One day someone discovered that dropping Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke causes an explosion of carbonation. This was an event to be recorded, and consequently posted on the internet. As word spread, more and more people couldn’t resist, and now at least 800 videos of Mentos-Diet Coke explosions are posted on web sites such as YouTube and Google Video. Thousands of online visitors view these clips, giving two already successful products a boost.
Mentos and Diet Coke didn’t intend to use free online video sites for their marketing, but it helped them nevertheless. These days you can easily advertise online, not just by paying for expensive banners on popular sites, but by using online trends to your advantage. The biggest trends right now are YouTube and MySpace. YouTube has over 40 million plays a day, with increasing numbers every week. The Washington Post reported that MySpace pulls more monthly visitors than Amazon and is closing in on AOL and eBay. YouTube and MySpace are viewed internationally too. With websites like these, your potential audience is unimaginable. And free.
You can implement your own marketing campaign by uploading a video to YouTube, or by setting up a profile on MySpace full of multimedia jewels that your audience can’t get anywhere else. For example, to promote Cari Gelber’s teen novel Rising Star, Sinuate Media is using MySpace to run a contest, give away books, and provide information on the book and the author. Soon it will also provide audio clips containing excerpts from the book. Though it may feel like giving too much of your product away, in this technologically-dependent world, giving away more is definitely better.
If you don’t offer up the information, someone else will, and the audience will be more likely to turn into customers.
