• Create a MySpace profile
• Enlist the Black Eyed Peas (they were especially hot at that time)
• Put some videos on YouTube

Then… POOF! it spreads like wildfire.

Now, reading the pitches from the current lot of would-be gurus, it seems things haven’t changed very much.

The basic pieces of a social marketing campaign today seem to be…

• Create a profile/group on MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/Jaiku
• Launch a blog advertising campaign
• Create a contest that has some viral hooks

This formula is attractive because none of these things necessarily requires much effort on the part of the company. It might get kudos from the Madison Avenue crowd and a few marketing pundits, impressed by your “revolutionary” foray into the frightening universe of social media, but the long term rewards from real people will be thin and fleeting unless you do a little more.

Give something good away.

I’m personally tired of the whole contest thing. Too many big companies think it’s good idea to create some kind of cheesy campaign where, for example, they entice people to make their own commercials for you or slog through a ridiculous scavenger hunt for the chance at a big prize. This doesn’t count as a giveaway because contests like this demand payment (manual labor and/or creativity) in exchange for nothing but a chance at a reward.

Instead, what I’m talking about is not all that different from the old concept of a loss-leader. You take a loss on something that will attract people to you, and then you try to deepen the relationship with those people and persuade them to (or simply hope they will) buy more stuff. What if Microsoft simply gave away the Xbox for free, knowing that such a move would push their console market share way past the PlayStation? Could the resulting increase in game sales make up for the cost of such a move?

I’m sure Microsoft has already run the numbers on this, so I won’t fantasize about getting a free Xbox, but there are plenty of giveaway ideas that cost almost nothing.

A lot of companies have quite a bit of capital in the form of information. Become the expert. Make your company’s blog the go-to source. Tell secrets. Teach people something cool or valuable. Enable. Entertain.

Blog Maverick – The usually long-winded, sometimes incoherent, but always colorful musings and rants of Mark Cuban. Not strictly a marketing blog, as the champion of HD TV and owner of the Dallas Mavericks covers everything from politics to sports to big business.

Buzz Machine – Also not strictly a marketing blog. Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York, espouses on the nature of media and communications in general, of which marketing is a subset.

doshdosh – A recent discovery. The author of this blog is apparently a political science and philosophy student in Toronto, but he’s amazingly prolific and super sharp when it comes to discussing the business of doing business online.

Future Now’s GrokDotCom – Surprisingly bad name for a blog, considering it belongs to the Eisenberg Brothers, gurus of online marketing and authors of Waiting for your Cat to Bark.

Logic + Emotion – There aren’t a lot of new ideas here, but David Armano, VP of Experience at Critical Mass has a gift for articulating in pictures the ways people experience the web.

Made to Stick – The blog companion to the bestselling book on how to communicate ideas so that they stick and spread. They boil it down to a formula that I find myself referring to again and again.

Micro Persuasion – Steve Rubel, Senior VP at Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm is known for his bold pronouncements and sharp insights.

Seth’s Blog – Well-known pundit Seth Godin is a thought leader and guru when it comes to the challenges of marketing in the connected digital age.

Of course, whenever you buy anything from Amazon, they generously suggest other books you might be interested in…

Amazon seems to recognize that guys who habitually purchase books on information design and software engineering need all the help we can get.

It’s nice to know they have my back.