Viral Marketing - All the Way from LA-LA Land

I received an odd e-mail the other day.

This in itself is nothing new, as I have an e-mail address in my profile, and I occasionally receive a note from someone who has read a post and wants to follow up directly rather than leave a comment. Most of these blog-spawned e-mails are very nice, and I welcome them. Occasionally they’re weird, occasionally they’re creepy, and sometimes they’re just, well, odd.

This one, from a woman I’ll call “J”, was a breezy little number, that started out “Hi Maureen,” and proceeded to use the word “gotta” in the first sentence.

The “gotta” was attached to a query about whether anyone outside of LA cares about the pending entertainment industry strike.

Since I hadn’t given it a thought, ya gotta put me among the ‘outside of LA and don’t care’ group, which I suspect includes most of the country.

Still, I thought, it might be worth a post over on Pink Slip.

The rest of the e-mail told me that a well-known professional networking site “has created a Strike Survival Guide to help entertainment industry professionals avoid getting the pink slip.”

Well, the link was right there, so I clicked on over, and discovered that the well-known professional networking site has done no such thing.

The do have a Strike Survival Guide alright, but it’s generic  - not entertainment industry specific - and it isn’t about avoiding the pink slip, it’s about how you should use the well-known professional networking site to update your profile, etc., if you’re out of work due to a strike.

Clever enough, but pretty darned limited. And how often are users of the well-known professional networking site actually out on strike, as opposed to getting those pink silps, which I know for a fact happens lots and lots to users of the well-known professional networking site.

The strike, J goes on to inform me, “is no joke.”

She then shares the news that she was laid off this week, and noted “how ironic” that she’s now “working to place this story.”

Her signature included the name of a PR agency, and her e-mail address presumably contained the URL for said agency, but when I went to check out the agency, there was nothing there. Yes, when I googled the name of the agency, its name, address, and map-location came up. But they didn’t appear to have a web site.

How odd, I thought. A PR agency in this day and age with no web site? No wonder they’re having lay-offs.

Well, my guess is that J is trying to show that she’s someone who knows how to get the word out.

Which she obviously is.

If she sent this same e-mail out to a couple of hundred business bloggers, and even 20% of them picked up on it - lazy, idea-starved folks that we bloggers are - J could demonstrate results. As if was, she did get me to click through to the well-known professional networking site not once, but twice (i wanted to check to make sure that my initial impression that the content was not, in fact, tied to the looming Hollywood strike.

Maybe clickthroughs were all the J was looking for.

But I’m guessing that she was after something more, and that something more was getting business bloggers to write about her campaign.

Well, J, what might have gotten me really write about the Strike Survival Guide in a more positive way would be if it had actually been:

1. More fun, wittier, more off-beat
2. Actually specific to the coming strike (or not coming strike: Robert DiNiro, I saw, is warning that this is not the time for a bunch of actors to hit the picket lines - actors who everyone in the world thinks are overpaid and have glamorous lives, in which people hand them swag-bags containing stuff they can damned well afford to buy for themselves).

And I gotta tell ya, J, that not being able to find a web site for your PR firm was a real deal-breaker for me.

Of course, if J gets partial credit for mentions of “Strike Survival Guide”, I’ve done her bidding, as I’ve got the words right out there, rather than put them in disguised spammish format: $tr1ke $urv!val Gu1de.

J ended her e-mail with a perky “Hope all is well!”, which is actually how I start most of the notes I write on the facing page of the birthday cards I send to people I don’t talk to that often. Even though, in those birthday cards, I’m writing to someone I do know well, the phrase will now be tied forever in my mind to J’s wish that all is well with me, a complete stranger. (Unless I’m having a senior moment, and J is actually someone I know - as her last name is actually the same as the married name of one of my father’s first cousins Aggie D., who, if she’s still alive is well in her 90’s.

If I know you, J, or if you’re something like a third cousin twice removed, I apologize for not recognizing your name right off the bat.

In any event, Solidarity Forever. If and when the strike happens, I promise not to cross Tom Cruise, Miley Cyrus, or Robert DiNiro on the picket line.

Good luck with your viral marketing efforts, J.

And have a nice day!

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