With nearly 2 million views on YouTube after just two weeks, Beneful’s Dog Goldberg Machine video caught a lot of media attention (including a piece on CNN) and social media traction. Before explaining why it worked so well, I want to illustrate just how big the impact was.
Jose Cuervo recently released “Have a Story“ with Kiefer Sutherland. After the Jack Bauer fan in me calmed down, the commercial struck me as a near perfect outline for content marketing success.
In the 30 second spot, Kiefer describes five actions all culminating in the instruction to “have a story” (a key to marketing success).
Here’s the breakdown.
A team from the University of Basel in Switzerland released a paper in 2012 discussing research they had conducted on the impact of firm-created word of mouth communications versus user-generated social media content. The objective was to determine which type of content has the greater effect on consumers’ attitude towards brands and purchase intent. In other words, what’s driving your sales? The content that you create or the content that consumers create?
The research was based on 20 best-selling brands from the tourism, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals industries and also considered the role of traditional advertising such as television.
Recently, I’ve been studying the The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. He talks about various growth engines and I love how it describes viral businesses. So I’m borrowing his concept and adding some thoughts of my own.
For the purposes of this post, I am not discussing creating one viral campaign. I am instead focusing on products or services that are inherently viral themselves. In other words, they don’t use sticky growth (subscriptions) or paid growth (print, TV, radio ads, etc).
Hopefully you’ve had a chance to see the witty and headline grabbing response that feminine care company Bodyform posted to Youtube on October 16th in response to a snarky comment on its Facebook page. Though if you haven’t, I’ve posted it above.
In just the first 24 hours, the video garnered more than 626,000 views. By any standard, that’s pretty amazing.
If anything, I wanted to reserve our name – so I created an account, did a little branding, followed a few people and then tweeted on occasion so our account didn’t look completely barren.
Do you ever take time to look through your Twitter followers? I browse through them occasionally and love to see the spammers following me. Besides the lame Twitter handles (e.g. Yang43276), the descriptions are always a dead give away. Example:
Extreme social media scholar. Bacon specialist. Travel practitioner. Subtly charming beer guru.