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PandemicBlog

Insight into viral and social media marketing

Social Media: From the Fringe to the Front PageApril 15

In recent weeks, I’ve found myself in a staggering number of conversations with family, friends and coworkers about social media. I attribute this not only to their recent adoption of new technologies, but also to the surprisingly ubiquitous presence of social media in our regular news stream. These days it seems as if the New York Times can’t grant enough front page real estate to stories about Facebook’s fabled founders or how Snickers is taking advantage of the social media revolution.

Running parallel to the coverage of social media has been analysis of the precipitous fall of the economy. Given the overlapping timing of these two sea-changing stories, I can’t help but think about the connection between them. Obviously both the global economic crisis and the ubiquity of social tools are complex phenomena with causes and effects too large to number on these pages, but at the same time, it’s clear that the faltering economy played no small part in the explosion of social media services.

In other words, social media probably wouldn’t have grown so quickly if marketers hadn’t been fo

How quickly does your news spread?April 3

Being able to call yourself a blogger is great.  It does not matter whether you post many times each day like Chris Brogan or if you post every few months like the folks over at Where is Bob?

When you do post though, how do people find your posts?  Even if you are a personal blogger like Paolo Jr, you at least have a small group of dedicated readers… be it your immediate family, circle of friends, or Second Life buddies. But, how do new people find your posts?

In your blog design, you need to make it very clear how people can subscribe.  Look at the big RSS button with “subscribe” next to it there on the right.  You could be doing that.  I have to like your site a lot in order to check back frequently without simply using a subscription option to tell me when something new has been posted.  If people are not subscribed to your blog, it is easy for them to forget about it and stop checking in.

Now that you have subscriptions displayed prominently, you need a better way to bring in new readers than simply just waiting f

Have a Question? Tweet the CrowdMarch 27

Thanks to social media tools, marketers are finally learning the value of sharing the spotlight with their customers. In the old days, product information flowed directly from the brand to the customer. Marketers would put their heads together and develop the story they wanted to tell, the narrative that would (with any hope) stay in the mind of the customer when the purchase window moved from locked shut to wide open.  Of course, branding in this sense still exists; we need only look at the most recent Super Bowl to see advertisers jockey for attention and spend exorbitant funds on commercials to sell pancakes and tax assistance.

As forms of advertising, these commercials show how the narrative in branding flows from the inside, out. Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, works by soliciting the narrative directly from your customers. As a result, the c

Taking advantage of Social Media ? Taking part in Social MediaMarch 24

If you’re reading this blog, chances are that you take more advantage of social media than your average internet user.  You’re likely on Facebook and maybe even Twitter.  You might have a blog or check out Reddit and Digg once a day.

Do you simply use those tools?  Or, do you participate with their communities?

Personally, my favorite internet tool is Twitter, but I have a hard time dealing with tweeple, who only tweet about what they’re doing and thinking without ever interacting with their followers or the tweeple they follow.

Take a look at Twitterholic.  Even if you have something witty and insightful to contribute, you will be hard pressed to get a response from anyone on the first page.  Now, many of them are extremely busy and simply cannot follow every tweet.  However, the sheer numbers of people they follow or are followed by make i

Fleeting Fad or Here to Stay? The Meme of the MemeMarch 19

The history of Internet memes is as old as the Internet itself.  In fact, you could say that one of the major wonders of the Web is how it has scratched our human itch to share pointless twaddle with everyone we know. (As a disclaimer, I should point out that I mean, in no way, to ignore the Web as a revolutionizing and often positive force in our lives. I simply want to illuminate how it has also handed us a way to indulge our obsession with offbeat cultural phenomena.) To put it bluntly, we have never seen a cat in a onesie that we didn’t feel compelled to broadcast far and wide.

Do you remember the dancing baby from Ally McBeal? Or the video of those guys dancing a choreographed number while on treadmills?
These snippets from popular culture, and countless other