Grapevine Consulting

What? I want to understand this. Did this bloke really use a Motorola phone to film his marriage proposal and then Motorola heard about it?

Did Motorola find some bloke to use their phone and film his marriage proposal? What happened? What did she say?

I looked at the website as instructed but can’t work it out. So many questions - is that supposed to be the point?

Outsourcing is a big trend at the moment. I think it’s partly being driven by the current web business boom. Elance.com is a useful site catering to the need for freelancers and potential projects to link find eachother.

They also publish some useful content on there. I spotted this post “Thirteen ways to make your blog go viral”. Mostly just best practice for running a blog but a useful summary for someone new to blogging looking for ways to drive traffic.

I think one of the best bits of advice is around creating resources like “how to” articles or Top 100 lists, much like they’ve done here!

This is an interesting set of figures on video viewership in the first month on YouTube from Data Mining.

In the first month on YouTube

• 70% of videos get at least 20 views
• 50% of videos get at least 100 views
• Fewer than 20% of videos get more than 500 views
• Fewer than 10% of videos get more than 1, 500 views
• 3% of videos get more than 25, 000 views
• Around 1% of videos get more than 500, 000 views

See after the jump for how it looks in a chart but basically the average video should expect between 20 and 100 views.

(more…)

If the criteria for a successful viral campaign is…

• Reach a massive audience who have shared the viral, increasing exposure exponentially
• Creatively engage with consumers beyond traditional direct marketing campaigns
• Provide ROI far beyond what perhaps traditional media/marketing campaigns could achieve for the same amount

…then a viral campaign can work well.

What brands forget when planning these ideas is that a viral effect is hard to manufacture. We can’t guarantee what will work any more than we can exactly predict the outcomes of a marketing or PR campaign – at least with PR/marketing there is established methodology to follow.

It’s important to understand that a viral is not just a cheap advertising campaign broadcasting on the internet.  Although really popular ad campaigns can translate well to online activity; Sony Bravia a good example.

Most virals, whether email chains, image round-ups or a video clip tend to come about spontaneously and be funny in some way. Deciding in advance what a large audience will deem funny and worth sharing is hard. If there was an exact formula no one would ever suffer through an open mic night again.

(more…)