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On June 12th, there is going to be a pilgrimage of marketers to Toronto for the From Mass to Grass, CMA’s Word of Mouth Marketing Conference. If you’re in the area…or have the budget to fly…you should definitely check out this event. Some of the brightest minds in Canadian marketing will be there to discuss WOM, Social Media, and of course Viral Marketing.

To help promote this conference, the organizers have released this infectious video. Personally, I can’t resist a singing hamster…but who can? Definitely worth a click.

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You’ve heard the buzz. You’ve seen the videos. Now it’s time to create your own YouTube masterpiece. The marketing potential is huge. As you’ve seen in my other posts, a good viral marketing video can generate millions of eyeballs.

For the past couple of days I’ve been doing a lot of research on this subject. I’ve summarized my findings on Whamwiki.com. On the wiki, you’ll also be able to add your own tips, tricks, and secrets to the list I’ve just created. That’s the beauty of a wiki.

View list

Last June I reported on how MTV hired a couple of YouTube celebrities to promote their global warming campaign. This celebrity-on-a-budget approach is slowly starting to catch on.

According to adrants.com, the Philippine Department of Tourism recently hired HappySlip, a YouTube celeb, to promote Philippine tourism to second- and third-gen Filipino-Americans.

What I love about this pairing is that it makes sense. HappySlip is a Filipino-American. As a result, her videos are sincere and touching. Here is HappySlip’s sentimental arrival video.

I was going to write a long article on why companies should explore Facebook for their next viral marketing project. Luckily, Monica Hamburg from “Me Like the Interweb” blog beat me to the punch.

Check out her great article…and don’t forget to create a Facebook page for your business!

In an effort to sell more Cheetos, Frito-Lay has launched a website called the Orange Underground.

The microsite asks people to join a not-so-secret society that encourages mayhem and random acts of Cheetos (RAoC). I guess if you can’t get people to eat them, maybe you can get them to waste thousands of Cheetos on silly pranks and gags.

To help the creative process, Frito-Lay has created videos and a cookbook on how to best “fight the man”. To help spread the word, they are encouraging people to video tape their pranks and post them on YouTube. Frito-Lay is hoping that this healthier alternative will produce a collection of funny user generate videos.

Oreo’s Approach: Supported by a TV campaign, Oreo has taken a different approach to selling food. They actually have a viral campaign that encourages people to eat their product. Check out the next hot sport: DSRL. Basically it involves licking the cream off an Oreo.

Social bookmarking links and tell-a-friend forms are two of the most popular tools that marketers use to seed their campaigns. For example, if you like this article, you can bookmark it using one of the social bookmarking icons below or click on the envelope button to email it to a friend (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

Although these two methods are quite effective, I think there might be room for one more opportunity: instant messaging (IM).

IM can be utilized as a more efficient form of the tell-a-friend option. This technique not only reaches its target quicker, but it also can’t be stopped by spam filters. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

If you’ve developed a great viral idea and now want the world to know about it, where do you start? A talented social media expert named Kate has written an article full of great seeding ideas. It’s definitely worth a read.

Photo credit: pictoscribe

Sears.ca Wishbook Campaign leaves me feeling like Scrooge
A great critique of Sears’s new CGM (Consumer Generated Media) campaign. Kate Trgovac, a social media guru, also provides some fantastic suggestions on how the campaign could have been improved.

Tips from a Top 10 Digg user on how to get to the Frontpage
Detailed advise on how to get listed on Digg’s home page.

This week I’ll be spending most of my time surrounded by an abnormally large amount of people with laptops and tweed jackets (mostly worn by venture capitalists…I presume). With just one day under my belt, the Web 2.0 conference is proving to be quite informative.

Although this conference is not directly focused on viral marketing, there is a lot of useful information that can help viral campaigns. In some ways, you can say that web 2.0 products, which are about social networking and sharing, are inherently viral by nature.

One of the workshops I attended today was about community evangelism. It was presented by Anil Dash and Deborah Schultz. Here are the top 5 things I took away from this session: Read the rest of this entry »