How about $55,492? Last month, an Ohio guy by the name of Zack Brown posted a “Kickstarter” campaign. If you’ve not heard about Kickstarter, it’s a kind of on-line crowd-funding platform that works mostly through social media.
Someone, like Zack, puts up a Kickstarter campaign. Then, people make pledges to get the campaign funded. If the goal of the project is reached, the pledges are collected, funding the campaign. Most often, a Kickstarter project is put out there by an artist or writer or small businessperson – anyone trying to raise money for the arts, a cause, or their business venture.
Not Zack. Zack posted a campaign titled “Potato Salad,” commented simply “I’m making a potato salad” and even admitting “I haven’t decided what kind yet”. I’m not kidding, you can see the campaign here.
You can also see that Zack initially was trying to raise just $10, and that his potato salad really did get funded in the amount of $55,492!
Is there a technology lesson here? Of course. Social media and the Internet can still take a crazy, or not so crazy, idea and make it “viral,” often for free, in ways no one could ever achieve just a few years ago, at any price. Zack’s potato salad went viral.
And the marketing lesson here is to use that technology and… don’t be afraid to try something new and different to get your audience’s attention. Starting a crowd-funding project for potato salad probably isn’t a great business model for you. But take that creativity and consider what you can do that’s different from your competition… to share your message in a different way, to a different audience, maybe with a different “feel,” like the quirky, friendly vibe Zack used.
Not many of us are going to go viral like Zack, but with the right message, knowledge and help, there’s no reason you can’t have extraordinary results just by doing things a little “out of the box”.
