Take It to the Streets

Another great way to create word of mouth is to take it to the streets. If you want people on the corners buzzing about your product, deliver your brand where they’re standing. Guerrilla marketing, as it’s called, is the practice of hitting the streets with unconventional ways of getting your brand or product noticed. It could be as simple as a sticker campaign on every lamppost and cab divider. Or, if you’ve got the cash, it can be more elaborate, such as Microsoft’s launching Windows ME with a Sting concert.

A small firm named Eisnor Interactive created one of our favorite consumer “guerrilla” hits. Eisnor introduced New York Today, a New York Times online service. To publicize the service, Eisnor gave out thousands of paper spoons emblazoned with www.nytoday.com on the streets of New York. When people logged on to the website they could print out a coupon for a very cheap lunch at Daily Soup, a midtown caf . Spoons on the streets equaled a lot of business and a lot of talk about the site.

What if your company is somewhere between mini and Microsoft? For a midsize concept, you gotta have a gimmick. In the mid-1980s, coauthor Laermer managed a theater company called Theater in Our Time. The concept was to cultivate new audiences for off-Broadway theatre and to charge people a little extra for a small meal and the chance afterward to meet the cast through a Q & A onstage. We chose the plays carefully—Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll by one-person-showman Eric Bogosian, and the ’90s classic Miss Saigon.

To get some real press for our little group, we invited our members for a performance of the farcical Forbidden Broadway, a play that hilariously lampooned the Great White Way. But we also showcased the real stars being lampooned. This was the first time Chita Rivera, Ann Reinking, Tony Roberts, and others had a chance to see people make fun of them, and it made people feel terrific about going to the theatre (including the lampooned stars, all of whom had a great time). Theatergoers began talking to their friends at cocktail parties about this new, offbeat theater group that had just done something fresh and unique, and the ticket sales began rising.

A successful guerrilla tactic must be memorable and have an obvious link to your brand, and it also needs to invade people’s space a bit, in a respectful manner. Most people take the same path to and from work every day, stop at the same coffee shop, and go to the same gas station, all the while listening to the same radio station. If you can shake up their routines a bit, you stand a much better chance of being the conversation later in the office that same day.

BigStar Entertainment, an online DVD vendor, knew that billboards and most forms of traditional advertising were pass . Passersby are immune to regular outdoor signage. When we see pop-up ads on our browsers, we immediately delete them, and we’ve programmed ourselves and our ReplayTV digital recorders to ignore the thirty-second advertisements during Friends. BigStar decided to create a twist on the standard outdoor billboard by slapping its catchy message on delivery trucks rumbling through city streets across America. The fluorescent eighteen-wheelers marked with pithy copy lit up the streets and turned heads.

The trucks created word of mouth for two reasons: The first was their wild appearance, but the second was their immense numbers, giving the perception that BigStar was the biggest thing on the Web because it was shipping truckloads of tiny DVDs everywhere and anywhere.

The truth is, those trucks were shipping everything but movies. BigStar worked with shipping companies to slap its moniker on every truck in a fleet, whether they were shipping lobsters or comic books. The illusion of thousands of BigStar DVD movies on the street created such strong buzz for the small New York company that the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both featured the trucks on section front pages.

When You Want Someone’s Attention, Just Whisper

Gossip columns are funny. What many consider the most trivial form of journalism is, ironically, in some ways the most powerful. Granted, syndicate doyenne Liz Smith wasn’t—until last year at least—digging into the latest accounting scandal, and Cindy Adams of the New York Post may not know when tech stocks are going to rally, but what gossip mavens in every paper do know is what the superinfluencers are up to and what trends are about to emerge from their whims. That’s power!

Gossip columns get rumor mills buzzing quicker than you can say “psst”—and a good placement with a recognized columnist can catapult you or your product into stratospheric media levels. That’s how you start the ball rolling on a news item with style and verve. Say a piece of news, the juicy type, materializes for you. Suddenly you need to swing for the fences and pitch those gossip writers and columns that matter the utmost. Go get ’em, tiger! Here are the names (in no particular order) you need to know:

• Rush & Molloy’s “Daily Dish,” New York Daily News (syndicated)

• “Page Six,” New York Post, especially Richard Johnson, Chris Wilson, Ian Spiegelman, and Paula Froelich

• Lorrie Lynch, USA Weekend

• Army Archerd, Variety

• E! Online (www.eonline.com)

• Jeannette Walls, “The Scoop” at MSNBC and MSNBC.com

• Michael Musto, “La Dolce Musto,” The Village Voice

• Lloyd Grove, “The Reliable Source,” The Washington Post

• Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith, “Celebrity Gossip” (syndicated)

• Suzy, W magazine

• Roger Friedman, Fox News, foxnews.com (Fox 411)

• Cindy Adams, New York Post

• Marc S. Malkin, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer.com

• Liz Smith and Diane Judge—the writers of the “Liz Smith” column, syndicated in seventy newspapers, including the New York Post

• James Barron, “Boldface Names,” The New York Times

• Frank DiGiacomo, “The Transom,” The New York Observer

• Media Gossip: www.medialifemaga_zine.com, www.iwantmedia.com, and www.poynter.org

• George Whipple, NY 1 (New York event and celebrity news)

• Courtney Pulitzer, The Cyber Scene (www.pulitzer.com)

• Elaine Dutka, “Morning Report,” Los Angeles Times