I despise viral. I hate most of the attempts to do viral crap. It is rather amusing to see companies spend big bucks on Agencies with the hope that a video (the usual suspect for virality) will make it to YouTube's home page and score a big hit in terms of views. This sort of strategies tend to fail, even when they do score big numbers. And scoring big numbers is getting increasingly difficult.
Yesterday we had a very interesting day at work. Let me recap how things turned out first.
A couple of weeks ago Engadget published some shots of a small Pocket PC that were snugged out of our Beijing headquarters. This was rare. We usually keep concepts strictly confidential and behind closed doors. Yet it leaked. What to do?
David Churbuck decided it was time to put our money where our mouth was and contacted the Beijing design labs team, discussed the possibility of going open on it and so it was decided. We needed to be clear on what that shots actually were. Transparency, remember?
We were to publish a blog post on Friday. After editing and prepping the post I uploaded the pictures to the flickr account, marking them as "private" so none would see them but me.
I also started a little tease on twitter, using our @lenovosocial account:
Calls to newly posted pictures at twitter
The idea was to create some expectation towards the blog post. To be honest, that didn't work. At all.
Thus came Monday. We made the final adjustments to the post and, since I needed to insert the images into the post I marked them as "public" in flickr. Hell gates went wide open.
Within minutes the pics were picked by the main gadget / tech sites. We know they watch our flickr stream, but not that closely. While I was prepping to publish it went crazy.
We were expecting some level of visibility, but this wildly surpassed our expectations. Our aim was that the blog post should get the attention, not the pictures.
What ended up happening was a 2 wave shock. While many sites and blogs talked about the pictures and went into wild speculations about what that little pocket-fitting-thing would actually do we were publishing the official story. After pushing that live and starting to draw attention to it there were updates all over the place, letting people know that what they were looking at was a concept.
There were many lessons learnt. Most of those shall be kept private for the time being. The ones I can share with you here are:
- Content is still king (even when content is just pictures)
- "Viral" will happen in unexpected ways. And the not-so-prefabricated virals go to greater lengths than the agency stunt ones.
- Innovative design is the key for a company in the PC industry
Things didn't play exactly as planned, but they turned out nicely nonetheless.
(Post en español!)
