1. Becomes popular seemingly overnight (o views to 2 million in a week)

2. Creates a culture or “meme” around the content. Covers for songs, spoofs etc

Interestingly enough I came across a piece of content that fulfills both of the above “viral” components; but I think it would be even more interesting to break down the why for this particular piece of content. WARNING: Profuse cursing

Viral Breakdown

So let’s dig into 5 main reasons this video was able to collect several million views within only 4 days (nearly 1.5 million for this exact video at the time of writing, but several duplicates are cropping up on YouTube), why people started to do covers for this video and the heck do people even care about it in general?

1. Shock value

One of the first things you will notice about this video is how “in your face” it feels. It doesn’t ease into its purpose so much as it jumps in head first, making a big splash and getting every ones attention. From the color scheme, the washed video effect to the giant red “FUCK YOU” that shows up a few seconds in; this video smacks you over the head in a way that most videos fail to capture (for better or for worse).

2. Polarization

The other thing about this video is that it will completely polarize the people who watch it. You either love this video because you think it is absolutely hilarious, or you hate it because it is.. well vulgar, demeaning and gives a “we don’t care about ANYONE” kind of attitude. There isn’t a lot of in-between, and polarization drives discussion, pageviews and awareness.

3. Taboo

We aren’t supposed to like things such as this video, and for that reason many of us do. Like it or not, there is still a lot of money in the adult entertainment industry with part of the allure for many shoppers being the very fact that they aren’t supposed to have/like/watch/participate in whatever the content etc is. Again, this type of behavior just drives more traffic and therefore more awareness.

4. Emotion

This is one of the intangibles for marketers to calculate, which basically is my way of saying I am guessing; but it is not a far stretch to think that a certain percentage of people watching and sharing this video have some kind of emotional motivation to do so because they feel an emotional connection to the story. Did the event portrayed in the story happen to you? You might be tempted to shoot it in an e-mail to your ex. What about one of your friends? You may want to share it on their Facebook wall to make them feel a little more satisfied with the less than stellar situation they just went through. Either way, there are plenty of emotionally driven reasons why someone would share this video.. it is just a lot harder to measure.

5. Scarcity

This one is interesting because the video appears to be part of a pre-launch for a very real song and album and was posted by the “artist” themselves. The lack in ability for customers to buy now does kill  the opportunity to buy the song immediately, but what if they just can’t get the song out of their head? What if YouTube might take it down do to the shock value and polarization of its audience? These things force a video to move sideways into new social graphs through duplicate content (reposting of the same video which is common on YouTube), or the fact that it forces people playing it on repeat to have YouTube open which could then expose their friends to the video version of the song which is almost always the “richest” form of online experiences.

Conclusion

Ultimately there have already been covers done for this song by various artist (some actually pretty decent replications) because those artists want to be associated with the meme and cash in on the fringe brand associations. So the question is here, how can you deliver shock, polarization, taboo, emotional and scarcity components to your next promotional push in order to hit mainstream awareness?

You may or may not have heard that Twitter is rolling out their own official “Tweet” button for content sites, among others, to use for their audience to publish their content into the Twitter stream. A move like this from Twitter is important because it directly effects the many companies that publish Retweet type buttons to blogs etc in order to track and aggregate trending articles across a variety of niches. TweetMeme, arguably the largest of these aggregators isn’t being completely left out in the cold though since Twitter has paid to use some of TweetMeme’s backend code to facilitate this new feature.

Brand or Platform?

The most interesting part of this new product to me however, is figuring out whether or not this product is more about platform or brand control. The investors in Twitter have been saying for over a year that Twitter application developers need to “stop filling holes”. By that they are referring to the innovation coming out of many developer hot beds to fix the obvious gaps within the Twitter ecosystem. While you might think Twitter would appreciate all this innovation from its development community that made Twitter so popular to start with, but in fact Twitter has been gradually tearing apart the development community in order to deliver an end to end experience that consumers love.

This is in part motivated by control influences, but I feel that this is a big play by Twitter to control their brand across the web. If you have been noticing or not, Twitter has been implementing a refreshed sense of design across every product within their portfolio to deliver a clean and simple experience regardless of what platform you are using. This new button is no different in that the design, delivery and aggregration is now all under the control of Twitter itself instead of a 3rd party.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Twitter is being fair with gradually consuming each outlet of their data to control the user experience, or should 3rd parties be encouraged to compete against Twitter itself to add features and usability?

Interviews are daunting, and quite frankly they suck. With the economy how it is, what is a potential employee supposed to do in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of the applicants? In a word: Personal Brand.

People like @Garyvee have been promoting personal brands as a way to get to the next level, but what about if you can’t afford to jump right into the lush lifestyle of a talent agency representing you with speaking deals, book gigs and other lavish luxuries that people in that caliber are enjoying from their personal brand? What if, as crazy as it sounds you need to “take the deal” as Seth Godin says and go for a ‘regular’ job to earn more money?

All Hail the Personal Brand

While some employers may be timid about hiring an up and coming personality that is building their brand, the smart employers also know that the value you can bring to the table far exceeds the risk of losing you to bigger and better things. How will they know this? Because someone who is working on building their personal brand through blogs, social media, forums and other forms of communication really understands what is going on in the technology, marketing, communication, pr etc.

Personal brands are a great way to showcase your creativity, enthusiasm for whatever category you want to work in and give a potential employer some insight into who you ARE as opposed to just what you can DO. Personalities are equally as important as abilities to many employers, how are you building your brand?

The Good Stuff

What I was amazingly interested in however, was the contrast between the conversions of clicks to leads that stem from a very warm (and large) e-mail distribution list that has a) heard of Shoemoney before and b) has been communicated to by the list owner. Luckily enough, non other than Mr. Jonathan Volk of JonathanVolk.com decided to openly use a Bit.ly link with his e-mail push which meant we were able to peak into the results.

Bit.ly is a great way (mostly because of accessibility and free cost structure) to track the number of times your link is clicked, when that is, where its from (application) and what country. However, when doing a very public e-mail push, you are going to get called out on it from time to time.

Quick Background

So first things first, how did Jonathan Volk build up this e-mail list.. and how big exactly is that list? Jonathan Volk, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker, Frank Kern, Andy Jenkins and a laundry list of others all operate in the affiliate marketing space to a certain degree. Because of that, they have a large audience that overlaps with each other and at the very least has a very similar set of actual needs. When Jonathan Volk wrote an eBook about effectively advertising with Facebook and other affiliate marketing promotional methods, he was able to leverage his existing relationship with people such as John Chow, Shoemoney to pump his eBook to a ready, willing and eager audience while providing value in exchange for a nifty e-mail address.

Jonathan decided to chime in on my Twitter conversation with John Chow to make sure it was stated that he pulled off this e-mail list for JUST the cost of 3 iPads as Chow has stated…

But there were certainly more promotional methods than just this for Volk, but tapping into lists such as Shoemoney, Kern, Chow and Jenkins was a good way to capture the low hanging fruit. I know for a fact that he also used some Sponsored Tweets to promote his book to the affiliate marketing space. (side note: I plan on covering Sponsored Tweets pretty in-depth very soon).

The 150x ROI

The rule of thumb in the list building business is that a targeted e-mail list provides about $10 of profit per year for each subscriber depending on how effectively they are marketed to. So to figure out the total value return of this list for Volk, lets do some simple math that rounds up on the cost of promotion and down on the number of subscribers.

Subscriber Value: $10

Subscribers: 10,000

Average Subscriber Validity: 3 years

Lifetime Value of Subscriber: $300,000

Cost of acquisition: (3 ipads at $500 ea. ) = $1,500 + (sponsored tweets0 = ~$500 : $2,000

With these quick and dirty numbers, Volk can expect to get up to a 150x return on his $2,000. Not a bad return at all if I may say so myself!! So what about this particular launch that we have click and conversion numbers from?

Warm & Communicative vs. Cold & Direct

Volks list produced 1,629 clicks over a roughly 1 week period and two mailings out of list that is known to be at least 10k.

Click through ratio? (clicks/emails) = 16.29% or lower for an “active” list

Number of leads generated? 824.

Conversion Ratio? (leads/clicks) = 50.58% HOLY SHIT THIS IS GOOD

Cost per conversion (cost per lead/conversions) = $2.43 per lead, but has a much longer lifetime value

What were my results with my leads generated through advertisements?

I generated 588 clicks over roughly the same period of time as Volk, relying primarily on SponsoredTweets for Traffic with a total cost of $25.86

Click through ratio? This is hard to tell because I just used Bit.ly and we don’t know view/click data

Number of leads generated? 23

Conversion Ratio? (leads/clicks) = 3.9% MASSIVE DIFFERENCE

Cost per conversion (cost per lead/conversions) = $1.12

Summary

What is amazing about the difference in lists compared advertising for lead generation is the conversion of leads into your relevant product, service or affiliate offer. If you have a list that you have build of good will with in the community you are going to see a MASSIVELY better response rate from your audience and a much larger return.

In regards to me having a much lower cost per conversion for this particular push, it is important to note that while Volks cost if confined to this case study alone would be more than double what I paid, he will have the opportunity to repeatedly market to this audience for a return that is many, many times larger than what I may generate through this study.

Building a List

How can you build a list and start cashing in the huge return that people like Volk are reaping the benefits of? Here is a check list of things to remember when pursuing this opportunity.

1. You absolutely MUST provide value to your market (doesn’t matter if it is Dog tricks or Car Cleaning) in exchange for their opt-in e-mail.

2. You need to establish connections with as many people related to your targeted industry as possible. This is going to give you a much wider audience and essentially allow you to cherry pick the most active and highest paying users from your competitors list for years of marketing success.

3. GET YOUR LIST STARTED TODAY. Getting it started as soon as you possibly can allows you to compound your results and start seeing the power of list building, lifetime returns and a “list ATM” that so many affiliate marketers are used to at this stage in the game. If you are looking for a high quality service provider to use, Aweber comes highly recommended and gives you the first 30 days for ONLY ONE DOLLAR.

Click here to get the massive Aweber deal and start building your client base today.

]]> http://thecollegestartup.com/2010/07/24/warm-leads-vs-cold-leads-case-study/feed/ 3 http://thecollegestartup.com/2010/07/12/ads-vs-premium-vs-freemium/ http://thecollegestartup.com/2010/07/12/ads-vs-premium-vs-freemium/#comments Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:52:58 +0000 Travis Ketchum http://thecollegestartup.com/?p=451 With all the fanfare surrounding Hulu after it’s launch (especially in the College scene) as a free LEGAL way to watch premium TV shows (movies are available too, but have traditionally been lackluster). As Netflix got serious about their “Watch Instantly” offerings, many people found themselves signing up for the $9.99/month because it brought many students armed with their existing xbox 360 to get quality content onto their TV’s in a way that wouldn’t have the schools IT department knocking on their door and/or turning off their bandwidth.

So what is Hulu’s response to the higher resolution Netflix offerings? Hulu has notoriously been a completely free offering which was monetized through targeted advertisements, so it was only natural that Hulu would try to have more users (or at least more active) by offering higher quality resolution video across more devices (read: iDevices), and that service came under the name of Hulu +. “Great!” you may be thinking, and at a price of $10/month for recent episodes presented in High Definition it sounds fair.. until you realize that they STILL HAVE ADS.

Hulu has proven more than once that they are driven completely by the content owners (read: taken by the balls), so much in fact that the content owners are arrogant enough to think that with the age of the internet, we as consumers are stupid enough to pay for ad laden content. Hulu is even on record for pleading with ABC to NOT launch their free application on the iPad that gives users access to recent, quality content without an added fee.

Recently, according to ComScore, Netflix has edged out Hulu in traffic across their domain. While ComScore is not a greatly reliable source for accurate information, their trending data is a great gauge for how consumers are voting with their dollars. Why isn’t Hulu absolutely CRUSHING IT with a freemium model right now? Hulu could easily be syndicating their Advertisement laden content across as many devices as possible at standard definition, with an upsell of advertisement free and higher resolution content. In the Internet age, customers are voting that with ads the content should be free, and with a fee it should be high quality and delivered without advertisements.

Freemium is an amazing way to drive user base, upsell opportunities and other revenue generating procedures that continue to drive value for the consumers in exchange for their usage and/or their dollars.

We all know that the notion of a brand is enticing, and that people are willing to pay more for a Coke simply because it says “Coke” on the side and not just a random house brand. We also know that when Coke brings out a new product, if we liked the original we are much more likely to try the new product.. emotionally we are tempted to dive head first into products, services, locations etc we wouldn’t have otherwise because of how a brand makes us feel.

What does a brand mean when it is a person though? Does a celebrity have brand value that is nearly instantaneous? The answer is HELL YES they do. For an example look at the Twitter account started by LeBron James.. in a short 2 hour period after sending his first tweet that simply announced he was on Twitter.. he has a staggering 127,225 followers (and counting!!). So what is this brand equity worth? Well if you read this article you might believe that each follower is worth $6.19; and that value multiplied by his follower base adds up to nearly $800,000 in only 2 HOURS.

According to Ad Age, each person who ‘Likes’ a Facebook page is worth $3.60/year which is probably pretty fair if you were comparing the cost of traditional media to the reach of social media. If you think that this size of audience simply can’t be worth this much money, keep in mind that Jeremy Schoemaker (@shoemoney) had roughly 90k followers and PROFITED $50k in about 7 months time on Twitter.. the value is real and so are the paychecks.

How are you building your brand and finding your audience? It is likely worth much more than you think right now.

Yesterday, a cool company called HasOffers was nice enough to put on an open house for clients and potential clients. Special guest Jeremy Schoemaker was there (“Shoemoney”) for some extra fun. One thing I couldn’t help but notice about the type of people both at the event as well as employees was the type of person it takes to be in affiliate marketing as a general rule. What is more shocking though is the difference between the people who are actually making it compared to those who aren’t.

Performance Marketing vs Performance Talking

I am always amazed at how many people are “in affiliate marketing” that really only make $20 bucks here and there by spamming their friends with links compared to actually understanding how to setup a marketing funnel that when you put $1 in, you get more than $1 out.. while not all funnels are scalable (in fact many are difficult to grow vertically) you can at least generate repetition in your practices to know what is profitable vs what isn’t.

The most interesting part of this though is that the people who make the $20 must like to count numbers more than once because they are usually the people who act like they are pulling in $200k + a year in profit from their activities, while the people who are the real deal give you a hint of what they are doing without giving away their profitable niche (unless of course their talk is what makes them money). Because the industry moves so fast, if someone is eager to tell you about how they are making money you need to seriously ask yourself if this person is a) only making money by telling you their “secret” or even worse b) what they are trying to sell you USED to work but now is a saturated market that will likely never work again they way it did for them.

My next post will be about finally meeting Shoemoney in person (disclosure: I have worked with Shoemoney Media on a project) and how being successful doesn’t mean you have to claw people to be on top.

Today on TWiT Live, Digg founder and overall Angel investor Kevin Rose talked about a number of interesting things. One of those key things however was a sneak preview of long awaited and anticipated fourth version of Digg.com; which frankly is quite cool but the real question is how will the audience react? Only a few short years ago, this type of revision would have blown the doors off of the competition, but now it feels like more of a catch up release rather than a serious innovation cycle. Don’t get me wrong, the updated Digg is incredibly clean and just feels polished. The love for Apple, and admiration for their design ability by Kevin Rose  is far from hidden in this release; but much like the release of iOS4 this release of Digg feels stunning yet underwhelming at the same time.

The Vision(ary)

If you own an Android based phone, or have been using the Internet since before 2007, then there is a high likelihood that you have heard about Kevin Rose somewhere. Kevin received much of his press attention after bolstering Digg out of the gate with democratizing news for a tech and web based audience. The idea was simple, elegant for the time and solved an inevitable pain in the marketplace of reading the really good off-beat news that just wouldn’t be on the home page of CNN or similar news sources. Kevin quickly became entrenched with other successful ventures such as Revision3 (which just celebrated its 5th birthday a few days ago) through popular shows such as Diggnation and others. He also played his cards with Angel Investing to help get new and exciting start-ups into a (hopefully) stable development cycle and keep pushing innovation forward for the tech industry as a whole. Now, however, Kevin has picked up the reins once again as the CEO of Digg to really focus on the value proposition, positioning and ways to keep his once game changing service relevant for the world of Facebook and Twitter.

The Positioning Statement

How do people share things today? That is probably one of the first questions that Kevin asked himself as he took a look at why users chose to come to Digg and share stories, view new content and explore categories that interested them. He recognized why there is an addicting quality to the Facebook Newsfeed, realized the entrenchment that Facebook has and that there are areas of improvement as to how people consume content, not just statuses. Facebook uses an algorithim to decide how many people ultimately see your posted content based on projected engagement levels, as opposed to allowing all content to be pushed to people who essentially “opt-in” to see what you have to say.

Twitter on the other hand is able to avoid this lack of visibility seen inside of the Facebook ecosystem because users who you follow have all of their content pushed into your feed. However, the issue with this model, according to Rose is that “You may be interested in the articles of Tony Hawk.. but not that he just dropped his kids off at school”. The idea of authority figures within interest categories is being sought out, but Digg v4 hopes to solve the clutter of Twitter yet still have more promised visibility to your follows than Facebook.

Taming the Social Graph

In 2007 at the Facebook F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg would not stop talking about the “Social Graph” which is now unfortunately one of the most overused buzz words today. However, the idea of a network effect through the people you know and who follow you may never have the same value proposition as what Kevin is proposing with the new Digg v4. The idea that quality content has the opportunity to surface within interest categories gives it a much needed enhancement for the ability to spread. This means you are going to see not only higher targeted content, but more of it; and both of these factors lead to a better internet experience.

So while Digg is going to have to work in order to please their current audience as well as be inviting to new “average” users (read: not hordes of geeky males), I think that the upcoming version of Digg fills a very real need within the marketplace. Additionally I think they are doing it in a way that truly comes with differentiators that matter to users when comparing the service to Twitter and Facebook (as well as Buzz or Wave if you actually use those services). The fact that services now have to clearly state their mission and work extremely efficiently to deliver value, is a strong indicator of the competitive times. Gone are the days of the “do everything” start-up approach that had worked so well for many, including Kevin Rose. Instead we are seeing a shift to niche level services and aggregation tools that allow each component of the web to be the best it can possibly be, and in the end, the consumer wins.

While some lucky bastards people have been getting their iPhone 4 early thanks to a FedEx slip-up, the rest of the United States will be getting their new iPhones tomorrow (myself included). But what is most interesting about this new iPhone launch is that is going to finally popularize a high quality camera in consumer devices. Yes, other phones have had high-end camera components.. and yes, Flip HD cams have been an affordable option for many to start producing 720p video clips for YouTube. However, one of the single best selling hand held cameras continues to be the Apple iPhone.

So, you understand why I mentioned Steve Jobs in the title (CEO & Co-Founder of Apple); but what the hell does Gary Vaynerchuk have to do with a hardware release? Gary’s first book “Crush It!”, a #2 NYT best-seller, talks about the paradigm shift we are seeing in our culture thanks to technology. The new and vastly affordable technology that allows us to connect is also changing the way we consume. Where do you watch your news clips now? Likely online if you are reading this blog, and having a quality 720p camera in your pocket and on a device that can directly upload to YouTube is MASSIVE for the Internet as a platform. As Steve Jobs said when the Apple TV was introduced in 2007 (along the same timeline as the original iPhone) was that YouTube is great, but the consumer source devices were the biggest hold up in the platform for a great user experience.

Paradigm Shifts

As with nearly everything technology based, it feels like the rate of innovation is accelerating at a break neck speed. This has never been more true however than it is currently in the smart phone innovation cycle. We are getting faster chips, better screens and vastly better cameras. Google is outpacing everyone in the past 5-7 months though, ever since the introduction of Android 2.0 with the Motorla Droid. This new combination of feature rich, and capable handsets has helped throw fuel on the competitive fire and pushed every partner in the value chain produce better products at lower price. This is a huge win for consumers and software platform developers, nothing proves this more than the over 220,000 Apps for the iPhone App store at the time of this writing.

The consumer is now a creator, the developer is now an artist and every industry that has been stagnant for centuries (read: news, media etc) is being turned upside down. The people in control of those industries hate it because they are afraid of change, afraid of new models, and afraid of letting consumers have the collective power they have always been on the brink of realizing. However, if these organizations do not realize that ‘resistance is futile’ i.e. RIAA & MPAA, and that consumers are ultimately in control but that we are a) willing to pay for great content & great services; as well as b) if these content & service providers don’t give the market what they want, the market simply navigates around the obstacles to consume how they want.

If these content and service organizations realized that on the flip-side of locking down their content and sticking to their old business models; that in fact going for affordable, mass consumption not only relates to higher revenues, more profit and better business than they might actually wake up to the shift that is already in full swing.

How do you see these new devices changing the way you create, consume or manipulate content? I for one, am very excited at the potential of these devices and can’t wait to get my paws on the new iPhone bright and early tomorrow!

When talking with other entrepreneurs, far too many say something along the lines of “we are too small to compete with the big guys”. The general mentality is that the competition is just so large and so strong that there is no logical way for them to fall 2nd place to a hungry and innovative start-up. As evidenced by the banking crisis and others, being “too big to fail” is certainly far from the truth as the banking system in the United States is on welfare as far as I am concerned.

Think Google just got lucky? When they originally launched there were at least 5 established search engines available on across the web who had saturated market share, and the appearance of being unstoppable. Remember Altavista? The reason that Google is dominating the market right now wasn’t because of some mysterious series of windfalls, but rather BECAUSE they were small.

How can being small be an advantage?

Being a small and “hungry” company gives you the advantage of compounding innovation. Think about how long it takes these giant companies to roll out any meaningful changes, shifts in policy or new products. By being a small company you are able to test your product in a more meaningful way, produce useful changes at a speed that very few companies have the opportunity to do. This pace of innovation over time can show a drastic difference between the quality of a product (especially in software) over even 6 months time.

So as Steve Jobs says “stay hungry, stay foolish” but most importantly use your unique ability to compound innovation against the big guys and stop thinking that being small is a downfall. The process of building something is what should be getting you excited to get up in the morning, and what will ultimately lead you to the success you are after.