A couple weeks ago, I received a call from NZ, a serial entrepreneur I met a while back when I was an editor and he was a marketing exec at a high tech company. He was now teaching a class for the women 2.0 organization, which moves from venue to venue. This event was held in an office building on University near Alma in Palo Alto. NZ asked me to present 12 to 14 slides on leveraging social networking for marketing.
I had some free time and was already digging into the new phenomenon. I had been on LinkedIn for several years, pestering all the people I had met during my years in technical journalism to link in with me. Not only did it get me back in touch with long lost contacts, it also showed the power of all these connections, one being NZ. I also had a blog begun back in Autumn 2004, but I had not leveraged Twitter to help drive readership. I was also active on YouTube having posted some 30 odd videos. However, I was simply experimenting with a phenomenon.
I was now being asked to explain to a group of aspiring entrepreneurs how to leverage this social networking to make money. Where do I begin? In the world of on-line marketing, everything begins with a web site, the storefront where you meet your customers. Building a web site is pretty standard faire and I couldn’t add much to what was common knowledge.
Then it struck me. What modern marketing is all about is telling a story, the same story over and over adding unique twist with each telling. The most obvious example is the BMW-produced short videos starring Clive Owen in some clever plot twist aimed at convincing the viewer that BMW is “the Ultimate Driving Machine.”
The entire marketing effort at BMW from their commercials showing the construction of vehicles, to BMWs’ roles in movies like the James Bond series and more recently “Shoot ‘em Up,” keeps telling the story. As evidence of their success, the “BMW, The Ultimate Driving Machine” Facebook page has 30,873 fans, presumably owners or those aspiring to be.
How does an upstart entrepreneur tell their story with no money? For the short presentation to the Women 2.0 audience, I suggested finding an idea related to their business that goes viral. It’s a concept described in “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” a book by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s what BMW and every major brand has spent $billions over time producing.
For my example, I suggested a wedding planner business started by a couple, Jill and Kevin. I suggested that J&K might create a website called J&K Weddings. To promote their business they might plan their own wedding, film it and put it on YouTube with their company name and website on the ending credits. To make the video compelling they might do a different walk down the aisle to the alter.
The result might look like the YouTube video JK Wedding Entrance Dance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0), which has garnered, nearly 23 million views in the month it’s been posted and still growing. Whatever business Jill and Kevin were in, it could have leveraged their viral YouTube video and the resulting mainstream publicity (appearance on “Good Morning America” and the Today Show (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd79E6I5CV4).
I wonder if the idea took hold in any of those in the audience. I keep checking the hot new videos on YouTube just in case.
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