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MarketingSherpa Summary:
Brilliant! This viral campaign should inspire every marketer targeting huge organizations such as the Fortune 1000 and Global 1000. When your business prospect has tens of thousands of employees around the world, how can you get them all talking about how wonderful you are? How do you turn a handful of internal evangelists into thousands praising your name? Turns out rap music has all the answers…
Agency: in-house
Client/company: Morsekode
Brand campaign was conducted for: Morsekode
Launch date of campaign: May 6, 2005
Target audience/demographic: SAP Employees (especially in marketing)
Campaign Goal:
Increase exposure of our small marketing agency within one of the largest software companies in the world - SAP. We had done some work and wanted to capture their attention to make additional projects more plausible. To make ourselves stand out to SAP.
Creative:
We have excellent expertise in technology, we wanted to show that through the lyrics of a song, "The ERP of This Century." We also wanted to show our understanding of SAP. The song focuses on SAP throughout, but ends with a verse about Morsekode. Before the listener knows it, they are singing the URL to our website. Having musicians on staff and in house studio capabilities, writing and recording the song was no problem and was little expense to us (other than time). By placing the song on our site, and passing the URL, we could track plays via our Web stats. We didn't make it terribly easy to download, so most people who hear the song are being counted on our site.
Seed Strategy:
We sent approximately 20 emails to our various contacts within SAP. We didn't explicitly ask them to pass it on (although we gave permission to do so if they asked us). We didn't want to be likened to "pass this on or terrible things will happen to you" emails. Our low key approach actually worked.
Buzz Generated:
In the first month, the song was played over 14,000 times and rose well over 20,000 shortly thereafter. (NOTE: SAP has 35,000 employees.) It has been posted on blogs like this:
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"Unbelievable!
Just discovered via Technorati an The ERP of this Century (MP3 & lyrics) by Morsekode.
It cracked me up! These guys really know their business!!!
"CRM, PLM, SCM, and SRM' heck you got more M's than Eminem"... :)
The passage to Oracle (including text in German) is just splendid. I roll on floor laughing out!
Highly recommended ;)
at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/2289
and at others all over the world (you can search "ERP of This Century" blog and get a list) as well as on internal SAP discussion boards. It's been used for internal meetings at SAP and an SAP Big Band in the Netherlands is planning to perform it next month (they requested sheet music!). Furthermore, SAP Japan recently requested a Karaoke version.
The Wall Street Journal called to do a story, but they weren't impressed enough by the business generated (we've since done 4 projects with SAP, one of them another song), so they didn't run the story. For us, the attention gained within SAP was more valuable (although who wouldn't like a story in the WSJ?!)
Specific (Goal-Related) Campaign Results:
It took only days to see results on our Web site. SAP Solution Marketing Managers called us, internal publications from SAP called us, employees told stories of having the song sent to them 10x a day for weeks. Even today, the song gets a couple hundred hits per month, sometimes rising into the thousands. When we call now, everybody has heard of us and our calls our returned. We estimate that 85% of the company is well aware of us as well as a ton of SAP consultants working at non-SAP companies. As it's a b2b case, the numbers aren't crazy like consumer virals, but Morsekode is now famous at SAP and that makes the next project a lot easier for us to sell.
Biggest Learning:
My entire team was surprised that a rap song about software could gain such attention. We weren't really expecting that kind of success, so our follow up plan was not exactly in place nor did we have a proper strategy to continue the momentum. (We are usually too busy doing "real" client work!)
We weren't ready for the inquiries, nor were we ready to present ourselves properly when the "big guys" were ready to review us. Next time we'll have our ducks in a row beforehand.
Also, a few prospects at SAP didn't initially take us seriously because of the light hearted approach. That's been fairly easy to overcome, however, through our other case studies. Now it's up to our work (and future virals) to continue to prove our strategic value. It was a great experience and we learned a lot through it. And, like I said, we've continued to see work from SAP. So, all in all, we're pretty happy.
I regularly get emails asking "When's the next song?" And, it may not be too far away.
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