The Media Power

Approximately a month ago I went to a website called http://www.oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/ which is run by a Canadian, named Kyle MacDonald. He practically traded a small paper clip for a house. Of course it did not happen in one trade. In the website you could see how he started his journey with the paper clip and 14 trades later he managed to obtain the house. What impress me the most is he did it only within a year. WHAT A STORY!!!

He also admitted that he did not spend a cent of his money to advertise his intention. He started the trade from the craiglist website in the barter section. He basically started to tell the world about his intention from his blog. It was probably his unique story that attracted the media attention. Almost all the media from around the globe discussed about him in the middle of last year. In Australia, all the television station was talking about his incredible story. This media euphoria then further stimulates more attention from the society.

To fulfill my curiosity I further browse the internet and accidentally hit a website that asks us to vote for the most popular internet celebrity http://www.webjunk.tv/gis/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme. Of course these people are actually famous in the global internet community. They managed to obtain the attention from the society through YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, etc. Some of them even managed to obtained 1.7 million hits within 3 weeks. This is amazing. And hell yeah!!! This is the power of the media.

Intentionally or not I have to salute them from the marketing point of view. They have managed to utilise the power of public relation (PR) as one of the marketing aspects. In this modern society penetration through our target market could be done by different approaches. They have also fulfilled one of the basic human needs, curiosity. As human we always want to see, hear, and read something new in our daily routine. We are always curious about a lot of things. That is why we cannot be separated from the news, TV, and of course internet.

Do you have another experience or story in regards to this phenomenon? Please share. Probably you could be one of the internet celebrities =)

David Herlambang
MarketingFirst