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Whether you’re developing a microsite or a simple magazine ad there are three questions you should always ask your creative team/agency:

Why Stop
What’s going to make someone stop and look at the ad?

Why Continue
What’s going to make someone explore the ad?

Why Act
What’s going to make someone take action?

After asking these questions, don’t be afraid to act like a two year old and follow up with a “why”.

Photo credit: stevegatto2

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The next website the in The Dark Knight viral marketing series has just been launched. In just 18 hours, whysoserious.com has managed to get more than 1,000 diggs on Digg.com.

It seems that the Joker is recruiting members for his army! He’s also instructing us to look to the sky. Stay tuned caped crusaders.

One interesting observation, this morning the site looked a little different.

UPDATE: It seems that just one day after this post, the whysoserious.com site has changed once again. It now contains a video teaser and pictures from a street stunt where they painted peoples’ faces to resemble the joker.

Recently, CommunityNext held a viral marketing conference called Viral! From Zero to 10 Million Users.

I wasn’t able to attend this event; however, thanks to the Internet, I’ve been able to experience all the marketing goodness through other people’s blogs:

Emergence Media
Summarizes the conference’s themes and general information about widgets, Flickr, and 4 lessons from Keith Rabois.

Digital Musings
5 takeaway points from the “Online Communities To a Million and Beyond” session.

Meta Muse
9 takeaway point and a link to an article on why PR doesn’t work (conference session).

Lightspeed Venture Partners
5 lessons from the conference.

Daniela Barbosa
Numerous viral marketing tips and some insight from Dow Jones.

TINEyboppin
Christine Songco shares 4 things that she learned at the CommunityNext conference.

Let me know if you’ve blogged about this event, and I’ll add you to this list.

Photo credit: photo of Dave McClure taken by TedRheingold

One Degree, a great online marketing magazine, recently published an article regarding viral marketing. In it, Simon Smith talked about how true virulence requires losing control and how few marketers are willing to take that risk.

Unfortunately, it’s not always up to the marketers. Here’s a great example of what losing control can look like:

This video has managed to attract more than 250,000 views in just a week.

AT&T recently launched a new service that allows people to send a live video from one cell phone to another.

This got me thinking. With cell phone subscriptions numbering in the billions, what would it take to launch the world’s first cell phone distributed viral video? Perhaps a cheaper rate plan?

Dare to dream!

Photo credit: Steven Wilke

A Norwegian energy and aluminium supplier has launched a series of YouTube videos in hopes of inspiring the next generation of engineers. I love these videos…almost as much as I love engineers!

A couple of days ago, Advertising Age published an article called What’s Plaguing Viral Marketing, which discusses professor Watts’ research on viral marketing. According to Watts, marketers and books like “The Tipping Point” rely too much on influencers to trigger big change.

Mr. Watts argues that influencers have little impact beyond their own immediate neighborhood. As a result, marketers should target large numbers of easily influenced people. He calls this technique big-seed marketing (the rest of us call it mass marketing).

Although, I still don’t see the need for a new term like big-seed marketing, I think Mr. Watts brought up a few interesting point worth exploring. Read the rest of this entry »

Blendtec blender has managed to develop one of the most successful serious of videos on YouTube. As of this post, they have 31,644 subscribers and over a million views. The premise is simple. Tom Dickson, the founder of Blendtec, demonstrates the quality of his blender by blending everything you can think of. So far he has blended everything from a tiki tourch to an an iPod. And now, he is moving on to the next cultural phenomena, the iPhone. Enjoy!

There’s recently been a trend, especially in the entertainment industry, towards viral mysteries. From Nine Inch Nails to The Dark Knight movie, the Internet is increasingly being filled with elaborate riddles, puzzles, and plot lines.

If you’ve recently seen the Transformers movie, you’ve probably been exposed to the start of a new mystery code-named “Cloverfield”. The trailer for the unnamed horror movie combined with a growing number of microsites is starting to create a real buzz on the Internet. The web is now crawling with explanations, clues, and “I found” statements.

These online mysteries are often structured like scavenger hunts. Unlike most viral marketing campaigns, they are not limited to just one microsite. People are forced to scour the Internet for new clues and related microsites. It has become almost a badge of honor to find the next site in the series.

By all accounts, the Cloverfield viral marketing campaign is off to a good start.

Within the past year, widgets have exploded in popularity as an effective new way to spread your marketing gospel. As a result, I thought it would be worth listing a few tools that you can use to measure a widget’s success: Read the rest of this entry »