It requires a basic understanding of Internet users.  The vast majority of people that use the internet are content consumers.  Sites are built to make this group of users be able to consume content easily.   On the other side, there’s a small percentage that create content.  Some are professionals, but the vast majority of creators toil in relative anonymity, but continue to produce.  These are the folks that create reviews at sites like citysearch and comment on newspaper stories.   They are, virtually by definition, incredibly eager to share their thoughts.

These content creators are the most vital and active Twitter users.  They see the power of the system to push out their message, and are eager to defend its virtue.  Twitter can provide a megaphone for content creators of prior obscurity, and further amplify the voice of a loud organization or celebrity.  Since psychographically they are the same as blog commenters, they aren’t afraid to provide input into any article written about their new soap box.  This creates activity and action on sites that write about twitter.  It creates a cycle, which is self reinforcing.

Oddly enough, it doesn’t yet matter if the masses adopt it.  It will, as the ability to push a message to the masses is what is attractive in the first place.  But for generating hype, it doesn’t matter.

There’s a lot that any business can learn here.  Your best customers are your most powerful advocates.  Make it easy to share your message and they will.  Also, never forget the value you are giving to your best customers.  Twitter provides value by giving a voice, and their best customers repay them by returning the favor in hype.  Nothing is more viral than that.

The ad was rejected by Yahoo.

Why?

It lacked a disclaimer on the word “Free.”  That’s right.  They expected that the word could only be used with some sort of catch.

I tried to explain that we are truly free and get a sample disclaimer.  How can you disclaim something that’s true?

I’m leaning toward using “internet connection required” for our online ad.

Free, we will miss you.  I wish you still meant something because in these dark times, we need you more than ever.  It’s sad how often I need to put you in quotes to signify your empty meaning.

Even in the early days of the Internet, the rise in affiliate marketing led to “free” giveaways of expensive items.  The catch there was that you needed to complete a great number of offers, at substantial cost, to receive the so-called free item.  The affiliate marketer made more revenue than the cost of the item, and the rube customer received a number of products and services.  Certainly not free, but if a person were actually interested in all of the offers they did get the product for free.

The idea of the free trial was another big blow.  The idea was for a person to try out a web service for a short time at no cost to them.  Of course they had to enter their credit card for the free trial which was mercilessly charged if the service was not canceled in time.  The “adult” industry made this practice an artform and free was kicked hard yet again.

Credit reporting services brought both of these together to deliver a deadly blow to free.  Rather than go to the government’s weakly promoted annualcreditreport.com, where a consumer can truly download a credit report from every agency once every year for no cost; the credit reporting firms promoted their own “free” solutions which require a trial of a credit monitoring solution.  No matter what it says in the url, if a consumer doesn’t watch out they will end up with a monthly bill for their zero cost credit report.

Free had a bit of resurgence with peer to peer downloading, but getting something for free that you are supposed to pay for is just as wrong as thinking you are getting something for free and then paying for it.  The big difference is the lawsuits that were directed at the biggest users of free downloading.   The legal bills made this anything but free.

I’m certain that you have been hurt many more times than I could ever chronicle.  I feel for you.  Once such a noble word.  Now people assume you are part of a deception.

People have tried to revive you by adding 100% in front of your forsaken name, but to no avail.  Even the words completely and totally have no effect on you anymore, my poor lost free.

It is time that we move on and agree that you mean nothing now.

So how can we marketers tell people we won’t be charging them?   I have to admit I’m a bit lost without you free.  Could someone send me a free hug?

I’d put it this way.  It’s a transactional matter and little else.  Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.  It is my supposition and philosophy that the best interactive marketing is a relationship and a conversation.  Listen, respond, improve, grow.  Business is sustainable, get rich quick schemes are not.

Within a couple of days, I’ve seen two more comments on this in various forms within my industry.  First Dave Evans posts about Comment Cowards, and then Marcus Frind commented on my personal blog about a bot which targets his userbase with spam. It’s pretty clear that there is no compunction about using these poor “marketing” tactics.

This matters very much for mainstream marketers because it adds noise to an already cluttered landscape of messages.  Legitimate comments add to the discussion and build community.  Spam erodes it and tears it down.  There’s an ethic to online marketing that’s very important.  The Internet isn’t anonymous.  Assume that your tactic will be on the front page of google search results with your name tied to it.  If you wouldn’t or can’t defend it, don’t do it.  It might seem cheap, but it won’t be in the long run.  It can get viral in a negative way.

By implying that babies are a fashion accessory, J&J insulted the bond between a mother and a child.  This video on youtube shows a number of people’s feelings about the insult. Advertising Age provides an excellent overview of the time line here as well.

To my way of thinking the failure was in not actually having anything to say.  Any pain reliever could have said the same thing.  If all you have to say is that you understand your target, you’d better make sure that you actually do.  In this case J&J and Taxi clearly did not.

Pulling the campaign was the right move in this case, not because of the critics, but because it was very unlikely to be effective.  I would actually say they were fortunate that people were as vocal as they were so they could avoid wasting hundred of thousands in wasted media buys.

There’s a lesson here about “common interest” campaigns and social media.  The buzz will say one of a few things.  “Wow this brand really gets me” or “I hate it”  With the instant communication options open today, it would be very smart to monitor the buzz and react quickly.  If you get the Wow, ramp up.  If you get the latter kill it and listen to the reasons why.

google and ebay are made up words that had little to do with their respective category until they became the dominant player.  Much like xerox or coke, their name eventually became synonymous with their product.

cars.com and weather.com are generic names that have taken on a brand of their own, but are very descriptive of the category in which they do business.

Plenty of sites do some work in between.  My ad agency name was created by removing the “ad” from advertising it and replacing it with ROI, (ROIvertising.com).  Since I made it up, it cost me $10/year.  This domain is a cute way to say escalate phonetically.  These take the approach of building a brand, even for small businesses.  After the initial purchase, all of the attributes will come from my investments into building a brand.

Others take the approach of using very descriptive phrases.  These are domains that you see and instantly have a guess to what they will deliver.  A couple of random selections:  I’m pretty sure that I’ll get apple rumors at macrumors.com and can buy lingerie through simplelingerie.com.  They are pretty good to be descriptive, and most of the work is done up front.  They also have some advantage through search engine optimization.

Even though my personal preference lies in building a brand, for many businesses paying the premium for a direct, descriptive domain can be worth it.  Natural Search traffic is “free” traffic after the inital expenditure.  Its possible to model the value of a descriptive domain by looking at the cost per click for the type of search and estimating the traffic.  Do the math and figure out your best path.  The answer won’t be the same for everyone.

More often than not, the viral nature worked simply.  You install the app, everyone that you are friends with becomes aware of the install through your newsfeed or direct invites, and it becomes an innocuous part of a persons profile.  Every time a user visits his or her profile, the small frame of the app becomes an active user.

Recently, the controversial facebook redesign has made apps far less prominent.  They now have been relegated to the “boxes” tab on a users profile, forcing a user to actively engage.   It would seem as if this has caused traffic to many apps to plummet dramatically.  The reverse is true for a few.  Estimated app valuations have also apparetly plummeted as well.

It seems as if the second stage for apps has begun.  Its no longer going to be enough to follow the viral strategy 101 and just push for installs.  App makers will need to build apps that are engaging, not merely virally marketed well.

Leave it to Nintendo to break every other rule and create an ad that people will seek out.  Using the now familiar idiom of leaked footage of a new game uploaded to youtube, they continue to make the video break out of the frame to make the entire web browser appear to be broken apart by the rough game play.  It delivers a message that illustrates the uniqueness of the game in a way that’s very easy to understand. 

How effective has it been?  As of this writing about 12 days after it posted, over 2.3M views have been logged.  Pretty amazing for something that is nothing more than an ad.

The second installment debuted on microsoft, and was quickly ported over to youtube (by microsoft themselves).  This video is over four minutes long and reveals a bit more about the reason behind the campaign.  Windows wants to connect with real people.  To do so they employed two extraordinary wealthy individuals and “embedded” them into a normal family.  Again, the feature has very little about computers.  However, this one is pretty funny, despite being a bit confusing.

There are a number of very interesting things here.  The second commercial (more accuratly a webisode) tells you exactly what the first was trying to accomplish.  It’s so above board about it, that you can’t help but respect that Microsoft realizes they have a very serious image problem.

The second interesting point is the amount of buzz these items have generated.  Each of the videos has generated around 1M views on youtube.  That’s no sneezing panda, but pretty sold for a video that’s been up for only a few weeks and requires an attention span longer than the typical 14 year old in need or ritalin (or average blogger for that matter).  Lots of people may hate it, but they are taking the time to post, comment and otherwise communicate about it.  It is sparking an honest debate.  That’s quite impressive given that a vast majority of Microsoft postings in the past tended to be harshly critical.

At the bottom line, I’m not sure if the commercial will be all that effective or not.  It’s quite the undertaking to take a brand as well known as Microsoft and change they way people view it.  In the end it might end up be an ad campaign about nothing.   However, at the very least they are taking on a huge problem in a very impressive manner using methods that only they could.

Smaller brands can learn a lot from this situation.  The biggest lesson is to never let your brand get this far out of control.  They were the big bad monopolist for a very long time and tended to ignore consumers along the way.  It’s what got Microsoft in the pickle between apple and needing to do a campaign like this.  The second lesson is that respecting your consumer’s intelligence can go a long way toward getting your message spread.  It’s my opinion that the reason this ad is generating this level of communicaiton is how frank and honest it is about the situation they are trying to address.

The secret is: there was no prior world record for software downloads.  Firefox invented it.  The strategy was amazing.  The press and bloggers wanted to cover it, and users had an incentive to download it as quickly as possible.  They were able to multiply the visiblity of the launch many times over traditional marketing.

They also involved the existing community quite well.  As far as grassroots efforts go, they made it easy by having toolkits for the “faithful” to spread the word.

Firefox also added an element of pride.  Downloaders could print certificates for their particpation in the occasion.

From every aspect, the launch was an amazing use of publicty and community involvment.  I applaud them for setting the record they created…  and acheiving a very critical strategic goal with their innovative marketing.  They got beyond the functional improvements of the browser and made it an event to get a new piece of software.