Sacrilicious Marketing

Everybody is so caught up in the idea of blog to book deals, but really when you look at the Internet fame deals recently they have more in common than just blogging. They are mostly consumer centric, driven by the micro content phenomenon and appeal to the Gen X/Gen Y demographic. Now, let’s dissect that statement.

Top 10 Best Micro Content to Fame Deals

Recent Micro Content to Book/TV Deals

1.     Shitmydadsays (TV Deal)

2.     Fakeapstylebook (Book Deal)

3.     Fmylife (Book Deal)

4.     Texts From Last Night (TV Deal)

5.     F U Penguin (Book Deal)

6.     This is Why You’re Fat (Book Deal)

7.     Chuck Norris Facts (Book Deal)

8.     I Can Has Cheezburger (Book Deal)

9.     Stuff White People Like (Book Deal)

10.  Fail Blog (Book Deal)

Resource: Exploiting the Blog to Book Deal: A Guide

Resource: From Blog to Book, How 6 Authors Did It

1. Consumer Oriented

When you think of publishing fame do you think Seth Godin or JK Rowling? Seth has penned 12 best sellers but only sold 20 million copies, has an ad network/wiki called Squidoo and a social network called Triiibes. On the other hand, JK Rowling has penned a mere 7 bestsellers, sold over 400 million books and yet her fortune exceeds $798 million, ranking her the 12^th wealthiest woman on earth… The difference? Mr. Godin writes to marketing professionals, businesses and entrepreneurs while Ms. Rowling writes to a family friendly consumer audience of children and adults. What this should tell you unequivocally is that producing something you can market to the mass consumer market is more profitable than producing content you market to the business market.

Resource: Squidoo: Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross?

2. User Generated Content

The user generated model has really taken off within the micro content community with Fmylife and Textsfromlastnight. Each has successfully built a very robust and engaged community of commenter’s, voters and contributors. The product is simple. Hilarious situational humor coupled with a standardized format. The lesson? Find a universal situation or topic that all people can relate to and experience and open a micro forum where they can share their experience and interact with other similar experiences. The Fmyscript script can help you create just such a forum. It’s your responsibility to come up with the situation, the standardized format and populate the first few posts then spread the site among your inner circle. With any luck and good idea, it should go viral quickly.

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Popularity: 50% [?]

The art of a good PR story is knowing how to spin it with Disney moments

Snow White & The 7 Dwarfs Before the Disney PR Spin! Ho White.

What Would Snow White Look Like Without Her Disney Moments? She was a single girl, living with 6 miners and a Doctor! I’m just saying, without a song and a tap dance the story loses its PG rating and turns into bad Skinamax late night TV. And, no, I am not proud to have had to tart up a fairy tale to teach public relations strategy. Not proud at all…

Bill Gates was a college drop out that started a world-class multi-billion-dollar company. Jewel lived in a van down by a river and hung out with street gangs before she made it big yodeling. Kurt Cobain camped under a bridge for a while before fronting the most famous grunge band ever. Mrs. Fields was a desperate housewife before she baked a batch of cookies that changed the world and set the stage for more housewives like Martha Stewart to turn baking into a billion dollar business. And one of the greatest single mother stories of all time, JK Rowling was living in poverty on government assistance until she wrote Harry Potter! Great stories, right? Makes you feel like you too can spin hay into gold. But here’s the kicker, each and every one of these stories is PR spin – a Disneyfied version of the truth.

Let’s take Disney out of the details:

• Bill Gates’ parents were wealthy and sent him to private schools, the school he dropped out of was Harvard and the business he started was initially funded by his money bags parents.
• Jewel CHOSE to live in her van because her parents were hippies that CHOSE to live off the land in Alaska and she actually graduated from the $25K/year Interlochen Arts Academy in 1992 so somewhere along the line, her family wasn’t exactly as impoverished as she claims! (It’s more an Into the Wild story than a “I’m poor” story when you hear the details). Besides, don’t all rock stars have to live in a car or van to call themselves rock stars? Seriously, there’s even a site dedicated to this phenomenon BetterThanTheVan.com.
• Mrs. Fields’ husband was millionaire investment banker, Randy Fields, who bankrolled her and got all his millionaire friends to help market the company. (FYI- this chick might be crazy, she claims to have invented the cookie.)
• JK Rowling actually planned to quit her teaching job and go on welfare so she could write her book. Hell, she basically made welfare part of her business plan.

Now, I’m not saying these people didn’t work hard to get where they are, I’m just saying that the spin on their stories is world class and we can all learn something from each of them. If you want to be a legend, get your PR story right! Strategize it, stick to the formula and start telling it.

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Popularity: 60% [?]

SnazL is getting a lot of industry attention lately. Just check out their write up on Huffington Post! Yesterday I had the opportunity to chat with Mike Fabio of Warner Music Group and Candid Katie of CandidKatie.com about the music industry and it’s future in the age of piracy on SnazL for a New York Entrepreneur Week Un-panel. With over 6,000 people at the live event and over 1900 on our online SnazL page, it was amazing to see the traction the discussion received! Check out the SnazL chat accompanying the videos for a birds eye view of this hot button topic and what industry insiders are saying. Thank you to Ameeda of SnazL for organizing the event and Mike and Katie for their wonderful insights and participation.

Popularity: unranked [?]

I want to start this post with this thought. I love historical quotes, especially witty and insightful ones. But, come on people, this fad of auto posting quotations to your Twitter profile… horrible. It makes you look like you have nothing original to add to the conversation and Twitter is all about the conversation. So, here’s a tip, try to limit your quotations posts to only those that truly inspire or engage you and do your best to come up with your own original quotes or one liners and get them out there on Twitter or Facebook.  Don’t believe it works? Look at Gary V, his one liner, “Crush It!” has already made it into the public consciousness and was even recently included in an episode of 30Rock.

One of my secret potions to making people listen and recall whatever boring thing I have to say is the power of the one liner. Anytime I meet someone, speak at a convention, hold a webinar or write a piece for a magazine, blog or even an email, I always make sure I say something that will make them think, laugh or horrify them. I often go for the something witty, insightful, racy and on point. That seems to work best for me. This little trick can help you to craft other people’s perception of you as “smart” and “funny.” And who doesn’t want to be around someone “smart” and “funny?” We all love to be entertained and made to think, so crafting a handful of smart, witty phrases or comebacks to common questions and or situations you might run into in your life or business is a wise move.

How Billy Lightened Up Queen Elizabeth with One Liners

This tactic is actually age old and often used by Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays that both the Queen and the common people came to see so he needed to make sure that he got in at least one good one liner in each and every scene. You might recall the line in Romeo and Juliet, “Get thee to a nunnery.” (For those not following along with Cliff Notes or those who slept through high school English). This line was funny at the time because of the second meaning of a nunnery as a whorehouse. It was a memorable and racy line – basically, a “take-away” that audience members could take back and repeat in their daily lives. It kept people wanting to come back for more of the iambic pentameter (seriously, have you read that phrase since high school?) this Billy Shakespeare kid was selling.

You want to give people a “take away” from an encounter with you and since you are not Paris Hilton that can freely distribute Herpes Simplex X (yes, I just typed that) to your circle of influence, settle on a good one liner. Craft them based on the following criteria:

1.     Consider common situations you might use a one liner to diffuse and awkward situation, lighten the mood or simply seal a deal

2.     Consider your personality. If you have a dark sense of humor or are flirty or just boldly brilliant and witty make sure your one liner compliments your personality. (One quick disclaimer to the men out there- unless you are supremely confident and already know you can pull off “flirty” stay away from that one- you can come off as supremely creepy.)

3.     Start with at about 5 really well crafted lines. Over time as you encounter new and exciting situations that just roll over and beg for a one liner, add to your library.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

I love viral videos especially when they center on a brand. It’s particularly hard to achieve the right balance of kitschy, cute, educational, but Google brought it with “The Google Story”

There are few brands that have been truly able to pull off corporate viral videos but hat tip to Microsoft, Google, Evian and Jet Blue. This simple Google video hit the top of the Viral Video Charts and relates an important message – Google has a great PR story, they have a track record of success and are a brand you can trust for innovation.

Popularity: unranked [?]

OK, I’m gonna get all Ivy League “thinky” on you. If you think you can handle a dash of Mary sans controversy, read on. Oh, yeah, I also pull out my sociology degree in this one, so be prepared for theory and statistics. Its gonna be hot and a little heavy.

In sociology, there is this funky monkey number called the Dunbar Number AKA “the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” That number is generally accepted to be around 150. Basically what this means is that when you grow your personal social network beyond 150 people, you have a difficult time directly interacting with each of those 150+ people in a meaningful, stable inter-personal way. Which makes perfect sense offline, but online, we ought to be able to improve upon that with so many social networks, email and chat programs that allow us to message and interact with groups of people and individuals alike. However, some data suggests that people using social networks interact with only 5-10% of their available networks. Essentially, this means that online networks although larger are actually not as robust because they are not being used effectively to reach or expand a persons personal Dunbar Number.

For those of you that read Malcolm Gadwells The Tipping Point, the Dunbar number might ring a bell. In the book, Gadwell asserts that the Dunbar Number of any given human being is critical to their level of influence over others and the tipping point for any given event. Tipping points are “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.” Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term: “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” Whats interesting here is that if you as an advertiser or marketer seek to message to the influencers AKA the connectors or those individuals with higher Dunbar Numbers and therefore more connectivity to the general market, you can spread your brand and/or message through the collective conscious faster and more virally. And isn’t that what you want to do? Get your message to as many people as possible?

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Do you have what it takes to create viral content?

In a marketing department, good viral content almost always starts in the mind of the craziest person in the room. It is the responsibility of the “less” crazy people to tame the idea so nobody gets fired, arrested or deported. The following is a detailed multi-part series on how corporate marketing departments build viral campaigns like the Evian Babies or my favorite print piece, the Letter to Richard Branson from a “Virgin Atlantic Flyer” later to be outed as Virgin’s own marketing department.

The Problem

A client, a major name in the recording industry is interested in pooling celebrities and the charities they support on a website that engages multiple fan bases to donate money, time, goods, or services to the various charities. The problem is getting traffic to the site, promoting the site and getting all the celebs and charities (that may have opposing religious, ethical, or political dogma) to play nicely but still generate buzz collectively. So, the rub is finding something viral enough to generate the natural PR but something “politic” enough to not cause Hollywood WWIII .

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Popularity: unranked [?]