10 Commandments of Web Development for Business

In today’s marketplace, there is no single asset more foundational to the growth of your business than your website. Yet all too often, business growth objectives are not put front and center in the web development process. Every site that exists within the Web marketing universe can be categorized into one of two basic types: the one-hit brochure site and the superstar site that makes the cash register ring. To grow, you need a superstar site. To successfully build a superstar site, there are 10 fundamental rules that must be followed. Everyone involved throughout the life of the site, especially you the business owner or marketer, must understand and adhere to these commandments. Don’t be intimidated by the technology that exists behind the scenes. Own the process and make sure your site serves your business, not the other way around.

Put business growth objectives first

Due to the complexities of the architecture underlying any website, there has long been the misperception that web development is primarily a function of IT or engineering. As a result, technical capabilities, goals and trends – rather than business objectives – tend to be what drive the process. In reality, website development is first and foremost a function of marketing and business growth and must be treated as such from the ground up. Whether you are launching a new site or rebuilding your existing site, the first step is to draw up a list of all business objectives for your organization, whether it is to increase your customer base, expand your share of an existing market, enter a new market or all of the above. This list should be exhaustive, with each goal assigned a rank in order of priority. Only then can you begin the process of translating business objectives into objectives for your website – for driving traffic, increasing awareness of your brand, boosting sales and converting visitors into customers into fans. Ultimately, this analysis will provide the razor-sharp clarity you need to direct those building the site, making the development process much easier and more straightforward. It is also the only way to ensure that the end result not only reflects your organization – what it is, what it does, where it is and where it’s going – but effectively promotes its goals.

Know your audience from the inside out

Once you’ve clearly stated your business objectives, the next step is to gain a thorough understanding of your target audience. Map out all of the various segments – from those on the fringe of your market to interested prospects to your existing customer base to your brand evangelists – so that you can determine how your website can best serve each group to further your goals. Identify and examine each segment methodically. What percentage of your total audience does each comprise? What differentiates one from another? Who exists within each segment, and what are their motivations? What level of sophistication do they have regarding your product or service? How does your product or service affect their lives? What are the sales objections to overcome with each one? Then, take it a step further to understand each segment in ways that transcend their direct relationship to your business. What interests them? What are they passionate about? How do they spend their leisure time? What do they read? Is there an opportunity for you to play a part in their lives that goes beyond your immediate business offering? You must also understand the factors that cause an individual to move from one segment to another. What motivates them to come to your site or to your store? What brings them to that point of buying from you? What is it about the product or experience you offer that prompts a customer to become an evangelist who draws additional prospects to your organization? Completing this analysis will give you a clear picture of your entire audience. It will enable you to speak to each segment directly and relevantly without the static of inapplicable elements getting in the way, appealing to their unique set of motivations to propel them along the continuum from outer rim prospect to brand evangelist. This is the basis not only of good site architecture but of building strong traffic and of sharpening the sales conversion process.

Organize your site around motivations

At this point, you have identified and weighed your business objectives and profiled your target audience. Now you must apply your analysis of goals and motivations to create your site map. No matter the specific interests or demographic profile of your target audience, ultimately all users within the web marketing universe fall into one of five categories. These are:

1. The casual visitor: Those along the outer rim of your market that are available for you to capture and drive to your site
2. The repeat visitor: Those that make use of your website’s function, content or utility (not to be confused with your direct offering) on a regular basis
3. The interested sales prospect: Those who are interested your organization’s product or service offering
4. The customer: Those that buy from your website
5. The fan: Those who love you, what you do or your products enough to be an evangelist for your brand

Your site map must identify the elements required to move your audience along the continuum from casual visitor to fan. It must focus on providing funnels to propel visitors toward action. The recipe for successful business growth today begins with mastering these objectives in your site’s architecture. Casual visitors need a reason to come to your site in the first place. This involves creating either compelling content or purpose in utility. The key to driving traffic to your site lies in making an investment in building your reputation on the Web for providing resources, inspiration and expertise that are meaningful to the casual visitor. Converting casual visitors to core, repeat users requires exceptional effort in the areas of content and utility. If your approach favors content, then you need to publish original content on a regular basis in order to give your visitors a reason to subscribe and return frequently. If your method leans toward providing utility, then you need to offer powerful functions that are unique in your market in order for your visitors to bookmark you as a resource. Now that you have a strong influx of visitors to your site, it is critical to make the most of the opportunity to expose those visitors to your brand and your company’s offering in a way that will produce consistent sales results. Return to your analysis of your audience segments, their motivations and their potential objections. Ensure that your site provides solutions to their needs and answers to their questions in order to overcome objections and convert prospects into customers. Your site map must identify the elements required to move your audience along the continuum from casual visitor to fan.Once a customer has been won, the next step is to cultivate their ongoing loyalty. This type of visitor is not like the casual or repeat visitor. To promote the growth of your business, you must not only to serve your customers in order to keep them but over-serve them in order to transform them into fans. The fan is the most highly desired state for your customer to attain. Fans do your marketing for you in a way that other methods simply cannot rival. They come back again and again, bringing with them more visitors and helping to create new customers. Taking care of your fans entails its own responsibilities and set of motivations that must be addressed. You must engage these people in order to fuel their evangelism. Hand them a megaphone and give them 15 minutes of fame. Open lines of communication to allow them to offer feedback. Provide added incentive by rewarding their loyalty. Build an online community of like-minded individuals that they can identify with and participate in. Whatever your approach, make sure that your site map clearly identifies pathways for creating and nurturing fans of your brand. Your success in today’s marketplace is founded in the decisions you make in creating your site’s blueprints. Your site map is not just another stage in development – it is your strategic marketing plan for business growth.

Never implement without the ability to measure

A superstar site is not a brochure. It is an ever-evolving, dynamic entity that drives growth and is the catalyst around which your fan base develops. As such, everything your site does must be able to be reshaped, retooled and sharpened for maximum effectiveness. You must know what works well and what doesn’t when measured against your business objectives and the motivations of your target audience segments. The specifics of this analysis are different for every website and company. However, in broad terms, your site can be evaluated based on its performance along two indices, referred to as the ESM/ISM model:

• External Site Motivator (ESM): What brings visitors to the site? Where do they come from? What are they interested in?
• Internal Site Motivator (ISM): What motivates visitors to take action or evolve along the continuum into the next stage of user?

Optimizing the performance of your site is a lot like playing golf. Few hit the sweet spot consistently right off the bat. In the same way practice makes perfect in sports, great developers of website architecture, design and community have mastered the ability to direct the evolution of the sites they create in response to these performance metrics. Whether you are a local retailer or a worldwide software company, remaining diligent in the ongoing analysis of your site as well as each individual element you implement will allow you to eliminate what doesn’t work and promote what does.

Always opt for simplicity in design

The number one reason visitors leave a website is confusion. Either they do not find what they want quickly enough, the site presents obstacles that interrupt their progress or a lack of organization and quality content yields an unsatisfying user experience. The Internet is riddled with sites where creative design has been allowed to take priority over interface design, leaving the content and business objectives to suffer. The net result of this is a negative user experience and a poor impression of the brand. In Steve Krug’s book, Don’t Make Me Think, he goes on a warpath on confusing interfaces and flashy gimmicks that stop users dead in their tracks. The fact is, few websites – particularly those that strive to create a reputation for content and utility – focus on simplicity and ease-of-use. As a rule, the more a website does and the more it offers, the more difficult it is to navigate, as developers struggle to overcome more rigorous demands on interface design and usability. A good creative framework is one that does its job – funneling visitors according to motivation and promoting action – and then gets out of the way. Ensure that your site focuses on providing value in what it says and the functionality it offers rather than on showcasing a flashy interface that will only confuse or frustrate the user. To use a familiar example, think of a magazine’s interface. There are a table of contents and page numbers. The interface is simple – just turn the page – and as a result, the emphasis is inherently on the magazine’s content. Few websites – particularly those that strive to create a reputation for content and utility – focus on simplicity and ease-of-use.And while a website’s content is exponentially more dynamic and robust than that of a magazine, its interface and navigation should always meet the challenge of staying equally streamlined and intuitive. Let’s take a look at the master of interface design: Apple. From its website to its devices to its operating system, Apple creates products with tremendous technological capabilities. However, what defines Apple and differentiates them from their competitors is one thing – simplicity. In addition, you must be sure to guard your website against design fatigue. It is easy to look at a site one time and like it. To keep your investment in tact, you and your website designers must consider how the site’s design will stand up over the course of a thousand page views and many years. Strive in every way to protect your site’s content and its business objectives, and keep things simple with a design that doesn’t just look good today but stands the test of time.

Master the art of creating good content and publish it regularly

Content is not your brochure copy. It is not your sales pitch for the product or service you are selling. It is, however, about you, what you do and what you think as well as what others are interested in or inspired by around your direct offering. It does not require an investment by the viewer in your direct offering but must be of interest on its own merits. To compare it with a more familiar system, the business operation of a magazine relies on two parts: content that is compelling or interesting to the reader and advertisements that are in someway either related to that content or to the reader directly. The truth is business growth depends on quality content. Sales, conversions and customers are a numbers game, and the traffic you draw to your website directly correlates to your bottom line. Conquering the challenge of bringing interested, applicable prospects to your site is the first step, and this is achieved by having a reputation for content. Every business can do this. If you have customers, then they have interest in buying from you. You create a solution for them and, as such, have a greater opportunity to be a part of their lives. If you are still uncertain how to proceed, then you are not alone. Mastering the art of creating good content on a regular basis requires a complete departure from the mentality of conventional advertising, and a good trustcasting company is worth its weight in gold for the guidance it can provide in this area. Consult with your site’s architect and make sure that you have a plan in place to use content to drive traffic over the long-term.

Propel visitors through your site

Developing a reputation for your site as a source of fresh, compelling information that captures and holds the reader’s interest is the key to getting visitors. This is the reason behind the tried-and-true mantra “content is king.” However, many sites that strive to offer good content do not invest in sound information architecture. They do a poor job of mapping the relationship between the content catalog and all other elements within the website. If a visitor is perusing the content on your site, it is because they are interested in something about what you have to say or show. Ask yourself what elements within your direct offering relate to this area of interest? Create an organizational tree that identifies the pertinent elements of all content and use in conjunction with keyword tags that can relate elements that may not be able to be structured. Integrate these elements into your site’s architecture. Never let the current piece of content being viewed be the last one.For every piece of content, the website’s framework should provide avenues to promote further reading or action. If a user is reading an article about best practices for baking, then entice them to delve deeper into the site with a collection of bread recipes or a slideshow of staff recommendations for their favorite tools of the trade. Perhaps there are related actions such as a set of kitchen utensils for sale in an online store which are used in a featured recipe. Consider also that many visitors don’t arrive through the front door. If your content is truly great, it is going to get picked up by other sources. Visitors that land on a specific piece of content need to see that there is a catalog of related material that also serves their interests. You invest so much in driving visitors to your site, don’t waste the opportunity once you have them there. Never let the current piece of content being viewed be the last one. Make sure all of your content is related and that it is presented in a way that keeps the user turning the pages along their track of interest. You want to create a powerful hold over your audience so that they must turn you off reluctantly. You want them to see that there is more available to them than can be consumed in one session. Seeing that you not only have one interesting thing to say but that you have an entire catalog on a subject gives people a reason to bookmark your website, turning the casual visitor into an exponentially more valuable repeat user.

Separate technology from content

Good websites are built on strong foundations that allow for constant growth and evolution as business and performance metrics dictate. As such, your web developer’s approach to building your site must be one guided by a long-term vision. Your website is an ongoing investment, not a one-time project that can be checked off a task list. The site must have a solid foundation that can support changes that sharpen its performance and meet your company’s ever-changing needs without costly rebuilding. Content must be separated from the website’s design and framework. Each piece of the site must be able to stand on its own and evolve independently without interrupting others. As the person charged with business growth in your company, it can be a difficult task to ensure that your site is being built in the right way. This is akin to knowing if your house is built cheaply or with sound materials and methods. You have to know a bit about the process and have the experience to tell the difference. Ask these questions of yourself and your web developers to ensure your site is being built for the long-haul:

1. Is there a clear and strict separation in the site’s content and its technical framework? Are all required elements of your content mapped out?
2. Can the styles and elements of all content within the site be changed in one place easily?
3. Can the CMS (content management system) evolve with your site and its content?
4. How expensive is it to replace the site’s framework and organization? How will this affect your content?
5. Is each function of the site modularized and changeable without interrupting other portions of the site?
6. Are you dependent on any proprietary technology?
7. How difficult would it be for another web developer pick up where the previous developers left off?
8. Can you easily port your content to a mobile platform?
9. Are the content catalog and all site elements arranged and organized to allow for the relationships required now and in the future?
10. Envision where your site should be in one, two and 10 years. Can it achieve these goals based upon the foundation you are building? Can your content catalog and its supporting database expand with your business goals?

The technical side of website development can be very difficult to understand. Often confusion in this area results in a site that is too difficult to update or evolve, leaving the company with a dead, stale, ineffectual site that eats up funds rather than grows business.

Empower people to manage content

It is a common occurrence that websites – even the ones that start with the best of intentions and a great foundation – falter when it comes to publishing meaningful content consistently. Just as content is the lifeblood of a superstar website, the site that fails to live up to this commitment after launch sabotages its reputation immediately. The key to maintaining a consistent flow of great content is shaping the organization’s culture around it. Websites must be built with sound content management systems that give control of the dynamic content to the right people within their area of responsibility and expertise. While not all organizations have multiple departments managing its functions, a website’s CMS must be flexible enough to allow discrete access to the right people in the right areas. Human resources must control job postings; public relations should have access to manage news; volunteer coordinators must control opportunity postings; product managers must control product details and moderators need to approve comments to feature articles and blog postings. Having invested correctly in the steps to build a superstar website, your organization’s culture of marketing must be reformed to support it. Following good practices and planting a good foundation, you must apply the required due diligence to determine changes in your organization in order to keep the website publishing and in constant forward movement.

Plug into the greater Web marketing universe

Websites don’t come with visitors. The visitors are at other sites, where they are engaging in conversation, discussing news, organizing meetings and sharing content. In order to build traffic, your site must be built on an open model. Even the best websites cannot perform well in a vacuum. The conversation in your industry and around your business offering is happening outside of your site, whether you are there or not. As such, your website must be built to interact in all applicable communities outside of itself. Your visitors must be easily able to share content with other sites. Moreover, you need to be an active participant in other networks in order to allow people to connect with your brand outside of your domain. In doing so, you are not only plugging in to existing communities that have millions of regular users but also building a path that leads back to your own website in order to being the process of creating community around your own brand. What’s more, search engines recognize the leaders in categories by how well-established their websites and their content are outside their domain. Popularity in the greater community means higher rankings from search engines, which in turn funnels more visitors to your website. Part of the responsibility for following these rules resides with the site’s developer. However, your organization must also make a priority of incorporating these practices in its daily operations and systems. This blueprint for success will pay enormous dividends if you not only build a website that interacts with the greater Web universe but also maintain an open philosophy in your message, content and participation.

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Viva La Viral! Takeaways From 10 of the Web's Mega-Popular Moments

For much of the population, computer and mobile screens have replaced water coolers as the gathering place of choice for conversations about cool stuff. But rather than rehashing what happened last night, people are sharing links, congregating in office cubicles and clustering around smartphones to view the most compelling content over and over again. Score one for the Internet.

The Web is winning.

In fact, score one billion for the Internet – and counting. The Web's most-watched video of all time, South Korean pop music artist Psy's over-the-top production for his song, "Gangnam Style," became the first ever to reach one billion YouTube views in December 2012, and its total on YouTube now stands at more than 1.5 billion. That’s more tracked encounters with a single piece of content than the world’s all-time #1 TV broadcast, top movie and most-played radio song combined. By comparison, London newspaper The Times reported that a verifiable audience of 984 million tuned in to some portion of the 2008 opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics – the highest rating ever recorded. Average viewership during the ceremony was 538 million. According to Box Office Mojo, the most attended movie in history is “Avatar,” with approximately 270 million tickets sold worldwide. In 1999 BMI, the world’s largest music publishing rights organization, touted "You've Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,” as radio’s most played song of all time with more than 8 million plays. More recent estimates put that number at between 9 and 10 million total plays as of the end of 2012. These aren’t strict comparisons; one play on a radio station has thousands of potential listeners in a metro area, and a movie like Avatar’s DVD sales, rental and broadcast figures are not accounted for above. But one thing is certain: The Internet holds its own when big audience numbers are thrown around, and with every passing day, it’s wooing more of people’s time and attention away from more traditional media outlets.

“Going viral” has gone viral

To be sure, those outlets have taken notice. Watch an hour of network news or scroll through the headlines at any major online news source, and you’ll soon see a pattern: Whatever’s hot online is reported and given weight equal to other pop culture and business stories such as world tour announcements and new product releases. Viral Internet content has become a regular source of news in the standard media cycle. For example, a glance at Yahoo.com’s home page, which includes the day’s top stories in a rotating slideshow format, usually yields at least one article on a viral Internet event, such as this feature of a young athlete gaining attention for his incredible moves on the basketball court. 14-year-old Seventh Woods’s “highlight reel” on YouTube clocks in at about two and a half minutes – and amassed more than 5.5 million views in just five days. You’ll notice the story lead-in states “more than 3 million views.” Just a day after this item was first posted, the video had gained another two million-plus views, no doubt due (at least in part) to media coverage on Yahoo and elsewhere.

The common spark

Of course no one can predict the next billion-view video. But as more companies take a serious interest in the potential of viral content, there are lessons to be learned from the best the Web has to offer. In recent weeks online outlets have featured – and fed into – several viral occurrences we’ll examine here. We’ll also consider other content that has rocketed to Internet fame – some ubiquitous and familiar, some with more of a niche appeal. What they all clearly have in common is a spark that makes people want to tell others they saw something cool. It is this “shareability” that has the potential to take your brand to another level – whether that brand centers around a product, service or personality. Read more: The Anatomy of Viral Marketing

A word about numbers

Viral content has long since arrived as a pop-culture phenomenon, but as the Internet continues to evolve as both a marketing and entertainment platform, it is only natural that smart companies are figuring out better ways to crunch the numbers and quantify viral success more accurately. Measurables are in high demand, for good reason, as brands look to spend effectively in the ever-shifting Web marketing landscape. And it does get complicated. Any truly viral content pollinates all over the Web across thousands of outlets, from a singular genesis out to hubs like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube up to news feeds and back down to countless personal blogs, emails and text messages. To add another layer of meta-marketing, you’ll often see YouTube ads featuring one leading viral piece from a big player (say, Dove’s “Beauty Portraits” docu-ad) inserted at the beginning of another, more organically generated one (such as up-and-comer Woods’s clip.) “Views” and “likes” are a good start, but new metrics like True Reach™ (which, according to AdAge, “includes clips uploaded by audiences across the web, showing the complete impact a campaign or viral phenomenon has online”) have emerged to give a more accurate picture. Using the True Reach™ metric, “Gangam Style’s” total approaches 3 billion actual views. It’s also worth noting that active-user metrics like shares, pins and re-tweets, while usually much lower figures than likes or views, are rapidly gaining respect among brands and ratings entities like Nielsen and Klout. The motivation to move content down the line is at the core of a viral event. That momentum originates from an accumulation of individuals, which then gains critical mass and enters a “feedback loop” as news outlets pick up the story and create waves of audience growth. Some of the numbers included below are given as an effort to highlight the first-generation element that really gets things rolling. So without further adieu, let's get to the list, in no particular order:

Oreo Super Bowl blackout tweet

Impact

Retweets: Over 16,000 (6,000+ Twitter favorites) Hashtag trends: #Oreo got a huge initial bump, and #DunkInTheDark is still active. Facebook: Almost 7,000 shares, over 21,000 likes

Takeaway

Be ready to seize the moment. Oreo’s smart and timely reaction to the power outage during this year’s Super Bowl was a big win for the brand. The tweet and accompanying photo garnered instant raves and extensive coverage across the Internet and traditional media, with tech and marketing leaders’ immediate tweets followed up by a flurry of blog posts, articles and news spots in the days after. This story highlights the power and marketing potential of real-time social media, but it couldn’t have happened without an initial audience of some size to spread the word. Oreo had an established presence on Twitter (thousands of tweets and over 70,000 followers) and a Facebook page “liked” by more than 30 million people at the time of the blackout, which provided the opportunity to fire off this simple ad and watch it spread. Build your audience today, so you can harness its power to seize the moment tomorrow.

Dove: “Real Beauty” sketches

Impact

YouTube views: 26.2 million (89,000 likes) YouTube comments: Over 8,000 Facebook campaign video views: 1.7 million Hashtag trend: #wearebeautiful (Dove’s non-exclusive preferred hashtag), 1,900 Twitter uses, April 21-24 – up more than 500% from the week prior

Takeaway

Use your brand to make a statement for the greater good – and attract an audience who cares. Is there a compelling cultural element that relates well to your brand? Think about ways to engage directly in an effort that makes sense, rather than a “cause” that looks good but may not fit. Dove has created a unique space for itself in the beauty industry with previous campaigns like its successful “Real Women” series, which featured confident, striking women with body types and looks that don’t necessarily fit the Hollywood standard of attractiveness. Expanding on the themes of self-esteem and self-perception, last week the company launched a new set of documentary-style “Real Beauty Sketch” ads that immediately went viral. Dove has maintained an active channel on YouTube for more than two years, but more than 75 percent of their total overall channel views came in the week following the launch of this new series. While not all reaction has been positive, the ensuing coverage has been a noteworthy addition to the collective global debate about what constitutes “beauty.” With body image and appearance issues contributing to suicide and self-harm rates for girls and women around the world, Dove is to be applauded for this (albeit possibly flawed) effort to counteract stereotypes. The rapid spread of this ad series online and the ensuing media coverage are proof that Dove is contributing to a conversation that needs to happen.

Honda’s “Pintermission” campaign

Impact

Pinterest hits: More than 4.6 million people were exposed to Honda’s #Pintermission boards Repins: 5,000+ (nearly 2,000 likes) Media impressions: Over 16 million

Takeaway

Find a great fit for your brand in a new place. Seek out the places where people gather around shared interests that reflect your brand’s aesthetic and values, and carve out a niche for yourself there. Pinterest has exploded onto the social media scene in the last 18 months, reaching 10 million unique visitors faster than any standalone Web site in history in early 2012. As users come across lifestyle elements of interest on the Internet, they pin the items onto their personal Pinterest board. Many users take advantage of Pinterest’s instinctive environment to plan events and brainstorm remodeling ideas. The site’s uniquely aspirational feel lends many user’s pages a beautiful, collage-like look – perfect for any brand wishing to highlight its classic appeal and reach out to affinitive audiences. And here’s another fact that bodes well for Pinterest as a marketing platform: About 80 percent of pins on the site are actually repins. Compared to just 2 percent of Twitter content being retweets, that is some serious viral mojo. Just as Pinterest was reaching unprecedented momentum, Honda launched its presence in February 2012 on the site by engaging five prominent users who had garnered large followings. In other words, Honda identified people who created definitive Pinterest experiences and found a way to become part of that fabric. Honda invited these users to each take a personal “Pintermission” and live out some of the hopes and dreams adorning their Pinterest pages. Who could say no? Millions of hits and mounds of goodwill later, Honda stands as a cornerstone brand using Pinterest in a truthful, relational way that feels less like marketing and more like lifestyle collaboration.

Virgin Blue’s Twitter near-giveaway

Impact

1000 tickets: Sold out as fast as they released them, all through Twitter Lasting influence: Mainstay on “best-ever viral marketing campaigns” lists

Takeaway

If you’re thinking of offering a discount or giveaway as a way to gain lots of exposure, go big or stay on the ground. Make your deal memorable, accessible and easy to execute. The goal is to engage all the people who just miss out on your fantastic deal and keep the conversation going from there. As a way to celebrate its ninth anniversary and bump its brand’s profile, Virgin Blue airlines (now Virgin Australia) offered 1,000 tickets exclusively through Twitter for the unheard-of price of $9.00. People responded by the thousands in a flash, and the tickets quickly sold out. This one’s an oldie but a goodie, having taken place in 2009. It’s worth mentioning for three reasons: First, it helped establish the power of Twitter by taking place as an ad campaign exclusive to the site, then a young platform with more reach than proven value. Second, the discount was hundreds of dollars off a high-demand item – a combination sure to attract attention, raise brand awareness and drive motivated traffic to desired points of contact. Third, it went off as smoothly as it could have. The transaction tech worked flawlessly, and customers who were lucky enough to get in on the deal were left with a positive, seamless experience from end to end. That’s the kind of brand encounter that creates loyalty and trust.

K-Mart: Ship My Pants

Impact

YouTube views: 15.1 million (70,000 likes) in two weeks True Reach™: Over 20 million views YouTube comments: Over 13,000 Twitter: 8,600 uses of #shipmypants, virtually all of them occurring since the clip launched Related media: More than 30 official Kmart clips, each enjoying a mini-viral piggyback benefit

Takeaway

Yep, folks like to laugh. The key here is to get people laughing about your brand without…ahem…tainting your larger point. Sure it’s a little cheap, and plenty of folks are wrinkling their noses at this huge hit’s unsavory implications. But the risks seem relatively low and the comedic shock value has clearly translated into higher brand awareness for this traditional bricks-and-mortar mainstay. This clip accomplishes two things Kmart can really use during this uncertain time for big box retailers. First, the humor shows that Kmart knows how to laugh. Wide, bland product selection and longstanding customer familiarity may have led Kmart into a bit of brand fatigue – aka the shrug syndrome. “Ship My Pants” shakes that up. Second, the focus here is on easy shipping; this is Amazon and eBay territory. If Kmart wants to break into that market in a big way, it needs to alert its substantial customer base that they don’t need to look elsewhere for such options. And maybe, just maybe, those customers will share the good word even as they spread the...er…pants shipping.

OK Go’s Needing/Getting Chevy clip

Impact

YouTube views: 24.8 million (233,000 likes) Comments: 26,000+ Google+ shares: 5000+

Takeaway

When done well, collaboration can bring your brand to a whole new audience. If a raucous rock band can turn a shiny sedan into a musical instrument, your brand can find an unexpected partner and make a little marketing magic too. And you thought there were no more original ideas. OK Go seemingly breathes creativity, having released some of the Web’s most-viewed and most-beloved viral videos (at least six more of their clips have garnered more than 2 million YouTube views each). Chevrolet was smart enough to underwrite one of the best examples of brand synergy the Internet has ever produced. OK Go seriously upped its public profile by way of Chevy’s Super Bowl ad purchasing clout, and Chevy showcased its product to a young, hip online demographic that trusted OK Go to create another slice of awesome. Mission accomplished all around.

Cake resignation letter

Impact

Retweets: 7,000+ Twitter favorites: More than 2,300 Facebook: 6,000+ likes, 6000+ mentions Media coverage: Well over 100 features in major online news sources around the world

Takeaway

Serendipity is sweet. If your brand is captured in a candid moment that turns into a showcase, make sure you’re ready to meet expectations. And if you inject those moments with a little natural marketing flair, so much the better. On the brink of his 31st birthday, Chris Holmes decided to go all-in on his then-sideline dream job: creating fabulous cakes. So he did a classy thing and added a little smart marketing on top (note his business handle and Web address in the icing above). His genuine gift of a cake to his soon-to-be-former employers made a hard day a little easier and left co-workers with a great last impression. Then the Internet got involved, with a little help from Holmes’s brother-in-law. Dozens of interviews and thousands of retweets later, Holmes finds himself riding a nice wave of goodwill and publicity. And he was ready for it. A well-done website, a Facebook page with big, ooh-aah photos and a Twitter page stocked with more than 1,000 tweets before the cake photo went viral all add up to something built to last long after the sugar rush of headlines and hashtags wears off.

Seventh Woods highlights clip

Impact

YouTube views: 5.5 million (22,000+ likes) Comments: 7,600+

Takeaway

Do what you’re great at. Capture it. Then let the world take a look. If your brand is about sheer brilliance, the Internet is built to show it off. What would your highlight reel look like? We may well be witnessing the birth of a brand. This one’s too fresh to show up on a True Reach™ chart, but rest assured: it will be at or near the top in a matter of weeks. This clip is a great example of niche appeal (sports) transcending genre and breaking into the general culture. Woods’s age is surely a factor, as is his remarkable ability to soar above his peers. It is likely that many people are opening the clip because of his age, but staying through to the end and sharing it because the clip delivers on its promise of something spectacular.

Psy’s “Gentleman”

Impact

YouTube views: 214 million (1.7 million likes) True Reach™: Over 300 million views

Takeaway

Don’t repeat yourself, but don’t leave the ballpark either. If your brand recently enjoyed a bump in positive recognition for any reason, it may be time to play off that momentum in creative ways. Talk about a feedback loop – Psy’s global moment spilled over to his latest video almost by default. But he didn’t waste the opportunity. Psy established a worldwide identity with “Gangnam Style.” Given that the vast majority of his audience had no idea who he was before his rise to viral glory, it would have been foolish for him to release a folk ballad for a follow-up. Here Psy keeps his signature visual style, introduces another upbeat dance and ramps up the humor. The results gave Psy YouTube’s single day viewing record (more than 38 million views the first 24 hours) to go along with his top total views mark for “Gangnam Style.”

Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign

Impact

Backers: Over 91,000 Money raised: $5.7 million Facebook: 227,000 likes Twitter: 25,000+ followers, 14,000 uses of #veronicamarsmovie YouTube channel: 16,000+ subscribers, 450,000 total related clip views Instagram: Over 11,500 followers

Takeaway

If your brand’s core demographic can be described as a “fanbase,” source that crowd and do something incredible – they could be waiting to fuel your vision. If your audience isn’t filled with fans yet, woo that crowd. Make something amazing that creates demand for a sequel. This is a great piece to end on: cross-platform synergy galore, record-breaking numbers on the crowd-sourcing website Kickstarter.com and a just plain fun project to learn from. Plenty of fine TV shows have shut down too early to suit their small but loyal groups of superfans. Most of the time things fade out in a dwindling cloud of blog posts and awkward, sparse comic-con flash mobs. Not this time. After enduring seven long years since the show’s cancellation, the “Veronica Mars” fanbase remained so committed to its creators and actors that, when finally presented with an opportunity to get involved with making a movie based on the series, they swarmed Kickstarter and shattered every record the burgeoning crowd-sourcing movement had previously posted. In less than 11 hours, backers had committed more than $2 million dollars to the project. 30 days later, the final sum stood at more than $5.7 million, and 91,000-plus backers record had jumped on board. To be sure, the show and the Internet are a perfect fit. “Veronica Mars” is the kind of show that’s rife with sharable clips (which have been endlessly passed around every known platform in the intervening years), and its central star, Kristen Bell, is adorable, funny and tech-savvy. Her enthusiastic involvement and level of fame (more than a million Twitter followers) fueled the campaign in a way few others could. But crowdsourcing didn’t appear out of nowhere when Kristen Bell posted her first tweet about this movie. Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other similar sites have hosted thousands of campaigns in the last few years, most of them raising modest sums that fund less glamorous projects. But every one is a passion piece. Every crowd-sourcing success story starts with a few believers. Who knows – your brand could be one Kickstart away from the next level. *Twitter hashtag statistics obtained using Topsy.com

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