Our wacky e-marketing agency, eROI, created an off-the-wall site called “Send a High Five” to spread the virtual love and sincerity of a good high five. The site www.SendaHighFive.com was a labor of love for us. We wanted dip our toes into the ocean that is social networking and flex our creative muscles at the same time. We have certainly had some interesting initial results. On 4/20/06, we seeded the site on Wikipedia.
The stoners came out in droves. 4/20, which also happened to be National High Five Day this year, was our single best day for unique visits to the High Five site. Who says smoking reefer makes you unproductive? Our toking test audience gave us two bongs up but now we ask ourselves, “Do you have to be high to five?” We think not and we are ready to get the rest of the world on the High Five love-train. Check out the site, create a High Five and send it to me. We’ll keep you updated with the results of our Social Media / viral marketing experiment.
We at eROI are a little off-kilter. We dare to do some pretty stupid things and succeed at doing that regularly. Today (4.20.06), we collectively came up with the idea to launch a site called SendaHighFive.com on National High Five Day. You may ask, “What’s the point?” And I’ll answer, “I’m not really sure.” As an idealist, I’d say that it’s a site about peace, unity, creativity, and human connection. As a realist, I might admit that it’s a bit of an experiment to see if a few folks get the creative urge to send me a high five.
You may think it’s stupid, maybe random, or some have said it’s brilliant (my 4-year old daughter counts, right?) So, don’t overanalyze it and just try it out. Go to www.sendahighfive.com, click “Get Started” and upload a photo, add some flare or bling and send it to ryan@eroi.com. Thanks holmies.
Plushenko flexes his muscle on the ice to the throwback tunes of “Sex Bomb.” What’s he going to do in his next performance? Take a walk down the cat-walk?
Not sure why but even 4 years ago with the Trunk Monkey spots we seem to love when monkeys do the unexpected. Maybe it is because we were all monkeys at one point in time. And some of us her might still be monkeys.
eROI Predictions for 2006
In an effort for all of us to remember some of these outlandish predictions, we went with the beloved Top10 format.
10. Online viral campaigns will continue to spread like the plague.
Marketers finally get it – viral marketing is here to stay. The multiplier affect of great marketing, online public relations, co-creating with your customers, and lead capture for minimal cost is too much for marketers and business owners to pass up. 2006 will see a rise in viral campaigns. Some will feel forced, some weak, but the most innovative and creative campaigns will be rewarded with huge online traffic and leads. Our five favorite online viral campaigns in 2005 are:
a. Death Jr Hamster Game – Konami
b. Chinese Back Street Boys
c. Kettle Foods Crave Site
d. Darth Vader Mind Games – Burger King
e. JibJab’s ‘2-0-5’ video
9. Email design and content will matter more.
Assuming email addiction has set in more and more as we predicted last year, we are becoming more and more jaded with email in our inboxes that have predictable content and weak design. Don’t tell me that you spend 5 minutes admiring every email that hits your inbox – holmie don’t play that. The average email recipient spends 2.8 seconds reading an email. This time per email is decreasing rapidly year over year. As humans, we love a pleasant surprise; something that makes us stop and look a little bit longer so we can tell our friends and colleagues about it. Email template and brand consistency will continue to be important, but more marketers will take advantage of unique headline banners to their newsletters and other email communication.
8. More blogs than websites for most.
It’s not whether or not to have a blog in ’06, it will be how many blogs. Disclaimer: we are ridiculous – eROI maintains four blogs and five websites (www.eroi.com and four micro-sites). Companies will realize that a blog for each vertical niche of their product or service offering (or for segmenting their customer base) is the way to go in ’06. Why? For three main reasons:
I love emails that make you think creatively, even if they waste some company time (which is painful when you manage a large team).
Rolling Stones, The Pet Shop Boys, Smashing Pumpkins, Scissor Sisters, Guns and Roses, Led Zepplin, The Pixies, Dead Kennedy’s, Garbage, Alice in Chains,The Postal Service, 50 cent, Talking Heads, Blondie, U2, Gorillaz, Iron Maiden, The Police, Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The presentation went smoothly. Janet Johnson with Marqui once again did a phenomenal job of co-presenting the unexpectedly viral case study surrounding the controversy of her own company paying bloggers. But, what really stood out from this “innovative technology” tradeshow was the excitement and knowledge from the attendees and companies around the e-marketing world. It was my first visit to Austin, and I was impressed with the culture, the music, the passion for technology and online marketing.
Several follow-up emails from Austin went above and beyond the typical “great to meet you” emails. Their emails probed for deeper insight on some specific e-marketing topics and truly engaged me in a two-way dialogue. Cheers to Austin.
MarketingVox reports that email list rental prices continue to drop. Surprised? I hope not. It’s pretty clear that email list rentals have become tougher and tougher to justify the ROI. Perceived spam and irrelevant content are two of the major reasons why email list rentals often don’t work. In an effort to adjust to this sad fact, B2B list costs have declined to around $0.17/email and B2C lists are down to roughly $0.10/email on average.
Leveraging your own in-house email list continues to top the list of most popular and effective online marketing tactics along with search engine optimization and marketing. Viral marketing (aka “grassroots marketing”, “word of mouth marketing”, “word of mouse marketing”) is quickly becoming the new new thing in the world of online marketing. Blogs, RSS, Podcasting, viral microsites, short video clips, and advergames are just a few of the tools and technologies that are making this such a dynamic medium and industry.
Great article in the inbox tonight showing how the top three sites with traffic were all driven by viral emails.
Nielsen//NetRatings announced that viral marketing emails drove website traffic to the three top fast growing sites during the week ending October 30. The sites were Coors, Mondo Mini Shows and AmericanGreetings.com
Coors was the fastest growing site, increasing 285 percent over the previous week. Nielsen//NetRatings attributes viral email marketing interactive games to the increase in web traffic to the tracked sites.
“The use of email as a vehicle to spread marketing messages has proven to be an effective way to drive up website traffic, thus companies are likely to continue to take advantage of this method in increasingly creative ways,” says Gerry Davidson, senior media analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings.
VIV Blows It Out With Animated Gifs - We have all been jawing about the use of animated gifs in emails over the past 8 months and I love that we are starting to see them being used more and more when they make sense. Now not only to they really make an email work well, drive deeper engagement, and even make us [...]
Our wacky e-marketing agency, eROI, created an off-the-wall site called “Send a High Five” to spread the virtual love and sincerity of a good high five. The site www.SendaHighFive.com was a labor of love for us. We wanted dip our toes into the ocean that is social networking and flex our creative muscles at the same time. We have certainly had some interesting initial results. On 4/20/06, we seeded the site on Wikipedia.
I am excited to join a great panel for an upcoming Software Association of Oregon event called 
