The Bacon Flowchart by shutterbug from incredimazing.com
I found The Bacon Flowchart on Twitter yesterday. As it’s dated December 22, 2007, I seem to be a little behind the times, but it’s funny stuff (even if you don’t actually like bacon). I immediately retweeted the link to my Twitter friends. Still, I felt incomplete. This was really funny. I needed to share.
I went to Facebook and added the link to my profile. The Bacon Flowchart generated nine comments in about 18 hours (and my Facebook Friends tend to be a stoic bunch, so this is a lot). A friend in Seattle liked it enough that he re-posted the link on his Facebook profile 25 minutes later and his friends immediately began to comment on the joys of bacon.
If I were a marketing person at Hormel or Jimmy Dean, I would be talking to the creator of this little gem about how I could help spread The Bacon Flowchart love. I would not hard sell. I would just stick a logo in the corner and let it run on its own.
Make your promotional stuff clever, fun and useful and your fans will do to the work of telling others for you. And when we do marketing for you, it doesn’t feel like selling to us or to the friends we’re sharing your stuff with.
I think there’s a job in this area. It seems that an enterprising individual who is proficient in navigating the blogosphere / Twitter / FB / other social networking areas could identify then present these sorts of opportunities to various companies. Though, given the state of ethics in this country at the moment, what is to stop the company from stealing the idea.
In the same vein (sort of), I often hear advertisers wondering how they can get people to watch their commercials given DVRs and TiVo (I refuse to lump TiVo in with the other lowly DVRs!) allow people to skip over commercials so easily. I can’t figure out why they don’t work with TiVo to have sweepstakes. You get entered by watching the commercial, taking a quiz to ensure you did indeed watch the commercial, then being entered in a contest to win things. Bored people would totally jump on this. I could see social media being used for this sort of thing, too. “You can win an iPhone in the next hour if you go to a site and just watch this 30 second ad and answer a question? I’m there!” I dunno. Maybe it’s just me.