Oct 24, 2008 Posted in Marketing Ideas, Success Stories

Using Publicity and Buzz

I recently wrote a post about Dean Hunt and his unique approach to generating buzz and traffic using web 2.0 and social media. My review was pretty flattering but sincere. And to prove it I’m actually in the middle of testing two of the ideas contained in one of his reports.

I do a lot of work for Trek Escapes, an adventure travel company with offices across Canada. They have a very cool product to offer but a conservative approach to marketing. I’ve been shaking things up a little by using video marketing, etc. but I still have one problem that I’m having trouble with.

The site has very little unique content. Ninety percent of the site is dynamically generated by pulling data from a database to create pages based on the search criteria defined by the visitor. We have some travel stories but other than that, not a lot.

I’ve created a blog but again, with no content it is tough to promote. And nobody wants me to post my travel stories there. We’re trying to encourage travelling

All that to say, I was having a hard time coming up with something to ‘buzz’. Then the CBC launched something called One Million Acts of Green and someone in our office mentioned it. Basically, it is an initiative to get Canadians and citizens of the world to reduce the impact they have on the environment.

Besides being a very worthy cause, it was also a great publicity opportunity. It was timely (the site had launched on October 22nd) and it was something that both myself and Trek believe in.

Very quickly we had a press release written, issuing a challenge with a forfeit (Dean’s idea) and had it submitted through PRWeb within 8 hours of germination of the idea.

We’ll see how it goes but I’m pretty excited. Of course, apart from a marketing exercise, this is a great cause so feel free to join us. You can do so by visiting the CBC site, searching for “Trek is Green” and joining us.

To see more about the challenge you can see our press release on the Trek site.

I’ll keep you posted with the results.