The ‘offline’ world has been giving away free stuff in exchange for selfless product promotion for decades. Buy a CD, and get a free tshirt. Visit a music festival, and you’re given branded tattoos which you willingly emblazon across your sweaty flesh. Get a free water bottle from your gym, covered in the gym’s corporate logo.
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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