Hey guys!
As you know, we are entering a new age, a digital age that is changing on a daily basis. It is incredibly important that journalists stay abreast of these changes, as the digital age is reshaping traditional forms of media. It isn't that journalism is dying; it is just getting ready for a rebirth. We must prepare ourselves for this rebirth.
We read excerpts of an Esquire article on David Plouffe yesterday, the campaign manager for Barack Obama during the last election. Plouffe embraced the role of new media; his use of the web during the campaign was pivotal to Obama's success. With a beautiful website that enticed readers to submit contact information for marketing purposes, an email list with 13 million live email addresses that allowed the campaign to get their message out quickly and easily, an iPhone application that explained his positions on key topics and locations of local rallies, and a combination of social network marketing gimmicks, Plouffe was able to engineer Obama's historic victory.
With traditional newspaper readership at low levels, and our newspaper readership lagging, we must do something to get the word out about our newspaper. We also need to understand and embrace the use of marketing in doing so - self-promotion is an integral part of the journalism industry. Taking a page from Plouffe's book, we are going to develop a viral marketing campaign for En Garde! the newspaper. The viral marketing campaign can either be in-school, web-based, or real world. It may also include some combination of these approaches.
This assignment is going to be part social experiment, part marketing for our newspaper, and part plain fun.
Procedure:
1. First, I will be splitting you into groups of five. As a group, you are to read the Six Principles of Viral Marketing post on Musketeer Journalism, in addition to the information at the following links:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/869/politics-goes-viral-online.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1184060,00.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/12/AR2007111200042_2.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2005-06-22-viral-usat_x.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/business/media/18adco.html
2. You will then be asked to come up with a viral marketing campaign. This campaign will be broken up into three separate sections, each worth 75 points for each team member. THIS MEANS THAT EACH MEMBER MUST BE INVOLVED IN EACH STEP IN THE PROCESS.
A. THE PITCH
Your group will be asked to come up with a viral media campaign idea, and will pitch it to the class as you would to a conventional advertising company or promotional team. Your presentation will last approximately 10 minutes and must discuss what the idea is, how you came up with the idea, how you intend to implement the idea, what effect you hope the idea will have, how you intend to measure the success of the idea, and a visual aid that will assist you in showing the class how you plan to deliver your idea.
B. THE DELIVERY
Your group will then be asked to implement the idea. If your idea is to take place outside the school, you will be expected to work on parts of it in class during the assigned work time.
C. THE FOLLOW-THROUGH
Your group will then be required to post personal responses to blogspot in which you discuss the successes and failures of the assignment. This part of the assignment will be posted on blogspot closer to the due date.
At this point, I am sure that some of you have no idea how this might look, so I am going to give you an example. One group decides that they are going to take advantage of word-of-mouth by collecting cellphone numbers and emails and sending out a series of cryptic text messages leading up to the announcement of the new-and-improved En Garde!
They establish an exciting looking booth in the gravel pit area at lunch time one day that advertises something NEW! SOMETHING EXCITING! SOMETHING DIFFERENT! SOMETHING SO AMAZING AND STUPENDOUS, WE CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT IT IS...YET! This booth then collects a 'contact list' of emails and phone numbers, with the promise that students will be 'contacted when the reveal will take place'. By collecting the data, we have essentially found the way that students will be best contacted about the school newspaper, and we can use that to get the word out. This approach will also have a significant word-of-mouth effect - people will talk about it.
This will be a challenging assignment, but I believe that you will find it to be fun, rewarding, and informative. Expect to receive
rubrics determining how grades will be awarded in the next 2-3 days. This assignment will be completed within the next two non-publishing weeks for En Garde!
Good luck!
Mr. Parsons
GCHS Journalism
Posts
10 comments:
Throughout the course of the viral marketing project, I have learned the reasoning behind it. When using viral marketing you have a goal set to get the attention of a variety of different people. A lot of companies like to use viral video to get the attention of potential costumers using comedy in their commercials or just having a cliff hanger type of commercial then ending it with a web address, to grab the attention of people. For our viral marketing project, my group and I chose to make a video for our journalism class. The video was to catch the attention of anyone watching it, and throughout the video we put the name of our newspaper in it. then at the end of the video we left an address to visit so that after the video the viewer would then go to their computer and then visit our website. So the basic principal of the video was to get our paper more noticeable by teachers, students, and parents. The making of the actual video was tough. We had to be very specific with what we had to do, and setting up the scenes. Also the editing was very tough to because once we started, we noticed little things that needed to be fixed but we were unable to actually go back and do it, on the count of people missing, and Andy's camera not being charged. This experience was a very fun to do. It gave us a chance to add ideas and talk to each other and get to know one another.
My group did the "Pac Man Chronicles." Blake was Pac Man, and Allison was Ghost. The costumes were a success, I think. They looked really good and eye-catching. People knew that we were doing it during lunch and people knew it would be Pac Man after they saw the posters, but they didn’t realize how much work we had put into it. One person asked me if we were just going to have someone run around in yellow, and they were really surprised when they saw how great the costumes looked. I thought the overall project was a success, too, so far. It's only our first video, but people definitely seemed to be entertained and they're talking about it, which is great. Hopefully, they will want to go check out more videos after seeing the flyers and will read the newspaper, too. It was a success that Allison and Blake didn't knock anyone down or hurt anyone, although Allison did hit Mrs. Carter and the old lady with the lunch cart almost knocked them out. Mr. Baker said beforehand that if people were too wild afterwards that we couldn't do it again and it didn't seem to be a problem, so hopefully we still have permission to continue the videos. One of the failures was during the first time we went. One of the cameras didn't work so we didn't get all of the footage. However, we refilmed during fifth lunch and fixed the problem.
Allison Rowe
Mr. Parsons
Personal Response
March 26, 2009
Starting this project I had no idea what viral marketing was. I learned that it was basically just a way to get more viewers, in this case for our newspaper. My group came up with an idea that would be fun and that would draw the minds of viewers in. We decided to dress up as pacman and one of the ghosts that chases him the popular game and run through the school making similar sound effects. Our idea received administrative approval and we implemented it perfectly. I think that our plan was very successful in getting students’ attention. By putting up posters we were able to get students and teachers to read them and know where to find more of what they were soon to see and by performing these actions in front of only about a fourth of school, many students didn’t view it and wanted to and the only way they can do that is by going to our online newspaper. Also it went successful because neither Blake nor me, who were the characters, got injured and no one around us did either. The only problem that occurred was during the first running of our chase one of our cameras did not film as planned, but we fixed this with a second chase among a whole different group of students. I believe that through our idée the newspaper will gain more viewers, as they will want to view the videos of our chase and the chase in different scenes. Overall, our plan was very successful.
Before starting the viral marketing campaign, I had a limited understanding of what viral marketing actually was. I understood that the driving force behind the marketing was word of mouth, but the process necessary to generate said word of mouth buzz never really occurred to me. My group generated a few ideas for our campaign. Some were decent ideas, and some were rather lackluster.
A member of our group shared an idea with us that they had previously viewed on the Internet. The concept was intriguing. One person of our group would dress up in a Pacman suit, whilst being chased by a red ghost. Then, we decided that we would make videos of this scenario happening in various locations. We would videotape this, and then post the videos on the school newspaper webpage. We would pass out flyers for “The Pacman Chronicles”, with a link to the En Guarde! webpage to bring more visitors to the site, and then gauge the effectiveness of our viral marketing campaign by implemented a hit counter on the webpage.
After some struggles with the school administration over our plans, we finally put the campaign into action. We released the ghost and Pacman through the cafeteria during 1st and 5th lunch. Overall, the response was quite good. Students were laughing, some were understandably perplexed, and some just stopped and stared. I heard several students talking about what we had done while walking through the hallways. It seems that our campaign generated the buzz that we had desired. The En Guarde! webpage has tallied up around 300 visitors in one day, which I must say is decently impressive.
If I were to redo anything, I would probably want there to be more organization with the filming, or perhaps more people filming, to get better film angles and better coverage of the event. Other than that, I am very satisfied with the outcome, and I hope the En Guarde! webpage continues to bring in more visitors.
Melissa Jackson
3-26-09
My group’s idea was to create videos (or pod cast) about random things and put them on the en garde site. At the end of the pod cast we would put the date the next issue would come out and tell them to go to the site for the next video. The one we did was about a guy falling in love with a balloon. We named the guy Davit and had him meet the balloon and go on a date with a balloon. We each had some part in the video. It was fun trying to get people to read engarde and there are many different ways to get people to read engarde. I think that our way of getting people to read engarde may or may not work. Hopefully it will work. I think that our video is funny but could be better. Hopefully with this assignment we get more viewers to the newspaper. I learned that there are a lot of ways viral marketing can help a business or newspaper. We were limited to what we could do because we are doing this in school but with what we could do I think will work. We already have more people talking about engarde hopefully we will have more people talking and actually reading en garde when we are finished with the viral marketing project. It was fun creating the video and it was also hilarious. We had fun making it. Hopefully now we have more readers for en garde.
Chelsey Hayes
4th period.
My group and I decided to come up with a fictional character, called Petey. We made a video of Petey getting attacked by a pack of wild wolves because he did not read En Garde, the schools paper. If he did read En Garde then he would have known about the pack of wild wolves. We came up with Petey because we wanted someone or something rather to be interesting to the viewer and hilarious to them, to watch Petey getting attacked by a pack of wild wolves. The video is out of the ordinary and really funny because it was something you can just watch over and over again and it still is funny.
The group worked really well with each other, we came up with very good ideas and created a great video to improve the readers of En Garde. We stayed on task for the most part. For the days I was not able to be in here because of my math remediation but when I came back the group was working hard and coming up with new ideas and Petey video’s that we could record.
I’ve learned from the viral marketing project that viral marketing is very very important to the society and businesses. It draws the viewer in and makes them want to know more about the subject that you used for your viral marketing campaign. I really enjoyed this assignment because I wasn’t aware of viral marketing or how it can affect the society and businesses.
For the viral marketing project my group created "The Pacman Chronicles." While my group was brainstorming someone mentioned a video they had recently seen on the Internet called "The Pacman Prank." My group decided to create our own version of the video and relate it to EnGarde. The concept of "The Pacman Chronicles" was to have two group member, Blake and Allison, dress up in costumes from the classic arcade game, Pacman. Blake, who was pacman, was to run around the cafeteria during the first and last lunches while Allison, who was the ghost, chased him. Before Blake and Allison entered the cafeteria, Shelby distributed flyers that promoted "The Pacman Chronicles" and EnGarde to the students in the cafeteria. The idea was to film the video and post in to the extras section of EnGarde, this way people who did not see the video could watch it online and perhaps even check out our newspaper.
On Wednesday we followed though with our plan, and video taped it. Lyndsay and I recorded the event on video, Shelby organized it and passed out flyers, and Blake and Allison played their parts as pacman and the ghost. We edited the video footage of the event and posted it to the EnGarde website. So far, we have no statistics as to how many people have viewed our videos, but “The Pacman Chronicles” did generate a lot of buzz around the school. We plan on making more videos of the same nature and posting them as well, in hopes that EnGarde will get more readers.
In the Viral Marketing assignment that we have been working on for the last few weeks, each group had to come with a Viral Marketing idea to grab the attention of fellow students to make them want to read En Garde.
The group that I was in, after several days of thinking of ideas, decided to shoot videos, and call the series of videos "All- American Guy". The idea of the video was to show an actor, portraying All- American Guy, achieving incredible feats. These incredible feats included: a mid-court game- winning basketball shot, lifting weights repeatedly, a long college algebra math equation, a touchdown pass that was thrown by All- American Guy to himself, All- American Guy pitching a baseball and hitting the ball himself and also catching the ball in the outfield by himself, and All- American Guy walking down the hallway with one girl on each arm.
Although these videos could have made our Viral Marketing campaign successful, the group that I was in was not focused enough, and we were only able to successfully shoot one of the videos, the game- winning basketball video, how we wanted it.
Throughout most of the assignment, most of the group members just sat around, doing nothing. When we finally decided on the plan, we were each assigned a task within the group, such as making the pitch and measuring the success of the campaign. When the group members were first assigned their assignments, there were arguments about how to do the task, and tasks within the group were switched.
When we first began our videos, we were able to record two of the six videos, as said earlier the basketball video, and the weightlifting video. We were able to successfully shoot the basketball video, but the weightlifting video needed improvement when we went back and looked at the video.
When we wanted to do the reshoots and shoot the other videos, either our actor portraying All- American Guy was not at school that day or did not want to or was not ready to shoot that day. Because of this, we were only able to have the basketball video shot and able to use in our campaign. This one video did not accomplish what we wished to accomplish with Viral Marketing due to the fact that we finished editing the video the day before our assignment ended.
The basketball video was the only thing that we truly accomplished for Viral Marketing, as the whole group worked on the video together and did not work on their individual tasks.
To me, the whole Viral Marketing campaign was a failure with my group because of most of the group members were not doing their work or were not willing to do their work.
Through this assignment, I learned that Viral Marketing is a complicated way of marketing an idea or product, but if the idea is good and can draw interest, your Viral Marketing Campaign can be successful. If your campaign is successful, the idea or product that you are marketing will most likely sell well or people will be interested in using the idea in their own life.
Even though my groups work was a failure, I feel that other groups ideas were able to create buzz within the school. Hopefully, others groups successes with their Viral Marketing Campaigns will be able to draw people onto our website at wearegchs.com and they will be interested in our stories and will continue to read our publications that we put on the site every other week.
I think viral marketing is a great way to promote something. My group’s Petey project I think should attract a lot of people, compared to what passing out the address to the school newspaper would have done.
I Think vial marketing is catchy and entertaining. If someone came up to me and said hey read the school newspaper I would just blow them off. But if I’m watching or seeing something; I really think is cool; it will persuade me to check it out. And most people would too.
Viral marketing I think will make anything popular as long as there is a good idea behind it. Especially if it involves something to do with teenagers, most teenagers have a lot of free time on their hands after school. So if they seen some type of viral marketing they will most likely go in line and check out what going on.
I think Viral Marketing is a great idea. It really helps something get popular. I think a lot more things out there should consider using viral marketing, because it can bring them in more business or more popularity.
Tahler Peveto
When we first started the project I didn't know the first thing about viral marketing. As the project progressed I learned that it is one way of advertising to get more viewers. Many companies use it to drag in consumers and catch their attention to sale their product. I learned that word of mouth goes a long way and so do catchy ideas. Thus my group came up with a few catchy ideas to use viral marketing to get more viewers for our school newspaper.
My group came up with a viral marketing campaign called The Petey Project. Our project consisted at first of about 3 comical videos. One of the members, Chris Miller, would play the role of an awkward and nerdy GC student. He would perform random scenes such as getting attacked by wolves, getting dumped by a cheerleader, and getting into a fight. These all would lead back to the famous catch line "but he didn't read En Garde." Technical difficulties happened with attendance of group members and uploading videos. After working through these problems we managed to finish the wolf chasing Petey video. Our way of advertising would be through flyers and a networking on Myspace and our videos would be broadcasted on Youtube. This would be a challenge because all of our networking sites would be proxied at school. But we managed to get both sites and have over 100 friends that attend GCHS. If we could do it again it would be great to do all 3 videos. We reached over 100 students here at GCHS and hopefully they are now more aware of En Garde.
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