All to often I am accosted at networking events by so-called social media experts who, when pushed, admit they don’t know the first thing about social media marketing except that “you have to be on Facebook and have a YouTube video.” Run from these people like they have the plague. They will suck your marketing budget dry before you can say “reciprocating viral retention loops.”
To learn from an expert, who knows more about online marketing than most entire marketing companies, I bring you Andrew Chen’s Futuristic Play.
Andrew has written a great article about Bridging your traffic engine with your revenue engine. If you are remotely interested in social media and viral marketing at dating sites and social networks, you need to read this.
A brief Hot OrNot case study is in the post, and the sidebar of the blog is a plethora of fascinating links such as Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy, Are your SEO efforts working, or failing? and Is your site really viral? Viral Branding versus Viral Action.
An upcoming post about social dating site Zoosk will dive much deeper into the benefits of “going viral” on Facebook.
Speaking of social dating, A diligent reader told me about Ignighter, which, as far as I know, is a group dating application where you start a group of your guy/girl-friends on Facebook, and hook up and go out with other groups of men/women. Nice idea, not sure how popular that’s going to be.
Futuristic Play does not pass go or collect $200, instead it immediately goes into my blogroll.
Off to play some Scrabulous, I’m addicted.
