I have been working with a friends band with an idea they have come up with for spreading the word about their band Circus Envy. Essentially their idea is to mimic traveling books, where one person reads a book, then puts comments in the cover and leaves that book in a public place for someone else to find and read.
Their idea is to do a similar thing with a CD of their music. Hoping that this will spread the word about their band, get them noticed for something new and innovative.
I have been helping developing some software for them, which allows users to enter flags on Google maps where they have found one of the CD’s along with a comment. This software is growing (as all these things do) and now it calculates the distance that the CD’s have traveled. At writing this post their CD’s had traveled 9033 Miles! Have a look at their Traveling CD Map here.
Basically with Google Maps API you can get the longitude and Latitude of a point clicked by the user, which means I can then enter this into a database field and then present it as a marker on the map.The user can locate where they found the CD using the search function which can search place names, street names or post-codes.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
//<![CDATA[var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map"));
map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(10.107421875,49.89463439573421), 14);
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());
map.addControl(new GScaleControl());GEvent.addListener(map, 'click', function(overlay, point) {
if (overlay) {
map.removeOverlay(overlay);} else if (point) {
map.recenterOrPanToLatLng(point);
var marker = new GMarker(point);
map.addOverlay(marker);}
});
// Recenter Map and add Coords by clicking the map
GEvent.addListener(map, 'click', function(overlay, point) {
document.getElementById("latbox").value=point.y;
document.getElementById("lonbox").value=point.x;
});// bind a search control to the map, suppress result list
map.addControl(new google.maps.LocalSearch(), new GControlPosition(G_ANCHOR_BOTTOM_RIGHT, new GSize(10,20)));//]]>
</script>
I have secured the page that allows users to add markers so that a correct CD Reference is required, thus hopefully meaning the map will not be Spammed.
It struck me that this was essentially a viral marketing exercise, and that there are some essential points that can be learned from this exercise for future attempts in viral marketing.
- Viral Marketing does not have to be always online, but creating links between the physical world and the virtual world do work.
- New and innovative ideas do work. At the outset we did not know if this exercise would work, but all concerned were prepared to gamble some money and time to try it. I guess this is the key, many ideas will not work, but you don’t know that until you try it. The very nature of viral marketing means that if the idea catches on it rapidly starts to fly and spread.
- If you have a unique idea that starts to spread, there are opportunities for marketing in addition to the viral side. Getting the press involved with something you can demonstrate (in this case the number of miles that the CD’s have traveled, gives the press something that they can hook into and lead with.
- Allow people to get involved in your viral marketing. People love to interact, in this case the Map allows users to find where the CD they have been listening to has been, who has listened to it, and what others thought about it.
- give something away as an incentive. When a user registers a point on the map, they can download an un-released track. This is something that was relatively easy for the band to do, but something that fans will fall over each other to get.
The Travelling CD and Circus Envy are well worth watching. There is no way of telling how far the idea will go, no way of telling if it will get them noticed, but it certainly seems to be starting to take off.
