Brian Carter is Director of Search Engine Marketing (PPC), SEO, and Social Media at Fuel Interactive, an interactive marketing agency in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Visit her personal Web site at http://www.briancarteryeah.com/ (great URL, right?).

IMU is sponsored by internet marketing company Hubspot. It’s billed as “a free marketing retraining program for marketing professionals—as well as marketers between jobs—looking to gain new skills to get ahead in the competitive workforce.” However, I recommend IMU for anyone, regardless of employment status, interested in learning about social media marketing or in stepping up their social media marketing game.

IMU debuted in June with a weeklong series of webinars that culminated in an online “Certifed Inbound Marketing Professional” exam. Two new webinars will be broadcast on August 11 and 12, and all past webinars are available on-demand. New and former participants will have the opportunity to take the certification exam.

• PR for Inbound Marketing with Todd Defren (SHIFT Communications)—Tuesday, August 11, 2009, at 1:00 pm EDT
• Twitter for Business with Laura Fitton (Pistachio Consulting, author of Twitter for Dummies)—Tuesday, August 11, 2009, at 1:00 pm EDT
• See a complete listing of past IMU sessions.

I attended most of the IMU webinars in June. A few were too basic for me, but all of them contained solid, useful information. My favorite sessions included:

• Viral Marketing and World Wide Raves with David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing and PR and World Wide Rave
• Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research with Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz)
• Social Media and Building Community with Chris Brogan (New Marketing Labs)

IMU was also valuable because of the interaction it fostered. Participants kept in touch with the presenters and one another via Twitter. I found myself asking questions, answering questions, and making new connections with marketers from all over the country. In fact, between listening to the webinars, taking notes for my blog, and following both the IMU hashtag and direct replies to myself on Twitter, the experience was stimulating bordering on manic. There was a healthy and exciting exchange of ideas going on through and around the presentations.

Also, in case anyone is wondering, yes, I took the exam and am now a Certified Inbound Marketing Professional. I suspect that and a dollar fifty will get me a McLatte, but I never turn down an opportunity for free, high-quality training. Neither should any of you, so reserve your spot soon!

Travis Skweres

Key Takeaways

• Get to know your target demographic before launching a community site.
• Don’t rush your site launch; be prepared to address technical and usability issues.
• Online commuities are also developed through offline, real-world interaction.
• You’ll likely have to demonstrate the value of your site before monetizing it.
• Be available, approachable, and authentic at all times!

First of all, what is Werkadoo? How did the idea for Werkadoo come about?

Werkadoo actually started as a brick & mortar service in Houston, Texas, called House of Talent. H.O.T. had a group of freelance professionals whom we would match with businesses to create their “remote back office” and get whatever they needed done, from admin support to full scale large projects. We also had an actual house where we leased out cheap workspace to our freelancers, giving them another place to go to be productive. We had a great reputation and were growing very quickly, and we didn’t want to buy a bigger house, so we decided to take the concept online!

Is Werkadoo intended to be a direct competitor of bidding sites such as Elance, Guru, and Rentacoder; or are you envisioning a different business paradigm altogether?

We do currently see eLance and Guru as our biggest competitors, but Werkadoo’s vision far exceeds what these guys are doing, and our ultimate goal is to become something far different. We’re giving businesses the ability to hire entire remote teams and manage them all effectively online, like a virtual office.

Unlike eLance, on Werkadoo you can hire 10 different people and assign them all to the same project, allowing them to all share documents, communicate, live chat, and do everything required to get the job done. In addition, when you hire a freelance professional through Werkadoo, you never have to hire them again, and they’re always in your talent pool. If they did a great job, this allows you to continuously give them projects as needed, creating more stability for the business, and more revenue for the freelancer.

In the end, we want to foster long-term relationships between our freelance professionals and our businesses, making them more like remote employees and less like one-time contractors. And ultimately, we don’t want to be a “bidding site” either. We want to be focused on quality, not quantity. This stuff will have to get ironed out as we go, though, because we’re still getting feedback from our users to define the optimal business model!

The bidding sites I just mentioned do not include many social elements (Elance and Guru have blogs, and Elance has special interest groups), but Werkadoo Beta features a blog, forums, groups, and personal dashboard for each registered werker. I consider this to be an important differentiating factor, which is why I asked you to let me interview you in the first place! How does the concept of community figure into your business model: how do you plan to leverage community to make your customers more successful?

The concept of community is extremely important to Werkadoo for a lot of reasons. For one, when doing our preliminary research, we found that one of the biggest objections to hiring freelance workers was: “I don’t know who this person is. How do I know they’re good at what they do?” So we decided to add a community section to the site, where freelancers and businesses could get to know each other and interact before actually doing work, which reduces the ambiguity that comes along with remote working. The community will make both sides more successful by lowering barriers, increasing interaction, referrals, and so on. Also, we’re all about transparency and listening to what our users have to say. At the end of the day, without them, we don’t exist! Through our community section as well as blog, twitter account, Facebook, etc, we try to stay as connected to our users and crowd as possible, allowing us to take their ideas and feedback, and make our product work better for them.

Building up critical mass on a community site that is subscription based or ad revenue driven seems like a tricky venture. How do you convince people to pay to join and/or advertise on a community site before a healthy-sized community develops? Any advice for those seeking to create a community site that generates income, be it ad-based or subscription-based?

When Werkadoo first launched, we had a subscription based model…silly us! We received an enormous mass of emails telling us basically that “Hey, we’re not going to pay for a beta site!” And it makes sense: we have to prove our value to our customers before they’re going to pay.

Based on our research and feedback from the community, we decided (for better or worse) that we wanted to go with a subscription based service as opposed to our competitors, who charge a commission on all projects through the site. We want to do this for two reasons: Freelancers hate to have an enormous commission taken out of their paychecks (and they’re right, that sucks!). And two, charging commission for projects through the site forces Werkadoo to police our community. If we charge a commission, people will try to find ways to work around it and contact each other outside the site to avoid paying the commission. We don’t want to deal with that, and we don’t want to be the police, so we decided that a basic subscription fee for access to the community or tools would be best.

The problem with that, though, is people need to REALLY be convinced of the value of something before they subscribe, so that’s our challenge now. Being a new site that’s under 90 days old, we have to show that we’re here to make them more successful in the long haul, and that we’re worth it.

So as of now, the site is still free to use, and we’re playing with different subscription tier ideas and other business model ideas submitted by our community members, but we have still not found an optimal business model to go with. We’re taking it one step at a time.

As for advice for forming a new online community, depending on what business you’re in, to build critical mass you most likely have to be free. It’s becoming harder and harder to be supported by ad revenue, especially these days, but right now that’s the only real proven way to reach critical mass because of the low barriers to usage entry.

How did you prepare for the launch of werkadoo.com?

We did a lot of research and spent a lot of sleepless nights. We began development of the website in late January, and went live on April 1st, which means we pushed out the beta site from nothing in only a few months!

Can you elaborate on the kind of research you did in preparation for the launch of werkadoo.com, specifically as it relates to building out the community component? Any lessons learned?

Most of our research in launching Werkadoo was based on freelancers, the types of freelance work being done in the US today, the size of the market, the competitors in the space, and the quality level of service to the market. We found that no other site out there had a social media component, and so that was our reason for implementing it on Werkadoo. Plus, we just like being social ourselves, and we have seen the real value of social media in staying connected with your customers.

Did you set any specific goals to define a successful launch?

We weren’t sure what a successful launch looked like. We knew we would have bugs and just wanted to get the site out there in the hands of the people. We spent the first few weeks just monitoring feedback and finding bugs. We’re still finding bugs!

How effective do you think your pre-launch preparations were? Any important lessons learned?

We learned not too rush too much, and perhaps do more testing before going live. We put a self-imposed deadline of April 1st, but we could have probably waited a few weeks longer, ironed out more of the site problems, and went live at a later date, with less issues.

What tools/methods have proven to be the most effective in building the Werkadoo online community? The least effective?

Twitter and Facebook have been extremely valuable in building the Werkadoo online community, especially Twitter. It allows us to communicate instantly with our fans. We can tweet about new jobs posted or new werkers joined, changes to the site, etc. It’s all about getting in on the conversation, participating, and being reachable. We currently have no advertising to speak of, but our registrations are growing 30–40% a month, mostly through social media and word of mouth.

I know the Werkadoo staff put a lot of effort into being visible at events such as SXSW Interactive. How much do you think “offline” promotion figures into launching and maintaining a successful community site?

Live events are extremely important to us. It goes back to being transparent and involved in the community. It’s so much more valuable when a user or a fan of Werkadoo can put a face with the site, and know the people behind the scenes. At the end of the day, we’re people just like you, trying to make a site that makes freelance professionals more successful. We don’t want the image of being a “corporate entity” or a huge website behemoth; we want to know our crowd and have them know us!

If you could give others looking to launch a community site one piece of advice, what would it be?

The cardinal rule is you have to be genuine. If you’re just trying to screw people or make a buck, they’ll find you out, and you’ll soon be left alone. If you truly believe in what you’re doing, and truly want to use what you’re doing to help others, then you can leverage the community to get involved, join the conversation, get feedback from your users, and participate in discussions. This will ultimately contribute to the overall success of your business.

Thanks, Travis!

Many thanks to Travis Skweres for taking the time to answer my questions. Questions or comments for Travis? Find him on LinkedIn or follow Werkadoo on Twitter.

First Things First: What the Heck Is Inbound Marketing??

If you’ve ever fast-forwarded through a TV commercial, screened a sales call, or lined your birdcage with newspaper ads, you know intuitively that the traditional advertising model is broken. The hot topic of the day is “inbound marketing,” and it represents a huge opportunity for us as marketers and as consumers. (We are, after all, both.)

• Outbound Marketing (aka “The Hammer”): Traditional radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, mass emails, telemarketing; one-way communications a company broadcasts that customers are unable to contribute to or avoid. We are getting more and more adept at ignoring this kind of advertising (Tivo, caller ID, spam filters, etc.).
• Inbound Marketing (aka “The Magnet”): Leveraging blogging, search engine optimization, and social media (like online video) to help customers find you and then entice them to learn more about you, like you, trust you, and—eventually—buy from you.

30 Tips for Marketing with Online Video

1. There are two basic types of video: Entertaining (music videos, spoofs, TV mini-shows) and Informative (Webinars, interviews, tutorials). Leverage both types for your business.
2. Publish your video everywhere! You are not penalized for duplicate content when it comes to video, so post it wherever you can, and especially on your own Web site.
3. Focus on the first 10 seconds. Attention spans these days are not impressive, so you must hook your viewers immediately.
4. Use action, humor, and mystery. Prompting a little curiosity (“What the heck is this about?”) can entice viewers to keep watching.
5. Camera shy? Try screen recording. It’s excellent for tutorials and demonstrations.
6. Be yourself and don’t over-script. The video can come out sounding stiff. Outline your presentation instead of writing it out word for word. Spontaneity is valuable; it adds interest, a human touch.
7. Don’t break the bank. You don’t need a $5,000 camera for your online videos, but you do need an external mike jack. Don’t rely on the built-in mike. Cheaper microphones are okay, though. Hubspot uses a $40 clip-on mike that came with the camera. Finally, a tripod is the best $40 you’ll ever spend.
8. Shooting for wide screen format is a good idea.
9. HD quality is not necessary for videos posted online.
10. Prioritize how much editing time you’re willing to devote to a video project. You’ll probably want to spend less time editing informational video and more time on “viral” videos.
11. Don’t shoot video in front of a window. The quality will be awful.
12. Publish your movies as Flash for best compatibility. Otherwise you’re likely to get complaints about incompatibility.
13. HOWEVER, you need M4V format for iTunes, iPhones, and iPods. Flash is not supported (thanks, Apple).
14. Make file formatting easy on yourself with this simple shortcut. Record video in any format you want, and upload to a site such as YouTube or blip.tv. These sites convert the format for you. Then you can use the embed code they generate for posting to your own site.
15. Optimize your video for search engines. Use keyword-rich titles and descriptions. When you post video to your own site, add a text transcript or program notes.
16. Sometimes SEO conflicts with your need to maximize the social/viral element. Obscure titles can make videos fun, enticing, or mysterious. For example, compare Hubspot’s videos “Optimize Your LinkedIn profile for SEO” and “Dude, cold calling is for losers.” You may want to publish a video with an “enticing” title at first and then change the title to a keyword-rich version later on.
17. Optimize for YouTube. Promote your video to get more people to link to it or embed it. Encourage ratings and comments. YouTube features “most discussed” videos, which can significantly increase your Web traffic.
18. Publish a controversial or shocking video. Sex, religion, and politics are always good bets. This tactic is dangerous for businesses, but the rewards are ample if you pull it off successfully.
19. Optimize for iTunes. Use descriptive titles and descriptions, and include an attractive image. Promote your video to increase its popularity rank.
20. Promote your video everywhere—Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.
21. Tweet your video. It’s even okay to tweet it a few times on the day you publish it. (Don’t forget to use a URL shortener like tinyurl.com!) Add a “Tweet This” button to the video on your Web site.
22. Facebook promotion: Post the video URL to your status (the handy Twitter app will forward your tweets to Facebook). Add the video to your profile and business page. Encourage your company to post it on its business page.
23. LinkedIn promotion: Add the video URL to your status. Use one of the blog apps to add your blog post to your LI profile. Send a link to your video to your LI groups. Ask your company to post it to their profiles and group.
24. StumbleUpon promotion: Submit the Youtube link as video.
25. IMPORTANT: Play around with StumbleUpon before you start promoting your own material. You need to participate and contribute to this tight-knit community first, or anything you post will be suspect as spam.
26. Promote the video on your blog. Be sure to describe or transcribe it for SEO purposes. Respond to any comments. Encourage your company to blog it as well. Again, search engines do not penalize you for duplicate video content. Just make sure that anyone posting your video does not also copy and paste your supporting text.
27. Make it easy for your whole company to promote the video. Email everybody to let them know about a new release, provide a short URL, and provide a “lazy man’s tweet” (a blurb they can copy and paste into Twitter).
28. Paid promotion is not usually worthwhile.
29. Try ending your video with a call to action. Using a custom URL as the landing page will help you identify incoming traffic from videos.
30. Measure traffic, leads, and customers from your videos. This is the reason you’re making and promoting videos to being with. YouTube Insights let you see viewer activity. Blip.tv also provides statistics. And, of course, Hubspot does a great job of helping you track these metrics with their software products (surprise).

Other Online Video Marketing Resources

• Examples of online video Web sites: YouTube, blip.tv, Google Video, justin.tv
• Tracking and analytics for online video: Visible Measures, tubemogul, Hubspot
• 12 free and commercial screen recording software tools
• Slides from Hubspot’s How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing Webinar

Did I mention that registration is free? Don’t pass up this opportunity to learn from industry leaders such as Chris Brogan (New Marketing Labs), Mike Volpe (Hubspot), and Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz). The class schedule includes:

• How to Blog Effectively for Business
• Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research
• Successful Email Marketing
• Successful Business Uses for Facebook and LinkedIn

Sign up for Inbound Marketing University today!

Breaking the code can be deadly for your reputation. So, marketers, be wary, and stay away from these 7 deadly sins of social media marketing!

Pride (or, Forgetting That It’s Not About You)

Online networking is like real-life networking: nobody likes the boor at the party who can’t stop talking about himself. Your core purpose is to bring value to your customers. How is your online presence helping them succeed? Make your “company profile” a story about your customers:

• Turn your “About Us” story inside out. Instead of a dry list of facts, figures, and executive bios, tell your customers’ stories: how did they solve their problems using your product or service? The printing company Moo has a great e-newsletter that highlights the creative things customers do with their products.
• Take it a step further and let your customers do the storytelling for you. Sheraton hotel’s home page features first-person stories about guests’ vacations, for example.
• Become a resource. For instance, Dell created a Facebook page to help small businesses leverage social media.

Avarice (or, Forgetting that You Don’t Control the Message)

The “old way” of advertising was about “safe” one-way communication like TV ads and brochure-style Web sites. Many companies are slow to step into social media because they fear what customers will say about them online. They want to keep their message all to themselves.

The truth is, the message never belonged to them in the first place. The conversation is happening now; Your only real choice is whether or not you’re going to join in. If you do join, you must let the conversation happen naturally and not try to manipulate it.

• Don’t lock out your Facebook wall (like Walmart did) or disable comments on your blog out of fear that someone will post something negative. It’s more likely that people will perceive you as having something to hide if you appear to be trying to silence them.
• Blog, don’t flog (like Walmart did with its ill-fated Walmarting Across America blog ). If you’re paying someone to endorse you, say so.
• Be honest about who you are. If you’re a business with a product, say so. Don’t pretend to be a fan and post messages promoting your product. (People sniff out those pseudo-advertisements all the time.)
• Appreciate the wisdom of your customers and let them guide you. Dell launched IdeaStorm, where customers play a central role in shaping the future of Dell products by submitting, discussing, and voting on ideas and by sharing their own success stories. IdeaStorm has proved so popular that other companies are following suit.

Envy, Gluttony, and Lust (or, Forgetting That It’s About What You Give, Not What You Get)

These deadly sins happen when you focus too much on satisfying your own needs rather than others’.

• Consider what you can afford to give away to help people and give them a taste of what your business offers. Free e-books, podcasts, tutorials, and coupons establish your reputation as an expert, give people a chance to experience your product or service, and spark conversation.
• Don’t just consider it an obligation to contribute to online communities; make it your passion. Of course you are in business and need to make money, but focusing on that need can distract you from fulfilling it.
• If you have ulterior motives in your dealings with people, they will not want to interact with you. When you channel your energy toward giving and helping, you can build authentic and lasting relationships–the foundation for future success.
• If you can’t interact without pushing your product, quit now. You’re missing the point.

Wrath (or, Forgetting to Watch Your Tone)

We’ve all experienced this, right? Someone takes offense at an email you wrote because they thought you were being rude or sounded angry. Maybe you made a joke that fell flat without the benefit of inflection. Maybe you really were annoyed and let that irritation seep into your message. Particularly if you are responding to customers online, be vigilant in monitoring what you say and how you say it. Are you maintaining a respectful tone? Are you projecting the persona you want others to associate with you?

Counter wrath (or perceived wrath) by reviewing your writing before you send and by keeping your persona in mind. Need help with that? List the qualities you want to project on an index card and keep it by your computer while you work. Check your messages against the card before you send.

What if you really are angry? Maybe the customer is being a jerk, but you have to decide how you’re going to respond. Are you going to fuel the fire or put it out? Are you willing to miss out on the opportunity to turn an upset customer into your biggest fan by solving his problem (in front of a massive audience, no less)?

Sloth (or, Get Off Your A$$ and Update Your Blog Already)

Just like in the real world, if you don’t participate, people can’t get to know you, like you, and trust you. Jump in and become a valuable member of the community.

• Answer questions on forums.
• Write articles for your blog on a regular basis and share them on your social networking profiles.
• Don’t start a social media presence that you can’t sustain.
• Make time each week to update your blog. Better yet, create an editorial calendar to keep yourself on track. A stale blog is unprofessional and leaves the impression that you’re not on top of things.

Social Media Salvation

Would-be marketers need to remember always that social media is about creating spaces where people are empowered to communicate, collaborate, and contribute. Does your behavior foster or hinder this purpose?

News releases get your company exposure through syndication, help you build back links to your site for SEO purposes, and drive Web traffic directly from syndication sites. Surprisingly, Corliss’ recent research indicates that social media news releases do not perform as well as traditional press releases. Some of the features that make SMNRs so useful to journalists, for example, can complicate portal sites’ ability to syndicate your content. Corliss offers many tips for optimizing your releases to maximize your chances of syndication and SEO benefits for your Web site.

Content

• Many portal sites don’t accept special formatting. Do not use bullets, bold text, italic text, etc. Making the portal site puke out your XHTML hurts your chances of syndication.
• Do not include embedded multimedia. Instead, include a link to your Web site where the multimedia is located.
• Including attributable quotes at the end of your release is optional. It doesn’t seem to help or hurt your chances of syndication.
• Make your content crystal clear! When you are direct and concise, you’re more likely to use high quality keywords. Portals that use human editors to select content will be able to understand immediately what your release is about.
• Discover your best keywords. Hubspot has a free keyword grader to help you do this.
• Use descriptive headlines. Limit the length to 80 characters. Don’t forget that your headline must be an H1 element.
• No gobbledygook words! Terms like “cutting edge,” “flexible,” “scalable,” and “ground breaking” mean nothing to search engines (or people, for that matter). Hubspot has a free gobbledygook grader to help you de-fluff your content.
• Limit the body of your release to 300–500 words. Excessive length limits the potential for syndication. A long news release is a sign of verbose content, so go sniff out that gobbledygook and get rid of it!

Anchor Links

• Include a link at the beginning of the release. This link should be the most important, relevant link in the release—something you want to build more SEO authority to.
• Link to internal pages on your Web site as well as the home page.
• Always use anchor text. This tells Google what your link is about and is an opportunity to get your Web site to rank for your best keywords.
• Try making anchor text the same as the page title of your release.
• Don’t repeat links or anchor text. It dilutes SEO value. One exception is when an important link needs a fully-written url next to it in parentheses.
• Use anchor text for your links. However, bear in mind that some news release portals do not accept hot links, so the most important links in your release should be followed by the URL written out. That way at least the link to your site will be viewable.

Optimize Press Releases for Your Web Site

• Include an RSS feed so that media can sign up to receive your updates.
• If your Web site is a blog, make each news release a unique page to enhance SEO (this is a good practice for all blog posts, actually).

Measure ROI

• You can use Hobspot’s Link Grader to help you figure out if your news releases are helping your Web site.

Final Tips

• Think like a journalist, not a PR professional. Remember that it all boils down to writing great content that people want to read and share.
• Promote your company’s content through relationships. Use social media to spread the word.
• Publish a small number of news releases—only when you have something important to say!
• Hubspot has a free tool called Press Release Grader to check the health of your releases. Check it out!

The following article is reprinted with the permission of its author, Dr. Ralph Wilson. Though the article is several years old, I think its points are still relevant and presented in a beginner-friendly format.

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, February 1, 2005. Originally published 2/1/2000
Easy Transfer Copy

I admit it. The term “viral marketing” is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. “Do they have a vaccine for that yet?” you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don’t even have to mate — he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.” While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won’t try. The term “viral marketing” has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

Let’s examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free “cool” buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the “pro” version. Wilson’s Second Law of Web Marketing is “The Law of Giving and Selling” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). “Cheap” or “inexpensive” may generate a wave of interest, but “free” will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit “soon and for the rest of their lives” (with apologies to “Casablanca”). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you’re okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated “Netscape Now” buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person’s broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others’ resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others’ websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others’ webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.

Put into practice

I grant permission for every reader to reproduce on your website the article you are now reading — “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing” (see http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles-clean.htm for an HTML version you can copy). But copy this article ONLY, without any alteration whatsoever. Include the copyright statement, too, please. If you have a marketing or small business website, it’ll provide great content and help your visitors learn important strategies. (NOTE: I am giving permission to host on your website this article AND NO OTHERS. Reprinting or hosting my articles without express written permission is illegal, immoral, and a violation of my copyright.)

When I first offered this to my readers in February 2000, many took me up on it. Six months later a received a phone call:

“I want to speak to the King of Viral Marketing!”

“Well, I’m not the King,” I demurred. “I wrote an article about viral marketing a few months ago, but that’s all.”

“I’ve searched all over the Internet about viral marketing,” he said, “and your name keeps showing up. You must be the King!.”

It worked! Even five years later this webpage is ranked #1 for “viral marketing.”

To one degree or another, all successful viral marketing strategies use most of the six principles outlined above. In the next article in this series, “Viral Marketing Techniques the Typical Business Website Can Deploy Now” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-deploy.htm), we’ll move from theory to practice. But first learn these six foundational principles of viral marketing. Master them and wealth will flow your direction.

“Copyright © 2000, 2005, Ralph F. Wilson, E-Mail Marketing and Online Marketing editor, Web Marketing Today. All rights reserved. Permission granted to reprint this article on your website without alteration if you include this copyright statement and leave the hyperlinks live and in place.”

• Depends on the company
• Who’s going to use social media in different ways?
• Figure it out ahead of time make sure delineations are clear–line item documentation.
• Make sure someone from senior team has sense of ownership – a C-level “champion”

Outreach and Community (bring wine to the picnic)

• Go out and start interacting with a community, bring something to the table that’s valuable before expecting anything back; Give people information, no questions asked
• Most important points: be present, listen, connect, be human, measure meaningfully.

What comes next?

• Marketing shifts into business conversations, storytelling replaces ads (content marketing), mass customization)
• Example: give product to customers and let them have video blogs, create content around their experiences (let them drive the car, carry around the camera phone, etc).
• Were Transformers the ultimate experience ad for GM?

Question and answers section

Q: How do you use time efficiently for social media?
A: Email is a huge time-sucker–does all that time employees spend sending email provide business value? Find business opportunities and go after them. Understand that you are doing more than just tweeting; you must have a strategy, identify conversion points, and measure success.

Q: How much of social media is a fad and how much will stick around?
A: Social media has hit a nerve in our collective psyche. Maybe twitter et al is not the end game, but it’s a step along the evolution of new opportunity.

Q: How do you demonstrate the value of social media marketing for a b2b company?
A: See case studies on Chris Brogan’s delicious account. There’s less of a difference than people think between b2b and b2c. The boss is really your client – how do you convince that client to engage in inbound marketing?

Q: Should social media marketing be done in-house?
A: Having an agency run your social media campgins is like having Brittney Spears hiring her PR agent to tweet for her. Agents should be involved as an educator, showing in-house staffers what to do.

Q: What’s the easiest way to win buy-in from Management?
A: Show them a competitor doing the same project and succeeding at it.

Q: How do you respond to managers’ fears of “losing control”?
A: This is a drinking game for marketers: We’re supposed to say, “You never had control of your message to begin with,” and then we take a drink. Remember that an email in-box can spread negative press, too. There was a similar same fear around IM when it was released. consider a social media policy for employees engaged in social media marketing endeavors. You can replace the word “email” with “twitter” in your company’s email policy and it will probably apply.

Q: Should you avoid social media if you don’t have time to fully engage in a particular site?
A: Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small and grow your program as you see results.

Q: How do you demonstrate ROI on social media/inbound marketing efforts?
A: Compare the cost of employees who are doing the work versus payback/leads generated.

Students of my social media seminar series: Notice how similar much of this information is to what I’ve been telling you for the past 3 weeks? *wink*

How to Demonstrate the Value of Social Media to Your Boss
with Chris Brogan and the HubSpot team

The boss’s question: Don’t you have something better to do??

We’re trained to ignore content on a huge scale. It’s really important for companies humanize the Web, to get people to “un-ignore” content and turn off the mental filter that keeps us from being distracted by the 1000000 or so ads with which we are bombarded every day.

The Landscape of Possibilities

Blogs

A blog is a digital content source that provides solutions, in which you can thread in (useful!) marketing messages.
Selling points:

• Great for search, easy to manage, just plain swell
• You can create a communication bridge with readers (e.g., rss, email subscribe, links to social places)
• You can target a niche audience (that share specific interests) instead of blasting generic information to everyone in the whole world

Twitter (or, What Seems to be the Stupidest Idea Ever

Yes, the Twitter feed seen in its entirety looks random and chock-full of useless information. the trick is to put it in context:

• Show the boss applications such as TweetDeck to demonstrate specific conversations instead of the unfiltered Twitter stream
• Harness the power of Twitter Search (listening to conversations of needs to identify areas of opportunities for the company to make offers)
• Listening tool: What do Tweeple say they need? What can you offer?

Community Platforms (If You Build It, Will They Come?)

Should you build your own community space for your company?

• Dell IdeaStorm is a compelling example of collecting, listening to, and responding to customer input.
• Dell also launching specialized versions of IdeaStorm to vertical markets (Healthcare)
• Starbucks has its own flavor of IdeaStorm now.

Social Networks (Outposts)

Alternately, you can establish “outposts” on existing social networks such as Facebook.

• Make your social space about your customers, not your product.
• It’s not about you; it’s about how you empower your users.
• Facebook Ads are worth a look; can be highly targeted to interest groups.
• Facebook is adding 700,000 new people a day (35-65 yr old range).
• LinkedIn Groups are also gaining traction as a useful social space.

Video (and by That, We Often Mean YouTube)

• YouTube releases 100 million videos a day, making a place companies definitely want to be.. BlendTec (of “Will It Blend?” fame) increased online sales 500% (most requested item to blend? another Blendtec blender)
• iPhone apps, especially location-based apps (what if you could brand an experience of location-based fun? )

How to Argue Effectively (How to Best Position the Work)

• http://delicious.com/chrisbrogan/casestudy
• Explain how social media aligns with sales needs and reduces customer acquisition costs
• Avoid justifying social media because “it’s cool”–stay focused on business value
• Address strategy alignment (sales leads, branding/awareness/organic SEO (blogs,customer service, product marketing)

HR needs

• Which departments will own social media strategy?
• How many people needed to run SM campaigns

Implementation

• Use the “bridges and islands” strategy (Separatize the pilot effort to reduce risk and limit investment resources and then show how the process moves backwards into the organization)
• Make measurements (tricky)
• Demonstrate small victories to justify future efforts and expense

What to Do with Listening

• Get unguarded, unfettered customer feedback for PR, marketing, product research, customer service, what else?
• free tools for search: http://search.twitter.com, http://blogsearch.google.com, http://technorati.com, http://alltop.com
• Bucket all this information into Google Reader.
• Google the phrase “grow bigger ears” and hopefully Chris Brogan will appear as the #1 result

Equip and Empower (Give Your Ideas Handles)

• Giving your ideas handles means giving other people the ability to take the idea and do something with it
• Give someone flip video campera
• Give them sense of participation
• encourage uploading, tagged photos/videos
• Curate such content (don’t have to share every single wart along the way, for once it’s okay not to be 100% transparent
• Produce a best-of, giving credits to others
• Develop slideshows (animato, slideshare)
• Provide promo materials to bloggers ; must be pertinent to their respective audiences
• Use hashtags #####

Whose Job Is This?

It can be a combination of marketing, PR, sales, and internal (HR/training). the responsibilities can shift over time.

The New Presence (What All These Tools Mean)

• Creating a Home Base: your Web site isn’t “the site” anymore, but rather a home base for your entire social presence.
• Ouposts are the social places where you can establish a presence
• Outposts to start with: Twitter, LinkedIn or Xing, Facebook, Yelp, upcoming.org
• Realize that there are tons of places to go to find your audience, and you don’t have to be on all of them. in fact, spreading yourself thin is bad
• Pick a few outposts depending on the interests of your audience.

Some Useful Passports

A “passport” is a location where you can be standing by in order to jump into the online conversation quickly if you need to.

• WP.com, flickr, gmail 9Google Groups), yahoo, discuss, delicious, twitter, facebook, openid.org, brightkite, yelp
• Be available and ready to jump into conversations.

Whew! that’s a lot of information, and I’m not done yet. Stay tuned for Part II, coming soon!