Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today by Adam L. Penenberg

Author:Adam L. Penenberg [Penenberg, Adam L.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2009-09-24T14:00:00+00:00

[ WHAT NOT TO DO ]

Because the odds of benefiting from a phenomenon like the Mentos–Diet Coke geysers can be less than the chances of winning American Idol, some companies have been trying to game the system, with decidedly mixed results. Samsung released a series of videos on YouTube featuring a Saint Bernard named Sam on a plane. The few who actually watched characterized them as “lame,” “a stinker,” and “zzzzzz.” One user summed up: “I would really like to know which agency and production company came up with this uninspired piece of crap.”

Dove has also had hits and misses. It scored big with Evolution, a Web video that illustrates through makeup and software how an ordinary woman can be transformed into Mischa Barton hot. On YouTube alone, several parodies were viewed a total of 5 million times. (Personal favorite: Slob Evolution, in which a male model eats, drinks, and smokes himself into someone who resembles Christopher Hitchens.) Dove also issued a flop when it tried to foist a promo for Dove Cream Oil Body Wash on to the YouTube community. The video received more than ten thousand comments, almost universally negative. FedEx, on the other hand, squelched any viral marketing potential by threatening legal action against a customer who had created furniture out of the air shipper’s boxes, then posted the pictures on his website. “The worst thing you can do is act like a grumpy old brand and send out cease-and-desist letters,” says Michael Maslansky, president of Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research. “It makes you look bad.” Adds Mentos’s Healy: “If I had been FedEx, I would have gone online and created a ‘Design Your Own Dining Set Out of FedEx Cartons’ contest.”

There have been some modest corporate-inspired Web video successes, too. Millions of YouTube users have watched Tom Dickson, the earnest founder of Blendtec, a blender manufacturer, pulverize an iPod. He also stars in several other must-see Will It Blend? videos released on YouTube and Blendtec’s own website, where he destroys baseballs, rake handles, light bulbs, magnets, marbles, half a rotisserie chicken, and a 12-ounce can of Coke. The month after the videos first hit the Web, Blendtec sold four times as many blenders online as it had over the previous monthly record.

Mentos continued to sponsor Grobe and Voltz, helping them perform with Blue Man Group in Boston. They appeared on French TV and gave performances in the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, and Pittsburgh. “We are earning a decent living as performers and it all started with a simple Web video,” Grobe says. The company also struck up a relationship with Steve Spangler, a highly caffeinated educator who has made a career teaching teachers how to teach science. A staple at conferences, Spangler, whose father was both a magician and scientist, speaks to roughly 150,000 teachers a year. And at each conference he can’t resist but demonstrate the power of Mentos and Diet Coke.

Spangler, who claims to have set off more than five thousand Mentos—Diet Coke geysers over an eight-year period, markets toys based on this theme.

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