HELLO WORLD!
Just got done listening to a webinar by the good guys at HUBSPOT.
I love what these guys do and what they have to say. This most recent webinar was called “Viral Marketing: How to Create a World Wide Rave”. Â It was really awesome.
My favorite part of the webinar was one of the introductory stories. Â It’s the story of when 7 equals 350 million.
The story was told of the lady who was tasked with the job of marketing the brand new Universal Orlando Theme – The Wizardly Word of Harry Potter. Â She had an almost unlimited budget for marketing. Â She could do anything she wanted. Â So she thought about her options:
- Direct Mail Marketing
- TV Commercials
- Super Bowl Commercial
- E-mail Marketing
- and, I’m sure a ton of others
So, what did she come up with? Â The slickest super bowl commercial ever? Â A million dollar give away? Â
Nope, she set up a special – by invitation only – webinar.  The webinar was scheduled at midnight (you know – the whole Harry Potter wizard thing).  Invitations went out to a whopping SEVEN people!  That’s right – only seven.
How were the seven people picked? Â Again, did she pick major news people, journalists? Â Theme park revieweres (assuming they exist)?
Again, nope. Â She simply picked the seven most popular Harry Potter bloggers and invited them to this special invitation event.
All seven agreed.
Her bosses, of course, were beside themselves. Â I can only imagine the questions – why aren’t you buying magazine ads? Â Why aren’t you buying tv commercials? Â Why aren’t you hiring a super exspensive Ad Agency?
She didn’t have an answer UNTIL 24 hours AFTER the event. Â
So, what happened? Â Of course, we know the story. Â All seven bloggers immediately wrote posts about the event. Â They posted pictures about it. Â They put information on facebook, they tweeted about it. Â And, within 24 hours, over 350,000,000 (that’s right – million) had heard about the new park. Â
And, it isn’t just a random collection of 350,00,000 people. Â It was 350,000,000 people who had some sort of interest about Harry Potter – exactly the kind of people you want to know about your brand new Harry Potter theme park.
All I can say is “WOW”! Â The simple truth is that you can’t buy that kind of publicity. Â Literally – no matter how much money you have, you can’t buy that.
So, the question is what does a story like that mean for you and me? Â Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.
Here’s a couple of my very short and very brief thoughts:
- NEVER underestimate the power of social media
- Be real – form a TRIBE – get the book TRIBES from Seth Godin to see what I mean
- Giving up control can have AMAZING results – to do something like this – you have to be willing to give up some control.
Other thoughts? Â Let me know.