Viral Marketing at its Best

The OMMA Awards which honor brand marketers, agencies and content providers in the area of online advertising creative were given out last night at the New York Hilton. MediaPost put on this second annual event which took place this week in order to coincide with Advertising Week 2007 and the OMMA (Online Media, Marketing and Advertising) Conference and Expo. These awards were given out in 20 categories to those who "push the potential of online advertising".

The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments, which was a campaign that I wrote about in the PROMO Live Day Two post from last week, won the Best Viral Campaign Award as well as the Best of Show.  In my post I listed the many examples of successful viral video campaigns that Jim McCafferty from JP Creative shared with us during his "Virtual Slide Show" session. I promised to report back to you with more about the Viral Program 101 course that Jim also shared with us, so in light of the OMMA Best of Show Award I thought today would be appropriate. So, here it is:

1. The obvious...define the goal
2. Be creative and produce content that has a "Wow" factor
3. Identify your "Bacon" (a joke referencing Kevin Bacon) in other words find those that will help spread the word in the circles you wish to target
4. Be flexible and open to modifications
5. Define your budget and the tools you will use to create the content
6. Seed it, seed it, seed it
7. Monitor it and measure
8. Adapt to opportunities as they arise
9. Monitor and measure again
10. Capture audience data and input
11. Adapt it again

Jim suggested seeding the content on many different sites and under different names. He found that these different identities can become valuable assets in the future. There are many websites now that you can upload videos to seed in various places. Just "Goggle" the words "Video Sharing" and you'll find many of these. I was amazed really at how many of them exist besides the big one, YouTube. I came across Light Reading which I thought was very useful. It lists the Top Ten Video Sharing sites and ranks them for ease of use, file storage size, flexibility and distribution as well as it includes some overall comments about each.

Jim left us with these main principals of viral marketing that we should follow:

Creating good content, working hard, being aggressive and having the willingness to try. Jim said, "It's okay to fail and you can fail quickly, but then figure out what you need to do to achieve success."

Here's the video. Enjoy.