The Smell of Good Business

Great video on Social Media…

CeBIT 2011 in Sydney was a terrific event. This video gives you a snapshot of the event.

This guest Post is by Alex Petrovic, Advanced SEO strategist with Dejan SEO whom I met at Cebit 2010 in Sydney.

Viral content is something that existed way before internet was born; it was just in different forms. The internet allowed us the ability to create viral content much easier and to spread it faster, but with a big market comes big competition, so viral marketing can become quite difficult even with a huge fan base. Even so, getting your content to go viral can be a crucial step in your internet marketing campaign and is surely worth the effort. Once viral, your content will reach thousands of people and tell them about your services, products and your brand in general. The best form of advertising is when your users and customers promote your work on their own, which is what viral marketing is all about.

Creating Viral Content

The biggest problem with viral marketing is creating a viral campaign. For those who know something about SEO the principles are the same as with link bait, but viral content requires more effort over a longer period of time. Let’s get this straight, anyone can create viral content material, but not everyone can make it go viral without doing their research properly.

He Already Reached the Stars, Can You Do the Same?

The first step is to come up with an idea that can go viral. This depends on your market, but in most cases you can rely on trends. If you investigate the upcoming trends in your niche you can find out which topic has the best chances of going viral. This is not an easy task and requires a lot of understanding about trending, but this is your best shot to predict the success of your viral content and to find something worthy of creating and sharing.

If you are not sure what to go for then simply investigate something that is already popular and feels like there is room for more. Start with things you already know. We did an experimental viral marketing campaign with a video that was supposed to tap “the biggest, the ugliest, the greatest” category. With hours and hours of research and quality implementation of the project, hiring professional voice actors, professional designers, we managed to achieve just that. But the idea was already there, we didn’t come up with something new, we took what already existed and made it interesting by adding a hook. With some promotion we managed to get the video become viral and even to this day it is often tweeted, shared on Facebook and talked about. Just the comment feedback was amazing.

A certain news website makes almost every single one of their posts go viral. What they do is they monitor the news feeds and as soon as something comes up they write a 300 word post talking about the news and they publish it, tweet it, digg it, stumble it and post it on Facebook. If you visit the same page few minutes later you will see more content, a few minutes later you will see some images or even a video, and 30 minutes after the post was published you will see a full news article with details and everything. So what is the idea here? Be first to break the news and you are pushing your viral campaign though the door with ease, everyone remembers who the source was and who was the first to publish some news.

Upcoming Trends
This is just an example, but creating viral content is all about being first or being original, and both are hard. So knowing what might work is essential. Investigate your market and come up with trending topics you can work on to create something of value.

Easy Sharing
One of the reasons why most viral marketing campaigns fail is because the content is not easily shared and is often fragmented. Consolidating your content and create a one strict URL where the content will be shared from, where all the tweets and digs and likes will point to is crucial if you want the post to go viral, this all comes down to building the critical mass and tipping point.

You will never create a viral campaign if your post has duplicate pages and people can share it from various sources, as that way you will never reach the tipping point, you will lose your critical mass. So make sure that your content can be shared only from a single URL, and make sure that you add your preferred methods of sharing.

The first Pitch
Some marketers believe that the first pitch is the most important one. Although it definitely is one of the crucial aspects of success, it is not the only one, as most viral marketing campaigns tend to be long term and your tipping point may happen months after the content is live. But to make sure you get the right exposure from the start you need to maximize your first round and you can do that by engaging influential people connected to your market.

If I want something to be heard in the SEO world I would do anything I can for SEOmoz and their crew to share that content, which will allow me to have maximum exposure in the first round. You need to find influencers in your market and think of a way to engage them and have them share your content. But don’t stress if they don’t, most of the times the content that has quality will come to them sooner or later, through some other channel, some long tail user. After all, viral content circulates the web, so it is no surprise if some influencers you haven’t thought of become the ones that make your tipping point explode.

If your content was done based on someone’s research you need to make sure to cite and content the original researchers. If they share your content that will not only help your promote it, but it will give your content the needed authority. Focus on providing quality, something of interest for your market, be that a video, an inforgraphic or an article and the quality along with some authority shares will push your content where it belongs to.
Not every viral campaign manages to go viral, but that I mostly due to mistakes made during your efforts. The best part is that there is no time limitation when your content can become viral, so be patient. Makes sure you do your research and engage the right people in the beginning, and most of all, make sure that your content is easily shared and that all roads lead to one single page in order to accumulate your critical mass.

Author bio:

Thanks to Alex Petrovic, Advanced SEO strategist – Dejan SEO for this guest post.

You can connect to him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Alex_DejanSEO and follow Dejan SEO at http://twitter.com/dejanseo

An excellent example of how a vision of product possibilities can show leadership in so many ways….

Once upon time Old Spice used to be the product that, well, old men wore. I remember it being cool when I was 10.

However the Old Spice guy viral marketing campaign changed all of that with one of the funniest viral marketing campaigns to date. A quick search on Youtube will yield the results of many many clips shot following comments from followers including the names of the commenters. The interactive nature drew large attention.

Now the Old Spice guy is heading to Australia to help sell a (we think) Windows product. Interesting cross marketing that reinforces both brands. For your enjoyment, I’ve also included below Grover from Sesame St doing a send up – terrific stuff from one of my favourite muppets.

This presentation provides an overview of what you need to think about in putting together an online business strategy. Enjoy!

Here is a recent presentation I’ve completed on this topic, hope you enjoy!

Recently I attended the Institute for Information Management session on Fremantle Ports‘ journey  with information management.

As a part of the session there was an extended discussion on why champions of information management struggle so much in getting buy in from people working in the business to apply good information management practice.

One of the biggest blockers is that some of the  traditional champions of these types of systems still talk about  electronic documents and records management systems. With the invention of DVDs and CDs, the term “record” is as old fashioned as is the notion of a company librarian.

The internet has somewhat liberated us  from the drudge of finding relevant information, however so many people could  find that some simple help on search would be far more practical  assistance.

The common enemy for information managers is the shared drive, and the reasons shared drives are attractive to business users are obvious:

• fast
• visual
• easy to understand
• drag and drop
• easy to create from other similar structures used at previous employers
• cheap, no software cost
• no change management or training required

However there are plenty of downsides, and the problems manifest more greatly the larger the organisation

• cannot find information  created and saved by other team members
• ediscovery  legal issues
• security  as to who can access which documents
• version  management through many documents called final or versioned simply by date without regard to contents
• no ability to easily discover relevant information created by others

Whilst many people that are working in the industry consider they are making headway, the reality is that they only make significant change when the two challenges faced here are brought together.


In the former instance the advantage of a shared drive structure is most felt by the individual. In the latter case, the benefit of using an enterprise content management platform primarily benefits the business as a whole. Clearly then, the technology needs to get out of the way and get back to being a really helpful tool for people creating documents and  using information today.

It is also important to recognise that there are different kinds of information management needs. Individuals often make their own choice of when something is valuable enough that it needs to be versioned and kept, or when it is still very much in a creation stage and not ready to be considered final. The challenge exists in circumstances where many projects start as ideas and stop soon after. It often only becomes apparent what should be kept after the project is complete, and in many cases people are under job and time pressure without the time to go back and appropriately document all that was covered.

I’m a big fan of some of the social business tools that exist, particularly around projects. These tools are of most advantage when you have participants in the project are remotely located and aware of ideas and information is shared in the project. Basecamp is a classic example of one of these tools and there are a range of others such as Jive, Socialtext, Confluence, Cubetree and many others.

If you are interested in a series of tools that I use in running my business that are cloud-based please see June edition of Emergination in Action.

Excellent presentation by a colleague of mine, Michael Field, on the use of LinkedIn to build your business and professional brand….