Osmosis Marketing – Social Media Buzz

The idea that any brand’s image is achieved through the osmosis of pervasive blog buzz and tweet trending is referred to as osmosis marketing.

Fact or fiction depends on whether you are a believer or a doubter. This doesn’t need much explanation outside of the fact that you are in one of two camps. Emarketing & social media buzz is or can be more effective than conventional marketing efforts, yes or no.

Facts are pretty clear, that there are successes in conventional marketing programs and there are successes and emarketing and social media programs. Yet the fact remains that print media has suffered severe declines over the last 5 years while online has grown by double-digit percentages year after year.

Osmosis marketing is more than just jargon, and a perfect current example is the Old Spice Man. Old school Procter & Gamble rocked the online world with video of the shirtless Isaiah Mustafa. If you’re in marketing, you’ve seen the videos and if you’re not in marketing you’ve seen the videos, right ladies! There have been over 36 Million views of the video “The man your man could smell like”. In fact they built a YouTube channel based on this initiative.

Lots to be learned in this example, and without going into too much detail, Craig Reiss at Entrepreneur provides five lessons that I’d like to share.

1) Create a strong persona

2) Seed social networks

3) Engage influencers, bloggers, newscasters, and celebrities

4) Personalize the communications

5) Short, simple videos

Clearly we don’t all have the budgets of the Old Spice marketing team, however, the basics are available to everyone. Build your brand, post on social media, engage influencers, personalize your communications and keep your videos, short and simple.

A receipt for success? Perhaps, yet, let’s be clear, social media engagement works for large brands and small brands alike. Osmosis Marketing or word of mouth advertising, you can be sure of one thing, it works.

Michael Bickerton, Raven5 Ltd, Toronto, November 2011

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