In the spirit of Halloween, I would like to take this time to talk about a potential trick that was pulled on all of us recently.

As anyone in the internet world will tell you, it is difficult to make something ‘viral’ in today’s online media world. The one thing required to make something viral is that it needs to be something that, when viewed, inspires the viewer to pass it along to everyone they know, invite people around their desk to watch it, or tweet/retweet it.

And that’s not an easy task.

Today’s savvy internet user is fairly unshockable.  There is little you can do (and keep it PG-rated) that will create ANY kind of shock, interest, or humor.  That makes it relatively hard for a big company like Microsoft (who already has a perceived image) to create a promotional campaign/video.  What can they possibly do, then?

Let’s fast forward to right before the launch of Microsoft’s newest OS, Windows 7.  They of course needed to market it after the dismal Windows Vista release, so they decided on a (let’s sarcastically say) brilliant ad campaign where users would host Windows 7 launch parties.

Essentially, a person could decide that they liked Windows enough that they would go online, sign tons of paperwork and become an official launch party host.  They could then recruit all their friends to come (using an overly complicated invitation system that discouraged people from actually using the official way) and sit around and… install Windows 7.

But that’s not all.  If you had enough people you could potentially get a Windows 7 box signed by Steve Ballmer.  Don’t even check eBay, because I’m sure no one would want to part with that gem.

I realize that I may not be explaining this process very clearly. So Microsoft, in their eternal wisdom, made a video that explains the whole process.  Please enjoy below.

Now… I’m going to assume you watched it and that you have the sensibilities and intelligence of a moderately intelligent human being.  What the heck was that?!?!  Awful, awful, awful.  I mean really… it’s embarrassing.  On every single front.  Acting, video, writing, sound quality… was this really produced by a multi billion dollar company?Why, this video is so BAD that I am inspired to forward it to all my friends and laugh at it…

Oh wait.  They got me.  Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but this one has to make you wonder. Did Microsoft intentionally make one of the worst, lamest, milquetoast videos to play right into the lame-o image that Apple created for them?  My gut says no, they aren’t that smart.  But at the same time, it makes me wonder.

If the goal of the video was exposure and publicity, it worked.  The video has been viewed millions of times.  It has been laughed at and mocked, it has been spoofed and goofed.  It’s an embarrassment.  Again, I don’t think they meant to, but Microsoft made one of the most talked about viral videos of the year by making themselves the brunt of the joke.  Congrats.  They did it.

But at what cost?

If you’re even minimally involved in marketing, you know that advertising and mass marketing are undergoing major changes. Have been for some time. We have become so inundated with constant marketing messages that we have become quite efficient at tuning them out. Not only is there too much noise, but mass marketing interrupts us, generally at the most inconvenient times – think TV commercials.

The worst part about this mass of advertising? A high percentage of it is simply irrelevant. The person hearing/seeing the message is not the target market. So we have lots of noisy messages that interrupt us with irrelevant messages.

It’s easy to see why changes are in order. As a way to make sure messages are more effectively delivered, companies are frequently turning to new marketing formats (like internet marketing) and engaging with customers in a more natural, transparent way.

Why Transparency In Business Is Good Business

One of the trends we’re also seeing is businesses moving toward greater transparency in everything – from pricing, to quality, to a company’s corporate responsibility policies. Previously, most companies were able to hide behind the curtain of mass media and carefully control the messages sent out to customers. That’s increasingly difficult because customers are able to get far more insight into a company and its products than ever before.

One of the developments that is driving the transparency trend is online customer reviews and recommendations from personal acquaintances, usually gathered online. The Nielsen Global Online Customer Survey recently found that “recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally.” So not only do people place higher trust in online reviews and personal recommendations, but it is becoming increasingly easy and convenient for people to write reviews online.

This is good news for consumers: more transparency means a greater ability to make informed purchasing decisions. This is also good news for well-run, ethical companies who offer a valuable product or service. I would expect the cream to rise to the top, in this case.

In many cases, though, transparency alone isn’t enough. Because of the power of social media/networking, companies must invest in engaging with current and potential customers online as well as actively managing their online reputations. Companies that do these things well provide distinct differentiation versus their competition that will simply drive bottom line business results.

Because the site’s 122 million+ monthly visitors (according to July ‘09 Compete stats) needed one more reason to use the social network, Facebook can now help its users in the fight to manage their online reputation.

Unlike its competitors who always seem to fail at adapting their service offerings quickly enough to match the constantly evolving landscape of social media/networking, Facebook has now added the ability to tag friends in status updates.

The ability to tag friends in updates isn’t particularly fascinating, especially for those who “tweet” regularly. But Twitter-tagging is limited in terms of effectiveness for online reputation management (ORM).

Why? Because anyone who has a unique username (“unique” = not the same name as your birth name) in Twitter loses out on ORM-benefit because the link text is irrelevant. When I have a Twitter conversation with “@bhawk988″ (known to his friends and family as Kevin Doory), the link at the beginning of my Twitter message to him doesn’t help his profile rank for the search “Kevin Doory” in Google.

However, when tagging a friend in a Facebook status message, placing the “@” symbol in front of the person’s name creates an anchor texted, SEO-friendly link from your profile to your friend’s profile. It also creates a similar internal link to your Facebook page on your own Facebook wall. Check out these images below for an example of this concept at play:

How Facebook Tagging Can Help Protect Your Online Reputation

There is plenty of documentation out there stressing the importance of managing online reputation. Facebook tagging helps manage online reputation because a user profile earns a quality, authoritative, internal link with each tag in a Facebook status.

Anyone who was part of the Facebook username rush back in June and managed to secure their own name is likely concerned with their online reputation. Getting these internal links from across the Facebook universe to a Facebook profile naturally increases the authority of that profile. Those same links also improve the chances that a Facebook profile indexes in the Google search results for a related search term (like my Facebook profile for my name, for example).

Facebook tagging is likely to create a classic case of “he who has the most links wins” in search engine results for people and company names.

The implications of Facebook tagging don’t just end with the Google search results benefits, either. I don’t have confirmation on this, but look for Facebook tagging to begin to have an impact on internal searches within Facebook. If a searcher is looking for a certain “Jonathan Bentz” in Facebook, for example, the fact that I am tagged in more status messages than my co-Jonathan Bentz’s will likely cause me to rank higher than the others.