How to Launch: Social Techniques for Building a Successful Launch

Do you want to launch a product or service to your existing audience?

Are you wondering how to get people involved and excited?

To discover how to create a successful launch, this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast goes deep on the subject.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode the tables are turned. Cliff Ravenscraft, popular podcast producer and host of Podcast Answer Man, interviews me!

You'll learn the different ways you can get people involved in a successful launch and how to create a buzz around a new product or service.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
How to Build a Successful Launch
I reveal how I launched a brand-new online magazine.

An introduction to My Kids' Adventures

I knew as a busy, working entrepreneur, marketer and parent that my kids were growing up way too quickly. So I decided to go ahead and create My Kids' Adventures.

It's an online magazine for parents who want to have adventures with their kids anywhere, either in their home, neighborhood or the great outdoors. It will launch very soon and it has tons of great content from creative people.

Listen to the show to hear what made me go ahead with the idea for My Kids' Adventures.

How to first tease this new idea to your audience

One of the biggest challenges you face when you want to launch something new is the possibility that not all of your audience is interested in your idea. You should always have a strategy and more importantly, start early.

The first thing I did with My Kids' Adventures was to come up with a cool code name, which was Project Torch. Once this was decided, I started to tease my Facebook personal profile friends.

As soon as Project Torch was announced on Facebook, everybody wanted to know what it was about. I was teasing a sub-community of my larger community.

You'll hear how it not only caused underground buzz with my employees at Social Media Examiner, but high-profile friends too. In marketing terminology, you'd call it the teaser phase.

Whenever I start something new, I always go to the same place to do the initial planning. Here I made a short video of me saying that I was working on something new and very exciting. Implying I was in the same place I was when I started planning Social Media Examiner made people believe that it must be something big.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAnvWdojGXk

Once I had written my notes on the new project, I took a photo with my iPhone and uploaded it to Photoshop to blur out the answers to my questions. This image was then put on my personal Facebook Page to tease my audience.

I did the same thing with the Vision Statement. I blurred out about 70% of the words, leaving enough for people to try to figure it out. You'll also discover the other teasers I used on Facebook over the next few months.

This got people interested and they wanted me to share with them what Project Torch was about. Everyone loves a mystery. The response I received was the motivation to keep going.

Listen to the show to hear how the idea came about when I went to Disneyland last year.

How to release more details

Following the teaser stage, I moved on to what I call a super-soft release. Although I wasn't totally ready, I decided to make an announcement during my keynote at Social Media Marketing World in April this year. You'll discover why it was the ideal time to do this and why I chose to do it with video.

The video was shot two weeks prior to the conference,