Perilous Wisdom
You have to wonder at what passes for wisdom in the modern PR and marketing space. Consider this post, from David Meerman Scott - where he promotes the viral videos (and associated book) from Kevin Nalty.
Sure, the videos have been seen a lot, but here's the more interesting question: do they serve a useful marketing purpose? Do they help promote any product or service? Or do they just help promote the author of the videos?
The answer to that set of questions is pretty simple if you take the time to watch any of the videos. They're pretty well done, and they are pretty funny. Do they help attract any customers? Not really. Do they help make any product or service stand out? Not so much, no. So beyond promoting the author of the videos (and book), do they achieve any business purpose?
No, not really.
This is one of the things that drives me nuts about catch phrases like "no one cares about your product". It's true in one sense - prospective customers care about the problems your product can solve, not about the product per se. That doesn't mean that they don't want to hear about the product though - it means that they want to hear about how your product can help them solve their problems. Which gets me back to the whole viral video thing - how do any of the videos Scott linked to do that?
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