Tinder
- Create a fake profile and include a reference to your product in the profile.
- David did this for Bernie Sanders
- Scale API seemed to do this for their product (I can't remember seeing any other woman reference a tech product in her profile).
2017.04.26 - Hack-PR.com - How We Hacked Reddit to Generate 5 Million Media Impressions in 3 days
- HN discussion
- Summary:
After a quick brainstorm, I set my sights on Reddit. I follow various threads on Reddit on a daily basis and understand the power it has to make something go viral. I just didn’t know how to do it. I knew that if I could get one of my links to the top of Reddit Politics, I would have a pretty good chance of making the idea spread, so I set that as my goal: Get to the top of Reddit Politics within 24 hours.
What I did next was simple and cheap. From my own personal reddit account (Probably should have used a fake account or someone else’s), I posted a link to our Washington Times story on Reddit Politics. Then I went to Fiverr.com and bought every UpVote package that was offered. Total cost: $35. Two hours later I came back to check the results. We were number one with over 500 comments already.
We had media lists built of every journalist and writer in politics and began blasting them with “anonymous” tips from fake email addresses. [Examples: 1) Subject: 'Have You Seen This?'; Body: 'Just saw this at the top of Reddit....thought you might find it interesting.....<br>link'; 2) Subject: 'Is this law for real?'; Body: same as in (1).]We sent these types of emails out to over 20,000 media contacts from 6 different email accounts.
The media requests began to pour in like we’ve never seen before. We had so many requests coming in it was challenging to respond to them all. That is a great, great problem to have.
Vice, Al Jazeera , US News , even Anonymous wrote about the idea, and every time we got a new media hit, we followed the same process on Reddit. Post the link to various Reddit threads and then go on Fiverr and buy UpVotes to make sure we got to the top. In just the first few days, we had over 50 media outlets covering our story.
As the idea continued to spread like wildfire, our website began to crash. In 3 days alone, we had received over 2 million hits to the website, but most importantly, we had had over 4,000 volunteers sign up.
To keep our momentum going, we sent out this urgent request to those volunteers, pleading for their support to spread our idea. We turned our 4,000 supporters into a media pitching machine.
[He shows an image of a fairly standard email urging people to 1. contact journalists that cover politics, 2. tell the journalists that they support this cause, and 3. giving them three recent articles to choose from as a reference to link to.]Another wave of media requests came in from this push and we just kept up with the same process: Post on Reddit, buy UpVotes, repeat.
In less than a few days we had generated over 5,000,000 media impressions and received over 6 million website hits. Total cost? $255 from Fiverr.com.
Content Marketing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
The following examples demonstrate early use of content to disseminate information about a brand, and build a brand's reputation:
1891: August Oetker sold small packages of his Backin baking powder to households with recipes printed on the back. In 1911 he started publishing his very successful cookbook. It went through major updates over past 100 years and is one of the most successful cookbooks, globally reaching 19 million printed copies. All recipes originated from the test kitchen of the Oetker company, and the book was carefully written as a textbook to teach cooking from scratch. Oetker was very aware of the need for good marketing, practical communication and use of his doctor title to lend authority to his marketing.
1895: John Deere launched the magazine The Furrow, providing information to farmers on how to become more profitable. The magazine, considered the first custom publication, is still in circulation, reaching 1.5 million readers in 40 countries in 12 different languages.[4]
1900: Michelin developed the Michelin Guide, offering drivers information on auto maintenance, accommodations, and other travel tips. 35,000 copies were distributed for free in this first edition.[5]
1904: Jell-O salesmen went door-to-door, distributing their cookbook for free. Touting the dessert as a versatile food, the company saw its sales rise to over $1 million by 1906.
This company helps you connect with YouTube influencers / bloggers / Instagrammers / etc.
This is the blog of the guy who started this company: http://www.evanasano.com/
The PayPal Wars, p. 57:
"Oh, yeah. So what we need to do is go out and start buying stuff on eBay and insist on using PayPal to pay for it."
"But there are over three million auctions on eBay--we don't have that much money!" I rebutted.
"Well, we don't need to buy every auction," Luke replied. "Many sellers list multiple items at a time. Instead of buying all their items, all we need to do to introduce them to PayPal is just purchase one."
"So how do we do this? How do we buy something from every seller on eBay?"
"OK--there are a couple of ways we could try. First, have you heard of the Web farms in Asia?" I shook my head to indicate I had not.
[...]
"Either that, or we could build a 'bot."
Billboards
2004.01.21 - Talk at Stanford Technology Ventures Program
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMater ... l?mid=1021
Speaker(s): Max Levchin , Peter Thiel
advertising (billboards) wasn't cost effective b/c it had started to cost $100,000 for 1 month and each sign was only seen for 6-10 seconds
Don't use noreply@yourdomain.com on emails
http://customer.io/blog/dont-use-noreply-on-emails.html
Sending email from noreply@megacorp.com signals to a user that you don’t care about them. It’s a one-way relationship that allows you to blast them with email and them to do nothing. At a previous startup, every email we sent was from helpfulpeople@ourapp.com. This made users happy - especially when they would write to us and one of the helpful people would respond.
[...]
One of the biggest opportunities for apps is to offer help to users as they’re using your site.
- Offer help when a user doesn’t finish setting up their profile
- Offer help if a user starts, but never finishes, uploading a video.
- Offer help if a user creates an account but never uses it.
[...]
When a user cancels, it’s a great opportunity to ask them what went wrong. We’ve had success in the past with an automatic email from the CEO asking for feedback.
[...]
There are tremendous opportunities beyond monthly marketing emails. Start a dialogue with users by using an email address they can reply to. Reach out to them at key points in their experience on your site. Both alone and in concert, those two changes will improve activation and retention.