My MarketingSherpa e-newsletter landed the other day. Students of email marketing (and video producers) may want to check out their lead story about how adding video to an email marketing campaign scored a larger conversion rate. Let’s face it, folks L-O-V-E video on the Internet. But in this case I don’t quite get why it worked.

The case study is about a florist that regularly uses email marketing. In addition to offering the usual photos of flowers, this time around they did two things relating to video. First, they bought 15 seconds of stock video of tulips, and they provided a link to that footage in the body of the email. Second, they included the word “video” in the email subject line. Aside from mentioning video in the subject, they also used some good copy to call folks to action in the email headline. OK, launch email.

Conversions—which in Web analytics speak means sales coming from that email campaign—jumped from the usual 1.35% to 2.8%. Nice, particularly since they learned that using “video” in the subject line seemed to dissuade folks from opening the email. Usually 16.5% of recipients open the email, but this time only 14% did. Perhaps they were afraid they might open a large embedded video file or even a virus. So that leaves us with fewer folks opening the email, but more actually buying. Thank you, stock tulip footage!

And now I’m back to why I don’t get it. To sum up, we just learned that 1) users are willing to make the extra click to see tulip video, and 2) are swayed by a video of tulips more so than by a single attractive photo of tulips. They’re flowers, people, they don’t move!

Oh, the sweet promise of Internet video.

The challenge to figure out what you want to say is not new. Neither is the challenge to say it clearly and convincingly to your intended audience. What’s increasingly difficult is finding an appropriate outlet. There’s so much attention competition that the unexpected is becoming increasingly effective.

Don’t discount the arresting power a message can have when coupled with non-traditional placement.

For example:

Comcast’s “Televisiphonernet” is a great spot that works on various advertising levels (humor, message, target audience). Comcast, however, has missed the digital forest for the trees. When searching for this ad online, I was frustrated and confused. Despite my best televisiphonernetting skills, I could not locate this ad in any of the usual places—YouTube, Google, or even Comcast’s own website (for shame, Comcast!). Finally I located the ad on the website of a Bruno publication called Boards.

Comcast should dial up AT&T, who also threw their hat into the buzzword ring with their “Your Seamless World” commercials, otherwise known as Virgicolementoflaggantonio.

They have all of the commercials from this service easily accessible on YouTube. For example:

My suggestion to Comcast is that they stop multitasking and spend some time focusing on their Internet presence. True, message is important, but so is making it accessible to as many people as possible.

Everyone’s talking about tonight’s debut of ABC’s Cavemen! Well, everyone is talking about how tonight’s debut of Cavemen will probably stink beyond comprehension. While sitcoms have inspired commercials aplenty, never in television history has a commercial mutated into a sitcom.

Critical outlook for these comedic Cro-Mags is grim. The original pilot has been available online for months; it was decimated by critics. Feel like punishing yourself for some unspoken sin? Catch a half-minute here:

Tonight’s kickoff episode? ABC hasn’t even bothered with a pre-release. That’s either an acknowledgment of inanity or an impossibly weak attempt to build “what’s behind the curtain” buzz.

The funniest thing about Cavemen may be that, for the next few hours at least, plenty of people will talk about it. And while we’re all bracing ourselves against the stench, more than a few folks will embrace their inner gaper’s blocker and actually tune in. That’s good news for advertisers—perhaps. Or it could undermine years of brand goodwill built up by an amphibian with an English accent.

If you’re one of the brave souls who cave in to these knuckle-draggers, let us know what the morning after felt like.

The most effective marketing artfully blends a crisp message with impeccable placement (a rare combination of timing and location that hits the right audience at the right moment). Add a touch of dark humor, and you’re impossible to ignore.

Bus side ads are nothing new, but bus tops? A high-level photoblogger captured this CareerBuilder.com placement, which uses the usually unseen real estate above the bus to tremendous (if potentially offensive) effect. The concept is effortless, the targeting is spot-on, and the impact is—well, let’s let just hope the impact remains figurative.

I was listening to the Marketplace Morning Report on public radio the other day when host Lisa Napoli’s juxtaposition of the following made me sit up and listen: God and branding.

In my limited experience with Hinduism, religious branding is limited to kitschy bags like the following:

But this wasn’t about bags or other kitschy religious merchandise. Just what was Napoli talking about?

She was having a conversation with James Twitchell, the author of the book Shopping for God. Twitchell claims that while there seems to be a surge in the number of people who consider themselves religious, this increase has to do more with marketing than spiritual awakenings. Television evangelists have become marketing gurus who deftly package God in ways designed to satisfy their target audiences.

I’m reminded of the efforts that have been made to improve marketing and branding by understanding how and why the religious become true believers. What do the devout and brand loyalists have in common? According to this list by Martin Lindstrom, religion and powerful brands both create:

1. A sense of belonging
2. A clear vision
3. Power from the enemy
4. Authenticity
5. Consistency
6. Perfection
7. Symbols
8. Mystery
9. Rituals
10. Sensory appeal

So we’ve come full circle: where once branding executives looked to religion for answers, clergy are now looking to marketing for insights into drawing crowds to sermons. According to Twitchell, religious organizations are studying the tastes of young people and targeting them accordingly. The influence of marketing agencies have led to rockstar-performance sermons, faith-based fashion magazines, and other innovations. And lifestyle branding is drawing people to faith by analyzing what they find most comfortable and relevant, meeting the younger generation’s demand for quick, flashy, and hip ways of being spiritual.

Neologisms are cool.

They really are. At least to word-nerd types like me. Nothing proves that the English language is alive and kickin’ more than the dozens of new words that are added to the lexicon seemingly daily. Some of them can be classified buzzwords (mumblecore, anyone?) but some are really useful, and we wonder what we’ve done without them (I could have used frenemy in middle school).

So naturally my word-nerdiness was piqued by Comcast’s ads for its Triple Play package—TV, phone, and Internet combo—which feature neologisms describing the people who happily enjoy Triple Play, as well as the product itself. This collection of [mostly] portmanteau words even has a portmanteau name: TripleSlanguage. See what they did there? Good stuff.

TripleSlanguage’s website features an interactive flash card for each word and a short animation illustrating its usage. I don’t know about you, but I telebinge weekly. There’s a short quiz that will declare you a Triple Slangfessor if you pass. That’s Mrs. Slangfessor to you.

The site also includes a call for new vocabulary submissions. At press time it didn’t seem as if any had been submitted—or at least not greenlighted by Comcast. Personally, I’m too busy televisiphonernetting to submit one right now, but I encourage you to try it out.

A blog post from makeuseof.com ran up digg yesterday and got me wondering about all the lists we create. You see them posted all the time: ”My list of favorite X.” This one is pretty typical: 40 Unusual Websites You Should Bookmark.

What compels someone to construct a list like that? Considering the many companies and services mentioned, I’m hopeful makeuseof.com has not become a PR shill. So why? And why would those 40 make this list? Call it coincidence, but Seth Godin wrote a short post yesterday that hits on the topic. Is makeuseof.com an Official Influencer? Were they targeted by marketers? Likely not. With the barrage of Web applications that seem to pour onto the Internet every day, one magical thing still makes them boom or not…and it’s called “do I give a crap about what it does?” As Seth wrote:

…the most effective technique [for viral campaigns] is making stuff worth talking about in the first place. True viral marketing happens not when the marketer plans for it or targets bloggers or skateboarders or pirates with goatees, but when the item/service/event is worth talking about.

Customers, users, visitors, chumps. Call us what you will, but it’s we humans that matter, not what the application does. Make a product worth using, worth talking about, and you just may be on to something. You can try all day to make it viral, to be on as many lists as you can worm your way onto, but if Your Thing does nothing I need, ciao, baby.

One of the best lessons I learned during my bartending days (besides a martini-shaking technique that makes them cold enough to skate on) came courtesy of an industry-savvy pub owner. “If someone has a good time here,” he told me, “they’ll tell a friend. If someone has a bad time here, they’ll tell ten friends.”

Such is the driving mentality behind word-of-mouth marketing. If people have a positive experience, they’re bound to share it. If they have a negative experience, they absolutely will. Human nature.

The funny thing is that you, as an organization, have no control over the feedback. You can only control the product or service you provide. And if you try too hard to sell yourself, you’ll get picked apart if you don’t deliver. Examples of this pepper the web. In their earliest incarnations, company websites were little more than over-amped billboards or Yellow Page listings. People threw up all kinds of affirmations – “We’re the best, just ask us!” – and maybe that flew for a minute, just because we were mesmerized by the fact that you were online.

Jump ahead a decade. Now, visitors have become users. They’re looking for a fulfilling experience as much as for information, and they’re the ones who are going to decide if it’s good or not. Oh, and once they’ve made their decision, they have a near-infinite means of sharing their p.o.v. That’s the muscle behind web-driven word-of-mouth marketing.

This is scaring the hell out of many traditionally minded organizations, and their messaging is suffering as a result. They’re afraid to say anything significant online. You can almost hear the company leaders deciding: “Well, if we reveal who we really are, we’re making ourselves too vulnerable to that devastating negative word-of-mouth. We might as well just keep quiet.”

Bad play, because here’s the news – people are going to find out whether you want them to or not. They’re experiencing your products and services – and those of your competitors – and they’re talking about it in blogs, forums, newsgroups and the like. Play your cards too close to the vest, and you’re just making it difficult for your audience to get the info it now thinks it’s entitled to.

It’s “not damned if you do/damned if you don’t.” More like “maybe damned if you do/definitely damned if you don’t.”

So, figure out what messages you want to push, back them up with credible performance, and your intended audience is bound to appreciate and echo it. Get clandestine and quiet, however, and you can bet that they’ll still find a way to dig out the truth. What’s more, they’ll resent you for making it so much trouble. Then they’ll really start talking trash – and there’s no martini I can make that will help with that headache.

Ah, the free sample—staple of bakeries and food courts everywhere. “Hey buddy, check out this ginger chicken on a toothpick!”

That’s confidence, right? This stuff is so good you just taste it and you’ll want to buy it.

You know what I love about the food court sample? It’s always there. Sometimes on a busy day I just walk back and forth grabbing toothpick after toothpick. Score!

Think they notice it’s me over and over? Think they care? Listen, the chicken is cooked anyway, someone’s got to eat it.

When the day comes that I’m hungry enough, I’ll buy a meal. In the meantime I tell hungry friends to go eat there—ooh, did someone say viral marketing?

And now is when I compare ginger chicken to Web applications.

I just finished an online whiteboard collaboration with my team that works 80 miles away from me, and it was fantastic. “Oh, WebEx,” you say. “Maybe MS LiveMeeting or Adobe Connect.” Nope. Check out vYew, a FREE online collaboration and conferencing tool. It rocks.

Their model is much like the ginger-chicken-on-a-toothpick model (as taught at Wharton). After a simple registration, I get a taste of the chicken, not the whole bird. But I can return again and again whenever I need it. No trial expiration, no watermarked examples.

Much like the generous folks at 37 Signals, which offers up free online tools like Campfire (group chat) and Basecamp (project management), vYew is giving away their product to folks who need just a little bit. Currently, I may only need to use this online collaboration tool a few times a year, but now that the sample hooked me, it means two things:

1. If I need more (more pages, file uploads, etc.) I will become a paying customer to them as opposed to one of the other players
2. I’m telling other people (you) about them

Great product. Great model.