Tag: viral marketing

News-jacking Dussehra: An Idea to NDTV coverage in 2 days!

0raavan

‘News-jacking’ is the art of injecting ideas (with your brand DNA) into news stories, creating kick-ass content and riding media coverage plus social engagement. What started on a Friday evening, came full circle with coverage on NDTV’s homepage on the D-Day! :)

Idea & Execution

We had the hindu festival of Dussehra coming up in a few days.  The popular mythology around Dussehra is the victory of god Rama over the ‘ten-headed’ demon king Ravana. After countless ideas and brainstorm droppings, our hunt was to find brand DNA match to News-jack this.

So came the simple idea to turn the central character of the festival on its head! We re-imagined Ravana (the ten-headed demon king), as if he were alive today, and put him in everyday situations, creating cool graphics for a Facebook Album. There’s always an urgency of a news-room when we’re working on topical content: Move Fast and Execute! And when it’s ready, distribute like crazy. Distribution is half the game, after you’ve cracked the idea and content. From Facebook post, internal promotion to blogger outreach in the beginning.

2-raavan

1-ravan

3. ravan
See the full series – Guess Who’s Back

Results

Screen Shot 2015-10-22 at 11.28.16 pm

Got a ping from a friend on WhatsApp that NDTV had picked up our post and it had made it to their homepage. Phew! Happy Dussehra!

Spending money is easy, getting there with an idea and kick-ass execution is Startup Swag!

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

 

What Matters More in Influencer Marketing: Message or the Messenger?

pic-1-influencer-marketing

Fifteen years back Malcolm Gladwell wrote ‘The Tipping Point’ and idea of influencers was born. Gladwell argued the “Law of the Few: The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” It meant that a select few individuals had the power to influence their tribes and as marketers we had to find these mavens, these super-influentials and have them on our side. Over the last few years, I ran campaigns with this rule implanted in my head. If I focus on select few, treat them well, win them over, then we win the game. Well, all that changed, in the last one year.

When The Message Trumped The Messenger

In August of 2014, we released a video, a travel hacks video for ixigo. The video got mere 300 views on YouTube and died, but the second day we released it on Facebook as a native video. That day, Gladwell’s law in my head was shattered forever. We got 50,000 views on first day, and the video went on to become a 7 million views hit, shared by 3.5 lakh people over few months.

Half of our 7 lakh fans on Facebook suddenly became influencers.

Every ‘share’ our content got, influenced users, with many fans specifically tagging their friends and family to see the video. That one video had the reach of 25 million, which was about 25% of Facebook’s user base in India at that time (view case study) We followed by releasing a bunch of videos, from the learning, and got phonemenal success. One such video was shared by a Facebook user and it alone got 2.4 million views on his page. The question we now ask before we dive into designing the message: How will people be compelled to talk about this and share it? Sharing became the new currency :)

Influencer Marketing On its Head

With the learnings from that one video and many other viral hits later, the best practice evolved into making share-worthy content. If the content (the message) is compelling enough for anyone to hit share, then everyone is an influencer (messenger); We didn’t have to find the perfect people to spread the idea, if we focus on the message, make it compelling and easy to share, it doesn’t matter whether the individuals who share it have 5 friends or 50,000, whether they are popular or not.

However what may be true for one vertical may not be true for another. I’m sure many a marketing strategies are working great by engaging selected influencers. We did some influencer marketing campaigns in the past which were successful, but nothing came close to the phenomenal numbers we saw by focussing on the message.

I would love to hear your experiences with Influencer Marketing, your challenges and if you think this game is changing faster than we thought :)