Making It "Pop!" - Viral Marketing with Multi-Tactic Campaigns
by Justin

What is a "meme". It is how things spread through the internet and a reflection of the internet culture.

Story starts out with the "most creative way to create popcorn" video contest.

They decided to win by creating a "crowd sourced popcorn" popper.  The popcorn popper is triggered by tweets that results in "likes" on youtube.

They put it on:

Youtube 

Promoted it on Facebook, Twitter and Lava.  The news of them winning made it on Mashable and Engadget.  

They got blog posts about the video from around the world.  Half were from Brazil.  They showed up on NPR, Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal.  Then they got picked up on the the food blogs.  Finally they made it into Popular Science.

This is a great example of how something went viral that was intended by the authors to go viral.

This was the only entry in the contest.  FireWorks Popcorn gained 300 facebook fans, web hits went up 10% and sales went up 5%. 

Elements that were combined:

- Lego robots 
- Labview software (100k users) / Lava forums
- kittens
- twitter
- dog
- popcorn
- cute music (very recognizable)
- Digg, Reddit

These topics cut across many demographics and are very popular independantly.  Responses were expected from several of these groups (esp. Lego and Labview fans).

There are so many videos uploaded to youtube that the internet has developed a pseudo consciousness of its own.  It finds something it likes and then plays with it for a while.

Multi-tactics for promotions:
- many, many tweets about it
- update Facebook about it
- email friends / colleagues
- sent LinkedIn messages to acquaintances
- harass your family
- post in domain specific online forums (less than 10)
- making a direct appeal to selected professional contacts (include social media coordinator at National Instruments)

Tried to activate their personal networks any way possible with requests to vote for a video.  People want to be part of something important on the internet.  

There was an authentic element because they weren't really selling anything, it was just something that was more fun.  We were trying to entertain ourselves.

We don't know how this impacted National Instruments.

Keeping it going.....this is my 15 minutes of fame on the internet.  How do I get 17 minutes of fame, how about 19?

- retweet it
- follow up personally with everyone who helped promote it
- replying to tweets (kinda a version of customer support)
- creating behind the scenes / tech docs and posted on domain specific forums
- talking about what we did at events like ProductCampRTP

Take Home Points

- going viral is partially a matter of luck, but fortune favors the prepared
- we were working with neat things that are interesting to us
- we ducted taped things together (innovating) instead of inventing new stuff
- once you have that stone moving, it's not hard to get it to turn over one more time
- the internet is a big place, but it is possible to put a dent in it (we only have 25k views on youtube, but there was a benefit to fireworks popcorn)

Questions:

1) what do you do if you have negative stuff on the internet.

Comments from audience:

- you monitor what is being said about you

2) did you do anything to calculate the impact

No, we weren't expecting this level of response.  It is also very difficult to track the overall impact.  If we were doing it for a commercial purpose we would have done more to track it.  Maybe use a bit.ly link.



twitter:  @justingoeres
mail:  justin.goeres@gmail.com