Wijfzonderlijf.be and CroQaudile.com

Yesterday I sent out some e-mails to my friends and I hope my collegues did the same or will do the same this week. I will check the statistics at the end of the week and I'll put them online.

But yesterday evening I had a brilliant idea! I created an account at this very popular Belgian blog Wijfzonderlijf.be: a blog where everybody can add its own video, picture, ... Different from the other sites I created a profile in my personal name so I did not use the Tagora.
I did the same for another famous and popular blog CroQaudile.com: here they immediately edited my subject line into: High speed train and deleted the word TGV out of the content.

The number of views on these 2 pages were great and on both sites I got a reaction.

How great were those views on these 2 pages you wonder?
Well I just checked the Dutch TGV movie at YouTube and in 1 day I managed to generate more than 530 views (yes in 1 day) So this plan worked!

Briefing internal email

I just got briefed on how to boost this campaign. So they want me to go and have a chat with my collegues and write them an e-mail. So this is what I can up with:

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>> Dutch version:
Subject: TGV wil in alles de snelste zijn. Of toch in bijna alles …

Hallo

TGV heeft enkele verleidelijke promoties online staan. Om de website extra kleur te geven, bedacht Tagora een originele reclamespot die je zeker eens moet gaan bekijken via onderstaande link:

http://www.tgv.com/be/nl/annexe/video/video.html?from=mail

Stuur deze e-mail door naar alle vrienden in je adresboek zodat ook zij kunnen genieten van deze promoties en de leuke online reclamespot.

Groetjes
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>> French version:
Sujet: TGV veut être le plus rapide en tout. Enfin, presque en tout…

TGV a mis online quelques promotions qui sortent des sentiers battus. Pour donner au site de nouvelles couleurs, Tagora a mis au point un spot publicitaire original que vous devez absolument aller voir via le lien ci-dessous:

http://www.tgv.com/be/fr/annexe/video/video.html?from=mail

Envoyez cet e-mail à tous vos contacts pour qu’ils puissent également profiter de ces promotions et de cet étonnant spot publicitaire en ligne.

Salutations
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I hope this will have some effect. I have also send some e-mails out to a couple of friends with the message to go and have a look at the funny videoclip and the promotions on the TGV site. I hope this will create a first viral wave.

Viral starts inside?

The views are still very poor and the brainstorm session gave no real solution.

So I got the message from my 2 COO's to start this viral campaign within our firm. They suggested to write an e-mail to our floor (the floor to their friends, their friends to ...) and ask them to go and have a look at this funny videoclip and the promotions on the TGV website. I will be briefed after the weekend. I'll keep you updated on this matter.

Copyright and other troubles

For the last week I tried to post the TGV videoclip on as much video sharing websites as possible. I will put the list with all the links here asap (to be continued)

After the upload on these sites I got some comments from administrators: problems with copyrights, no commercials allowed, ...

But the worst part is that we don't have a lot of views on those video sharing sites but neither on the TGV website. So I sat down with the Interactive departement for a little brainstorm session and they only think we can generate some traffic to the site with an extra bannering campaign. They don't think a little contest will help because it will be on the site itself without any exterior bannering campaign.

My first blog post ever ...

Ok I know: it's really a shame that a webmaster doesn't have his own blog. But hey, I didn't have the time to create one. Till now.

This is how it all started ...
A few weeks ago my collegue Geert Desager, Business Development Manager & Strategic Consultant at Tagora asked me to help with a new project for TGV. TGV had a small budget and they wanted to do a classic banner campaign since their objective was to create brand awareness for their site. Instead of the classic campaign we shot this funny/sexy video, created the html pages on TGV.com and ...

... My task: try do give this whole campaign a viral character:
- by posting this "TGV - In bed" video on all possible video sharing websites such as Youtube
- by getting in contact with influential bloggers in the different target countries to have a look at the video and if they like it to blog about it.