You’ve probably seen many above the line guerilla marketing techniques. Traditionally, these methods have included the likes of pasting promotional posters on electricity poles, and plastering branded stickers on shop-fronts. More recently (and definitely more creatively),ideas that are more environmentally friendly have come to the surface, such as:
- 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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