Category: Content Marketing

The Meme That Smashed Benchmarks And Was Shamelessly Plagiarised

Sometimes, just sometimes a content piece comes along which gets into the sweet spot: with the users and with Facebook’s ongoing experiments. A meme which was born out of the collective frustration of the team in planning a group trip, went crazy viral smashing all our previous image post benchmarks.

meme1

The Results – First Week

smashing-meme-2

The meme was part of our experiment on Facebook, an innocent little 3pm post on a Tuesday, had gathered more than 110,000 comments by Friday.

  • Reached 20 million News-feeds
    (that’s like reaching the entire population of Netherlands, and then some!)
  • Received more than 120,000 comments
  • Added 16,000 new fans to our Facebook page
  • Shared by more than 100,000 users
  • Smashed the previous benchmark of image post virality
  • Featured by 9gag! with 200+ comments
  • All organic and with-in the first week!

Learnings

Content Marketing to me is like operating a movie studio, make ten movies hoping that two would be crazy successful. Some stuff works, some just dies a quick death, and what works becomes a best practice :)

The following four buckets help in planning topics for virality

  • Useful: Is it providing a solution or solving a pain point?
  • Inspirational: Does it inspire users to take action?
  • Topical: Good old News-jacking: Breaking News + Brand DNA. Example, and another example :)
  • Celebrate nuances: The little things, the stuff we don’t say, tiny part of our users’ lives

Easy to guess which bucket this meme fell into :)

“Do ten experiments, two may work, just like movie studios”

Shamelessly Plagiarised

Got update from friends about the same meme being shamelessly copied and passed on as their own, on Facebook and Instagram. Re-posting the content is cool, give credit and I’ll understand, but when you erase our logo and put yours shamelessly, that is downright cheap. Our videos have been copy pasted before but not like this.

  • Facebook: On Laughing Colors Facebook Page: Take a look, conveniently removed our logo and added their own, got 90k likes and 14k shares at the time of writing this.
  • Instagram: On some ‘Realshit.Gyan’ account, take a look. Same shit, different account. This one had received 10k likes and 1600 comments at the time of this post

UPDATE: The said posts were removed on request :)

Video Marketing – Q & A

Screen Shot 2015-09-18 at 4.30.44 pm

One hour of crazy typing, awesome questions and a vibrant group. Prateek Shah organised a Video Marketing chat on Facebook recently, and the rapid fire questions made for a very energetic afternoon :) The event link is now an archive of sorts with questions and answers about video marketing. From review of a video, to best practices to ROI, we covered it all. Check it out

Few questions asked in the chat

Q: Are there platforms other than YouTube and Facebook, that brands should seriously focus on for promoting video content?

Q: What is the difference between video marketing and video blogging? Are they same? How can they be used in b2b business/lead generation?

Q: Can you share some key case studies which gives a great perspective on how a growing brand leaped ahead just by following a strong video marketing strategy.

Q: So I started this ecom startup and am on a very tight budget. How do I go start with DM to let the people know about everything. Get some sales and create awareness!

Q: We build multi author blog, we are trying to promote multi host video channel. What no of volumes we must aim at to promote the Expert?? (I mean how often videos should be released and total no of videos)

Q: How can we generate website traffic with the help of video content?
(It is for marketing of events not for a product)

Q: How do you measure the success of a video marketing campaign? What do you measure?

Q: Does having product videos on product page help more than exclusive videos on Youtube page for an e-commerce company?

Q: What are the best practices to control cost while promoting a brand through videos and to engage audience?

Q: I’ve made a video for my app marketing, according to all the rules and guru research. I made it very short, crispy, informative and what not. I still am struggling to understand why is my video not getting good response? Can you throw some light on it by quickly taking a look at it?

Q: At what stage one should focus on Video marketing in a startup. Should it be done parallel or keeping in view the kind of engagement it demands, done at a later stage. Sounds basic, but just in case your experience can throw some light on this.

Q: How to do marketing in youtube?

Q: Which is the best platform for video marketing? Facebook or Youtube?

Q: Does Instagram video marketing work in India?

Check out the answers :)

How to make a viral video? Quick Interview

Few weeks back I met Rajeev Suri, who’s super energetic and vibrantly spirited about digital marketing. If you want to be in the know of the latest insights from the industry, hit subscribe on his video blog on YouTube, he interviews the game changers in the Indian digital landscape and provides a lot of learnings and insights.

It was an honour to be interviewed by him, and talk about something which has shaped my journey over last few years: Viral Videos. In quick 10 minutes, we discussed the best practices behind making viral videos, from coming up with topics to distribution. One memory from my visit to Mumbai, neatly captured in a video :)

Highlights from the video and his blog post..

Replace your obsession with the video going viral with your focus on the content and story you are going to tell.  And for God’s sake, don’t make an ad. Social media is about activism. People are trying to make a change, and impact. focus on that.

Use the right medium to propagate. sharing or share ability is in the DNA of Facebook, not so much on youtube, which is traditionally the source of video distribution. And don’t link a youtube video on Facebook, upload directly on Facebook.

Happy Content Marketing :)

Best Practices in Viral Video Marketing

Few months back I did a webinar on the best practices in viral video marketing, the method to the madness in producing and distributing video content. Here’s a quick 5 minute video with highlights from the webinar, the longer version you can find below. Happy Content Marketing to you :)

Webinar Highlights in 5 Minutes

Content ideas are everywhere, execution is everything

Full Webinar – One Hour

Operate like movie studios, do ten experiments, two will work

Slide-deck

 

News-Jacking The Infamous Govt. Ban!

bangkok

The news spread like wildfire, govt. without notice banned porn in India. Now that’s something a brand will never associate with, forget creating content around it. But then we thought, what would Amul do? Amul’s creatives have by far been the inspiration for topical content, the original king of news-jacking in India.

News-jacking is a fancy-schmancy marketing lingo for topical content, or easily put: Breaking news + Brand DNA, for creating content.

We racked our brains, until we hit the sweet spot, spot on, yet subtle. Since our brand DNA is all about celebrating travel, we merged the ‘ban’ with popular tourist destinations, and the idea was born.

Ban is the new ‘B’ word

banaras

brisbane

Take a look at the entire album

When stuff like this happens, you got to become CNN for 2 hours, from brainstorming, to design, to post, super fast at execution. And results were great, and since it is in the news still, it’s growing :)