Viral marketing is a great way to spread the word about your product or brand, but how can you get a viral marketing campaign off the ground? KISS Metrics has put together a Viral Marketing Cheat Sheet that provides seven great tips designed to help you catapult your brand to viral success.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Finding a video on YouTube video that is so compelling that it has to be shared is as rare as seeing a double rainbow, but that doesn’t stop advertisers from trying. We recently spoke to Dan Greenberg, who is the CEO of a video advertising firm in San Francisco called Sharethrough. Greenberg’s ability to turn branded videos for companies like GM and Lego into viral sensations earned him a spot on Advertising Age’s list of Media Mavens for 2010. He shared with us some basic strategies for viral marketing.
Before Sharethrough, Greenberg was a teaching assistant at Stanford University’s first Facebook class in 2007. The assignment was to build a Facebook application and use basic psychology principles in the social space to get it to go viral. Six to seven weeks into the class, one student raised his hand. “We’re making $2,000 a day,” Greenberg recalled him saying. “Can we keep it?” Greenberg’s students had figured out the psychology of social media:
After the class, Greenberg estimates that at least half of the students either continued to run their businesses, sold out to other companies, or were hired to work at a gaming company like Zynga. It was in this class that Greenberg met his future co-founder and CTO, Rob Fan.
They said, “let’s build some of these apps ourselves,” and set to work getting advertisers to pay them for video content. Learning how to help a video “find its way into the nooks and crannies of the web,” Greenberg said, would become the core product of Sharethrough. He had this advice for getting people to share videos:
2010 saw quite a few totally new and original trends that have revolutionized viral marketing. A few of our faves include projection mapping, interactive video, HTML5, YouTube takeover campaigns and response campaigns.
Recent AOL acquisition About.me wants to take on Google as the source of finding out all that you want to know about a person. With refreshing visuals and simple interface, AOL is hoping About.me will be a winner.
LikeLittle.com has been turning heads recently as students have turned to this social network for flirts to help stimy exam prep boredom. The website spread quickly throughout college campuses thanks to the same strategy that helped Facebook explode on the scene some four years ago.
Never underestimate the power of porn. A distraught Glasgow woman has single-handedly forced the giant soft drink maker Coca-Cola to pull a Dr. Pepper Facebook promotion after her 14 year old daughter’s status was altered to include reference to a porn movie. The promotion required Dr. Pepper “hijacking” users’ status updates with embarrassing statements – some more embarrassing than others by the looks of it. The offending statement was first removed, but Coca-Cola announced yesterday that they would end the promotion altogether. Regardless of whether or not the pornographic status update would offend us all, this signals a victory for the solitary voice using social media to rally against a multi-billion dollar corporation online.
Read more
