I have been watching these debates that have been happening in the US about gun control and one thing that I saw was that interview dome with Alex Jones on Piers Morgan. Was it just me or did it seem like one person simply tried to yell the loudest to get as much attention as possible? That was kind of interesting I thought as it is kind of the flip side on what people can do to generate controversy and attention as opposed to the other road of trying to be civilized, so to speak.

This reminds me of an incident I saw with a lady at a store who was trying to return a product on the basis that she simply didn’t like it. This was like a movie and so obviously the store couldn’t just take it back. Her solution to getting what she wanted was that she simply started to yell in-front of everyone saying how upset she was at the product and sure enough she eventually got what she wanted in terms of getting a refund.

I was just thinking from a marketing point of view that when it comes to certain things it’s kind of funny as you could spend the time to think of something brilliant and unique to get results or like that you can just tell the person to do something extremely brash. I suppose it would be a PR nightmare, but if you were just trying to get attention in general I guess it can come down to that philosophy that any publicity is good publicity.

I heard an interesting debate today where if you were running say a retail business and your goal was to try and attract a lot of shoppers would you do this by spending it on advertisement or making a product so ridiculously cheap where you are losing money that the hope is that sale will go viral? For example, if you had a marketing budget of $10,000 would you use it to develop like a video ad or would you simply price a lot of items at a loss? For example, a $500 laptop would be $99.

Interesting scenario I thought. I’m almost inclined to say nowadays maybe the at a loss routine may generate more buzz and attention since almost everyone is using some form of social media. As well, the post affect of it would probably be good too as a lot of people enjoy taking pictures to brag how cheap they go various items. Of course, this would probably only work best for a semi established company. It does make me wonder though why more businesses don’t use these kinds of strategies as sometimes even if there are only like three items that are available it is still good advertising.

I was showed a funny example today of how these two guys seemed to have something against another individual where as a result they insisted in continually talking bad about him and his business. The irony was they were trying to speak negative about him to people who didn’t even know who he was to begin with. Therefore, instead this acted like a marketing tool for him to get more exposure from people who wouldn’t have known his business otherwise.

He handled it pretty well too as all he did for the most part was ignore them and continued to put out work for people too see. As expected, he generated new business and interest that way. That is a better way to do it I say as usually people would be so caught up in trying to attack the people who are bad mouthing them. It is very hard in the beginning to simply ignore people like that though. I think eventually you just learn that it is more productive and to dedicate your energy and effort in creating great things as oppose to trying to change others who are set on a certain view.

Today I got kind of a surprise as for a particular project it apparently got a lot of attention due to a certain topic becoming more popular all of sudden. This resulted in a massive amount of people researching for different information sources in the category to try and find alternative information. It’s interesting in these situations as there are so any different things you can focus on that will help you in the long run.

For myself I was more interested in the type of engagement people conducted at the page and what that ultimately did in terms of generating a social buzz of sort. It’s actually funny in some ways as in the original source that generated this publicity people were viewing it in a negative way where they believe the author was wrong and as a result people were looking for another source to in a sense try and prove to themselves even more that the person is dead wrong. The amount of energy it appeared that people put into this made it almost as if people started to turn into promoters.

Generally speaking I know that people are generally apprehensive about doing things where they feel that others have something to gain out of it. However, the mentality here sadly enough seemed like people were willing to do what it took to help/promote others in an effort to harm the other person. It makes you wonder in many ways why the majority can’t simply support something because they say respect/appreciate it.

I guess you have to be delicate in how you handle that crowd of people too as you have to find a balance between using it as an opportunity learn about what they felt they weren’t getting to be looking elsewhere and at the same time not simply going on a crusade against the original outlet, so to speak, as you don’t want to prematurely burn bridges.