While marketing’s hierarchy pondered how best to incorporate the www into the mix, Cindy Gordon blazed a viral trail through the Internet jumble. The concept of viral marketing has an eerie feel about it – ‘It is vital to go viral’ chant the converts. What Gordon showed is that if you get your conversational marketing strategy right, its power can be swift and mighty – her magnificent seven spread the word to 350 000 000.
Then VP of new media and marketing partnerships at Universal Orlando Resort, Gordon was tasked with launching the theme park’s new attraction – The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Instead of spending millions on a traditional media campaign based on television and magazine advertising, billboards, blimps and direct mail, Gordon understood that millions of fans around the world are passionate about things Harry Potter. She knew she could rely on word-of-mouse (viral marketing) to get the job done.
Gordon chose to spread the message by first telling her news to a small group of avid Harry Potter fans selected from the top Harry Potter fan sites. Author J.K. Rowling herself provided input about the choices. The final seven were then invited to participate in a ‘top-secret’ Webcast held at midnight on 31 May 2007.
During the secret Webcast, a Web micro-site went live to provide a place for bloggers and the media to link to for information on the theme park. Visitors to the site learned that the park would feature immersive rides and interactive attractions, as well as experiential shops and restaurants to enable guests to sample fare from the wizarding world’s best known establishments.
Shortly after the Webcast seven blogs were updated and the news had soon reached tens of thousands. Then mainstream media listened to those tens of thousands and wrote about the news in their newspaper and magazine articles, in TV and radio reports, and in blog posts. Gordon estimates that 350 million people around the world heard the news that Universal Orlando Resort was creating The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park.
“If we had not gone to fans first, there could have been a backlash,” Gordon says. She imagined the disappointment dedicated Harry Potter fans might feel if they learned about Universal Orlando’s plans in, say, The New York Times rather than an insider fan site. Because Gordon’s team launched The Wizarding World of Harry Potter through social media they were able to run the entire promotion in-house, with a very small marketing budget (covering the Webcast infrastructure and the micro-site production) and a small development team. They did not hire an agency, and they did no widespread outbound media relations, no marketing stunts, no CEO conference call, and no expensive advertising.
The success of Cindy Gordon’s promotion is now written in marketing folklore alongside other examples of social media being used to create and monitor brand awareness. It is not always as simple as it seems though, and not everything turns to gold the way it did for Universal Orlando. For some businesses it is the social nature of the medium that is the biggest limitation ie, the message must have some social appeal for it to propagate effectively through the network. For promoting Harry Potter, with a worldwide fan base of millions, it is ideal. Marketers expecting the same results when trying to inform the world’s instrumentation and control engineers of the benefits of say, a new type of pressure sensor, may be disappointed with the results and decide to stick with targeted traditional media like SA Instrumentation and Control. Probably the scariest aspect though is that if someone is disillusioned in any way by your message, they may tell seven of their friends …
David Meerman Scott’s New Rules of Viral Marketing can be found at http://instrumentation.co.za/+C13609
Local hosting of video content
Technews managing editor, Graeme Bell, attended the Honeywell Users Group (HUG) for the EMEA region recently. He explains in an article about the conference ‘Return on imagination’ why Technews has been performing trials on the hosting of video content on its local South African servers.
As part of this initiative, SAI&C has obtained permission to host video material that was recorded during HUG 2009. The technical presentations include Norm Gilsdorf’s keynote in which he lays out his vision of the future and how technologies will impact on industry. The intention is that this multimedia content will be available to readers, in support of and alongside, existing online content. South African readers (in particular) are encouraged to make use of this free service by visiting instrumentation.co.za/video
Steven Meyer, editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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