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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, June 2015 |
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Last Chance: Have Your Viral Marketing Tip Featured In This Newsletter
This is only one part of a series on making a message viral. I’d like to include your stories in the series—with full attribution to you, of course. Your viral message success can be for a product, a company, a service, an organization, or an idea.
Please write to me at shel AT GreenAndProfitable.com with the subject line, Viral Marketing Success Story, and *brief answers* to the following questions:
1. What were you attempting to market?
2. What steps did you take to make it viral?
3. What results did you experience?
4. How you’d like to be identified if I use your story (name, company, URL)
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| This Month’s Tip: Make It Viral, Part 2 |
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| Strategies to Build Virality |
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Last month, we introduced the idea of viral marketing, and I shared two examples of successful campaigns. Now, let’s increase the likelihood of your message or campaign going viral.
Notice, I said “increase the likelihood.” I didn’t say “go viral.” In this world, there are no guarantees. The fickle and unpredictable universe cannot be forced to go where it doesn’t want to go. It took Google less than one second to bring back 5,500,000 results for “expensive viral marketing failures.” As in traditional media coverage, there are no guarantees.
In fact, the worst thing that can happen is a viral campaign that backfires, makes you look like an idiot, and THEN goes viral. If you think it can’t happen to you, just ask Sony https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2006/dec/11/newsonyviral or Johnson & Johnson https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/17/AR2008111703280.html
Even if you don’t think you’d ever use viral marketing, you might very well use crowdfunding (e.g., Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Barnraiser, GofundMe)—and you’ll need to get viral traffic to your funding page. Or you might need to build community support for a cause.
So…what can you do to build traction in with your hopes and prayers?
Engage the Emotions
If you can…
- Make people laugh
- Get them angry
- Engage their compassion
- Harness their “better angels”
Your chances of success are much higher—because people will want to share your message and pass on that humor, anger, compassion, or inspiration. Think about the types of messages that come into your inbox or social media and strike such a deep chord that you want to share them. How can you create the same effect in others?
Influence the Influencers
In my 8th book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I discuss an amazing viral campaign Two book co-authors identified 50 top bloggers and did an over-the-top but easily replicated campaign. Because several key bloggers took the bait and the story was picked up by other bloggers who read them, the book was featured on 178 blogs. That’s more than three times as many blogs as they contacted.
The key takeaway here is to contact people who influence a lot of other people, whether via a blog, social media, a newsletter, a newspaper column, or even a major network TV program. If you contact even 20 people who have 100,000 followers, and three cover you, you’ve just potentially reached 300,000 people.
Influence the Public
Remember that old-fashioned idea called media exposure? It may feel quaint in the social media age, but it still works. Not only can you amplify awareness of your campaign by orders of magnitude, reaching a vastly larger number of people. You also gain an exponential boost in your credibility if you get respected news sources to cover you. This is why I started using media publicity for the social justice work I was doing, all the way back to the 1970s.
And let me tell you. Lots and lots of people still read newspapers, listen to the radio, and watch TV. And they tell their friends.
Start Conversations, On AND Offline
Even now, not everybody is wired. Of those who are wired, not everyone’s on Twitter or Facebook (let alone the smaller networks). Make sure you reach people who don’t spend much time in front of their devices.
With Save the Mountain, we did old-fashioned door-knocking and tabling, and it was probably our most effective organizing tool. Yes, we did social media (as it existed then). Yes, we newspaper, radio, and TV publicity. But the one-to-one human contact is what built our movement. My daughter even got her entire sixth-grade class to write letters to the local paper, several of which (including hers) were published.
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I just pretaped an interview with Green Divas radio, which by now (or within a few days) should be available at https://thegreendivas.com/archived-shows/. |
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And I’d like to call your attention to two recent interviews. I think my full-length segment on The Bucket List Life might just be the best of the hundreds of interviews I’ve done: https://thebucketlistlife.com/p59 . |
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There’s also this very short interview on The Price of Business: https://youtu.be/6vBCNYGi5Mg |
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| If you’re attending Book Expo America and want to get together, drop me a private note, subject Meet you at BEA? Please tell me a bit about you, your book, and your goals, right in that first email. (You can do it all in one short paragraph, trust me). |
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.
Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
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| “As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).” |
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| Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help |
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| No-Charge Consultation with My Life Coach, Oshana Himot
Working with Oshana, I’ve been able to achieve remarkable clarity about my true purpose in life, and how to inject that purpose into the very core of my business. My new focus on turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance is a direct result of our work together.
Note: this is NOT an affiliate arrangement. I do not benefit financially by recommending her.
She writes:
“My work as a life coach assists you to achieve your goals and to contribute your skills in helping to create a better society. Together, we focus on your strengths and abilities and the areas of your life most essential to you. Working on your life and work goals at the same time can enable you to achieve them more easily. To set up a time for a complimentary consultation, call 480-353-7312 or email oshanaben@yahoo.com “ |
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| Another Recommended Book—The Starbucks Experience |
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The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary, by Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D.
When the original Starbucks opened, with no seats, it sold only ground coffee; you couldn’t get a cup to drink. And just as it took milkshake mixer salesman Ray Krok to recognize the possibilities in the McDonald’s concept, so it took Howard Schultz, who noticed that Starbucks bought a lot of the high-end coffee grinders he sold, to bring the company, kicking and screaming, well past grinding and bagging coffee.
Eventually, tired of swimming upstream from owners who only wanted to be in the bagged coffee market, and only in and around Seattle, Schultz organized the investors who bought it.
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Hearing Dr. Joseph Michelli tell this story at a talk some years back, I acquired his book. But it took the recent brouhaha over the “Race Together” initiative a few months ago before I took the book off my shelf and started reading it. As one of only a few people to defend Starbucks’ attempt to start a national conversation on race (see my blog post, “Starbucks’ “Race Together”: Am I the Only One Who Thinks It’s a GOOD Idea?,” https://greenandprofitable.com/starbucks-race-together-am-i-the-only-one-who-thinks-its-a-good-idea/ ), I wanted to know more about what makes this wildly successful company tick.
And I confess, I came in somewhat skeptical. I grew up in New York City, one of the few places in the US where you could get a good cup of coffee in the pre-Starbucks era (at least in Little Italy and Greenwich Village), and currently live in an area with a very strong independent coffeehouse culture. I find Starbucks’ straight-up coffees more bitter than I like, and their coffee-based drinks and pastries way too sweet. While the baristas are pleasant enough, I’ve never experienced service at Starbucks that felt extraordinary, and I’m aware of several coffee companies that source 100% of their beans through fair trade. But it’s also a company that I respect, both because it does talk consistently about social responsibility both in its markets and its supplier countries, encourages volunteer and philanthropic projects—and because it seems to succeed without selling out the things that matter.
Michelli identifies five strategies that contribute to Starbucks’ success:
- Make it your own
- Everything matters
- Surprise and delight
- Embrace resistance
- Leave your mark
How do those work out in practice? In an overall experience that keeps customers coming back. Employees have wide discretion to provide exemplary service, going far beyond simply replacing a drink that has some problem. He tells dozens of examples, even including a barista who sat with her long-time customer, sharing a cup of coffee and a muffin the way the customer had done for years with her recently deceased husband (pp. 77-78), another who opened an hour early in order to serve a regular spotted outside at 5 a.m. (p. 84), and another who gave away a free replacement French press machine worth when she couldn’t locate parts to fix the customers worn out one (p. 105). Maybe the most amazing story is of the store manager and two baristas (one just getting off shift) who saw a passer-by fall on the sidewalk outside the store, called a cab, took the man to the hospital, stayed with him at the clinic, and even lent him money for treatment, as the traveler had left his wallet in his hotel (p. 85).
And they remember their regulars’ preferences, even though Starbucks offers an astonishing 17,632 different varieties of coffee drink.
Schultz’s dream was to create a “third place,” more formal than home and more comfortable than work.
Starbucks provides extensive training—and listens to its employees. Frappucino, accounting for half the chain’s profits, was invented by Dina Campion, a line employee in the Santa Monica store.
Perhaps the most interesting of Michelli’s five principles (each of which gets a chapter) is “embrace resistance.” Hearing and acting on criticism extends well past thanking and de-escalating not just irate customers (nothing unusual among companies that “get it”). A writer who’d published a column critical of Starbucks’ service on a banking website was pleasantly shocked to get a voicemail from Gregg Johnson, Senior Vice President of Emerging Business. Expecting a confrontation, he timidly returned the call, only to be greeted with a warm, sincere apology that resulted in a follow-up column and invitations to speak. Johnson was asked why he took the time:
…You obviously respond to get customer recover. But the main reason…is an opportunity to learn more about what we can do how we can be better, how we can approach things differently, how we can help our operators be better operators, how we can help our baristas be better baristas and customer service advocates, and how we, as leaders, can guide them…to provide that great experience. (p. 113)
An even more interesting part of the resistance principle is in how Starbucks can bring cultural sensitivity as it enters a new market. In one New Mexico community, the district manager and a colleague went door-to-door, introducing themselves to every café owner and talking about how to make it work for everyone (p. 129). In China, the company committed significant resources to education charities, knowing that education is highly valued in that country (p. 122). And sometimes, the company decides that the best course of action is NOT to open if its community ties aren’t yet strong enough (p. 133).
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