Last week I had lunch with a friend at Celadon House in Oakville. When the owner came by with the bill, he gave me a coupon for 250 CIBC airmiles that I could acquire by returning to the restaurant within the next 45 days.

Awesome! 250 airmiles and all I have to do is show up and pay for a meal at a restaurant that I love to go to. I doubt I would have been back there in 45 days so the restaurant benefits as well. OK, they are Aeroplan miles and my be devalued any second now but still, it will bring me back to the restaurant before I would normally return.

More importantly, it gave me a good feeling when I left the restaurant.

On the flip side, I flew down to Texas last week using United airlines. Wow, United not only breaks guitars, they don’t serve food either. Not even peanuts! And….no TV!  The lack of food was one thing but no TV on a 2 1/2-3 hour flight; unheard in a civilized country like Canada. We flew out of Buffalo for the first time so we didn’t know the policy of no TV for internal US flights under 3 hrs. I will plan my flight better the next time and check out the airplane amenities on Seat Guru.

The Great, The Good and The Ugly Marketing Tactics

Viral Marketing – How about the viral marketing produced by the, “United Breaks Guitars Video”. A campaign any seo company would be proud of.

Celadon Restaurant – Little things mean a lot, especially if they are the last thing a client remembers about your encounter.

United Airlines – Even if you are running a cut rate service, clients still expect a minimum of civility.

Here is why you Need to Listen to the Social Web

I was reading a blog post written by ‘smoothspan’ called Social Media: The New is the Old, People are People. This post talks about if you have a new piece of social media technology that you find might appear alien, he says compare how it would work in the real world. He says that “There is a real world analog for most any Social Media”. ‘Smoothspan’ backs up his arguments with blog post, Twitter accounts, forums, and groups. He says that although twitters 140 characters might seem weird, if we were to have a real conversation in real-life, then we would probably not go over 140 characters because other people would be talking back and forth. Blogs allow for comments at the bottom, and forums and groups allows for similar discussions. He likens them to group talks where you can comment after the person has spoken. He says that although social media changes things a little, people are still people and they interact in much the same way. However, although he brings up good points, I have to admit that I rather disagree with ‘smoothspan’ on his argument.

For a while now I have been reading up on the psychology of cyberspace. Conversations that occur through social media, however similar they appear to real life conversations, are not. The online disinhibition effect plays a major role in how humans interact with the Internet. There are several points to the disinhibition effect, such as dissociative anonymity (you don’t know me) and invisibility (you can’t see me) that affect how we interact with each other on the Internet. It is well known that people say and do things online that they would normally not face-to-face. Time is a huge factor that needs to be taken into consideration. Face-to-face, people have to react and act on the spot whereas online, responding to a person can be delayed and thought out well before a response is actually sent. A person’s personality and the mood that they are in at a particular moment will also hinder how the person behaves and reacts online. Shy people, tend to feel safe and secure behind a computer and thus interact differently with people online as opposed to people offline. The Internet is not actually a space at all, but a made-up world we created.

Interacting with the Internet does mimic to a certain degree how we interact in real-life, only because as humans we know no other way. However, disinhibition factors play a huge role in the way in which we communicate online. So to say people are people and interact in the same way is a bit of an over statement. I asked my Twitter followers what they thought and here are the responses I got.

@Xgalien: on the internet people are more spontaneous, less inhibited, you see more of the inside of them…

@anthonyidem: Geez, I hope not..

@chapin55 My interest is personality. Schizoids and introverts are much more outgoing online. I’ve heard some freaky things regarding online experiences.

I will be discussing more on this later next week.

When I think “viral marketing”, one of the first campaigns that come to mind is the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty I am sure that I am not the only one!

There have been several elements to the Dove Campaigns, pretty much all of interactive and successful. Click on the link below to see just one Dove promotion, a YouTube video that was posted in 2006. Since that time, this video has been viewed 8,056,122 times, commented on 3,262 times, and been rated 7469 times. Talk about consumer interaction!

Dove Evolution

Another viral element is their pay beauty forward campaign, which invites their website viewers to send a flower with a message (the sender picks both the colour of the flower and the message from a drop down menu). So far over 10,000 flowers have been sent. There was also the Dove Sleepover for Self Esteem, a great concept inviting women and children to host a sleepover that includes much discussion about self esteem and “real beauty”.

Now I happen to live in downtown Toronto and I doubt that I will ever forget the “Fat vs. Fab” billboard over the DVP that featured a woman in her undies. People were invited to text in their votes on whether they thought she was “Fat” or “Fab”. They rant the same ad in UK with the options being “Overweight” or “Outrageous” and I think it was “Fat” or “Fit” in the US. I remember being slightly uncomfortable with this one and very disappointed when the results came in with 51% of them voting “fat”. Still, that was one of the first campaigns that I had seen successfully incorporate texting

So after mentioning all of these well thought out interactive campaigns, what will Dove come up with next? Something that focuses on how well Dove products work, perhaps? With the exception of maybe a couple of television commercials, Dove has so far skipped the whole “believe in our product” sort of advertising and jumped straight into the “believe in yourself” messaging, weaving their products with the warm happy feelings that one feels when she is confident and beautiful.

Love or hate the Dove approach, this whole concept of creating a movement that is bigger than your product is a perfectly suited for viral marketing and the rest of the online world. We have seen other successful examples of this and, as more companies catch on to the implications and potential of online marketing, I am sure we will see many more successful viral campaigns spread throughout the web like a wildfire.