Let’s face it, website statistics are only of interesting to nerdy website owners (<gulp>, I had to swallow a bit of my pride typing that).  Normal people don’t care how that your website visitation increased by 23% in comparison to the same period last month, or that your bounce rate decreased by 7.8% resulting in a significant rise in conversions. Apparently, normal people have better things to do.

Well here’s an interesting concept, called One Million Hit Wonder.  It actually turns the usually dry subject of website statistics into a commodity of public interest and appeal.

The aim of the One Million Hit Wonder  ’experiment’, to eventually attract one million visitors the homepage of One Million Hit Wonder each week.   The experiment aims to bring more awareness to the general public of the basic principles of website traffic, in a light-hearted fashion. One Million Hit Wonder achieves this, because it’s website statistics are completely transparent to website visitors, being published to the site’s home page and updated in real time.  It’s really quite addictive watching the numbers go up (…nerd alert!).

Seriously , click here to see yourself as a website statistic…and don’t tell me it wasn’t strangely satisfying!

Advertising on One Million Hit Wonder

Another interesting aspect which has been incorporated into this site, is the inclusion of a single advertising slot which spans for 7 days.  By having just one advertising slot available on the homepage in a very noticeable. To add further intrigue for advertisers, the advertising slots are only available for purchase via a weekly eBay auction.

And the icing on the cake – whomever is the current advertiser when the site reaches it’s goal, will retain the advertising slot for a 3 month period, probably providing them with more advertising exposure then their wildest dreams!

If you have a few spare moments, take the time to check out One Million Hit Wonder.  The site will be evolving during the next few weeks with some additional ‘hooks’ to keep visitors coming back , so it is sure to be a very interesting experiment as time moves on.

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In more recent years, since the  ’online’ world came on the marketing scene, free stuff has frequently been offered in exchange for personal information, rather than to   word of mouth and brand-in-your-face promotion . For example, you’ve probably participated in online campaigns where you  ”Enter the email address of 5 friends to increase your chances of winning”, or “Provided your name and email address , and we’ll give you instant access to our whole library of online reports and online our online community”.

And now, with the inception and acceptance of social media, word of mouth online marketing is now possible.  As online marketers, we can now officially offer the public free online stuff, in exchange online word of mouth promotion.  Many marketers will argue that word of mouth advertising is the best form of promotion, so the ability to achieve this online is a major milestone.

If you’re interested, check out a very recent example of a Twitter free-stuff-in-exchange-for-word-of-mouth advertising campaign below, by Brisbane musical act Yves Klein Blue (credit for the article below goes to B&T Magazine).

Music fans are being asked to pay in “tweets” to download music from Brisbane band Yves Klein Blue, as it seeks to grow its audience through digital word of mouth.

The campaign, created by digital social media agency The Population, record label Dew Process and Universal Music Australia, launched this morning and saw the band tweet a message to its followers offering them the chance to download its new single for free.

The only condition is that after downloading the track, they must tweet about the lengths they would go to see the band play at the Splendour in the Grass festival in Byron Bay next month. The campaign not only aims to engage with existing fans, but to use social media to reach new audiences.

Tony Thomas, managing director of The Population, said: “The social web provides entertainment companies like Dew Process Recordings and Universal Music with an opportunity to reward their fans with valuable content, in exchange for spreading the word. Ultimately the fans become the communication channel.”

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Sure, we’ve seen a few campaigns in the past that have used webcams to do simple things – like insert the user’s face on a cartoon body, or something to that effect.

But technology has come forward in leaps and bounds since then, and Paper Motion of Australia has recently released a fantastic new piece of software that uses your PC’s webcam to create a fully interactive user experience – creating virtual characters, virtual objects, and movement in 3D.

It’s breathtaking, addictive, and will be the next big novelty item in interactive online marketing. Check out a few demos of the software in action below…..

And another, used for Earth Hour, here…

If you’re interested to see how some existing websites have already used this technology, it is also worth checking out the following websites:

Jack Links

General Electric

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• street-chalking (whereby stencils are used to apply chalk ‘graffiti’ on public foot paths and concrete walls)
• sea-tagging (a great new temporary street-art concept, again a stencil is used but this time the ‘printing medium’ is salt water, which takes a lot longet to evaporate than normal water thus remaining on the footpath for up to 15 minutes)
• snow-tagging (involves creating a branding imprint into the snow, using a large ‘stamp’)

All of these are fantastic methods of using our existing surroundings relatively innocently and harmlessly to create brand awareness.

So how do we adapt these Guerilla Marketing techniques from the offline world, to the online world?

The answer, my friend, is quite simple.   Search for ‘public spaces’ on the internet, put your creative thinking cap on, and devise an ingenious plan to somehow leave your mark for others to stumble across while they are leisurely going about their daily online business . The trick is, you must be careful not to act in a way that is seen as careless, or worse, illegal.

After all, back in the real world, graffiti isn’t legal, hence the reason most companies will draw the line at spray painting their company message on any old public wall….it simply ain’t kosher and will do more damage to the brand than good.

Ok, so what are examples of these online public spaces that I speak of?  Well, the list is endless, because it really depends which ‘spaces’ are relevant to your industry.

Ebay is an easy one to begin with, as the rules for listing items are quite straightforward.  Ebay has been used succesfully many times in the past to create fun, viral hype about various products and individuals. For example, did you see the guy who sold his entire life on eBay late last year?

 
Or perhaps the piece of Nutri-Grain (an Australian breakfast cereal) that looked like ET and sold for over $1,000 Australian dollars.

These are fine examples of viral eBay listings – an online marketing medium that I believe still offers many opportunities to the astute online guerilla marketer.

Another example of an ideal online public space for online guerilla marketing, is a job listings website.  These websites are frequented by millions of users every day, and most users are either desperately unhappy or downtrodden, which offers you the perfect opportunity to brighten up their day with a clever and light-hearted job description that promotes your company’s image and ideals.    The company below took it one step further, and created (what I believe to be ) a very humorous phony job listing, that was recently posted on Australia’s most popular job seeking website, Seek.  Click on the image below to zoom in – it’s quite an entertaining little piece which received a lot of viral attention in a very short space of time (mostly through the general public emailing the link to their friends for a laugh).

The moral of this story, is that on online marketer should not only focus on traditional online spaces to post their marketing message. Think laterally, aim at the online spaces where your loyal fans and potential  consumers might be ‘hanging out’ , and as long as the website traffic is there your online guerilla marketing efforts could well pay off.

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WAYN is a community based website entirely dedicated to travel, and includes travel reviews, stories, and comments from travellers across the globe. If you’ve not checked it out, it is certainly worth a look.

I’ve been following WAYN for some time, but until now had not seen a solid execution of a travel related ‘campaign’ using the WAYN platform.

Today I received the following email in my WAYN inbox.

Hi Jake,

Have you been to Ireland before? If not, I thought you might be interested to check out the Tourism Ireland interactive profile so you can discover the magic of the Emerald isle.

Imagine wreck diving off the North Antrim coast, hiking the craggy mountains over Teelin Bay in Donegal or mountain biking around the Aran Island… All of this is showcased on the profile, along with an official blog, a feed of cultural and sporting events, videos, images and a range of visitor information and more.

If you’re one of the lucky ones who’s already experienced what Ireland has to offer, why not share some of your Ireland memories by posting a comment on the profile, so others can see what they’re missing!

See you online,

Maartje

Having not visited Ireland before, and not really knowing what it has to offer, I found this email to be quite captivating, despite its relative simplicity. The first link in the email above (http://tourismireland.wayn.com/ ) is the “call-to-action”, and links through to a dedicated WAYN-based Tourism Ireland mini-site.

If you are involved within an organisation that focuses on a travel related destination, service or product, why not investigate the potential of a WAYN-based minisite for your next online marketing initiative.

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It looks like a video shot by Los Angeles Lakers start Kobe Bryant and a few of his mates. It was actually a thoroughly planned, professionally developed video by Nike. The ‘home-video’ feel was created in order to engage the target audience, generally young males from early teens through to late 20s. This demographic are frequent users of video, both recording and viewing, as a means of entertainment and capturing (sometimes not so sensible) antics on the street.

This viral video is yet another example illustrating just how ideal the web is for reaching a target audience of any demographic. The bounds are limitless. The real challenge for online marketers, is reaching a level of engagement and trust through the use of an appropriate conversational and experience style that will appeal to the target demographic.

……and for those of you wondering whether the stunt was actually real, you can read all about it here.

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With huge viral appeal it was not long before this video was circulated across the world via email forwards, social networking and social bookmarking sites.  As the hype continued, the Levi’s brand suddenly reared itself from the depths as the brains behind the video.

Fun, clean, well-thought out, addictive, clever, and without ‘in your face’ branding.  Two thumbs up from me!

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…..except that I’ve not actually seen the end product anywhere. Please share your story if you’ve downloaded and/or seen the Doritos application in use.

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Check out the full, updated article here.

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Amazing technology….amazingly dated that is.

Now comes the 2008 version. Esquire magazine has taken on the technology supplied by E Ink (purveyors of low power ‘electronic paper displays’), to create the world’s first animated magazine cover (or second, depends if you count my slam dunking Michael Jordan magazine!)

Though the whole cover is not animated in this instance, surely this type of technology is paving the way for the future. If a magazine priced at $5.99 can afford this technology, just imagine the potential this low cost, eye-catching communications medium has as a gimmicky and disposable marketing tool as the technology becomes more widely available and is developed further.

The only catch currently is battery life.  In the Esquire magazine instance, panel is powered by a battery with a limited lifespan.  Depending on the temperature (the life of a battery depletes faster in warm weather, than in a cool environment),  this panel would last somewhere in the vicinity of 3 months.

As I am currently based in the Middle East (average temps in the mid 30′s), this could actually be a problem.  My proposed solution - is the incorporation of a paper thin solar-panel in this device, and then it will be desert proof!

Sorry Michael Jordan, I think I’ve found a new favourite magazine cover.

Pricing and Implementation

If you’re keen on getting in on the E-Ink action, I have conducted some further research into the manufacturing of ‘animated magazine covers’ similar to the technology recently adopted by Esquire magazine.

The technology is referred to as “Ink-in-Motion” (or IIM).  For a similar design to the Esquire magazine (i.e. similar sized panel) and assuming a print run of over 20,000 units, the following manufacturing costs and timeframes would apply for the hardware itself:

1. The production per panel would be approximately $14-$18, depending on the specific size chosen
2. The manufacturing time would be 2-4 months

The panels run on six coin cell batteries (you would have probably seen these batteries in a household electronic device at some stage, they are the size of a small coin)

In addition to the above timeframes, you would need to create a conceptual design of the animation (this could be created using a full animation tool such as Flash, or through a static ‘story-boarding’ technique using a flat image to illustrate each individual frame.

I would also ecommend that the creation of a conceptual design for the IIM animation was not commenced until the rest of the cover was designed, so that the IIM panel could be seamlessly integrated into the overall design and page layout.

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Real Fiction’s latest offering is this crazy thing they call the Dreamoc 3D display system.   Through the use of an off-centre glass pyramid,  these guys have managed to create a housing for free floating 3D objects which could suddenly make 3D models quite ‘consumable’ to the general market.

Imagine the possibilities. Retail stores could advertise their new products before they’re even manufactured, at home you could have a fireplace or a fishbowl without the need for mess or maintenance.

In a world of great haste, minimal maintenance and a love of shiny things, this concept could go far.

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