Old Spice

I had to research a bit to find a viral campaign I even remembered -- apparently I miss out on a lot of internet memes! But here's one that I definitely enjoyed.




It's true, whatever man I get, he'll never be like the Old Spice Guy. And he's not on a horse.

The viral marketing that went wrong

The casualwear chain 'Gap' decided to change its decades old logo with a new chic-style logo. The new logo irritated fans, spurring them to complain about it online. "Gap" became a trending topic on Twitter, as design- and branding-savvy Twitterers (as well as those who just like to voice an opinion on everything) proclaimed their distaste for the new logo. In a knee jerk reaction they decided to crowd source the logo through social networking websites. This turned the irritated fans into an online mob, with custom avatars mocking the logo popping up and even a fake Gap Logo Twitter feed, @gaplogo, with a few thousand followers. A set of individuals referring to themselves as "The Randian Preservation Society" went so far as to launch a site called Crap Logo Yourself, in which you could put any text into the style of the new Gap logo, playfully asking, "Why hire an expensive firm to rebrand?"
Gap North America president Marka Hansen said in a statement, "There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we'll handle it in a different way," Hansen said, adding that the project was not the right one to offer up to "crowd sourcing."
A week later the gap logo was changed back to the original one.
Guess the retailers didn't estimate the 'gap' between their logo and their customers correctly.

Education First, Promotion Second, and Sales then

The interesting method that advertiser use in this campaign in its website - radikalbebas.com is educated the visitor about free radical. The website attrack visitor to interact with them to try its services. If they satisfied they can tell their friends by reffering up to 5 people. Advertiser offer its product as one of the solution.

HP in similar way use bloggers to increase sales of th HDX Dragon notebook PC. They gave the notebook to 31 top bloggers to review it and write about it in their blogs. Only with that costs, HP boost its Dragon sales 85%, traffic to HP website increase 15%, and also got 10% total sales PC increases as the "halo effect".
Read the case study here.
Watch one of reviewer video here.

Web 2.0 and Viral Marketing

Everybody knows we are now in the world of Web 2.0. Wiki, Blogs, Mashups, Social Networking, Podcasting, RSS, Widgets are growing day by day. According to Forrester research on “Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast”, enterprise will spend $4.6 billion on Web 2.0 technologies by 2013.

From the book “Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide” written by Amy Shuen, there are five-step action plan for applying Web 2.0 technologies business models: build on collective user value, activate network effects, work through social networks, dynamically syndicate competence and recombine innovations. In fact, Social networks can help us our business reaching more audience by building our community. But there are many questions we have to ask how to work through social networks.

In the book, the author gave an example of success of through viral marketing. “One extra line at the end of each Hotmail—"Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com"

Other interesting stories are traffic generation of small number of web sites like Yahoo!, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Digg through viral marketing.
We should not also forget about LinkedIn, Facebook and their success.

I may be writing about tech and hype but we always have to explore fundamental concepts behind these technologies and how to apply them.

Ref: “Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide” written by Amy Shuen Chapter 6 Business Incorporate Strategies