Making Microsoft your bitch

In today's keynote address at Real Estate Connect SF, GapingVoid publisher Hugh MacLeod explained how a viral marketing campaign he engineered for a South African winery, Stormhoek, has helped boost sales from 50,000 cases to a projected 250,000 cases in 2007. To oversimplify things a little, MacLeod -- a former ad copywriter who draws crude but clever cartoons on the backs of business cards -- got bloggers writing about the wine by having the winery send them a free bottle. Then cartoons he created for the winery also went viral.

One of those cartoons, the Blue Monster, seems at first glance to have nothing to do with wine. The cartoon is sort of an unofficial slogan MacLeod created for Microsoft empoyees. "Microsoft: change the world or go home" it reads. MacLeod posted a high-resolution file of the cartoon on the Web, and Microsoft employees started "downloading the heck out of it" to make their own t-shirts, stickers and screen savers. The blue monster got noticed on social networking sites like Flickr and Facebook, and influential folks like tech blogger Robert Scoble helped spread the word (Scoble supposedly has a Blue Monster sticker on his laptop).

The Blue Monster was actually part of the viral marketing campaign for Stormhoek. Notice the winery's URL is in little letters at the bottom of the cartoon (above).

"Microsoft is my bitch now," MacLeod joked to Connect attendees. It's not so much that the Blue Monster got everybody going to the company's Web site, but that suddenly industry publications were talking about the unusual ad campaign. That helped Stormhoek sales people get their foot in the door and talk to the people who could distribute their products, like grocery stores, MacLeod said.

The takeaway for marketing real estate? Social networking sites are all about "social objects." The objects themselves -- pictures people upload to Flickr, say -- are unimportant. It's the conversation that takes place around them. Social objects always consist of a noun, such as the photo, and a verb -- the action they create, such as the urge to share. MacLeod didn't dream all this stuff himself, he said. It goes back to research anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski did while living among Pacific Islanders nearly 100 years ago.

All rights reserved. This content may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News. Use of this content without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.