Seth Godin, marketing coach for millions, has posted a primer on what makes “viral marketing” on his blog today. In it, he observed:

Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.

Marketers are obsessed with free media, and, as is often the case, we blow it in our rush to get our share. We create content that is hampered or selfish or boring. Or we create something completely viral that doesn’t do any marketing at all.

As the work of getting your brand (whether personal or business) in front of people becomes more important, we believe that branding every link you ever send can be a great way to enhance your marketing efforts.

Most people copy and paste to retweet, or simply forward emails they think interesting, engaging or funny. Your Smubbed links are highly likely to be forwarded or retweeted right along their way. In one simple step, you’re creating the opportunity to extend and market your brand by simply Smubbing web content of interest to you.

In my outreach so far to bloggers about Smub, I’ve found the most immediate “aha!” moments come from PR professionals. It seems that those who use the power of words to make their living have no problem grasping the beauty of letting memorable (or branded) words shortcut your path to any URL…

Michael O’Connor-Clarke, VP of Social Media at Thornley Fallis, an eloquent, yet succinct guy, said this:

MOCC Loves Smub

Abbie Kendall, Technology PR Maven, said most agencies transform press releases into a PDF and send to editors: “Much better to send editors a nice little Smub link containing a standard or social media release … oh yeah, I like that.”

I like it, too, Abbie.

Smub Fabulously Branded URLs

You can effectively brand any URL online with Smub, and can share them incredibly easily. Imagine if Thornley Fallis was able to send out interesting articles to their clients - which they probably do…

“blah blah brilliant blah, here’s an interesting article in the NY Times about the polar ice caps for your review: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/science/02obice.html?_r=1&ref=science”

When now, they’d get even more credit if they’d send a Smub like this: (which isn’t real, because I don’t want to poach their Smub user name)

“blah blah brilliant blah, here’s an interesting article in the NY Times about polar ice caps for your review: http://smub.it/thornley/nytpolar”

Hey Michael, don’t you want to go register that Smub user name for the business?

Meanwhile, if you want to read about the polar ice caps, check out http://smub.it/janet/nytpolar

Thanks for the feedback. Please keep it coming at me, via Twitter, or comment here. We’re listening.

Next up: Smubs for marketers… plenty of value there.