Articles in Word of Mouth
Widgets are all the rage, and it’s no surprise to me that many new businesses are creating business models on the creation of them.
Gydget is one such company, and it focused around creating Widgets to promote musical artists.
Not only is it a great way for people to show their support for their favourite artist, it’s also a tool for sporting clubs or brands to engage their passionate fans in the promotion of their products.
Here’s a test Gydget i have setup which includes the RSS feed from this blog, a video from youtube, as well as a test event.
Alvin and the Chipmunks is a new movie to be released on Dec 14th. To promote the movie, the Oddcast software has been used to create quite a unique promotional microsite. The site is called Munkyourself and allows consumers to create a mashup of a chipmunk animated character generated combined with your own voice recording which is of course modified to sound like a chipmunk.
Cleanscores is a new site which links Google maps with the cleanliness of a restaurant rating.
It’s currently reviewing restaurants in LA and San Francisco and is indicative of a trend towards empowering consumers to rate products and services. I expect to see more and more consumable items being both reviewed and commented online, providing assistance to would-be purchasers.
Perhaps because alcohol products have had greater restrictions advertising on mainstream channels and therefore have had more time to experiment with other levers. But it is now more evident with the announcement that Jim Beam’s CMO Rory Finlay is committed to refocusing it’s advertising budget into activities aimed at generating Word of mouth.
Word of mouth marketing is not new. It started around the camp-fire when people debated over what were the best hunting tools, and conversations continued into market places where trade flourished. But since the invention of the TV, which radically changed the way brands spoke to consumers, many big brands have either forgotten or ignored the levers that drive word of mouth marketing.
Google in Australia have launched a doodle 4 google competition which encourages school aged kids to design their own Google icon based around an Australian theme.
Consumers will have a chance to vote for their favourite entries, and the overall winner will have their doodle featured on the Google Australia homepage on Australia Day 2008.
Perspective: This is a nice touch by Google to promote their business with schools and also to encourage participatory consumer generated media.
This is the presentation that I gave at Adtech Shanghai
[slideshare id=176617&doc=frontiering-for-ad-tech-1195795916588180-2&w=425]
101 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke + 523 Methos mints = One cool science experiment
These videos are hosted by Revver, which is a consumer generated video site that includes ads and shares the revenue 50/50 with the video creator. In this case there is a Menthos ad at the end which almost summarises the whole essence of the mint.
See the current Menthos Ad which interestingly enough has a guy who sneezes and mistakingly shaves off a little hair from the guy. He ponders the repurcussions until his friend helps him come out clean.
Here’s a clever way to use your consumers to market your product to their friends.
You provide them with a simple widget that they can paste into their Myspace page which provides them with active content on a subject they are passionate about.
That’s exactly what Roller Warehouse have done with this Rolling News Widget. The news widget scrolls current Roller Skating News from the Aggressive Skate Blog.
As an additional incentive, consumers who post this Widget on their Myspace are entitled to a 5% discount.
