How many times, we feel like talking to someone but can’t even take the first step. It starts with “How to approach” and once you approach “How you build a meaningful conversation”. If the conversation goes like flowing water, than it is of no worry but if it does not, “the onus lies on the initiator to transform a talk into a conversation”.

I had an interesting experience during my association with a startup where we handed over free gift to each person who helped testing our product. The free gift was definitely priceless for us since it would help us to spread our word [as our name was printed on the gift] but very few people noticed it. That is where each one of us started interacting with every person during the testing process[spending an extra minute or so] to explain about our product and startup through the “name” which was printed on the freebie.

It is a universal truth that “Pictures speak louder than words” and to demonstrate that we have this Twitter T-Shirt[which I ordered months back] from Pringoo

The T-Shirt contains my Twitter profile and 400 of my randomly selected followers. It is an excellent marketing tool [much more than just putting your company's name on it]. These are some of the basic things it does :

Effective story telling

As Seth Godin points out that Great story telling should capture the imagination of the audience. This is what the T-Shirt does perfectly. It not only eye catchy but also makes a person to craft his/her own story around the picture. This curiosity makes him/her to clarify whether the guess was right !!!

Starting a conversation

As pointed in the beginning, this is a great tool to make up a conversation. I was travelling in a bus and a guy came to me asking “Is this your Twitter profile” and at the end of it, we exchanged business cards and got connected elsewhere. That person was curious to know “Not only about Twitter but also about the other guys pictured on the T-Shirt”

Popularity of your service

In this case, the T Shirt was spreading the word of Twitter & to build my own brand [IMHO having 400+ followers is no big joke ]. What if your service had more than XYZ followers and you randomly selected first ABC & got them printed on some medium. It would definitely help spread the word much much faster !!! Even better would be if this was handed over as a gift to some lucky user of your service.

This is just one example of so called “great story teller”. May be next time when you hand over a freebie, the first question that should come to your mind is “Whether it would help build a talk or conversation” !!!

If you have any other thoughts about the Twitter picture, do share them by leaving a comment & the same would be included in the article.

All of us know that something that is visual carries more appeal and also sends the right message with less effort. Though pictures are very effective, many a times; videos have an upper hand over them.Take the example of Google Chrome, instead of numerous cartoons giving insight into Chrome, if Google would have created a small video[or a series of videos] indirectly demonstrating Chrome’s capabilities over other browsers-high CPU usage by Firefox, V8 etc., it would have been much more appealing.Since, Google being a brand in itself, such things may not have a negative impact on it’s business.

This podcast focuses on why online videos are becoming a crucial part for promoting the business.The best example to demonstrate effectiveness of online videos is the following clip:

If you find found this clip interesting, you can check out the actual video live in action on my test blog, definitely worth a watch !!! It really interested me[like many of you] how this video was made; after looking into the source code, I came across this Google Gadget which is the heart of the video.Debug version of Flash Player & addons like FireBug were also quite helpful to find it’s details.

Keeping the technical brilliance apart, the shake-it up video resulted in 500% increase[from 5000 to 25000] in it’s total number of page views/day.

This article provides the complete insight into “How Wario Land’s shake it video broke the Viral Marketing mould !!!” Though there are lot’s of Viral Marketing videos around, if you come across any video that has created such a high impact; do drop-in your comments & it would be added to the article.

There are a lot of SlideShare presentation embeds on this blog so,wouldn’t it be great to know it’s secrets straight from the horse’s mouth Below is a video coverage of Amit Ranjan[Co-Founder of SlideShare] sharing his ideas about Viral Marketing[at Proto,which I had missed] and it’s corresponding implementation at SlideShare.

Some very interesting points from his presentation:

In simple terms,Amit describes Viral Marketing as a combination of Web Analytics & Psychology and he justifies this very well in his presentation.The other interesting part is a term coined by him called “Shared DJs” [guys who are responsible for indirect marketing of the website by spreading it's content through mediums like Blogs,Twitter,FriendFeed,Delicious etc] who are as important as the content creators & both of them should co-exist for the success of the website.

Related Article:
Proto-IV coverage

In some of my previous articles , I have written about Viral Marketing through YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare and other Web 2.0 sites. But how about a marketing campaign where you can sell yourself [as a person, through a prank] and guess what, it indirectly does the marketing for the company whose software was used for creating this prank

Check out this amazing video below which is created through Paltalk and I am sure after watching the COMPLETE video, you would also want to include the same on your blog. IMHO, this inner feeling of showing off this video is what makes it so viral !!!

Note:
If you have watched the complete video , than let me make it clear “I still reside in India”