John Raymond

I’m writing this post because I’m seeing a lot of people have tweeted lately about this new interactive campaign by Chipotle – http://www.mychipotle.com. The purpose of the post is to stimulate some good conversation from both the consumer and marketer perspective. So by all means please comment.

Being an internet marketer, I highly enjoy a good viral video campaign or contest (did my first in 2006). Viral Video contests have been done quite a bit in the last few years. In order to get the greatest potential response and reaction from visitors, you have to go the extra mile. So when I see these types of campaigns I try to break it down and analyze the structure of it and see if it will work.

I looked over the site and found plenty of room for improvement with this contest. Here are a few observations from dissecting the contest site and strategy:

1. Search Engines Still Count - With a viral campaign, the goal is to get someone forwarding it onto a friend. However, you still need to consider search engines when building the site. When you click on a video right now it pops up movie player. Why not structure the site to where you add a new page every time someone submits a video? If you add a new page to the site with a unique page title, google will see that you are adding content and reward you for that. So as it stands right now, google sees one page with 50 videos on it. If you follow the “Sammon Method” (humor me), google will index 50 unique pages. Which will give people more opportunities to find your web site.

2. Visitor Interaction- Web sites are no longer a one way communication stream. You want to engage and allow your users to interact with your site. Why not give people the ability to comment on each individual video? Half the time the best part about youtube videos are the comments made for the videos. This is also a reason for the visitor to come back to the site.

3. Incentives – Why should I make a commercial for you if you aren’t giving me anything. There are a million online contests a year and people want incentives. As easy as making a short video is these days, people won’t participate unless you give them a reason to.

4. Voting – They should implement some kind of voting incentive on the site for visitors and for contestants. It could be something like the video that gets the most votes will win Chipotle for a year. Something like that. But you also have to give voter incentive too (it’s also a good opportunity to ask they for their email address). There’s nothing like a overall leaderboard to get one hungry contestant to email every person they’ve ever met to vote for them so they can be at the top of the leaderboard. It’s amazing how people get into these contests.

5. Embrace Social Media -The very basic goal is to have someone forward the site or the video to a friend. That functionality is not included here. What would be even better is if you hired a programmer guru to wire up your web-site to interact with facebook/twitter. So that when someone could post notice that they were in the contest to their facebook wall or twitter page. The number one referrer to the Cambria Suites Polaris contest, a viral contest for a hotel chain in Columbus, was facebook.

I don’t mean to roast the campaign because they may plan to add more features as time goes on. As with future posts, i’m trying to stimulate conversation among the community of online marketers. What are you thoughts?