Lego goes viral - and you can too

From Kern Lewis

Lego loves generating buzz, plus:
Can you replace Billy Mays???

January 22, 2010
510-329-8155

Greetings!
The child in many of us still loves Lego toys. Put a bunch of Lego pieces on a table in a meeting, and soon idle fingers will start building things.
Lego marketing is fun, too, especially their viral stuff. Here is a buzzy sample about Lego's own new online community:
Article on LegoClick
And here is how it did the week it launched: Traffic Rank Article.
This lessons is getting long in the tooth:
Creating interest among online browsers for your interesting stuff requires that you create interesting content. Most of us don't have Lego's budget, but we also don't need to impress as many people to make a comfortable living. Understand what titillates your target audience, and create content that features your product, service or brand but scratches the targets' itch to be amused or informed at the same time.

Are you the next Billy Mays?

You cannot bottle lightning in Marketing. You can and must create sparks, but full-on lightning is all luck. Billy Mays, the amazingly effective pitchman for direct marketer TeleBrands who died unexpectedly last year, was lightening incarnate. Still, TeleBrands is running a public competition to replace him.

Good luck, I say! You can't force such a selection on the viewing public. "The Public" decides which sparks become lightening.
On the other hand, publicizing the search is a good move in this era of reality TV and digital PR. In this case, the final winner will be almost immaterial, and I do applaud TeleBrands for seizing one last chance to leverage the popularity of the old Billy Mays franchise.

Is your brand tied up in a personality? How would you replace that person if they left? (This goes for your best salespeople, too.) Have a succession plan ready to go.

Forbes and I are back online.