Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Awareness of the importance of creating buzz and viral effects needs to be part of everything we do in online marketing; or any marketing for that matter.

While we must do our research and trials to see how a product or service we are looking to develop will resonate with the public, we also need to think in terms of marketing as we build these products or services. There needs to be a type of "hook" embedded in the offering that makes it compelling to market with.

I'm thinking of the newest book by Ben Mezrich, called "Rigged," based on a true story of a young man who enters the Merc Exchange in lower Manhatten, for the purpose of "revolutionizing" the oil trading industry.

Here's a description of the book and the exchange from the Amazon.com site: "A place where billions of dollars trade hands every week, the Merc is like a casino on crack, where former garbagemen become millionaires overnight and where fistfights break out on the trading floor.

"This ordinary kid has traded Brooklyn for the gold-lined hotel palaces of Dubai.  He keeps company on the decks of private yachts in Monte Carlo-teeming with half-naked girls flown in by Saudi sheiks-and makes deals in the dangerous back alleys of Beijing.  But the Merc is just a starting place. 

"Taken under the wing of another young gun and partnering with a mysterious young Muslim, the kid embarks on a dangerous adventure to revolutionize the oil trading industry-and, along with it, the world.”

The idea is the story lends itself to great marketing material. Reading the above description makes you want to not only go and buy the book, but as I and many others have: write about it.

When we look at potential creative ventures, think in terms of marketing at all the stage of developing the product or service. It will tell you a story that others will want to hear. From there you figure out the ways to best tell that story.