Viral Marketing or Is It Publicity?

Getting visual with publicity

The popular term in today’s marketing on the web is Viral. This is becoming a hot subject as well as a new marketing tool that advertisers, not all, are embracing. Getting in on a new technology is sometimes a good thing. But not knowing how it will fair out can be risky business.

viral videos and publicityRecently, a viral campaign was put to the test. A viral video was created using mentos and Diet Coke. The visual showed a geyser being created when mentos was put into the 2-liter bottle.

The video was viewed 600,000 times on such web sites as YouTube. This can be a great number when shown to potential advertisers. As with all new publicity and marketing tactics, there are the pros and cons of this new media.

One the good note, you can get your message, or visual of the product viewed by hundreds of thousands quickly. The negative, you cannot control how and when or where the video is viewed. It’s possible that your video is sent to a bunch of people who want to alter it, or place it near a porn video. No to do anything intentional, but again, no control on where it is viewed.

Another point, it is difficult to really track the effectiveness and direst sales results. Although the people at Mentos believe it worked well that they created a web site to encourage viewers to create their own videos.

This story about Mentos, and viral videos is getting a lot of media attention. In turn it is now part of the publicity phenomenon. Good or bad, a company needs to deal with the new media and be prepared to handle the direction it takes–good or bad.

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