Viral Marketing Plan: No Pain, No Gain

Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 3 of March , 2008 at 9:37 am

You find so many social networks these days that give you viral social marketing opportunities. How do you take advantage? How do you go viral? It’s the eternal marketing question. What can you do that will make people laugh at your YouTube video and say, “Holy mackeral! THIS is incredible! I have to email THIS to everyone.”

Add to the mix the fact that all your competition wants to do exactly the same thing - before you do - and the whole puzzle gets stickier.

First, you need a viral social marketing model. Recently, an incredible photo made the rounds through email. It showed a naked man on a hospital gurney, attendants standing around. What made this man’s photo remarkable was the telephone pole sticking out of his butt. It had been been sawed off, so it was only about 3 feet long, and it looked to be about 8-10 inches in diameter. The article with it said he had been thrown from his boat while bass fishing. You can picture the rest. He survived, but had some serious soft tissue damage. Oh, man. I’ll bet he did!

So think of the TV show “America’s Funniest Videos.” People send in their home videos of friends and relatives doing really stupid things, which often lead to incredible pain … which causes the audience to laugh like crazy. And that is exactly the effect you want to create (the laughter - not the pain), so the clips on this show may be a great model for your own viral marketing campaign.

What if your business is … say … accounting? Or anything else perceived by the public as totally boring? How can you possibly go viral?

How about THIS YouTube video: “The Death-Defying Adventures of Accountant-Man!”

1. Accountant-Man, dressed in superhero garb, sits at a desk. A dog comes up and lifts its leg, peeing on Accountant-Man’s foot.
2. Accountant-Man, smiling and all full of himself, tosses a baseball to his small child. The child hits a line drive right into Accountant-Man’s … (you’ve seen this before, right?). And Accountant-Man doubles over and drops to the ground in agonizing pain.
3. Accountant-Man rides his bicycle. You yell, “Hey, Accountant-Man! Are you on your way to save another victim of bad arithmetic?” And Accountant-Man looks at you and nods vigorously and raises his hands in triumph … and crashes into a tree, getting thrown off his bike.

If you’ve ever watched “America’s Funniest Videos,” you’ve already seen these clips, and a lot of others like them. People do dumb things, they get hurt, and the audience cracks up. At home, you take it viral. You call your family into the room. “Watch THIS! This is incredible!”

So next time you watch this show, take notes. What you have here is a perfect viral marketing model for any business or product or service, no matter how essentially boring it may be.

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Category: Viral Marketing, YouTube

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