ChasNote

Dell’s embed-able, subscribe-able, share-able video ad has added itself to the list of great commercials — ones that engage people enough that they are inspired to tell their friends about it. For example, here’s Maxwei’s blog:

I’m seeing a rising tide of Slide spam, some not appropriate for family-friendly sites like ChasNote. Below is a SFW one that came today. The FunWall says “Press forward to see what happens,” and comes with all my Facebook friends pre-checked so that virus passes along if I make the mistake of hitting Forward.

As BMW looks to the web to build buzz for the 1-Series, it is giving its video commercials an added boost: BMW is sponsoring Boing Boing TV with pre-roll “sponsored by” billboards and full commercials mid-segment. When Boing Boing fans embed episodes in their own sites (like I’ve done here), BMW’s campaign rides on Boing Boing’s viral coattails.

On Boing Boing TV’s site, this BMW banner runs alongside the video player.

From Seth’s Blog:

“Sure, 1% of your customers blog or post or just plain talk. They’re louder than ever before. But the other 99% represent a real opportunity for you. Figure out how to get them out there. Cajole them to go to a caucus.”

(The 1% Rule explained here.)

I know it worked for Obama yesterday — get of them to caucus — but that might be the harder path, getting your quiet fans to alter their personalities so they become talkative fans. An alternative suggestion: Find talkative folks, and see if you can deliver a noteworthy experience with your brand.

Randy Schwartz, Carat Interactive’s search director, pointed me to a Forbes story today I missed back on October 17, Digg This Headline, For Google’s Sake. Social media sites and blogs that are read by other blog publishers, it argues, can help push brands toward the top of natural search engine results.

“‘Social media’ sites like Digg, Reddit.com and Newsvine.com let users submit and rank news headlines and other links to sites around the Web. Sites voted to the top of these news aggregators receive tens of thousands of visitors. But the online marketing professionals gathered at New York’s Search Marketing Expo this week were interested in tapping into a different feature of these sites: their growing power to affect Google and Yahoo!’s search results….

“More important than that traffic, however, was the list’s role as ‘linkbait.’ ….Because Google ranks a Web site’s relevance based on the number of other sites linking to it, LifeInsure [a site with content picked up by Digg] now ranks fourth in Google’s results when the search giant’s millions of users search for ‘life insurance.’ Suddenly, the company had free advertising that put its name right next to huge brands like Metlife and Prudential….

“In fact, every headline that reaches Digg’s home page receives an average of 129 links, according to search marketer Neil Patel, and each of those links can push an online business’ traffic closer to the coveted top spots in Google or Yahoo!’s results. Digg is by far the greatest source of links and traffic among social media sites: A popular story on the site gets as many as 100,000 unique visitors. Sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine and Propeller can each add between 5,000 and 10,000 more.”

Last month Wacom partnered with Graffiti Wall to sponsor a Draw A Monster contest. In addition to the 515,000 votes cast on the 5660 monster drawings submitted, the contest encouraged more than 2000 Facebook members to become “fans” of Bamboo By Wacom, the Facebook Profile page for Wacom’s tablet computing kit.

Each time someone joins the Bamboo By Wacom fan club, a headline like this shows up in his or her friends’ newsfeed.

If you apply ChasNote math (I have about 300 friends in Facebook), that’s 2000 times 300 — 600,000 news headlines from one friend to another plugging Bamboo By Wacom. Say two-thirds of those headlines get pushed down the newsfeed before someone sees them, that’s still 200,000 friend-to-friend endorsements of your brand.

Forget about who you know in this fabulous video. Today I had lunch with the dude who sings the bass line in it. Tom Shields of the Woodside Fund and now Yieldex. Tom, you’re my hero.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, it’s small groups of hipsters in the East Village that start the trends that become national phenomena. In the book business, it’s a humbler, less fashionable set — leaders of small reading groups — that launch best-sellers (see NY Times).

“Increasingly, authors and publishers are tipping their hats to the power of 8 or 10 or 12 women (and usually they are women) sitting around a dining room table, dissecting their particular book of the month, then spreading the word to their friends. Along with ‘The Kite Runner,’ the successes of ‘The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,’ ‘Water for Elephants,’ ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and ‘Kabul Beauty School’ have been credited to the early and continuing support of reading groups.”

It makes sense then that other large brands — such as Johnson & Johnson are investing in marketing to small groups of evangelists.

From Ad Age:

“It’s been a meteoric rise of late for word-of-mouth marketing, defined by PQ Media as ’supported by research and technology that encourages consumers to dialogue about products and services.’ Still, the discipline accounted for just 0.4% of the share in the $254 billion marketing-services category, a grouping that includes direct marketing, branded entertainment and public relations, among others. If PQ Media’s analysis is correct, however, word-of-mouth marketing won’t stay small for long: The field grew 35.9% in 2006, far more than both the overall marketing-services category (7.7%) and the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (5.7%).”

From Seth Godin’s blog:

“Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

“Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.) The Mona Lisa is an ideavirus.”