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by Geoffrey McDonald Bowll

on Mar 21

Guerrilla Guide: E-marketing

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Have a reason to be loved

Give them experience, values, assistance, humanity, vision, compassion and enjoyment. Be helpful, be useful. Service, and a fantastic corporate culture, sure would help too.

Love the culture

I’m just saying use your brains and get into the community. Option A is a banner ad on Yahoo! But Option B is a dance party game that has them donate $10 to St John Ambulance to save someone who’s ODing, embedded with your ads. Your choice.

Be funny or cruel

E-humour is more brutal, more slapstick. And if you’re not funny or edgy you’re not going to get sent on, so you’ve wasted your money, finito.

Have a long tail

Few of us can afford to dominate on major sites like Yahoo! or ninemsn, but if you follow your buyer’s behaviour and track their steps, you can often buy on less popular, more targeted sites at way below mainstream rates.

People power rules

If you are finding your stuff commented on, don’t answer back. (Learn, and that’s all.) If your board can’t help but try to control it, you will be swamped by the general public who hate corporates being defensive. It’s death to be seen to be corrupting the power of the people. You are invading their personal space. It’s actually much better to make fun of your own brands, your own messaging. Takes maturity, intelligence and guts, but works brilliantly.

Twitter

Everyone in e-land bags twittering as bland, shallow communications that don’t matter. Who cares if you tell the world how many times you’ve been to the toilet this morning, or what you thought of last night’s Big Brother show? Sure as I’m sitting here typing on a Sunday, let me tell you, the dumber, the sillier, the more the public love something. And the younger the market, the more they say everything – they have no sense of ‘privacy’. Twitter away if you can, without being caught as a company doing it. I know of companies hiring people to send stories out to their friends. But be bloody careful – people easily pick planted information.

Give experiences

The punters want fun things to do. Stimulation, not sales talk. Scare them, infuriate them, just don’t bore them. A hint – if your board warmly approve of something, it’s not going to work. Much better to apologise while showing the results, than bother to ask for permission.

Be viral

Few of the media sellers support the concept of viral, ‘cause it involves us sending stuff to each other without them getting a slice. But work? You betcha. Any ad worth its budget should be put up on MySpace or YouTube. And sent to all the email addresses you have in your laptop.

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