Getting Publicity For Alternative Product Uses

Then there was the time that I did the demonstration (with his permission by the way), over my science teacher's desk; the resulting burst setting his grade book on fire. I went home that night with a very sore rear end, him having broken his paddle on my posterior. (My community was late in prohibiting corporal punishment - my bony rear end actually was the cause of splitting two separate science teacher's paddles, and I was a *good* kid!)

There are many products out there that have an alternative use, one for which it is probably not designed.

Don't think your product has any? Talk to the folks in the factory, you may be very surprised.

Why am I talking about these pranks in a publicity newsletter?

Because the popularity of funny videos on the Internet has turned simple teenage pranks into a great opportunity to actually increase your publicity and sales.

Consider the favorite Mentos and Diet Coke trick. Stick several Mentos into a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke, (I suggest you do this outside...) and you'll get a 3-5 second geyser of Diet Coke erupting into the air.

This experiment has suddenly taken on a whole new life with a very entertaining video done by EepyBird.com, which you can see at http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html or here:

They took 101 bottles of Diet Coke, combined them with 523 Mentos, and created a short video. Seriously, if have broadband, and you're at all interested in publicity and the power of viral marketing, I recommend you check it out.

You'll probably show it to your kids too, just like I did.

So what's the net publicity effect of something like this?

To Diet Coke, not much at all. In fact, they have such a huge business that Coke probably doesn't even care.

But to Mentos, this may be a totally different story. This publicity is just the kind of thing that will cause tens of thousands of teens, college students and crazy fathers like me to pick up a few packages (cases) and create our own little Bellagio-like displays in backyards worldwide.

An entertaining online video can create a few extra points of market share and a few hundred thousand in sales.

Trust me, these things get attention. A quick search on Technorati shows that 1621 people have linked into this site, 20 in the last 3 hours; 120 people have tagged it in del.icio.us, and there are a bunch of tags on Digg.com. Yes, people notice, write about it, and send traffic to sites with entertaining videos?

Is there something you could do to create a crazy video using your product?

What other viral techniques can you use to create underground publicity for your product

Tags: viral publicity mentos coke dietcoke eepybird