Welcome to the Escape Blog

When I first discovered tools like StumbleUpon and Digg, I was like a kid in a candy store. An easy way to get easy traffic, right?

Well, no actually. As much as we may think we are creating the best content ever and loads of people will be queuing up to read it, so are the hundreds of thousands of other people (including marketers) doing the same thing.

As well as quality of content issues, there are also the avid users of these tools who effectively decide the success of the things submitted and they get a bit put out if you just try to join the party and spam the sites with your “amazing” content.

People work very hard to make headway as ’superusers’ as well as the people who are genuinely out there simply using these tools on a day to day basis in the way they were intended and they won’t take too kindly to you posting one story and the Digging it or Stumbling it.

In fact, when you sit back and think about it, these websites are like Google in that respect - they work on authority and trust. The articles that do well, only really start to take off after they are Stumbled or Dugg by an active member of the community - someone who has reputation.

So, why not just slip them some money and buy some love? Well, you know that saying that trust takes a long time to build and seconds to lose? It’s the same thing.

So, if you want some success, start taking part. Start making friends with other Diggers and Stumblers and become less biased about the stuff you contribute.

And, why not encourage other people to submit your stuff too by using some sexy little icons like these ones below?

This is quality - a mixture of tutorial and comedy:

“Because you are only using $75 worth of Photoshop”

Remember the Mac Desktop Art? Well, here is some more - and it’s much cooler.

There are two very good reasons why viral marketing can work well for businesses of any size.

Firstly, people are less trusting of ads than they are of  their family, friends or members of on-line communities. And secondly, viral marketing is cheap since the cost is in the idea, not the promotion.

The key to viral marketing success lies fundamentally in the idea so the end product must therefore be something really worth talking about in order for your brand or products to be endorsed optimally.

Use the following as a guide to establishing a concept for your campaigns and for getting your message out.

1. You’ve got to laugh! Use humour in your campaigns as it has universal appeal, spreads very quickly and leaves a positive association.
2. Know your onions! Demonstrate your knowledge by being a resource that educates and informs.
3. Start a debate! Offer a friendly challenge. Done well, this can help gain respect for your brand, services or products.
4. The best things in life! Offer free things. Use caution here by only attracting ‘key influencers’ as this may impact your budget.
5. Fish where the fish are! Find out where your target market hangs out such as social networking sites, discussion forums and blogs.
6. Shout from the rooftops! Getting the word out (seeding) can be done initially by e-mailing family, friends and colleagues or by finding websites, forums and blogs related to your topic.
7. Tools for the job! Get ad space without buying an ad. For example, insert widgets on your blog or web pages that link to your videos on YouTube or your pictures on Flickr.

And finally. Remember that ideas spread because they are important to the spreader, not the originator.

Need some inspiration? See some top quality, big brand viral marketing videos.

Came across a story today on the trusty BBC site and my eye was caught by bubble.us. It’s a very simple and totally free web application that let’s you brainstorm online. Funky.

Laura sent me this video for Clustarack which at first I thought was another one of ‘those’ videos made by someone with too much time on their hands.

What it is though is a great piece of marketing for a relatively boring product.

Just goes to show though what can be achieved and how you can create viral marketing for most products or services.

Take away the mystique and see how they made it.

Radiohead have fans - lots of them. They could have just released a new record, got some airplay and sold some records. But they allowed people to pay what they thought was a fair price for In Rainbows - marketed online and distributed online.

And today it’s Coldplays turn with the new single of their next album announced as a free download.

How much traditional marketing spend have they saved? You can bet the cost is less than the publicity this ’stunt’ will generate.

Let’s face it thought - it’s not even a marketing stunt. It’s just the way things are moving with cheaper distribution and the nature of a viral message and social tools (I just Twitter‘d it). It goes hand-in-hand with the thousands of un-signed bands on MySpace and YouTube.

Oh yes, did I mention that these people have fans? So, what’s so special about you?

So. You’ve picked the music, pre-selected your outfit for the occassion and asked everyone to be happy and to ‘celebrate’ your death. Then you turn up in a mahogony box with brass fittings… so last year darling!!!

This article on the BBC website just goes go prove that there is a place for design even where you least expect it. I find this refreshing for 2 reasons. Firstly it provides an opportunity for humour to be introduced into what is always regarded as a sombre occasion. As much as many request it in their dying wishes, when did you last go to a funeral where everyone ‘did’ have a good laugh?

Secondly, I love the fact that we have created ourselves yet another medium for design. As an agency, this might not necessarily be a service we would usually offer but it proves yet again that there is a demand for creativity and people place a value on it. It also proves yet again that design is about telling a good story. I love the idea of designing a coffin showing someone holding a piece of paper saying ‘For christ sakes let me out… I’m not dead’. That lasting story/memory of ‘Fred Bloggs’ in the box is that he had a sense of humour, and that was delivered by design.

You may know that Google currently delivers near on 90% of search traffic in the UK, but an article by Robin Goad on Hitwise today suggest that through their web properties, they also deliver 36.55% of all UK traffic.

A custom category consisting of the 100 most visited Google-owned web properties in the UK accounted for 36.55% of upstream traffic to All Categories of websites in the UK during March 2008, up from 30.19% in March 2007.

Considering the domination of Google in the UK, the recent trademark changes to Google Adwords, could seriously damage traffic levels to brand websites, he goes on to discuss.

Wowsers… interesting developments on Google image search over at Techcrunch:

Google is now talking about using computers to analyze the stuff in photos, and using that to associate it in a ranked way with keyword queries. In effect, they’re talking about PageRank for images.