Six months ago, if you had mentioned Dollar Shave Club to a room of people, you would have gotten all blank stares (even though the company has been around since June of last year). Today, there are over 4.5 million people who would nod their heads and smile. 4.5 million YouTube views. In just a few weeks. How did they do it?

A viral video incorporates strong planning, careful execution, and a little bit of luck. Fortunately for those of us who have never won the lottery, the strong planning and careful execution part carries a little more weight than the luck part. Can you design a video and guarantee that it will go viral? Maybe not, but by incorporating these lessons from Dollar Shave Club, you can at least ensure that it earns the right to be seen and shared.

Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously

Humor is something Dollar Shave Club does really well. Seriously. There’s hardly a straight line in the entire video. But they’re not just cracking jokes either. Some of the humor is obvious and some is a little more under the radar, but all of it works together to communicate the vital information you need to know about the company. And it leaves you with that “You’ve gotta see this!” feeling.

Create a Unified Approach

Take a long look at your existing website and craft your video so that it supports your current marketing strategy. When you visit the Dollar Shave Club site, every element hangs together and sends the same vibes you received in the video. Your website visitors shouldn’t wonder whether you’re the same company as the one that produced the video they loved.

Put the Most Important Stuff First

In the first ten seconds, we know what Dollar Shave Club does, how much it costs, and what the quality of the product is. We get our questions answered: How can they afford it and are the razors any good? ( personally I enjoy the best straight razor from my barber and I don’t think that is going to change) If we decide to stop viewing (which we won’t, because their fabulous style holds our attention) we still have everything we need to know to pique our interest and entice us over to the website.

Put a Face On Your Company

Even if you don’t have the marketing background and camera-ease that Dollar Shave Club’s founder, Mike Dubin does, it still helps viewers connect with your company when you put a face behind the name. Make the story human and people will relate to it. Certainly not everyone wants that fresh clean shaved look. In the same theme you can do like http://beardcareshop.com/philips-Norelco-beard-trimmer-series-7200/ and make beard trimming and care sexy and attainable. Or any idea you may have can go viral, you simply have to work hard.

Creating videos people love begins with understanding how to communicate a message they can relate to and want to share. After that, who knows? You just might win the lottery.

I “Like” you. I’ll “Share” you with my friends if you impress me. If I really “Like” you, I may even “Comment” about you. No, these are not notes dug out of a middle-school girl’s locker. They’re the short version of what (hopefully) goes on in the minds of your Facebook fans every time they see your content in their newsfeed. Want to know how to engage your fans even more? First let’s talk about how you earn a spot in the newsfeed to start with, and then we’ll discuss some strategies that will increase visibility.

EdgeRank Demystified

Edgerank is the mysterious algorithm used by Facebook to determine which news stories show up in the newsfeed. Fortunately, the Facebook wizards have given us three factors that affect this all-important process:

• Affinity—Likes, shares, and comments determine a fan’s affinity, or engagement with your brand.
• Weight—Weight measures how popular your site is overall. It’s determined by how people engage and how often they engage with your content.
• Time—Time refers (obviously) to how old your post is. Newer posts are deemed more important than older ones.

How to Build Your Brand With EdgeRank

Now that you know the three factors that determine your Edgerank score, you can build your Facebook strategy around maximizing their impact.

• Create Fabulous Content

Valuable content is still the best way to earn fan engagement, and of the possible content formats, photos tend to carry the most bang for your buck. Make your content fun, upbeat, and relevant to the reader’s life.

• Give Your Audience What They Want

People are on Facebook to interact, smile, or otherwise get a boost for the day. So give your fans what they want. Study them to find out what kinds of content they engage with most often (pictures, videos, or witty comments?) and when they’re most likely to consume that content. Then tailor your posts accordingly.

• Practice the Three S’s

The most popular posts tend to be short, straightforward and seasonable. As people scroll through a newsfeed, they don’t generally take the time to read long posts. So keep it short. Don’t be afraid to ask for likes, shares, and comments. And be sure to include current content about breaking news, trending topics, and holiday items.

• Follow Up

Once you’ve earned the coveted engagement, follow-up by replying with a comment yourself. Many times, your comment will earn another like, strengthening your connection with that fan even more.

Capitalize on the Edgerank process by catering your posts to your audience. As you earn their loyalty with quality content, engaging and readable posts, and reliable follow up, you’ll see a boost in your Edgerank score. And that’s the key to staying visible.

The phrase was, “content is king.” Content was key for search engine optimization and played a huge role to position your company as an industry resource. Then came social and the need for pushing consistent communication and creative tactics emerged through micro-sites and social media popularity exploding, driving brands to compete with the thought-leaders or become obsolete in the marketplace.

Now, with the internet becoming increasingly personalized in our multi-polarized world, content marketing is more important than ever. Budgets are increasing to develop deeper, thought-provoking messaging and strategy (evolving from, “Look at us” and “Wow, our product and services are fantastic,” to a storytelling technique that taps into the customer experience).

So what exactly is content marketing? Entrepreneur Magazine’s concise definition is: “The creation and publication of original content — including blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos and photos — for the purpose of generating leads, enhancing a brand’s visibility, and putting the company’s subject matter expertise on display.”

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If you are unfamiliar with Yelp.com, as I imagine many people are, given the percentage of times I tell someone I am an Elite Yelper and they say, “What’s that?,” it is time to get familiar.

On March 2, 2012, Yelp hosted their IPO with shares closing at $15 a share, 64% higher than anticipated.  Nearly 6 million people use Yelp’s mobile app to find businesses near to them and 66 million unique users visit the website per month.  Some of the top Yelp communities in America are in San Francisco SEO (where it was founded), L.A., New York, and Austin (of course!).

Why is this important to you?  If you are a small business owner, Yelp can be used to add value to your business by leveraging social strategies to increase visibility of your business in your community.  That is, unless you have poor customer service or are peddling a poor product, then Yelp can be your worst enemy.   Let’s assume you have a nice small business, be it a restaurant or food trailer, day spa, clothing store, salon, day care, gym, or what-have-you.

Why Yelp is Good for Your Awesome Small Business:

1. Yelp is Mobile

Both dedicated and casual Yelpers look up businesses on the mobile app.  I found it especially useful when traveling since the app allows you to look for places meeting your criteria within a certain distance (2 blocks, 6 blocks, etc).  One author called this “enabling hyper local neighborhood searches” and this is the reason that many people prefer Yelp for local business searches to Google.  Yelp’s directions to your business are also superior to any I have seen on the web or on apps.  In New York, it even told me which subway to take since I was on foot.  That’s pretty cool.

2. Yelp is Trusted

66 million users per month and growing 80% per year.  Mm-hmm, people trust Yelp.

3. Yelp is Social

We are all familiar with “digital strategies” that businesses can employ to communicate with customers.  These include your website or emails you send out, even your tweets.  Anything you do that is basically one-way communication from the business to your current or potential customers.  “Social strategies” are when a business encourages interaction with itself and the customers and interaction among the customers.  This is becoming a much more powerful strategy to implement to help grow your business.

Yelp’s business model incorporates both digital strategies and social strategies.   Yelp is not only an on-line review website, there are also on-line and in-person social aspects to it that most people don’t realize.  Users (“Yelpers”) can set up their own profiles and tell the world what their favorite movie is or what their last meal on earth would be, they can have Yelp friends, or follow people on Yelp (becoming their Yelp fan), users can post events to Yelp, or topics in the Talk threads, they can give each other compliments, and send private messages.  In active communities, there are Yelp parties, and Community Manager Yelp Events (CMYEs), Yelpers can host their own “unofficial” Yelp events (UYEs).  And there is a tier of Yelpers known as Elite, but that is a whole different blog entry…

Stay tuned for Part II of this article, where we tell you exactly how to harness the power of Yelp to add value to your business!

Hello again!  In our last installment, we told you about thecorsetcenter.com Yelp’s business model, their online and in-person presence, their users and growth.  In this installment, we give you concrete advice on how to leverage Yelp to add value to your business.

How you can harness the power of Yelp

1. Claim you free business listing on Yelp

This is so incredibly easy and free.  It gives you the opportunity to put your business out there and not wait for a good Samaritan (or Yelper, in the case) or the dreaded D&B to list your business.  Your business will come up when people search either on the mobile app or the actual website.  You have the ability to post photos, give a detailed business description, list the business history, and your specialties.  Also, Yelp has free business tools associated with the business accounts, like how many page views you’re gotten or how your business comes up in searches.  Pretty cool.

2. Host or sponsor a Yelp event

If your business is in a city with an active Yelp community, consider hosting a special event for the Yelpers.  This is a great way to get Yelpers in your business and introduce yourself to the community at large.   Contact your local community manager for more details about this.

3. Read your Reviews

Read both the positive and negative reviews.  People are much more likely to complain about something than to praise it, so if a reviewer does praise something, take that as 10 people praising it and keep doing whatever that was.  As a business owner, you can respond to reviews publically, right on that review, or privately, by sending the reviewer a private message.

In reading negative reviews, it is important to read them thoroughly to truly understand the issue.  Do not be tempted to lash out at the reviewer, especially publically; nothing good can come of that.  My best advice for this is to respond privately to the user and apologize for their experience, tell them that is not how you do business, and invite them to give you another shot.  I have personally had this experience and was glad to have the opportunity to share my experience with the owner and give them the opportunity to correct the issue.   And after that better experience, I updated my review.  Remember, the customer that complains is your friend.

4. Buy Yelp Ads

Personally, I think if you do the first three steps well and often, you will not have to do step 4 or 5 at all, but the option is there if you want it.  In fact, there have been accusations of Yelp being overly-zealous with trying to sell ads to business owners and these ads not being as effective as other advertising purchases you could be making (see Yelp Ad Sales).  From my experience, businesses on Yelp that provide a good service, reach out to the community in general and the Yelp community, will do well without needing to advertise—word of mouth is so much more powerful.

5. Have Yelp Deals

This is another service offered by Yelp and again, is there if you want it.  These are similar to Groupon and Localiter Deals but on your Yelp page.  One benefit of these is that in the search options, users can filter on companies that currently have a deal, so depending on the type of business you have, this may be helpful in initially penetrating the market or trying to stand out among the crowd.  However, you want to be careful and avoid “Daily Deal Backlashes” which can actually alienate customers and employees and erode your prices and reputation over time.  Value and quality propositions are always better in the long run and it will pay off.

Good luck and happy Yelping!

As you probably already know, or maybe are just noticing, changes for your brand’s Facebook page have just rolled out as of this past Friday, March 30^th.  All Facebook brand pages have now been converted to the Timeline layout that most of us have seen on many of our friends’ personal pages.  With this conversion come many changes your company should be aware of; there are pros and cons.

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Coca-cola. Pringles. Play Station. Victoria Secret. Oreo.

What do these companies have in common? They are all top brands on Facebook, garnering the highest number of fans among the thousands of pages on our favorite social media marketing platform.

What does this mean and why do companies strive to emulate these brands and dissect every new campaign and social strategy? Because as marketers we know that fans = greater influence and reach. And increased interaction with your brand = increased brand loyalty and consumer satisfaction.

Check out this infograph that breaks down the correlation between number of fans, engagement and how that can influence the growth and success of your business.

You see them everywhere: on business entrances, restaurant menus, movie posters, brochures, direct mail pieces, the list goes on. Although we have heavily utilized these quick response barcodes for over two years in the marketing and tech world, as an industry we have yet to perfect the use of QR Codes (and in many instances failed miserably at understanding their effective placement).

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We’ve all seen the use of QR codes become more and more prevalent as a marketing tool for companies, but could QR codes be used as a source of entertainment?  I’ll get there in a moment, but let me first set the stage.  Aside from my new gig as a marketing consultant with HMG Creative (I call it a gig because to me it’s fun), I also have the unique title of “Board Game Inventor”.  A couple years ago, a random event sparked an idea for a new party game that I coined, Spontuneous.  Check it out when you have a moment, but let me get back to my story.

I recently attended the World Toy Fair in New York City, where I rented a booth to promote Spontuneous.  In doing so, I used QR codes as a marketing tool in a couple different ways.  The first was a large sign where toy store buyers could scan the code to download a press kit I had created with all the pertinent information they would need to place an order.  Several buyers scanned it, but a larger portion still preferred an old-fashioned hard copy; fortunately I was prepared.  The second use was a code on my business cards.  It directed the user to a YouTube video of the game being played with narration throughout and a call to action in the end.  Of the two, the video code was by far the most widely scanned.  Although effective, my strategy had room for improvement.

Now what really caught my eye had nothing to do with my own use of QR codes, but rather that of a couple other booths around me.  One belonged to Jacked Up Card Games, where certain playing cards within the deck had a QR code, that when scanned, would change the rules of the game.  The other booth belonged to 4 Clowns Game & Toy Company.  It was the first year presenting at Toy Fair for these clowns, but there’s no joking when comes to the amount of attention they received for their new game.  It’s called Codigo Cube.

Codigo Cube is a larger-than-normal sized die with a unique QR code on each of the 6 sides.  Players roll the die and scan the facing code, which returns a trivia question.  If answered correctly, the player rolls again and attempts a new question.  If answered incorrectly, the Codigo Cube is passed to the next player.  The first to answer a question from all 6 categories wins!

The beauty of this idea, which they’ve patented, ( learn more about how to patent something ) is that the bank of trivia questions can continually be updated with new questions and categories.  Another cool feature is that players can be given different handicaps depending on their knowledge, so kids and adults can play together despite different abilities.

What a novel way to use QR codes!  It’s a great game that the whole family can play anytime, anywhere and it will never grow old.  Keep an eye out for this one because over the 4 days I displayed across from 4 Clowns, it was not uncommon to see company executives from Toys R Us, Hasbro and the likes intently listening to their presentation of the Cudigo Cube.

So in looking for more effective ways to utilize QR codes as a marketing tool, I think the moral of the story would be:  Make it fun.  In addition to providing information; look for creative ways to engage the end-user.  After all, who doesn’t like to have a good time?