Archive for the ‘viral marketing’ tag
Ghosts in Bottles – Link Opportunity Missed
You may have seen the recent buzz about the the 2 bottled ghosts sold through New Zealand ebay clone Tradme to an electronic cigarette company. Besides wondering wtf an “electronic cigarette” is (do you plug it in or is it virtual, like that zippo iPhone app?) I immediately thought, “Holy Shit, whatever an e-cigarette is, those guys are viral link building geniuses”.
The most expensive colored water on the planet
Well after the story had went viral, I started looking around on Google to see what kind of link juice this company was getting from all of this press, which includes virtually every major news organization on the planet. Imagine my horror when I discovered that 1) the company was referred to over and over again as “electronic cigarette company” and 2) this company has no web site or web presence what-so-ever.
So, after reading like a gillion articles on this thing, I finally found the name of the company – Safer Smoking New Zealand. Checked Google NZ, nothing.
I understand you may be a new company starting out, haven’t got the web site up yet, just trying to make a splash with a big gimmicky auction buy, but dude, at least make sure the reporters know your freaking name! It’s called a press release! Instead of taking advantage of an almost priceless viral marketing opportunity, they just paid about $1,400 USD for what appears to be 2 small bottles of blue food coloring and will probably not sell one more electronic cigarette than they did the month before.
The moral of the story, always make sure you are in a position to take advantage of marketing opportunities at a moments notice. Maybe in a future post I will expand on that topic.