In recent years, the elusive search for online ‘Viral Marketing’ has become the Holy Grail of marketeers everywhere. Seminars, presentations, conferences and e-books on the topic abound: some of them adding great value - those of the celebrated world wide ravist David Meerman Scott’s come to mind – while others manifestly below par.

With this state of afairs, it is refreshing to come across examples of ‘genuine’ social media viral marketing that epitomize the best Web 2.0 practices, philosophies and attitudes. If as Anthony Robbins is fond of saying ‘success leaves clues’, we have much to learn from the case of Spanish (don’t be fooled by his English-sounding name) up-and-coming pop-star Graham Newey. Graham’s results are so remarkable that he may be rightfully regarded as a textbook case of how to go viral with a very limited budget but tons of creativity and a passion for what you do.

In a recent interview published in Spanish in my Tweetblog, Graham told me how he went from absolute scratch to becoming a budding pop-star in less than two years by creating quality home-made multimedia content with virtually no sponsoring and subsequently uploading it in three key high visibility social web sites: Myspace, Facebook and YouTube.

There is no question about Graham’s talent, a talent that underlies all of his artistic endeavours. If this twenty-something Barcelona-based composer, arranger and live performer has become a sensation is due in great part to his catchy electro-pop lyrics and the stylized ‘camp’ aesthetics of all his multimedia creations.

The figures speak for themselves: hitherto there have been more than 17,000 downloads of his videos and 60,000 views of his home-made Myspace profile. As I mentioned earlier Graham is also very active on Facebook, where his fans exceed 1,100. Surprisingly Graham hasn’t got a webpage yet – one is in the works he tells us – and it is only recently that with a little prodding from me he signed up for Twitter and started what I hope will be a very promising Twitterland adventure. His online philosohy so far can be summed up as follows: quality content first and foremost, free distribution via selected social networks, not to worry about ROI or statistics and enjoy what he does with the support of his loyal followers - who through sheer word of mouth take care of promoting his quality content all over the social web.

Having performed a string of live gigs all over Spain and on the verge of recording his first album, Graham is ready to sign up a lucrative contract and become the greatest example of zero-budget viral marketing Spain has yet to witness.

© Oscar Del Santo for THE ONLINE STRATEGIST, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Graham Newey, Viral Marketing