Live Blogging: Third Tuesday with Darren Barefoot

I’m well ensconced over here in a corner of Century, a lovely little restaurant that used to be a bank about a billion years ago. Or you know, about 90 in the world of Vancouver architecture. Same thing really.

I’ve managed to secure myself a beer and a photographer, in that order, and really, that’s all I need. (images coming as soon as he gets them online)

We’re getting underway here shortly….

7:15 annnd I’ve just confirmed that I don’t have a connection. excellent. This will be a really good live blog without an actual wifi connection. Rebecca has a connection. I do not. Tod is blaming it on my PC.

7:19 Darren’s introducing his case study: ThoughtFarmer. They make a wiki based intranet. Super cool products are easier to market. well, yes.

7:23 “ooh pretty slides!” that we can’t see! no projector = lack of visual aids for anyone but Darren. I’m glad he’s enjoying them. :)

7:25 people respond to originality. They value it highly. If you approach them in a creative way, you can capture the attention of the people like Mike Arrington & Pete Cashmore.

Marketing. The real definition? The thing you’re marketing.

7:27 We care mostly about ourselves. Go read “Made to Stick” – it talks about Maslow’s hierarchy, and talks about it in a way that makes sense to these sort of campaigns.

Remember: Funny beats unfunny all the time. It’s a key aspect of a campaign. We laugh at things we are surprised at.

1. The steps to create a new campaign include:
2. doing extensive research
3. finding the good idea
4. Using the above as the means to pitch or contact online influencers
   Follow up: hassle the bloggers a little bit (not much, but a bit)

The end result is that more visitors = more users = more links

7:32: Need an original idea to grab people’s attention. You’ve got to remember that, as a marketer, you’re essentially an interrupter.

Capulet made a fake company with a fake intranet called “Tubetastic“. “We make tubes, a whole series of them”. They wrote a couple funny stories, created a site. They were funny enough. Then, they created a profile of every blogger they were contacting as though were employees of “Tubetastic“. They all got goofy titles “tube shiner”, “assistant tube shiner”. they researched each blogger and created “interviews” with each blogger.

Every client gets a “social media resources page” links to blogs, elevator pitches, logos, Vimeo sets, Flickr sets, screenshots etc. They got the ThoughtFarmer to twitter, use Vimeo and more. They created a whole social media profile for the company.

Because everyone has far too much email, Capulet mailed the bloggers a ‘welcome new employee kit’. They are trading on the mystery “what the hell is this” humour, and recognition of exclusive peers. What’s the first thing they see when they go to the site? themselves. Their content. Their “interview”.

7:42 Safe is risky and risky is safe [Seth Godin]. The risk is that bloggers contacted knew that “wow, there’s my picture, my RSS feed, … um… that’s not cool…” except that most of the people they sent things to are pretty public people.

How did they find the addresses? Asked. For the most part, they asked people for their addresses. And those people, those public people and bloggers, offered them.

Make sure you’ve got your community management risk covered too. Any time you have a wiki in a marketing platform, it can sour with bad apples putting porn online or saying disparaging things about the platform.

They got on TechCrunch, and Read Write Web – the client was thrilled because those are two of the biggest tech blogs in the world. One of the risks involved in this campaign however, is that the RWW post was more about the marketing campaign than it was the client. There’s not really any way to protect against this however. If the post doesn’t mention your product, at least it mentions your marketing in a positive way.

7:54 A lot of the conversation among the technology elite has moved to Twitter. there were a lot of tweets about the campaign. Marketers need to determine the value of a tweet.

8:02 Overall, the ThoughtFamer TubeTastic campaign was considered a success. Traffic doubled, they got more requests for demos and got more links. They achieved all of their goals in a targeted manner.