What will go funny viral? It's like a thing

Now that the new HRmarketer.com B2B marketing platform is live, along with SocialEars in limited beta, it's time for us to continue the marketing.

Because, as all of you know quite well, marketing is hard work, even when it seems effortlessly funny.

Yes, hard work. Lots of it. If you attended our social media marketing and digital storytelling webinar with Jessica Miller-Merrell at the end of September, you'll remember I covered comedy.

Comedy can be highly subjective, but there are universals that can be a big viral win -- if you get it right.

"If" being the operative word. I bring this up because we're in the process developing some new viral marketing campaigns for HRmarketer.com, some of which will be funny (we hope).

Hey, after our magically viral marketing success in launching SocialEars, which was highly creative but not really funny per se, it'll be a fun challenge to be funny. By the way, I did nominate our SocialEars campaign for the Mashable Awards Viral Campaign of the Year, so don't forget to vote when the voting starts.

Being funny isn’t as easy as it seems, especially when combining comedy and B2B marketing. It’s hit and miss even in B2C marketing, which by the way you always remember your favorites, but you certainly don’t remember the bombs.

In fact, when attempting to be creative and funny whatever the medium, usually video, most HR B2B vendors don’t do a very good job.

Neither did I back in the day. Yikes.

Because the problem is that we’re trying to hard to explain what we are, what we do, why we want to buy – and oh, buy the way, please laugh at our funny, which isn’t. Here are some tips that might help:

• Good comedy is about getting us to relate about something we can all relate to (in our space). Like aspiring to grow up and work in HR.
• Run the script and/or copy by folks inside and outside of the space. Does it resonate? Crack a smile? Make them cry in pain and not the funny kind of pain?
• If you’re going to make an animated video, for goodness sake spend some money. Those free shareware problems are fun to play with, but they make for poor quality videos. Production is important.
• Whether it’s a live-action video or an animated one, or some combination of both, don’t make it too long. In fact, take your original length and cut it in half. Lighten up and the set up and get to the punchline quickly. 1-3 minutes max.

What will go funny viral? That’s anyone’s guess. It's like a thing.

"They have tables made of doors. It's like a thing."

Like OccupyFacebook in Nondescript Building 4

The show of hands was clear.

There were at least 20-30 people out of 250+ whose companies still block access to Facebook and other social networks. This revelation came literally at the nondescript interim Facebook headquarters at the end of day of ERE Media's latest must-attend event, the Recruiting Innovation Summit.

Facebook is a company that lives and breathes their own marketing mantra, "The web is being rebuilt around people." But there are still companies who build fences around the web, and vendors who only peek into others' yards, afraid to join in on the social media marketing fun.

But not Facebook. I learned yesterday that they hold Hackathon Projects, 8-hour marathon programming sessions where employees build something new.

No normal day-to-day work. Only building something new. All in 8 hours.

For example, the Facebook "Like" button was a Hackathon Project from only one year ago. (I'm still pulling for a "Right On" button.) Facebook Hackathons are not just for the software developers; they're for all employees. That means that everyone from marketing to recruiting and more get to build new stuff.

Here's another inspirational Facebook mantra, "Move fast and break things." It's okay, because stuff can be fixed and made fancy again.

It's true that Hackathons probably wouldn't fly at 99% of companies today, because too many worry about "clock-watching" instead of "innovation" -- innovation that the 1% knows can and will skyrocket productivity and revenue.

But the "99%" attended and represented at Facebook headquarters for the summit. They were there to learn innovative new recruiting strategies and the technologies that drive them. It was their Hackathon, their 8-hour marathon learning session to consume, digest and apply their own customized strategic versions back at their headquarters.

Hopefully.

And on the other end of that, recruiting technology and services companies like Branchout, Pinstripe, Jobvite, BraveNewTalent, Scavado, Jibe, Avature, SelectMinds and Dice were there with their own innovative "social" marketing Hackathons, from Branchout's mobile text surveys to Dice's 100 recruiting tips shared by the attendees.

Yep, I'm the dork with the chalkboard thought bubble. (Although I know a lot of firms who could use a marketing hackathon, that's for sure.)

It was like OccupyFacebook in nondescript building 4, with the web being rebuilt around us, the people.

Because we're the most important part.

In other words, SocialEars is magic

So maybe the 10 trivia questions were too hard, but that really wasn't the point.

Neither was our 10th Anniversary Celebration (Get it? One question for each year?), although we're very proud of the fact that we were an early adapter of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and that we've helped hundreds of HR suppliers in the greater HR B2B space grow their businesses, while witnessing the amazing tech trends of social and mobile turn enterprise innovation and the world of work inside out.

Only a couple of you got 9 out of 10 of the trivia questions right, not counting the bonus question:

What is the name of HRmarketer’s new service, to be launched at HR Tech 2011, which captures the tweets, blogs, and online conversations from thousands of HR and B2B journalists, analysts and other “voices” and uses a proprietary algorithm to show what topics are trending and who is influencing those topics?

Many of you did get that one right at the end, which was the point, if you were paying attention.

What the heck am I talking about?

Well, I'm talking about our launch of SocialEars, our groundbreaking algorithm that captures real-time online content, and analyzes the tweets, blogs and online articles by thousands of HR journalists, media outlets, analysts and thought leaders, who we call social voices, to show which topics are trending and who is driving the conversations.

In other words, it's magic.

We launched it with a low-cost viral social marketing campaign that buzzed along softly until its crescendo at the 14th Annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition.

• We released our 10-4-10 HR tech marketplace trivia questions into the wild about one month before HR Tech, which then redirected folks to SocialEars.com after taking the quiz.
• Also, for almost one month prior to the show, we shared lots of fun tweets like, "At @HRmarketer, we’re all ears. Are you? #SocialEars coming soon," linking to SocialEars.com.
• From there we shared a little more info via SocialEars.com on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and more.
• Then there was a little blogging sprinkled in for good measure.
• Then there were a couple of search-optimized marketing press releases and a SocialEars plug on our Digital Storytelling webinar.
• Then there was our pitch to all the HR Tech vendors to come see our SocialEars demo and get an iPod Shuffle.

So for just a small monetary investment compared to what many vendors spend for a product launch prior to the HR Tech show, primarily for our trip, exhibiting at the show and the Shuffles (and iTunes gift cards when we ran out of Shuffles), our team canvased the floor and our founder Mark Willaman delivered dozens and dozens of demos to nearly 100 people in two days.

Nearly 100 people in two days. Beat that, baby.

Check out some of the post-demo buzz:

• Forget Elvis! The real must see show this past week was #SocialEars at the HRMarketer's booth!! Very Impressive! - Kevin Hautzinger, Director of Marketing at OneSource Virtual HR
• New #socialears tool is HOT. Very cool. Sam Higgins, Acquire, Inc.
• Impressive stuff with #SocialEars! smashfly, Chris Brablc
• Demo'd @socialears from @HRmarketer and it's cool! I wish they had it for every industry! - Maren Hogan - Head of US Marketing for BraveNewTalent.
• If you haven't, make sure to check out #socialears at HRmarketer.com's booth #950. Awesome social media tool! Ceridian_US Ceridian
• Dear HR PR folks, please please check out @hrmarketer's #socialears. Great stuff and will help you write better messages to me. - Lance Haun, Editor for ERE.net

Pay special attention to the last one in particular -- "SocialEars will help you write better messages to me."

And check out this nice plug from Felix Wetzel, Group Marketing Director, Jobsite:

The company that impressed me most was HRmarketer.com with their new product feature “socialears”. It analyses the social activities of journalists, analysts, bloggers, thought leaders, and identifies the topics, enriches the profiles with tag clouds and Klout scores and highlights the key influencers for by topic. The demo looked really good. It met my criteria of increased convenience and better experience. I will certainly be testing it in a real time environment. And somehow it’s not surprising that this company isn’t really an HR technology provider, right?

Right.

Our new HRmarketer.com platform along with SocialEars (beta) will launch at the end of October. Don't worry, we'll make sure you don't miss it. And if you don't have it, you're crippling your competitive edge.

And double don't worry -- if you're already an HRmarketer.com software subscriber, you're golden.

By the way, if you did miss our demo and shuffle combo at the show and you'd still like to see SocialEars, contact us for a demo and we'll give you an iTunes gift card for your time.

Like I said, it's magic.

Transforming the ordinary into extraordinary

I ordered an iPhone 4S last Friday, upgrading from my 3GS. If you're a fan and watched the Apple promo videos (or any of their videos over the last few years), you'll notice that they make ordinary activities look extraordinary with their elegant hardware and software.

It's alien technology and I love it.

But you don't have to be an Apple fan to like amazing technology; that's not what this post is about. It's about companies who make extraordinary products and/or offer great services -- and market them as such.

I mean, Google's Android phones may have had blips of marketshare grab, but their campaigns are over-the-top Transformer sci-fi belch (remember, my cold and super cold crappy brand marketing).

Transforming ordinary activities into an extraordinary user experiences is where it's at. Keep it real, especially in our space.

After such an amazing HR Technology Conference and Exposition last week in Vegas, here are six companies that come to mind in the HR B2B space that do jus that -- transform -- with their products, services and/or marketing (and/or because even with extraordinary stuff, not all of them have the marketing quite there -- but hey, they're working on it).

1. Workday: If you've seen or used their HR software, you know what I mean. Talk about turning ordinary HR business workflows into extraordinary collaborative software interactions. Plus, they know how to talk with the HR business and the practitioners who populate it. That's huge today because too many vendors can't in a world gone cloudy.
2. ReviewSNAP: Their refreshing approach to conducting performance reviews while ensuring ongoing feedback in a way that clearly conveys to the employee the benefits that await them when they embrace workplace behavioral changes. It's called Benefits-Based Performance Management™ (BBPM™), and it's sweet.
3. Talent Technology: Like what Workday has done with HR software, Talent Tech has done with sourcing and recruiting technology. It's called Talemetry. And again, they know how to talk with their buyers.
4. Visier: Workforce and business data analytics are hot today, but too many vendors still only offer a few reporting choices, basic visualization and may or may not have predictive algorithms baked in. But if any company has what I'll call "alien" technology, turning ordinary data into an extraordinary interface that HR pros will understand and use, it's Visier.
5. Dovetail Software: My goodness, what's more painfully ordinary than dealing with issues and questions from employees? But Dovetail is on to something with their HR case management software, again turning ordinary activities into extraordinary process management and service delivery that can achieve significant savings for HR.
6. myStaffingPro: Any talent acquisition technology company who focuses on the candidate experience when developing their software is extraordinary as far as I'm concerned. And too many vendors still aren't doing that. But myStaffingPro is and they've got the usability statistics to back it up.

There are so many others (thankfully) that I could mention here, some of which I've written about here, and others I just haven't gotten to yet (TotalRewards Software and Bright.com and Talent Circles).

And of course, we have to include our very own new HRmarketer.com marketing platform launching at the end of October, complete with SocialEars.