December 17, 2007

Tony Award-Winning "Spring Awakening," a Powerhouse User of Distributed and Viral Internet Marketing

A think it's helpful to take a look at the overall Internet marketing strategy of Broadway musical Spring Awakening -- Bill T. Jones is the choreographer for which he won a Tony. Here's his acceptance dance and speech:

Actually, that was slight digression - I just like the video. Back to Spring Awakening's Internet strategy. At the heart of what appears to be a highly successful online marketing program is the embrace of no-cost/low cost, highly viral distribution channels to reach large, enthusiastic audiences.

Here are the component parts of the Spring Awakening Internet Strategy. As you'll see, there is little here that dancers and dance companies with even the smallest budgets cannot do:

The Website

Their website is bold and nothing is extraneous. It's about selling tickets and merchandise, getting fans to spread the word about the show and making as many friends as possible on MySpace and Facebook. Take a look at the Spread the Word page. I don't think they missed a single avenue for encouraging visitors to help generate excitement and sell more tickets. Here's an example of a promotional banner that you can embed on your website/blog/social networking page:

MySpace and Facebook

On MySpace, Spring Awakening has amassed over 12,800 friends and 3,300 messages. If you take a look at this page, you'll notice that it was designed with existing content - music, video and details about the show. So it was not time consuming at all to create and generates a lot of traffic.

And for the official Facebook page, the show has another 13,000 or so friends. Their Facebook page is on the boring side, but obviously thousands of fans see value in signing-up, which means that the "friends" of these 13,000 group members also end-up learning about the show. Here's example of the viral nature of Facebook. I visited group page for Spring Awakening. I clicked the "Share" button and posted info. about this group to my profile on Facebook. Now visitors to my profile page see the following in my Mini-Feed:

YouTube and iTunes

Here's one of the many Spring Awakening videos on YouTube. It's been watched 44,000 times, has 44 comments and 86 ratings:

I'm confused by what is and is not an official show video on YouTube.

You can also sign-up for the Spring Awakening video podcast on iTunes and then watch it on your computer or iPod. Here's screen shot from iTunes - you can click image to see larger picture:

Conclusion

Above I didn't really delve into the strategy behind building an integrated Internet campaign that leverages the viral and distributed nature of the Internet. But I did just want to show the component parts of such a campaign. While implementing a successful Internet strategy obviously takes expertise and thus money, what's especially interesting is that the actual services above - MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and iTunes - cost no many to use and can help you reach huge audiences.

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