My favourite slide is slide 9, below.

To view the rest of the presentation, just scroll down and click play.

I’d love to hear any opinions you may have, so feel free to leave  your comments!

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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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Concepts covered include:

• The Google business model
• Google’s purchase of satellites
• Google’s goals with voice capture
• Where, how and why Google monetizes only some of its services
• Google and mobile devices
• Google’s potential upcoming advertising channels (such as offline media, including TV, radio and billboards)
• The future for Google while the rest of the economy dips

The presentation can be viewed in pdf format for FREE by clicking the link below. Honestly, as a business owner or internet marketer, you really owe it to yourself to read this. Enjoy!

World’s best overview of Google business model

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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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The relevance of this 7 legged arachnid will make a lot more sense once you've read the article

Quite humorous don’t you think?  Maybe you’ve even forwarded it to a friend, you got such a kick out of it?

It is these real-world, random acts that defy social norms and convention that are truly viral.  Sent via online means (whether it be Facebook, Twitter, email or blog posts), these ‘campaigns’ are the most cost efficient and effective campaigns money can buy.

So how can your organisation or agency use these principles in your next campaign?

Dream up a humorous and realistic scenario. Maybe it’s an email chain of correspondence similar to the above situation, maybe it’s a Facebook status ploy gone terribly wrong. Make sure it something believable, that will tug a few heart strings, or ‘a laugh at someone else’s expense’.  It’s all about creating a scenario that is out of the ordinary.

Another option is to tactfully sponsor an existing humourous viral campaign in its infancy.

Try it. It’s such an inexpensive method of marketing that you would be mad not to. You’ll be reaching the eyes of thousands, potentially millions of users who hopefully will not even see your campaign as advertising, they’ll see it as a leisure activity.

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