I’ve been on Twitter for the last months and I love using biy.ly as a URL shortener because of the stats I gather. It’s interesting to see what the most clicked Tweets or the most Retweeted Tweets are.  One thing I realized is that publishing a link doesn’t create a commotion on its own.  What makes the difference is presenting or saying why it’s interesting.

I was wondering why and realized that in my “analog” or real life, I wouldn’t lend a book to a friend without explaining why I think it’s a worthwhile read.  If someone drops a newspaper article on your desk without explaining why (ie. I was thinking of you while reading this and…) it will most likely remain on your desk for weeks.

I believe this applies to any online campaign you’re planning. Adding a share with friends feature doesn’t ensure that it will go viral. What ensures that a campaign goes viral is the stamp of approval and reasoning of these friends.  If you don’t offer content that people can appropriate, chances are that you’re losing a big opportunity to create hype.

1 commentlatest by JS, Oct 13th at 12H28

Those days we talk more and more about building ecosystems around brands. Especially online where we have to adapt our brand attitude, messages, interactions based on the medium we use. Think of your own example, you’re not the same on Twitter as you’re on Facebook as you’re on your personal blog. We all adapt those presences based on the social network, people interacting with it. So we build our own little media everywhere…

With the social networks being now part of the web journey for all our users, we can no longer ignore that our brands have to face it and integrate it.

How do we do that? It is for sure by understanding the various environments, their codes and audiences, the way they’re used and then by defining your brand positioning/voice for each of them.

Today’s web ecosystem means that you can no longer plan the web as an isolated website, but more that an “alive” presence. Our brands will have to be humanized to be able to interact and be credible in such environments.

For example, a web plan today should integrate various tactics:
- think on how you can export your site content, can people share it easily? not only via en email sent to friends but surely by building pieces that are made to be shared and use tools to facilitate a large spread (ie. Addthis).
- what’s your voice on Twitter? on Facebook? On your blog? On others’ blogs?
- what’s your voice on your mobile site?
- what’s your voice in your newsletters?
- what’s your presence on FlickR? YouTube?

All these can be planned and tailored to deliver better results based on clear marketing objectives because at the end they can save you tons of media spends and build an efficient awareness. Like Seth Godin said last week in a conference here in Montreal “Stop advertising and start socializing”.

I truly believe that the web is more than a media, another way of connecting with consumers, the web is a living environment. It has demonstrated in the past years that it can create “virals, and like in real life, if you want things to grow fast, you just need to set up the perfect conditions for it.

Have a nice week-end all :)

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The folks at Geiko noticed the man now known as ‘the Numa Numa Guy’ (and the geek to whom I refer in the title) was getting a whole lotta hits on youtube. And by a whole lotta, I mean 27.28 million so far according to gawker.com. So they took the little Geiko gecko dude and inserted him into the fun. That little Geiko gecko dude is funny. I can’t take my eyes off of him throughout the entire video.
Numa Numa

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