Community Next- Viral Marketing

Yesterday i attended the Community Next- Viral Marketing event in Sunnyvale. Jeremiah thought the folks there were hard core because it was a beautiful day out- since i live in Pacifica even being indoors most of the day but having the luxury of walking outdoors for lunch and snacks made it a good reason to go.

Overall a good day and you will have to read through the end to get the tutu picture reference.

Some tips from the panels on viral marketing:

• target Hollywood media (music, movies etc.)- they have a built in audience and will drive users
  
• target politicians, especially during election races- another built in audience- allow your social media tools to help them spread their message. their constitutes will use the same tools to 'promote' themselves and their causes
  
• One of the top reason that viral services take off is the users like tools that let them do self-expression- accessorization of their user created content is hot
• When thinking about developing for Facebook Apps- consider how the user experience will be viewed within the Facebook news feeds which is where a lot of growth comes from
• Use tools like web-conferencing to test your target market- watch them click through on your beta site, see what they miss, what they click on etc. be agile enough to make changes based on real time usage
• if your service is a way for users to interact with others, or if your growth is going to be from them 'inviting' their friends- build in things like automatic upload of their contact list for sharing and building the community
• if you find people 'teaching' others how to use your tools (PBWiki talked about how educational users were doing seminars on using their wikis)- reward them by fueling the fire- they will be your spokespeople around the world- create presentation material they can use, send them t-shirts, premium access accounts, etc. 'Employee' your users.
  

So...? i work for Dow Jones mostly in the B2B enterprise market- what did i learn? Basically that creating buzz around products and services can extend beyond product brochures and Ads in industry magazines. We are already do some things but can definitely do more like:

• We already do a good job of this with our Factiva Insight products which do media monitoring and measurement by providing access to the tool to journalists, commenters and others. My colleague Melanie Surplice in PR usually highlights some of those on her blog.
• I constantly see blog posts (i have a couple searches on the term 'factiva') by librarians that write about finding something awesome in the database or even how they teach people how to use the factiva service- make them factiva 'divas'- send them a t-shirt, have them work with you to create training materials etc.

A couple of additional things i would like to comment on from yesterday:

1. boys- learn how to do presentations- presentation skills are important- engage, flow and message and if you have to use a PowerPoint slide deck use it well....
2. i call them boys in #1 above because I was also a bit disappointed (ok maybe more then a bit) that there was only one female on all the panels. Interestedly enough some of them spoke about the target market audience of viral application being young women- making some comments about how they sit around in a Tutu reading Cosmo magazine trying to figure out how to market to them.

Great Tutu photo credited to ambrosialove