Wacky Viral Marketing

With the glut of online marketers and the holiday season gearing up, many businesses are having a hard time getting your attention. Enter the world of the weird, the wacky, and the downright crazy to make you go “Hmmm…”

Have you seen the “Mentos Intern”? You can order lunch, chat, watch a live feed while he works, schedule his work day, rate his efforts, and much, much more. The campaign is hilarious, and effective. The “Mentos Intern” grabs our attention simply because we can all relate to his predicament. Who hasn’t been a lackey, working for ‘The Man’ at some point in their life? The campaign also includes the best of the best for social media marketing; Trevor is accessible through Myspace, Facebook, Blogs, and gaming! He’s your friend, he’s your buddy…he’s the “Mentos Intern.” The best part about this site is, that it’s gone viral all across the web, and the “Mentos” name is tagging right along. What better way to promote your company (and your brand) than to take advantage of the net?

Here’s another one that has been sweeping across the web. Sling Media is a company that designs and markets technology to control (and access) your basic cable from anywhere. Their home page features an interactive salesperson with a catch. Sling Media knows that salespeople are annoying–and exploits them. Their home page has an interactive Flash-based site that gives you the opportunity to be as mean as you could possibly be to “The Sling Man.”

While you may not know what SlingMedia does, this viral campaign drives traffic to their site because it piques your curiosity and is pretty darn funny. This is a good example of how wacky viral marketing can get attention to an unknown brand; beneath the “Sling Man” are some brand-and-product links that will help you understand what their flagship product, the Slingbox, is all about.

What kinds of wacky viral marketing campaigns have you seen on the web? Does it work for you?

A must-have for WordPress sites/blogs: “SEO Title Tag” WordPress plugin

Well I’ve done something I wasn’t supposed to do. I sat down and wrote a plug-in for WordPress. I’ve been “encouraged” by my fellow executives at Netconcepts not to do any programming. “Leave that to the programmers” they told me. “Stick to the strategic planning stuff and the article writing and the conference speaking that you do so well.” Did I listen? Well, no.

Their loss (I guess I’ll have to work on that strategic plan document over the weekend!) is your gain. I’ve created a whizz-bang little WordPress plugin that solves all your SEO problems in one fell swoop. Well maybe not all. But it does make the title tags across your WordPress site or blog a heck of a lot more search engine optimal than they are by default.

Here’s why you’ll want it:

• Free & open source
• Allows you to override the title tag with a custom one (defined through a custom field in a post or a page)
• Allows you to define a custom home page title
• Reverses the order of the blog name and the title, or drop the blog name altogether, or replace it with a shorter nickname
• Puts the tag in the title of (UltimateTagWarrior) tag pages
• Uses the category’s description as the title on category pages
• Has an Options page in the admin to change settings

Who could say “No” to all that?!

Here’s where to get it: SEO Title Tag

I’m open to suggestions for further improvements to the plugin. This is my first plugin, and this is a 1.0 release, so please be gentle!

What are Your “Must Attend” Conferences?

Now that I’m back full-time in the US, it’s not such a chore to get to conferences. I can even attend conferences that I’m not speaking at, which is something I seldom (if ever) did in the 8 years I lived in New Zealand. Yet it can be an excellent opportunity to connect with really interesting people and to expand my thinking. Last month, I attended BlogHer, to listen to my daughter Chloe, and I also made the trip to San Francisco for WordCamp. This month, I almost went to Gnomedex, but I hadn’t acted soon enough and it had sold out by the time I went to register.

Here is a list of conferences that I haven’t been invited to speak at and would love to attend:

• Pop!Tech
• South by Southwest (SXSW)
• TED – already sold out
• Web 2.0 Summit – invitation only
• Emerging Technology (ETech)
• Accelerating Change – on hiatus

These conferences are exclusive and expensive — and worth even penny. For those who can’t swing the invite or the budget, there are free podcasts of past talks. Pop!Tech has their Pop!Casts, TED has their TED Talks, SXSW has their SXSW Podcasts, and IT Conversations has covered a number of conferences including Web 2.0 2005/2004, Accelerating Change 2005/2004, and ETech.

How does your conference schedule look? What are some of your important conferences that you feel you have to attend?

Matt Cutts Live from WordCamp

Courtesy of One Man’s Blog, you can now watch Matt Cutts’ presentation at WordCamp.
Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers – Part 1