The Out-Smarts Blog and Podcast

As you may well know, back in June I was excited to participate in the mini book expo for bloggers.

I signed up and was sent the audio book Guerrilla PR Wired by David Levine. After the set back of discovering that the Iofy chip only worked on my MAC and not my iPod or phone as I had hoped, it took me some time to actually listen (after all, when I am at my desk I am usually working and its hard to find desk time to listen too!). Unfortunately, you can’t just stop the narrative wherever you like to review or recap which was a problem when the application crashed and I had to start again at the beginning of a chapter.

The narrative itself is easy to listen to and well laid out but I am not the target audience for this type of publication. The intended reader is a business person who is a beginner when it come to using the Internet - you know, one of those people that look like a dear caught in the headlights at the mere mention of the web marketing and for those people I would highly recommend it.

However, I did find some gems in the book pertaining to PR that will help Out-Smarts plan, set up and maintain a PR campaign. The book includes great tips on writing a PR piece (layout and format) and how to approach promoting them to the right publications and people. It covers guidance on your website design to support your campaign; learning how to understand the “media gatekeeper”; tactics to get your website publicized; strategies to help you continue to attract attention without becoming stale or overpowering as well as how to follow up on  and maintain success; pitfalls you should be aware of and how to deal with negative P.R..  I did learn a thing or 2 about PR but overall this wasn’t the best publication for me. Thanks to the mini book expo for allowing us to participate though.

We’ve talked in this blog before about the rise in prominence of social networking and its implications for serving the needs of diverse communities. Well the latest hit social network is aimed at the an even younger audience. The phenomenon sweeping through elementary schools is Club Penguin. It’s a site developed here in BC that kids can go to and create their own penguin avatar and play games (for money), meet and chat with other penguins and generally hang out. If you are a member (costs about $6 a month) you can buy pets (puffles) for your penguin, furniture, accessories even pizza and coffee. It’s becoming so popular (700,000+ registered users adding thousands more everyday) that Disney themselves recently bought the company that created it for between $350 - $700 million depending on the sites growth in the near future. It will be interesting to see how Disney intends to use it’s new acquisition and how long it will be before we see Disney branding in Penguin Cove. For now its definitely more popular for social networking in my household than Second Life (the grown ups say so!).

I was recently lucky enough to be selected to receive a free book on guerilla P.R. tactics. In true viral marketing fashion word spread to me of a mini book expo for bloggers via a blog I read regularly called My Name Is Kate (thanks for the tip Kate!).

Turns out (much to my glee) that I’m not even getting a book but an audiobook chip that I can listen to on my Mac or MP3 or phone - just perfect for those days when the beach beckons.

Nothing’s truly free I hear you say and you’re right, it does come with a catch. I get the book for free on condition that I review it in my blog. So watch this space for a review of the audiobook itself called Guerilla P.R. by Michael Levine as well as a description of my user experience with the tiny memory card I am anxiously watching for the postman to deliver.

The Office Journal recently published a question of mine posed to Brian Scudamore in their 1-800-Got-Question? column. Brian, Founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has grown the company to one world’s largest junk removal service companies since its inception in 1989. Much of this success has been due to word of mouth marketing so I asked for his advice in this area. His answer warmed my cockles as it were because it confirmed some of the benefits of new media marketing I have extolled myself in this very blog such as the fact that its costs less and is much easier than you think.

Here’s the question and Brian’s answer in full:

I have recently rejigged my sales and marketing consulting practice to help clients take advantage of new media marketing solutions such as blogging to help them extend their reach. Viral marketing has obviously played a big role in helping 1-800-GOT-JUNK? establish its brand and grow its customer base.

How much of that do you credit to technology and what would your advice be to a small organisation like mine that is looking to harness viral marketing to spread the good word?

Answer:

Hi Mhairi,

For the last few years, technology has certainly been 1-800-GOT-JUNK?’s best friend to get the word out about our company and our services. The primary reason is that technology has drastically increased the speed at which we are now able to spread our message. The appealing factor of viral marketing through technology for a small business is that once you have a computer, the remaining costs of creating a viral campaign are minimal.

We have utilized several media to accomplish viral marketing, including youtube.com, where anyone can post videos. For us, we filmed a low budget commercial that was actually only run a few times on television. The success of our commercial was actually generated from The video, infamously known as our Rat Advertising Trial (R.A.T.), featured on TBS as one of the world’s funniest commercials and attracting more than one million computer viewers.

Another technological medium that we have found successful is our Business Smarts podcast that we are able to post on iTunes. Podcasting is not only low-cost, but very simple to do. The essential ingredient for a successful viral podcast, which your target audience will listen to, is creating a dynamic topic people will find interesting.

Thanks to Brian for your insights and to Office Journal for publishing the question.