled with effective management and maintenance of the same is what will get you maximum eye balls.

Here are some tips for a perfect SMO that will get you maximum attention on the Internet:

1.    Increase your linkability – Mobilize your website. Update it regularly and imbibe blogs and whitepapers to enhance its linkability.

2.    Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Tag and bookmark your pages with all popular websites.

3.    Help your content travel – SMO goes beyond modifying structure and content of your website. If you have content that is in portable formats like PDF, audio-video files, PPTs etc, the same can be submitted to sites like YouTube, SlideShare, etc..

4.    Make web friends – Go ahead and exchange content and videos with other websites. Experiment with RSS and facilitate others in driving more traffic towards your web content.

Give your website the SMO power and see its presence grow in every corner of the World Wide Web!

Marketing Insider: Social Media & Lead Generation

The latest issue of the Marketing Insider focuses on bringing you some of the latest developments at the intersection of business marketing and social media for effective lead generation. The newsletter provides interesting links to some of the best practices being followed by marketers in the lead generation and social media industries.

Catch the latest buzz, read what the Gurus of the industry are saying, take the poll to see how you match against your peers in terms of your social media expectations of 2009.

Read the latest issue here: Marketing Insider

How to Use Twitter for Marketing

Twitter is a relatively new web 2.0 site that is starting to gain a lot of popularity. That means that a lot of people have heard of it but it is also quite common to run into people who haven’t heard of it.. yet. Twitter.com is this social site that encourages users to post often about what they are currently doing.

A lot of people are using it to improve their marketing reach, by being an active twitterer they gain followers who are interested in what they got going on. This means people being exposed to their updates on a regular basis. For example, if you have hundreds of followers in Twitter and you decide to post an affiliate link, that means that hundreds of people have instantly been exposed to your offer. In this article I will discuss ways to maximize Twitter for your marketing, and also a big mistake to be aware of.

In order to have a fan base per say of followers in Twitter you must be able to keep their interest in you and what you are doing now. “What are you doing?” is the whole foundation of what Twitter is about in the first place. Make sure to post daily if not several times throughout the day updates about what you are doing. The magical thing behind this is that many of your contacts will be able to feel like they know you so much better, will trust you more, and feel much more comfortable about working with you. On the other hand, when you follow others you can learn about them and their possible needs.

The big mistake to watch out for is only posting affiliate links or offers on your Twitter page. This looks like Spam and many people will see you as just abusing Twitter for your own personal gain. Think of it this way, if you would not want to invite your friends or family to keep up with you via Twitter then you are going about it all wrong. As with anything you send out or provide, ninety percent should be content and ten percent (at most) advertising. So this concept is quite simple… constantly post throughout the day what you are doing.. it is usually very simple and only takes a few seconds to post! Secondly, if you write articles or provide content online, provide a link for those in your Twitter posts. You may post many things within one day, but the last thing you post for the day is usually the most important because it will be there the longest. This means that your last post for the day should very well contain a link that you want your followers to see before your start Twittering again the next day!

Another part of Twitter is contributing. As with any social site it should be a give and take relationship. Notice that give comes first… the more you give the more people will want to work with you and the more attention you will receive. Make sure to read and follow other users in Twitter. If you read something interesting or helpful then make sure to reply and say so, or even put a link for it on your Twitter so that you are directing others to more quality content. This can also be as simple as connecting with other users, if they know you are reading their Twitter page they will be much more likely to check out what you have going on too.

To get started in Twitter you should first invite contacts who aren’t using Twitter and also find contacts who are already using Twitter so that you can start following them and also start getting people to follow you. Twitter has a nice invite and find feature that makes this incredibly easy. To grow your reach even more you can start following people who follow or are followed by the people who follow you.. or that you follow. You might need to read that sentence again.. but basically you can find other users to connect with that are already connected to other users.

Now for a big tip. If you really want to maximize the potential with Twitter, you should make sure to take advantage of any plug-ins or sites that support Twitter. Here are three, but I’m sure there will be many more in the future if not already. Squidoo allows you to input your Twitter account info into your Squidoo account and then it can automatically post updates to your Twitter account when you create or update Squidoo lenses. Facebook has an application called Twitter, it automatically updates your Facebook status when you make a Twitter post. The other tool is a free WordPress plug-in called TweetMyBlog that allows you to create a two-way connection from your blogs to Twitter. TweetMyBlog allows you to use a widget on your Wordpress blogs that will display your current Twitter feed.. that way all visitors to your blog can look at the widget and see a running feed of your latest Twitter posts. If they click on that they will be brought to your Twitter page. In addition, when you make a new post to your blog, TweetMyBlog will automatically make a post to your Twitter page with a link to your latest blog post. Imagine the extra exposure you can receive by using these tools that help people see more of what you are doing.

Lastly, have fun! Twitter is a social site… so interact and enjoy!

Author: Darren Olander

About the Author:
Darren Olander is dedicated to teaching others how to create a success online through internet network marketing strategies. He is a site owner, article writer, coach & marketing consultant enjoying the benefits of working full time from home.