Video Alone is NOT WOMM
Video alone is not Word of Mouth Marketing any more than the video of your kid’s first birthday is “viral”. Word of Mouth Marketing is a set of activities within a marketing objective that do the following:
- Provide a remarkable experience (in it’s literal “worthy of remark” sense)
- Facilitate sharing this experience – between customers, between the brand and customers, between communities, etc.
Video and video sites make video chunks of information very easy to share. The rub – and what determines whether or not a video becomes “viral” – is whether or not the video is remarkable enough to inspire sharing.
How do you become remarkable? You have to know your customers – listen to what they find remarkable now and note what topics make their radar. Then, examine your product/service/culture/offering etc and what potential sources of conversational capital you can own. After that, it’s all about making a great video, check out these guys or the Viral Video Artiste below.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/aXJVxmWTmkg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
If you do not start the world’s next viral sensation/Word of Mouth Marketing case study, what you have is not bad. Having rich, varied, positive multimedia content on your site and tagged on video sites is indeed a critical thing in our search-driven world. If you want to develop multimedia content in the hopes of generating conversations, make the first move not by talking, but listening. If you know what your customers are talking about, you will have a much better sense of how to create relevant videos, regardless of whether or not they show up on the Today Show.