Business Website Advice

December 2007 Sticky Websites A+ Web Page of the Month Award goes to the site that could make even scrooge smile and begs to be forwarded to mates with a Subject Line, ‘You gotta see this.’ True stickiness at work.  View it, enjoy it, then we’ll discuss the business strategies it achieves.

What is this site you ask?  Open it, then click the centre arrow.

VB Symphony is a Winner

For those of you on dial up and reluctant to watch this short video this is what you’re missing. VB (as in Australian beer company) created an ad campaign using 95 musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and filled to various levels of beer) and 6 timpani drums. Trust me. It’s far better to watch and listen than to read about.

Here’s how they Get ‘em There and Keep ‘em There, my slogan for being a true Sticky Website.

• delights by doing the unexpected. Any comic will tell you it always get a laugh.  An audience loves to be surprised, loves to be shown what it didn’t expect. We see black-tie, and we laugh when we see beer not champagne and a symphony not a jug band.

• positive brand association. Tasteful coupling with the highbrow. We see black tie, not board shorts.
• visually easy to grasp.  Video rather than text.
• easy to forward to mates.  We’re given two, not just one, big-button-prompts to Send to a Mate.  Note website owners: this is viral marketing at its best. Get your message passed on to an ever expanding audience achieving the long-reach of the internet. 

• encourages people to stay on the site longer.  ‘Behind the Scenes’ video shows how the video was made. Equally if not more interesting to many. All the while seeing the logo and subliminally smiling at all things associated with VB.

Read about the creative team on a blog that boasts over 1.2 million viewers during the past year. Ahhhh, stuff Sticky Websites are made of.

My humble thanks go Michelle Webb, owner of Gifts on Rathbone, who passed the site on to me to give me a laugh. Friends do that.  Little did she know I’d make it my site of the month.

Once I saw the video I knew it was a two time winner for me:

1. exemplifies the essence of a sticky website,
2. gives my readers a laugh during this busy time of year. 

To the creative genius of writer Jim Ingram and art director Ben Couzens I say, ‘Good on ya mate. Do it some more’. This is the good stuff I want passed to me.

To my readers I wish you the experience conveyed by conductor Cezary Skubiszewski in Behind the Scenes. He said he hopes for at least one laugh in each project he takes on, but in this one, he laughed every 5 minutes.  Here’s to laughing a lot in 2008.

To VB my applause.  Readers, notice the Competitions button that encourages yet more musical variations of their very popular theme.  And it keeps on getting stickier.

So what can we learn from this awesomely sticky site?

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