Grassroots Marketing - NetSquared 2006

Grassroots Marketing - NetSquared 2006 LinkTV - San Jose, CA The Distributed Grassroots Marketing Team: Letting Your Community, Advocates, Evangelists, and Fans Do the Heavy Lifting moderated by Marnie Webb, featuring panelists Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt, and Chris Messina speaking at the NetSquared Conference 2006.People have been trying to harnass the power of the successful viral marketing campaign by encouraging people to spread the message themselves. This technique was served to great effect for environmental causes with the (anti) Chevy Tahoe campaign, which generated a lot of buzz to the effect that environmentalists had turned Chevy's marketing on itself. However, it's an open question as to who took advantage of whom. Did Chevy's marketers actually expect this to happen? How could they not anticipate it? And who gets the last laugh? Surely, more people heard about the Chevy Tahoe thanks to the environmentalists, just like you're reading about it right here and now. And one might argue that the environmentalist community was never going to buy Tahoes anyway, so nothing lost there for Tahoe, but by getting their ad campaign in the general press, the environmentalists ended up selling a bunch of SUVs. Moral: A virus is not only hard to control but hard to understand in terms of unintended consequences.Two recent campaigns that certainly did not backfire were SpreadFirefox and the outreach for the first BlogHer conference. These efforts reached large audiences, without expending large advertising budgets. According to the Pinko Marketing Manifesto, you have to believe in your product or message, and then let those with the passion go spread the word for you. Give the power of communication away, don't try to control it.Presented by NetSquared in collaboration with Link TV.Funding of Link TV's video coverage provided by:Surdna FoundationLeland Fikes FoundationCare2.com

ForaTV | June 27, 2006

Tags:. .conference. .message. .reading. .lost. .hunt