July 17, 2006 Comments
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Not sure if this is a good idea or not, but time will tell. USA Today reports that Yahoo! is launching a new viral marketing campaign that asks site visitors to create a 12 second video clip promoting the site's new look. There are no prizes involved, Yahoo! is hoping that sheer love of product (and perhaps the 5 seconds of fame that will come with producing a popular video) will be enough to spark creativity. So why might this not be a good idea?
Well...you could always ask the good folks over at Chevy. When Chevy launched a viral campaign that relied on consumer submissions of video ads, they were stunned to find that a great deal of the submitted ads came from anti-SUV environmental activists. Not exactly the type of positive viral marketing that Chevy might have hoped for. The question becomes, does Yahoo! run the risk of having their video submissions overrun by fans of Google, MSN, MySpace and other popular web destinations.
From the article:
Yahoo Vice President Allen Olivo says user-generated advertising is just another way of having customers do testimonials for the site.
"Any advertiser or business that isn't maximizing the power of what users have to say is crazy," he says. "The brand belongs to the customer. Who better to express what we're all about than them?"
Olivo says anything goes at Yahoo, as long as people don't violate copyright and abide by Yahoo's usage rules, relating to language and sexual content.
For Yahoo!'s sake, I hope that their customers like them.
Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.
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