But Will It Blend a Rake? George From BlendTec on Viral Videos

Yesterday I sat in on George Wright's session at the Ragan Communications "New Social Media" conference I'm at in Chicago. George is the brain-daddy behind the wildly viral Will It Blend? video marketing campaign that launched about a year ago. He told the wonderful story of how, as the new (and first) BlendTec "marketing guy," he wandered through the manufacturing plant one day and noticed a sizeable pile of sawdust on the floor. He asked, "What's that about?" and was told casually that was how they tested their blenders... with 2 x 2s! A great idea, borrowed handy-cam, one chunk of lumber, a six-pack of coke, a handful of marbles, four golf balls, and an iPod later... voila! An new twist on an ancient form of marketing was born: intentional online viral marketing. The videos are now snagged from their own little podunk website in Utah as quickly as they're put up, slapped on to youtube and immediately hit the #1 favorite list time after time. It's the power of that little red "share" button on youtube.

Of course, viral marketing itself isn't new. It's been happening for at least as long as women have been buying shoes. The online version of it is simply when you see something that makes you pay attention--something interesting, unusual, funny, bizarre, intriguing, etc.--you pass it along to your friends. I had actually seen one of the "will it blend?" videos before yesterday as a result of viral sharing, so it was really interesting to hear the whole story and meet the man behind it. George is a delightfully self-effacing "marketing hick from the backwoods with a blender and a rake" who, with a $50 budget and a blender, got six million hits on his marketing experiment in the first week. Of course, the fact that he ended his talk by blending a rake was pretty impressive too.



BTW: The latest "Will It Blend?" video of Chuck Norris versus the bad guys mixing it up (sorry:) is a hoot and shows that even with an idea this powerful, you still need to introduce the element of the interesting or unexpected to keep up the momentum.