Video is currently big business on the internet. A recent study by Nielsen found that people are spending 25% more time watching online video that they were a year ago. Its a powerful medium which is helping large companies to spread their message and increase their global brand awareness.

Goviral, a video-content distributor, produces a top ten list of viral videos every month. This month and last the videos chosen show an international flavour to the video techniques used. This reflects marketers increasing desire to market globally with one hit. October 09 produced the following:

1. Volkswagen – The Fun Theory
2. Google Wave Cinema – Pulp Fiction
3. FIFA 2010 – How big can football get?
4. Rio de Janeiro – Olympic Games 2016
5. Diesel – Quique The Head
6. Canal+ – A Great Story
7. ReThink Breast Cancer – BoobyBall
8. Evian  – More than a bottle
9. Sony Ericsson – Hopper Invasion
10. Cadbury – Zingolo feat. Tinny

Goviral gives some commentary on each video and discusses why its viral or likely to become so. This is a useful site for businesses who are thinking of implementing this kind of online marketing technique.

Viral Marketing is just as useful for large global brands as it is for small start-ups who needs to get on the map. It can be applied to various online marketing mediums including video, email and texts. In a recent campaign to raise awareness of search engine Bing, Microsoft launched a video competition. The video that won was so amusingly poor that it did the viral rounds and created a lot of publicity for Bing.

As reported by Propero Digital, blogging is a very useful online marketing tool when used as a part of an overall marketing strategy. The launch of the latest iPhone model, 3GS, proves it. Furthermore its a viral phenomenon: its not just on the Apple blogs where people are hearing about the iPhone its on other people’s too.

A Nielsen Online report said that the buzz a week before the 3G S release increased its blog mentions by 1,226%. When the phone became available on the 19th of June, the blog figures doubled compared to the week before.

A positive blogging buzz is exciting for online marketing. Its viral potential is something that cannot be purchased but is only effective if the product is perfect for the market, otherwise the value of viral marketing turns on its head and becomes a quickly spreading disaster.

Apple was the most visited computer hardware manufacturer site in May 2009. It drew 55,716 visitors compared to Hewlett Packard therefore it’s potential for being picked up on blogging sites is therefore huge but it can happen for small companies too. All you need is something that captures the public’s imagination.

In 2008 two Northern Ireland students Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe, launched The Big Word Project which invited people to create a new dictionary. They sell words to individuals who can then link those words to their websites and thus ‘creating a new tapestry of words, meaning altogether different things.’ Currently they charge $1 per letter and the proceeds have gone to pay for their Masters Degrees. This site has attracted the attention of bloggers worldwide which has helped them to raise the money that they need.

Dantran Media asked 3,000 marketing and media executives what marketing strategies they felt had been successful so far in the current economic climate and what they felt would help them do well in 2009 and beyond. The results show that a varied range of online-marketing techniques were considered to be the most fruitful strategies. The most successful of all strategies was email marketing:

-80.4% of respondents found that email was a successful marketing technique
-58.5% of companies were planning to increase their spending on email marketing
-69% were planning to integrate marketing messages into transactional emails

What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing involves using email as a strategic marketing device:  as a one-to-one communication tool and a mass-market vehicle that spreads your company’s message.

The Importance of Email Marketing
1) Its cheap – in tough times the most effective methods must also provide value for money
2) Its time saving: its quick to put together, quick to deliver
3) Its time responsive: companies can very quickly respond to public needs and changes in the market
4) It has huge potential for viral marketing* making it even more cost effective

What are the features of a great email?

• As with any marketing campaign attention to detail is paramount. Email partners-up with your website as your virtual shop window. It will help you to promote your brand – your logo, your company message, your signature – are all devises that will promote brand recognition and professionalism. It all adds to the picture that says: this is who I am, this is what I stand for and more importantly, this is what I can do for you.
• It is very important to have a standard email template for all your employees. The details of day to day work-related emails are just as important as layouts for major marketing email campaigns.
• Great emails help to create a relationship between you and your customers and future customers. Relationships are created through contact and preferably interaction. You send an email and it requires your customer to do something: read a newsletter, click on a link, enter a competition. By encouraging an interaction you are strengthening your relationship with your clients. Strong relationships engender loyalty and loyalty creates greater income for you.
• Great emails are part of a wider marketing campaign. Creating back links to targeted website pages is a great way to increase your search engine rankings and encourage more visitors to your site.
• Great emails provide something that will be useful to your customers. They give good value, they do not just sell.

As the Dantran Media survey suggests there is likely to be an increase in email marketing which means it is even more important to get it right. Consumers are adverse to being ‘badgered’ online so limited but focused and well designed campaigns will be the order of the day.

Making sure that it easy for clients and potential clients to get access to you is one of the main functions of marketing.  Anything that makes this happen makes good business sense.  One of the latest products on the market is designed to help with this.  Telnic have launched .tel which is a web-based contact directory and has the potential to take over current directory providers.

Once you register your company for a .tel domain you add all your contact details.  This can be in the form of email, telephone, address, website, fax number, social networks and so on.  Any web-based information will be linked straight to its source and you can update the information quickly and easily at any time.  .tel can be accessed from any device which is linked to the internet and will be particularly useful for clients on the go to access you from their mobile phones.

Domains are on sale now at the premium rate of £325 for 3 years.  On 24th March at 3pm domains will be cheaper at around £10 for a year.

Telnic’s CEO, Khashayar Mahidavic,  thinks that spreading the word about .tel will be very easy and suspects that viral marketing will play a big role in this.  Talking to Bloomberg, Mahidavic  said that .tel is ‘the biggest innovation since .com.’  He explained that one of the reasons that the product is so unique is that it provides people with information very quickly.  Information is all stored on the Domain Name System (DNS), the back-bone of the internet  and therefore does not need an IP address. This makes it return information fast.

What will make .tel very useful as part of an internet marketing campaign is that it has keyword functionality and could be adopted as part of a search engine optimisation strategy.  You can select keywords to store and these will be used when people are searching on sites such as Google.

The service has come under criticism as it has been pointed out that unscrupulous people may try to buy up domains.  Ben Edelman, an internet specialist from Harvard University said that,

‘To date, spammers and scammers have been the quickest to adopt new domains.

‘If many .tel domains spring up containing misleading information, perhaps with the intention of soliciting email addresses or other personal data, individuals and businesses with more honourable intentions will be deterred from signing up.

 ’That problem has afflicted other new domains. From everything known about .tel so far, I think there remains a serious risk of a similar outcome.’

 Time will tell if it will achieve the success Telnic would like: for it become as universal to have a .tel domain as it does to have an email address.