The holy grail for many online social media marketers is creating a true viral campaign that sticks with consumers and (Deity-of-your-choice willing) resonates with the kids and inbeds itself into pop culture . Enter Amazon’s Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt product review by B. Govern, a hillarious customer review which has not only gone viral but changed the North American fashion landscape for better or for worse… Most defintely for worse!

Video – The Tool of Choice for Viral Campaigns

More often than not, online viral campaigns rely on free-to-air videos (read: YouTube) as they can communicate emotionality in one ‘super sweet’ multi-sensory medium. You’ve got the high impact visual – think Carlton’s Big Ad or Guiness’ Evolution… And you have sound; recall Bud’s Swear Jar Ad (don’t open this at work!) or Terry Tate Office Linebacker (really a blend of visual and sound, but I like it…) And best of all, video requires very little effort to take this viral goodness in – it’s a fantastic way to quickly reach a great mass of people.

Universal Search – Video, Forums, Reviews…

With Google Universal Search (a blending of video, reviews, forums, local business ads and traditional web content) increasingly creeping into Google’s interface, getting something to go viral around a top keyword could prove an SEO goldmine for marketers who know what they’re doing.

Imagine for example if your brand occupied the top positions on Google for a very lucrative keyword like heatlh insurance through a savvy blend of viral videos, relevant customer reviews or customer forums, local business outlets , etc…

Enter the Three Wolf Moon Shirt Review

Now imagine if you had a hideous piece of merchandise you needed to offload, say a whole warehouse’s worth of atrocious looking shirts with ‘artistically drawn’ wolves howling at a full moon – the type of shirt you’d see on sale at flea markets, strip malls and mega discount stores. How would you go about drumming up interest for this unique product?

Amazon's Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt

Clearly you’d have your hands full… And that’s where a clever viral marketing campaign can pay off.

I don’t know how many Wolf Shirts Amazon has cleared off the shelves, but seeing how many mankinis I saw post Borat (don’t ask me where or how…), it wouldn’t surprise me if Three Wolf Moon T-Shirts were sold in the thousands following this review.

The Power of Social Media – Sales $$$

And that’s the moral of this story. Clever viral social media can get you sales. Just look at how many follow up (and absolutely hillarious) comments followed this review to end all reviews… 

Another lesson to be drawn: viral marketing needn’t be all about video or require you to shell out an arm and a leg in production costs. A simple review, well-worded and witty, can start a revolution and even influence the course of fashion among meth addicts!

Have you bought your Wolf Shirt yet? Don’t be the last one in your neighbourhood to flaunt the power of the Wolf!

Reading the HuffingtonPost one morning I came across a YouTube clip of WifeSwap, the famous American television program where two families swap their wife/mum with another family. As you would expect from a ‘reality’ TV show, the two families in question could not be more different… Typically you’re presented with your successful city slicker well-to-do yuppie and their counterpart down to earth country bumpkin. The experiment lasts two weeks. The first week the swapped wife/mum gets to know her new family and lives according to its rules and then in the second, she sets the rules. The idea is that both parties will grow from the experience. What invariably ensues are a series of personality/cultural clashes which make for great trash TV.

And so it was I came across a tubby kid rebelling against his new mom. It was a glorious moment of very bad television. New mom was objecting to the kid’s diet and was preventing him from indulging in one of his favourite morning foods; bacon! But I digress… Where this got interesting is that it led me to another WifeSwap clip and to the story of a man called Stephen Fowler.

Getting Owned by Social Media – the New Online Reality

Notice I didn’t add a link to the man’s name. I wouldn’t want to add to his considerable notoriety. I’ll leave you to Google his name and to take it from there – for our purposes we’ll label him Mr. X.

Discovering Social Media – How it Can Hijack Your (Brand) Name

So Mr. X and his well to do San Francisco family agreed to take part in the riveting social experiment known as WifeSwap. He’s a British bio-fuel entrepreneur and his wife is a personal self-help guru – both partners holding many degrees (although I don’t know how ‘accredited’ the wife’s degrees are…)

So here’s where it gets interesting: Country mum shows up for the swap and very quickly (oh surprise!) there’s friction. Mr. X resents her presence and begins to denigrate her character, personality, education, background… you name it! It’s classic WifeSwap goodness!

Managing Your Reputation – Remember It Starts Online

As he’s ripping into her, I’m thinking: “Is this guy for real?” In today’s world, I give this clip about 2 hours before it hits YouTube and goes viral. Beyond the millions watching this debacle on TV, millions upon millions will soon join them online. And sure enough… that’s exactly what happened.

Social Media – Once up it lasts a while!

This story is now ancient history. It happened a while back as media cycles go (2/12/09 but it still has plenty of legs on the Web.

Social Media Highlights

Mr. X thought he was being clever, but what he failed to grasp was the social media clusterf**** that ensued – and it got nasty!

• A website was setup featuring his name and the word ‘sucks’ in the URL (that ranks number one on Google when you search for his name.
• Blogs and Forums tore into him – most interlinking with the afore mentioned site
• A Facebook group was created to further discuss Mr. X’s shortcomings
• Yahoo News ran the story under ‘the world’s worst dad?’ heading with links a plenty to the ongoing media sensation
• YouTube clips re-aired the story over and over…
• His wife’s business website was ‘baconned’ (an image of a slice of bacon was superimposed on the home page and obstructed the user’s view. No doubt to upset Mr. X’s vegetarian wife…)
• Etc

Social Media Damage Control

Yes, things got pretty much out of hand for Mr. X. He had to resign from two charity boards, his business and the environmental causes he supports likely didn’t win many fans, he hired security to keep vandals away from his home… and his ‘good name’ was completely trashed online. It was a complete fiasco.

Unfortunately for Mr. X, the contract he had signed with the WifeSwap prevented him from addressing the media to give his side of the story. He did issue a comprehensive apology on his wife’s site, but the damage was done.

Social Media – The Moral of the Story

And that’s the point of this post. It’s very hard to undo a coordinated social media onslaught once it’s begun. You could try to engage your attackers and explain your position, but odds are you would just fuel the hate.

Solutions to Cyber Bullying

One aspect of this story touches upon the phenomenon of cyberbullying, whereby anonymous online bullies seek to sully the reputation of their chosen victim online. Whether you think Mr. X deserved it or not, the tactics employed to denigrate his behaviour and character are reminiscent of the tactics employed by high school cyber bullies across this fair nation.

So what are the alternatives when your good name is being dragged through the mud online?

• Most people likely give up. It’s easier to let time do its work than engage in process centred around damaging you personally. But indexed pages have a way of staying around and hurting you…
• Prosecuting offenders is problematic as online trails aren’t necessarily easy to follow. Any legal proceedings might also attract more attention which could guarantee your little problem could grow to capture the attention of a much larger audience.
• Posting positive stories about yourself or creating a blog would help, but then again these positive stories may inadvertently draw attention to your past problems and keep negative entries about you around well past their shelf life.

Keys to Managing Your Online Brand

In the end, there’s no easy way out of this mess and so it pays to have a prominent (and positive) social media presence online. After all, if you already have a strong presence on many social media portals such as your Google (Account profile), LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter, or if you have your own blog, you can mitigate attempts by many cyberbullies to damage your brand.

Can you think of other ways you might protect your brand online? Send your responses in. Best one wins a can of V!

A client recently asked us about Social Media Optimisation or SMO as to ‘what the heck it was’ and if he should ‘get in on that action?’ Little did he know he was already applying many SMO techniques – he just didn’t know it!

SMO as defined on Wikipedia is ‘a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites’.

So if like our client you’re performing SMO if you are…

Adding links back to your site

Search engines like Google and Yahoo value links and reward sites who have many incoming links from other websites (especially relevant links from heavily trafficked websites). So listing your business on paid or free directories is a sound strategy for improving your natural (organic) search rankings.

How to find directories and acquire links

A good place to start: Type ‘Australia Directory Listings’ into a search engine and you’ll come across some popular directories, many of which are free.  Simply submit your site and wait to receive confirmation of your posting!

Popular directories include:

• Web Wombat
• Yahoo Directory Listings
• Hot Frog
• Gumtree
• and many more…

Making your site easy to tag and bookmark

Giving visitors to your web site the opportunity to bookmark your content is also a sound optimisation strategy. Don’t lose your traffic! Make it easy for users to stick around and engage with your brand by providing them with the tools to reconnect with you again and again.

Popular bookmark tags include:

• adding RSS feeds
• adding social bookmarks such as
• “Digg This” buttons
• Facebook Share Partner Link
• del.icio.us
• newsvine
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit
• Yahoo toolbar bookmarks
• FARK
• Technorati
• FURL
• Ma.gnolia

Adding content mashups

A further way to enhance your website’s content is via content mashups. Add videos, maps or streamed content from a news source provider to provide a better web experience or facilitate a sale. It’s surprisingly easy and a handy way to take your website to the next level and as search engines improve, those new forms of content will count ever more towards your quality score.

For example:

• YouTube videos
• Google maps
• Or various forms of web feeds or data scrapings

Sharing your content

It pays to share. And that saying certainly holds true for the web. Sending your content on via newsletters or posting to your company blog interesting topics like ‘Social Media Optimisation’ can only serve to increase the number of repeat visitors to your site.

So share your content through:

• Blogs (like this one)
• newsletters

A little site called Facebook

And finally… Is there a person who has not heard of a little website called Facebook? Synonymous with social networking online Facebook is great way to network, keep in touch with friends and link to people with similar interest locally and internationally.

Launched in early 2004, Facebook has grown from a niche university social networking site into a worldwide phenomenon. By starting your own ‘special interest group’ on Facebook or joining an existing network of likeminded individuals, you can rapidly expand the reach of your content and broaden your link profile.