Don McMurtry

From Web Science 2009 class

Bio

Don McMurtry was educated at Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ontario and has a Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. While at Rensselaer in the mid-1980s, he worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the chemistry department developing database applications. Don's sales and marketing career included eight years as Vice President of Sales at Research In Motion from where he retired in 2006. Don lives in Waterloo, Ontario where he remembers the glory years of the RPI hockey team winning most games and the NCAA championship in 1985.

Questions for Don

• Group1
  • Obviously internet ads have had great success, however no one I've spoken to has ever clicked on one save a few sporadic occasions. In your experience, is this the case with most internet users or are there some people out there who love clicking on ads all day long?
  • When attempting to promote a something via a social networking site where your first order reach may contain everything from close friends to people you don't know at all, what are the advantages and disadvantages of direct, personalized recommendations versus a generic mass marketing campaign?
  • What do you think is revealed about humanity by the viral nature of morally reprehensible media? Some notable examples include beheading videos put out by the Taliban, and a slew of sexually explicit videos which spawned viral "reaction videos" of their own.

• Group 2
  • Getting people to initially view something and pass it along via word of mouth or a forward or a link is difficult, even when the content seems to be something worth sharing. What methods do you recommend for getting a large number of people to initially view something on the web? Furthermore, have you ever used services like Google Adwords/Adsense for achieving views for a product? Do you recommend it? Or in general, do you recommend paying for promotion on the web?
  • Lately, I've noticed an advertising trend with viral campaigns, by means of a cryptic, almost puzzle, type website that intrigues viewers to figure out a series of clues or spot similar images scattered around the internet to figure out some big announcement. Do you have any experience with such campaigns, or know how much of a risk it is to attempt?

• Group 3
  • The project we're working on in this class requires that we have as many Twitter followers as possible at the end of the designated time-frame. What do you think the most important factor will be in achieving this?
  • The term "viral marketing" implies distributing marketing like a disease propagating through a population. What sort of "infection rate" is common in viral marketing campaigns? How do you maximize the virulence of the information you want to pass through the population? Is it more important to target groups that have large social interactions than to worry about the virulence of the information?

• Group 4
  • The increasing speed of communication seems to be enabling ideas to go viral and explode in popularity in a matter of days, and die out equally as fast. Will communications technology enable these ideas to essentially never die out? Is there an upper bound on how quickly this cycle can occur?
  • How do the social networks connect with each other? How does popularity on one network translate to popularity on another network?
  • What is the worst viral marketing idea that you have seen?
  • Since the spread of viral marketing seems to be rather uncontrollable, is there any concern that some of these campaigns may shift into the wrong direction and actually become damaging? How could this be prevented?

• Group 6
  • Social networks weren't invented by the Internet. How do you think the immediacy and pervasive nature of communication over the Internet and mobile devices has impacted the way we network?
  • Some ideas go viral even though they are not intrinsically valuable or even particularly entertaining. Do you have an explanation for this?
  • Do you think the success of viral campaign is more so a function of the quality of the object going viral or the method by which it iterates the network it becomes viral on?

• Group 5
  • There are a lot of emotions that you can play on in order to garner attention from an audience. These can be achieved through humour, mystery/intrigue, racy material, shock-value, and so on. From your experience which do you feel yields the best results and which yields the least?
  • Does a successful viral campaign have a greater impact on the sales of a product in comparison to a more traditional marketing campaign?
  • How can you differentiate between different social networks when marketing your products/services? In other words, how does a Facebook app compare to a viral video on Youtube depending on the product or service?

• Group 8
  • What percentage of blackberries are part of enterprise systems, where companies issue the devices to their employees and the IT department manages the devices, and do you consider blackberries in this environment more valuable than a blackberry for personal use?
  • Who do you believe will reach the promised land of online brand advertising first, Facebook or Google?
  • How do you think the open application development system of Google's Android operating system will affect the market shares of iPhone and Blackberry, which both have significantly more closed application development systems, iPhone being very closed and Blackberry being a fair bit more open?
  • Metcalfe's Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the nodes, Google seems to be exploiting this as much as possible by offering traditionally paid services for free, most recently GPS Navigation. With the strength of Google's combined networks they can enter any market at will, what effect does this have on the services industry?

• Group 9
  • Viral marketing is known in the industry as a Guerrilla marketing tactic because of the unconventional means of getting the message out. However in the business, guerrilla marketing campaigns are considered very risky methods of communication because they can backfire. Does this carry over to viral marketing and how can a company prepare for any negative impacts?
  • A lot of people tie viral campaigns to specific components of the internet like youtube, twitter, facebook, a blog, etc. Did the wide-spread adoption of the internet spawn the viral marketing-space, or just enable a faster spread?
  • Passing a message through a large number of people usually distorts the message. How can a viral marketing campaign avoid this deterioration of the message through a large number of people?

• Group 7
  • When trying to make something viral, is it best to post the same or similar content on multiple social networks (Facebook, Youtube, Squidoo) and websites, or is it better to put the content in one place and use other networks to talk about/discuss the content and link to the original source?
  • Many big corporations have tried to launch viral marketing campaigns, and many appear to have been successful. How is 'success' defined with this medium? Is there any set threshold? In other words, how does a company know if they have a successful viral marketing campaign?
  • As students inexperienced in marketing we only observe the successful attempts at viral marketing. How often do attempts at making something viral actually fail?