IMV15 : Viral Marketing

The following is a transcript for IMV15 : Viral Marketing. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo, Episode 15. I’m your host, Ted Murphy. And with us today is Richard Castellini, VP of consumer marketing for CareerBuilder.com. Welcome to the show today Richard.

Richard Castellini

Hey, thanks for having me Ted.

Ted Murphy:

Richard we’re here to talk today about viral marketing. And I know that CareerBuilder has recently won an award for one of your viral marketing campaigns.

Richard Castellini:

Um-hmm.

Ted Murphy:

But before we jump into that I wanted to give our audience a little bit of a background about CareerBuilder.com and who your target demographic is.

Richard Castellini:

CareerBuilder.com is the largest job search site in the United States with an average of 21 million unique visitors in a month. We are owned by the Gannett, Tribune and Knight Ridder companies, so three newspaper giants. I have over 1.3 million jobs on our site on any given month. And we specialize in you know well, we’re called a “generalist” in terms of having positions from high level, you know CFO, CEO positions down to entry level positions. So our target is very broad-based, you know our media buying targets are probably similar to a consumer package good than a niche program or a niche site.

Ted Murphy:

So, you’ve recently launched a viral marketing campaign and I know that this kind of dovetailed into some of the television and other advertising you guys have been doing. And that was called Monk-e-Mail. Can you tell a little, tell us a little bit about the campaign?

Richard Castellini:

Well around the, our second installment of Super Bowl ads, our second appearance in the Super Bowl we launched a new way for people to use and integrate our brand. You know we’ve got a consideration amount of equity built up in these chimps that people recognize from our spots from last year and this year and this was what we found was an interesting way for people to interact with that brand.

Ted Murphy:

And how exactly did it work?

Richard Castellini:

Well we partnered with our ad agency, Cramer-Krasselt and their technology provider Oddcast and had the ability for you to create a customized message. Whether you wanted to do speech to text or actually dial a 1-800 number, record a message and have that message being sent off to someone where they could see it and the characters that would be addressing this message were the chimpanzees that were used in our television advertising creative. So you could get a message from one of the CareerBuilder chimps. Maybe it’s a nice son wishing a Mother’s Day message to his mother or someone trying to romance somebody on Valentine’s Day with a Monk-e-message. Either way it’s been a tremendous success in people integrating with our brand.

Ted Murphy:

So before we get into the details and in case somebody hasn’t seen this, I know that actually that’s the way I was exposed to your brand was through one of these e-mails. Where can people go to actually send a Monk-e –mail.

Richard Castellini:

They can visit either CareerBuilder.com itself and there’s an advertisement or banner on the home page of CareerBuilder or Monk-e-Mail.com. Monk-e-Mail.com.

Ted Murphy:

All right. So how long did it take with this campaign before you were able to see some significant results? Obviously, you know viral campaigns kind of spread over time. How long was it until you started to see some increases in traffic and some good exposure?

Richard Castellini:

You know I, we, we’ve been really thrilled with the success. You know, unlike most viral campaigns, especially one like this where we actually didn’t use, spend media dollars behind it to support the campaign to drive people to the Web sites. We actually just began to feed this thing through one e-mail to our database of users. And then from then we’ve seen a steady growth. And you know we started out with sending about 4 million e-mails about the Monk-e-Mail campaign and since then we’ve seen, this is back in late January, we’ve seen somewhere in the neighborhood of 75,000 people a day.

Ted Murphy:

And where is the majority of that exposure coming from? Is it coming from referral e-mails? Is it coming from people blogging about it or social networks or articles of people talking about it, where are you seeing the traffic coming from?

Richard Castellini:

You know luckily it’s been across all of this. You know it’s the pass along that you made reference to. That people have sent you a message and they think it’s unique and interesting and send that along. If you go in and type, if you go to one of these blog search engines, like the Technoratis, you’ll see that there’s thousands of references to Monk-e-Mail in people’s blogs. If you go to different Web sitess and type in, there’s been plenty of references to it, you know we’re really excited in the sense that we’ve found something that was truly an interactive way for people to touch upon your brand that has gotten this much of ground swell.

Ted Murphy:

And you mentioned that you haven’t really spent much in terms of media. It sounds like you just used your --

Richard Castellini:

Um-hmm.

Ted Murphy:

Initial e-mail list, how does this, how does this compare to your traditional marketing efforts such as television campaigns?

Richard Castellini:

Well, I mean I can certainly tell you it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than a Super Bowl ad. But I guess that’s the most expensive, you know 30 seconds in media. You know we have found this to be a truly engaging thing. I don’t know if I mentioned this but we’ve had you know somewhere in the neighborhood of five and a half million unique visitors come and visit it. And they’ve played and streamed about 31 million Monk-e-Mail messages.

Ted Murphy:

So what, in terms of now, streaming out 31 million Monk-e-Mail messages, what type of budget are you working with? What are the costs? You know certainly not as expensive as a Super Bowl campaign but you know what type of budget are you working with?

Richard Castellini:

Well you’re working on a, I mean it’s a smaller budget but you know once a campaign like this gets up and running there’s the upfront cost obviously of establishing the campaign. But then after that you’re really looking at just paying for the 1-800 number and the incremental streams. It’s tremendously cost-effective, you know to have five, five and a half million people engaging your brand on average of six and a half minutes and all you’re gonna really have to pay for is a long distance call and some streaming costs, after the incremental setup, is has needless to say been a tremendous success for the organization.

Ted Murphy:

So how are you guys measuring the success of the viral campaign? I mean obviously it gets you brand exposure but is that translating into new customers for you?

Richard Castellini:

Well, I mean you know we have kind of a double-sided business or marketing approach here. We need to certainly get consumers or job seekers to our site to drive traffic to the people that pay for our business which are employers. And this is really focused at getting or increasing our awareness to job seekers. So you know to give you some idea we’ve had an increase in traffic on average of an additional million unique visitors or so, a month this year over last year and those job seekers have applied to about 20% more jobs than they did last year. So that’s been, you know an outright success. If you also want to look at the benefit on the employer side, the people that pay the bills. You know last year we grew at around 75% year over year. This year we’re going to grow our business by well over $100 million dollars.

Ted Murphy:

Wow. So what would you say are the key elements that made the program Monk-e-Mail such a success?

Richard Castellini:

Simple, engaging, truly viral, and unique. I mean it was simple to use, you can either quickly go in. You’re on one page. You don’t have to dig through several different pages on a web experience. You can type in your message and have it automatically come back to you and you can preview it. You can call real quickly get your message on the Web sites quickly. It is truly pass along or viral because the way to engage it is passing the message on to a friend. And it hasn’t been done in a mass scale like this before.

Ted Murphy:

And so in the future do you think you’re gonna be using similar channels. Are you going to try to, are you going to take this to the next level? What’s the future hold for you?

Richard Castellini:

Well one I made reference to a couple of holidays earlier. It’s been kind of funny that we see a spike in traffic in the Monk-e-Mail site around holidays. You know we saw a big spike in traffic around Valentine’s Day. No better way to say, I love you than having a chimpanzee tell you. And we saw a spike in traffic this last weekend with you know, Mother’s Day. So we will plan to update and to continually look to freshen, the experience of people on the Monk-e-Mail site.

But ongoing, you know we’re gonna be agnostic about the way to deliver our message to users. Meaning we’ll certainly look at online, off-line, you know traditional, new media, there are a bunch of different ways to use the rise of the internet and the changing medias to get your message out and we hope to do that as successfully as any marketer.

Ted Murphy:

I have a quick audio recording from someone here that has called in and left a voice-mail about viral marketing. And I’m going to play this for you right now and see if we can’t answer the question.

Richard Castellini:

Okay.

Caller:

Hi. My name is Kathleen and I’m calling from California. If your average small business marketer was looking for a cheap way to promote their services, I’m guessing word-of-mouth is probably the best option but where do you start with this exactly? How can I start the buzz? And where should I be looking to get exposure?

Ted Murphy:

Richard.

Richard Castellini:

Well, you know if we’re focusing on a small business I would be assuming that would, I’m thinking of a local retail shop for instance. And you’re gonna be focused on that local market, you know I live in Evanston, Illinois. So I’m thinking of a local shop in Evanston, Illinois, you know how do you generate buzz? You do things within that community. Whether it’s sponsor a different race, whether it is doing a give-away at your store or something like that. That’s where you would look to use word-of-mouth to make a splash, get your name out. Get some publicity in the local area or the local market. So, you need to do a lot of grassroots thing.

If your business is a little bit larger and you’re talking about define marketing budgets and then you open up a different area of opportunities. And as everybody looks, you know one of the more effective ways people have looked at is for instance search marketing, you know get your word out on the terms that people are using.

Ted Murphy:

And actually speaking of search marketing, did you guys do any sort of search marketing or anything like that with the Monk-e-Mail campaign?

Richard Castellini:

Yes. I mean we buy the words that support Monk-e-Mail, you know when people are looking, you know talking chimps or monk-e-mail itself, career builder you know we buy words around it to support it.

Ted Murphy:

And what would you say are the top three most important things that people should know about viral marketing that you can share with our listeners?

Richard Castellini:

I would, in my estimation top three things when you’re looking at viral marketing is it has to be engaging. It has to be genuine. And it has to be easy to use.

Ted Murphy:

Fair enough. Well our, if you’re listening to this through a podcast, you can download our viral marketing white paper at internetmarketingvoodoo.com. Richard, I appreciate your time today and certainly some great information for our listeners who are always asking us about viral marketing and what they can do with their own campaigns and hopefully we can have you back in the future when you guys release the next iteration of Monk-e-Mail.

Richard Castellini:

Well great. Thank you for your time.

Ted Murphy:

Thank you.

[End of Audio]

Marketing Resources
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viral marketing, word of mouth, buzz, viral, guerrilla