If you’ve spent any time online at all, you must have run into several of these. Things like the “Star Wars Kid”, “Numa Numa Song”, “The Evolution of Dance”, and the “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” video. A viral video is “video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites.” They’re the bread-and-butter of sites like YouTube.
It wasn’t long after these things started getting popular that corporations, looking for ways to make up for declining television ratings, discovered that they could generate a lot of buzz by putting out a funny video that could be shared. The marketing machines of the big brewers have also turned their attention to this new way to reach their audience. After all, what is the key demographic for the big brewers? Men between the ages of 18 and 34. What is probably still the largest demographic of people who spend a lot of time online? Men between the ages of 18 and 34.
Bud.TV was part of this effort. It wasn’t purely about viral videos, but one of the most famous beer marketing viral videos was Bud Light’s “Swear Jar”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHBzAQoj4P0
That’s not the only video out there (just check out the video tag here on Hop Talk for a few) and there are more coming.
Associated Press: Beer makers increasingly turning to viral ads
Viral marketing has been around for more than a decade, but viral video ads have grown in popularity as it has become easier to watch and share video on the Web and video-sharing sites like YouTube have grown. Forrester Research estimates interactive advertising was worth $20 billion in the U.S. this year and projects that amount will triple by 2012.
“It’s definitely a trend, definitely happening,” said Benj Steinman, editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights. “But it’s still, relatively speaking, a small part of total (advertising) spending. The big part is still (on) sports on TV. That’s still where the action is for the young adult male target.”
Marketers are treading carefully. Branding has to be “gentle” otherwise it’s too much of a turn-off. Also, once you put a video out on the web it’s there forever; there’s no way to “pull” an ad, like you can with television advertising. And, of course, there’s no hard-and-fast measurements on how they affect beer sales. They are, at best, building “brand awareness”.
Alas, I am not in their desired demographic. I suspect you’re not either. That’s probably for the best. I’ve been finding the television ads from big brewers to be more and more peurile and have little tolerance for them. Videos on the web, at least, I don’t need to see if I don’t want to. Even so, they’re pure entertainment to me. I don’t see how a video from any of the big brewers, no matter how clever, will influence my attitude toward them. But since I’m not their target demographic, I guess that’s all right with them, too. Some of them are worth a chuckle, though.
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Ummm…what?
Beer 2.0. You know, Web 2.0 technology focused on beer. We’ve mentioned other beer-focused Web 2.0 sites before.
Well, here’s a few more my fellow technophiles might want to look into.
Blogged is a directory of, well, blogs. In particular I draw your attention to All > Family & Home > Cooking > Drinks > Alcoholic > Beer. Registered users can review blogs themselves, connect with other members, get notifications if their own blog gets a review, and so on.
The Aleuminati - aleuminati.ning.com
and
Democracy’s Drink - www.democracysdrink.com
Heard of MySpace? Facebook? Same idea here. Members can create profile pages with all kinds of customization, participate in forums, and otherwise network socially. The difference is that these communities focus on beer.
Heard of Digg? Again, this is basically the same idea. Members can vote on stories, and the stories with the highest ratings bubble to the top. Again, however, the difference is in the focus: beer-related stories.
Finally, I’ll mention Plusmo. What is Plusmo? I’ll let them explain it:
Plusmo is a FREE service that lets you run cool mobile widgets
on your phone. Mobile widgets are tiny killer apps that offer a
much better mobile experience for a specific purpose. There
are over 20,000 widgets on Plusmo, most of them created and
shared by users like you.
They’re not beer-focused, obviously. However, someone has created a Plusmo widget for Hop Talk.
What are your favorite beery Web 2.0 gizmos?
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Love it or hate it, think it’s an ego-stroker for pop-culture geeks or the most democratic application of human knowledge, or something in between, there is no denying the success of Wikipedia. While the problems you would expect from a site that anyone can edit, like vandalism, slander, and complete misinformation are rampant and continually thwarted, it still contains an unbelievable amount of information that is accurate and useful. Between Wikipedia and Google, I feel like there’s nothing that I can’t find the answer to.
Even the reason for this little blog, beer, is well-represented on Wikipedia. Check out the Wikipedia Portal: Beer.
But, as you know, no general knowledge resource can reach the depth of information for a topic as well as a resource focused on just that topic. So, I decided to look around to see if there was a “Wikipedia for Beer”. A “Beer-o-pedia” if you will.
Indeed, there are a number of community-driven open content Wikipedia-like projects out there on the world wide web. In fact, all of the ones I found in a brief search are using the same software as Wikipedia. Unfortunately, for the most part, they are not very well developed, and in at least one case seems to be fairly well abandoned.
Brewerpedia
This was only launched recently, and it shows. They appear to be looking to cover beer, wine, mead, spirits, and soda. Only there are only a handful of pages, and none of them very well developed. Only five registered developers. Unless they start adding content there’s nothing worthwhile.
Beer Wiki at Wikia
Wikia is a commercial concern from Jimbo Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. The idea is that they offer the Wikipedia software and hosting, limit repeat topics, and make money with ad revenue. Its relationship to Wikimedia should give it a leg up, but it really doesn’t and it shows. The focus is purely beer, but there still aren’t that many pages, but what is a little more developed. There is still less than a dozen registered users.
Beeropedia
Now this is more like it. Lots of articles are still “stubs”, but there are many that are fairly well fleshed out. Some of the information offered for individual beers includes alcohol content, containers, and links to commercials. Still, there’s still not as much information as can be found at Wikipedia. And, again, fewer than a dozen registered users. (Not that this is a real measure of its quality, but a site like this needs to be popular in order to get people to add content, and a popular site should have a lot of registered users.)
Beeripedia - The Beer Wiki
Like Wikia, this resource is ad supported, although apparently not a pet project of a multi-millionaire. More pages are available, although many are still just “stubs”. There are over a hundred registered users, however. Judging by the logs, it is also the most active of all of these. If I were to sign on to help out at any of these, this would be the one.
Still, none of these can match the amount of pure beer information available at Wikipedia. There are certainly a few reasons for this: Wikipedia has been around for several years and has thousands of editors. The style guidelines are well-established, and prolific editors contribute across multiple topics. And, of course, there some very large non-wiki beer community sites with a wealth of information, such as BeerAdvocate.
What’s your favorite beer-focused community site/wiki?
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If you pay any attention at all to technology news, one of the big buzzwords right now is Web 2.0. For the uninitiated, Web 2.0 refers to the “next generation” of web services, where content is mostly created by individuals or collaboratively (rather than being created by big companies) and the web experience is more like desktop applications, utilizing technologies like web services, AJAX, and RSS. Blogs and wikis are generally considered to be part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. (For a more detailed description of Web 2.0, see Wikipedia.)
You’re thinking: What does this have to do with me and the pursuit of good beer? I’m glad you asked!
Two interesting sites came to my attention recently. Both would be considered Web 2.0 applications and can help you and I and other thirsty beer seekers out there find good beer.
The Beer Mapping Project at beermapping.com is a project to help people find good beer using the Google Maps API. While it is U.S. only at the present time, it offers two types of maps: Regional Brewery maps and City maps. The Regional Brewery maps use icons to indicate the locations of breweries and brewpubs in six regions of the country. Everything from each of Anheuser-Busch’s locations down to little brewpubs way out in the hinterlands is listed here. Since it’s Google maps, you can drag the map around, zoom in and out, and get directions.
The other maps are City beer maps, and these are even more ambitious. For a given metropolitan area (and in some cases a State), icons are displayed for breweries, brewpubs, beer bars, and beer stores. I checked out Washington, DC and was shocked to discover how many good beer locations I didn’t know about.
At the time of this writing, Cities currently mapped include:
- Austin
- Baltimore
- Boston
- Boulder
- Chicago
- Cleveland
- Denver
- Detroit
- Los Angeles
- Madison
- Milwaukee
- Minneapolis
- North Carolina
- New York City
- Philadelphia
- Pittsburgh
- Portland
- San Antonio
- San Diego
- San Francisco
- Seattle
- St. Paul
- Washington DC
More cities are planned, but geocoding each address takes time. There are also forms to submit a missing location and to correct errors.
Coastr.com - the social guide to beer
Coastr.com is a social networking site centered around beer. Registered users can add beers that they enjoy and write reviews for them and, of course, find other people who like the same beers. Each user gets a rating, which is calculated on how many beers have been reviewed and how many people found the review helpful. Beers can be browsed by style, brewer, tags, and origin. If you really like a particular style or beers from New Jersey, this is helpful.
Additionally, registered users can add “places”. This is a little nebulous, but is supposed to be “establishments where you enjoy your favorite beers, as well as stores where you can purchase those great, hard-to-find brews.” I’d like to be able to categorize places like brewpubs out from other types of locations—I’d drive significantly further for a brewpub than for just a bar or beer store—but no such option exists. I give them credit for keeping things as simple as possible.
There includes a blog with the goings-on of the site, as well as a Wordpress widget (which you may very well see here on Hop Talk in the near future). They’re really embracing Web 2.0 and, in fact, received an honorable mention in the social tagging category in the SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards.
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