When all publicity fails, a hoax remains as hope for PR
Did you hear about the new X-Men movie?
Strangely before the release on May 1st, copies have been found on the Internet, and highly visited and regarded websites like TechCrunch, msnbc, BBC News, Hitfix, and almost 2 million links more if you search on Google.
Marketing a movie is expensive and is a significant part of the total budget.
If you can get free publicity and interest by letting it getting published on the Internet and distributing a Press Release about it that gets copied in many newspapers, journals and blogs then you have achieved what you wanted to obtain: to let announce the release of the movie to the world.
Hoax for business too?
Would this be applicable in business-to-business too?
When all marketing has failed like PR, emailing campaigns, advertising or even your viral marketing campaign, is there one last hope by creating a hoax?
A hoax that you hope it will spread virally.
A hoax collection:
We have collected a few examples of hoaxes:
- Museum of hoaxes: Business – Finance
- Internet Hoax Busters
- Media hoaxes
- MS iLoo and Wikipedia about the iLoo.
- Walt Disney and Bill Gates
- Nestlé: super cooled water
- Danish P2P Site The Honest Thief and The Honest Thief Story
- Stars: Hannah Montana, Adrienne Bailon
- The biggest drawing in the world
- Was man on the moon a hoax? Wikipedia: The conspiracy theory
Or not? The Great Moon Hoax.
It generated worldwide interest and showed the power of the US.
Movie stars have used it, large corporations have used it, and movie producers have used it.
Then why wouldn’t you use it too for your business?
Creating the hoax is the problem
A hoax needs to attract the media and if possible generate buzz and word of mouth.
If you are lucky, it can go viral.
The problem is crafting a hoax that:
- Relates to your company or solutions
- Doesn’t harm your company or products / solutions
- Generates interest
- Exposes your brand
- Avoid all legal and liability issues
The hoax has to relate to your solution directly or indirectly:
- Your solution could be the cause of the problem in the hoax.
- Your solution could be a remedy of the problem that is the subject of the hoax.
The main rule is not to lie about your product or solution itself.
Requirements:
- It has to attract the media by the subject
- People, money or animals need to be involved
Thus if you are running out of marketing budget, your press releases don’t get any interest or your advertising doesn’t generate leads, think about a hoax.
Could you imagine a hoax that generates a large amount of interest and press coverage?
All suggestions for our LEADSExplorer lead generation and customer retention web service are welcome.
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