Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I caught up with Phil Arturi for a discussion on how the social transformation has changed his life, or not.  A soft spoken, calm mannered guy, Phil has an obsession with results that has produced over $1 billion in value for clients including companies like KPMG, Accenture, MasterCard,Pitney Bowes, and Mercer.  If you’ve been following my writing, you’ll understand when I say he is a“thinker” sales archetype.   Today, as president of White Hawk Sales Partnershe serves the sales outsourcing needs of B2B companies.

• What does Social Selling mean to you?

Social selling embraces the fact that prospects are better informed and control the buying process.  They research and validate their buying options through multiple social channels. This well informed buyer is demanding relevance from sales people, expecting them to know about them, their companies, and their needs. The best inside sales professionals will leverage the multitude of social channels to actively listen, engage, and understand their prospects’ buying environment and opinions. A proactive inside sales outreach integrated with social media listening produces the best opportunity to engage with relevance – and a high quality pipeline.

• Is Social ringing the death bell for sales?

It all depends on which engagement model is best for a potential buyer. From a cost perspective, the model is straightforward; employ the lowest cost channel to reach the broadest audience. Use social and the web for broad ongoing engagement, and highest cost direct salespeople where the potential short term benefit is highest; a closed deal. However, it is important to understand how your prospects buy.  That determines which model, or weighting of channels, is most appropriate and at what time in the buy cycle.

That is why it is so important to take the time to really understand how your buyers buy and align your selling channels appropriately. Building a high quality pipeline requires you to clearly understand your buyers.  Where do they spend their time in the buy cycle; map your sales and marketing efforts to match where they are and what they’re looking for.  Do this effectively and you can optimize your sales and marketing resources while making sure that each stage of the buying process is being handled correctly.

• If that’s the case how has B2B sales changed?

“Sales” today means building long term engagement models. It used to be that Sales was defined by a set of short range activities that led to closing a deal.  Today “sales” means engaging in a broader, deeper and longer term relationship that engages a potential buyer every step of the way through their buying process.

B2B selling has become more targeted and focused. Making the relevant connection to a potential buyer at the right time has always been the greatest challenge in sales. Originally salespeople literally knocked on doors to find good prospects. Knocking on doors was replaced by direct mail, cold calls, and mass emails. Today, the Internet has created many more ways to determine where in the buying cycle a potential prospect is and what might be the most relevant outreach. Marketing automation platforms, social media listening tools, and lead scoring and ranking all provide more insight than ever into where prospects are in their “Buyers’ Journey” and how to interact with them with real relevancy.

• Are social technologies marginalizing sales?

Not at all – just the opposite. Social enables sales to get an even better sense of what’s really happening within their markets. Whenever Sales has more information and can use it to drive a smarter conversation, we can do a better job matching offerings to buyers who really care. If anything, social technologies create efficiencies in the selling process.

But let’s get real, social has made selling harder. The best salespeople know where to spend their time, where they can get the most leverage for their efforts. Getting more insight into buying behaviors via social media helps develop messages that resonate. The challenge, and what is harder, is making sure your time is spent focused on only those areas that can yield results. That requires more discipline. Getting caught up in turning over more stones in order to find a few opportunities is a surefire way to miss your numbers.

• How does outsourcing sales development fit into the Social model?

For many companies, the complexity of the sales engagement process deserves a dedicated company salesperson. However, for most B2B companies, inside sales for buyer targeting, engagement, and qualification is better handled by a professional outsourcer.  Why? Many companies don’t put their best, most seasoned people on inside sales.  Instead, they treat it as a proving ground for younger, less experienced hires.  In social business that introduces a significant level of risk because you’re trusting your ZMOT to someone without experience in developing continuity in conversation or buyer experience.  What better place to have a seasoned, professional than where the buyer will most likely first engage in a meaningful conversation?

That being said, outsourcing requires a partnership between the client and the outsourcer. This is not a ‘throw it over the wall’ relationship but one governed by mutual agreement on process, methodology, and execution so that everyone is bought in and works as a team. Regular touch points to review results, change-up the approach, and review the pipeline of opportunities is key. What sets the best outsourced sales firms apart from telemarketers and appointment setters is they recognize this and have experienced, articulate people building meaningful buyer relationships. Incorporating a well structured methodology and process to engage with the client’s direct sales counterparts to insure a seamless sales transition of opportunities and consistent buyer experience is the second key to success.  The best outsourcers align their fees with their client’s results to create the best selling environment where everyone wins.

• What advice do you have on how to drive growth?

Focus, focus, focus. This seems so elemental yet we see so many companies that don’t take the time to create an appropriate coverage model for the kinds of customers they want to win.  Start by understanding your target market’sBuyers’ Journey, align a sales model to match the Journey, continually look for patterns of success and failure, and then measure the results.

The reality is that in the transformation to becoming a social business, sales needs help.  Instead of carting everyone off to Las Vegas for the ritualistic Sales Kick Off and annual sales training that no one pays attention to, let’s spend that time teaching sales how decipher a prospect’s social body language, use social media to build a meaningful relationship with buyers, and have sales conversations that prospects actually look forward to.  Do that and sales will be reborn.

Christine Crandell

From all of us here at API.

Esther Howland, the woman who produced the first commercial American valentines in the 1840s, sold a then mind-boggling $5,000 in cards during her first year of business. The valentine industry in the United States has been booming ever since. Today, over 1 billion valentine cards are sent in this country each year -- second in number only to Christmas cards, according to the Greeting Card Association. (The happy day is also celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France and Australia.)

Around 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to cards, there are millions of boxes of chocolatesand bouquets of roses purchased (mostly by men) for the February 14 holiday.

When did the Valentine's Day frenzy begin? Scholars tell slightly different versions of the history of this popular holiday. In this article, we'll look at that history, with its Roman and Christian roots, as well as holiday traditions that have developed over the years. We'll also check out some old valentines and some new ones.

Origins of the Day of Love

The origins of Valentine's Day are shrouded in mystery. According to University of Notre Dame Professor Lawrence Cunningham, scholars have two main theories to explain how February 14 became synonymous with romance:

• Roman Feast of Lupercalia - This ancient pagan fertility celebration, which honored Juno, queen of the Roman gods and goddesses and goddess of women and marriage, was held on February 14, the day before the feast began. During festival time, women would write love letters, also known as billets, and leave them in a large urn. The men of Rome would then draw a note from the urn and ardently pursue the woman who wrote the message they had chosen. (Apparently, the custom of lottery drawings to select valentines continued into the 18th century, coming to an end when people decided they'd rather choose -- sight seen! -- their valentines.)
• The Birds and the Bees? - In the Middle Ages, people began to send love letters on Valentine's Day. Medieval Europeans believed that birds began to mate on February 14.

There's also some controversy regarding Saint Valentine, for whom the famous day is named. Archaeologists, who unearthed a Roman catacomb and an ancient church dedicated to St. Valentine, are not sure if there was one Valentine or more. Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred on February 14 -- at least two of those in Italy during the 3rd century. The most popular candidate for St. Valentine was a 3rd century Roman priestwho practiced Christianity and performed secret marriages against direct orders from Emperor Claudius II, who believed single soldiers were more likely to join his army. Legend has it that Valentine sent a friend (the jailer's daughter) a note signed "From Your Valentine" before he was executed on February 14 in 270 A.D. (That phrase is still used prominently on today's cards!)

Early Christians were happier with the idea of a holiday honoring the saint of romantic causes than with one recognizing a pagan festival. In 496 A.D., Pope Gelasius named February 14 in honor of St. Valentine as the patron saint of lovers. In 1969, Pope Paul VI dropped it from the calendar. However, the blend of Roman festival and Christian martyrdom had caught on, and Valentine's Day was here to stay.

The First Written Valentines

Verbal and singing valentines began to be replaced by written missives in Europe in the 15th century. The first written valentine is usually attributed to the imprisoned Charles, Duke of Orleans, in 1415. He reportedly passed the time by writing romantic verses for his wife. By the 16th century, written valentines were commonplace.

What were early valentines like?

Early valentines were made by hand, using colored paper, watercolors and colored inks. These valentine styles, some still made today, included:

• Pinprick valentines - Made by pricking tiny holes in paper with a pin to resemble the look of lace
• Cutout valentines- Lace-look cards made by folding paper several times and cutting out a lace design with small, sharp scissors
• Acrostic valentines - Verses in which the first letters in the lines spelled out the beloved's name
• Rebus valentines - Verses in which small pictures took the place of some of the words (for example, an eye instead of I)

Cards decorated with black and white pictures painted by factory workers began to be created in the early 1800s; by the end of the century, valentines were being made entirely by machine. Sociologists theorize that printed cards began to take the place of letters, particularly in Great Britain, because they were an easy way for people to express their feelings in a time when direct expression of emotions was not fashionable.

Manufactured cards notwithstanding, increasingly beautiful handmade Valentines were often small works of art, richly decorated with silk, satin or lace, flowers or feathers and even gold leaf. And many featuredCupid, the cherubic, be-winged son of Venus, and a natural Valentine's Day "mascot." (If you'd like to read more about Cupid, take a look at Holidays.net: Cupid.)

Some of the more unusual valentines were created by lonely sailors during the Victorian era -- they used seashells of various sizes to create hearts, flowers and other designs or to cover heart-shaped boxes.

Valentine Symbols

It's not difficult to figure out the connection between the heart and Valentine's Day. The heart, after all, was thought in ancient times to be the source of all emotions. It later came to be associated only with the emotion of love. (Today, we know that the heart is, basically, the pump that keeps blood flowing through our bodies.)

It's not clear when the valentine heart shape became the symbol for the heart. Some scholars speculate that the heart symbol as we use it to signify romance or love came from early attempts by people to draw an organ they'd never seen. Anyway, here are some of the other valentine symbols and their origins:

• Red roses were said to be the favorite flower of Venus, the Roman goddess of love. Also, red is a color that signifies strong feelings.
• Lace has long been used to make women's handkerchiefs. Hundreds of years ago, if a woman dropped her handkerchief, a man might pick it up for her. Sometimes, if she had her eye on the right man, a woman might intentionally drop her handkerchief to encourage him. So, people began to think of romance when they thought of lace.
• Love knots have series of winding and interlacing loops with no beginning and no end. A symbol of everlasting love, love knots were made from ribbon or drawn on paper.
• Lovebirds, colorful birds found in Africa, are so named because they sit closely together in pairs -- like sweethearts do. Doves are symbols of loyalty and love, because they mate for life and share the care of their babies.

How about the "X" sign representing a kiss? This tradition started with the Medieval practice of allowing those who could not write to sign documents with an "X". This was done before witnesses, and the signer placed a kiss upon the "X" to show sincerity. This is how the kiss came to be synonymous with the letter "X", and how the "X" came to be commonly used at the end of letters as kiss symbols. (Some believed "X" was chosen as a variation on the cross symbol, while others believe it might have been a pledge in the name of Christ, since the "X" -- or Chi symbol -- is the twenty-second letter of the Greek alphabet and has been used in church history to represent Christ.)

It became easier to mail valentines in the mid 1800s, when the modern postal service implemented the penny post. Until then, postage was so pricey that most cards were delivered by hand.

Esther Howland struck gold with the first commercial American valentines. Today, there are nearly 2,000 greeting card publishers in the United States.

Steve Jobs’s prominence in the collective imagination of what a truly innovative business leader should think, say, and do has only strengthened exponentially after his death. As it often happens in the case of similarly influential, seminal figures, the hard recollection of facts and of “what really happened” gets quickly out-shined by references to memorable, albeit often anecdotal, events in that person’s life. These are the stories that tend to be told again and again until they take on the aura of myths. We love myths, especially when they come with a hero.

Along these lines one could also argue that Jobs’s near-ubiquitous biography has been instrumental in this still ongoing “mythification” process: If you happen to work as a professional in the creative industry, countless conversations these days start with a client, a colleague, or even a friend quoting a passage from the book, and one can come to see this state of things either as a precious conversation starter or as an unavoidable reference to someone whom you’re expected to either praise or criticize.

There’s no denying that the role Jobs has come to play in the field of innovation-at-large is usually associated with the term “genius”--and I largely agree with this value statement. But I’m interested in how Jobs’s example has shaped our perceptions of where innovation comes from. Are innovation and creativity the material of über-talented individuals working in splendid isolation, or are they the result of a team effort, even when well-orchestrated by a conductor?

We’re starting to see a backlash against the idea that today’s innovative businesses need to be structured around a shared vision, cross-disciplinary group collaboration, and a deep understanding of the intended end-users of their products or services

You can see this "pendulum swing" in recent articles, including "Groupthink" by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorkerand “The Rise of the New Groupthink” by Susan Cain inThe New York Times. Lehrer takes the position that brainstorming is useless, while Cain posits that the current obsession with collaboration and “groupthink” needs to be rebalanced in light of evidence highlighting the key role that lone and often introverted thinkers and inventors have played in major recent and not-so-recent breakthrough innovations.

So what gives?

Is innovation the result of the prophetic reflections of lone creative geniuses, or instead the fruit of the collaboration of a group of talented contributors working together? Does innovation come pushing out ideas that start as flashes of individual insight, or from taking the time to learn what users want?

I don’t think there is an archetype for the people or processes that foster innovative thinking, or even what type of physical working environment can best support a creative culture. That view of the world is too polarized. In my experience, there is no single specific behavioral trait, methodological approach, or carefully selected set of contextual factors that guarantees success in the ability to think differently and translate that thinking into success in the market.

That said, there is indeed a common trait in the typical way creative thinkers approach challenges: They can comfortably hold opposing thoughts in their heads and get to work. At times, this trait can be misconstrued as “the magic of creativity” and especially in the design field I frown when I hear that label because it reveals a preconception that designers are industrial artists that purely rely on their intuition to give shape to their solutions. Not so.

Successful creative thinkers see opposites and apparently contradicting goals not just as a potential for dissonance, but as an opportunity for dynamic harmony. To paraphrase one of Walt Whitman’s most famous verses “creative thinkers are vast, they contain multitudes.” And to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the mark of a truly intelligent person is the ability to still function while holding two, opposing ideas in their head. Creativity is inherently inclusive. And that applies whether the creative thinker, in their heart, is a designer, artist, technologist, or CEO.

Okay, so what now? The truth does not lie in the extremes, and definitely also not in the middle. The truth lies in harnessing the positive tension between the extremes, and fine-tuning it until it resonates with what current technologies can enable and with what intended consumers and end-users are ready to adopt in a given sociocultural economic context.

Bringing an innovative product or service to market involves a multitude of vectors. Imagine them individually stretched amidst the opposing constraints that often define their conceptual and practical boundaries (time to market, development cycles, user experience, technical feasibility, branding, business models, just to name a few). Now imagine all these vectors as taut guitar strings, one alongside the other. Imagine fine-tuning each string so that it’s in harmony with all the other ones when they are strummed together. Imagine this being not a one-off task, but a near-continuous activity that a talented musician needs to constantly perform as he or she is playing, not before.

It’s simply wrong to see brainstorming in opposition to solitary thinking, or user research as antithetical to disruptive innovation. These apparently opposing approaches are actually complementary, and effective innovators already use them as such, picking the right mind-frame and the accompanying tools and methodologies according to the specificities of the challenge at hand.

This holistic way of thinking and working is the trademark of places like the one I happen to be lucky enough to work in.

These are places where the physical working context combines an open-plan with project rooms of various sizes to support small group collaboration or individual focus, with plenty of highly transparent, portable cubicles (which is what most people call “headphones"). They are environments where people can also work from home or wherever they prefer when they’d rather work alone. These places foster the idea that an office isn’t just walls, but can be wherever people live, work, and use the products and services we give shape to.

At someplace such as Frog, a highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and multicultural environment is simply a requirement, because of the complexity of the problems we face. In that context, every team member needs a strong individual point of view fueled and sustained by personal passions and deep vertical knowledge. The point is to create associations between the complex world that we’re trying to address, and those slower periods of processing, reflection, and interpretation. So by combining moments of intense, personal immersion with high-intensity collaborative workshops and workgroup, we can generate insights rather than prescribing mechanistic solutions. In that context, we can welcome end-users into the creative process while still expecting team leaders to be advocates of a holistic vision.

The idea that visionary geniuses are best-poised for radical innovation is simply misleading. Maybe Jobs or Steve Wozniak were visionary geniuses working in uninterrupted solitary isolation … when they weren’t busy working crazy-long hours with the rest of their über-talented crews in the cultural cradle of high-tech innovation.

The answer lies in harnessing positive tension. It’s an art that only a group of talented individuals have proven to be capable of mastering.

People are greedy little animals. With thousands of years of evolutionary memory of times of near-starvation, our brains are instinctively programmed to cram as many calories down our gullets as possible when given the chance, because winter is coming. But we’re no longer in the paleolithic age, having to ration our mammoth jerky until the next big hunt. We have food whenever we want it.

Sadly, our brains don’t know that. One study--which sat people in front a bowl of tomato soup that could never become empty--found that people didn’t notice that they weren’t making a dent in their dinner and that they ate 15 ounces of soup (as opposed to nine for people with bowls that emptied at a normal rate). And even more sadly, restaurants and packaged food companies are eager to fulfill that ancient desire to gorge, giving us as much food as we possibly can eat. A new infographic from Massive Health shows exactly how much more we’re being tricked into eating.

It’s a (deep fried) chicken and (buttery) egg situation, but as obesity rates have soared in this country, so too have portion sizes. Are our bigger portions making us fat or do our fat bodies crave more food? Either way, a good way to stop being overweight is to eat smaller portions. Just take a look at the difference between the average sizes of various foodstuffs between 1977 and now.

Everything is much much larger. And then you still eat it all. Say you have a 500 gram pizza. Studies show you’ll eat about 335 grams before being full. Mmm, 335 delicious grams of pizza. The perfect amount.

But say that same pizza is twice as big. You’re not just going to still eat 335 grams of it, even though that would completely satisfy you. No, you will eat 434 grams. You just can’t help yourself. There is a lot of pizza and you have to eat as much as possible

Since it’s not your fault (mostly), one trick is to be careful about the size of the food you put on your plate, and knowing how much you should eat. A better sense of portion control might be why Europeans can eat the buttery, oily food they eat and not get so fat (though this, too, is changing). One serving of meat should be the size of a deck of playing cards, and one serving of cheese should be the size of a nine-volt battery.

If you were ever served portions that small at a restaurant, you might ask for your money back. Those just aren’t the portions to which we’re accustomed. But it might be a good idea to start getting accustomed to it quickly. You can see the whole infographic below (click to zoom) or online here:

In this interview, Mark talks about why so many new hires fail so quickly, why soft skills are so important now, how the hiring landscape is changing, and more.

Why do so many fail within the first 18 months of taking a job?

When our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament.

Are technical and soft skills less important than attitude? Why?

It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re much easier to assess (that’s why attitude, not skills, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure). Virtually every job (from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that can assess technical proficiency. But what those tests don’t assess is attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.

Soft skills are the capabilities that attitude can enhance or undermine. For example, a newly hired executive may have the intelligence, business experience and financial acumen to fit well in a new role. But if that same executive has an authoritarian, hard-driving style, and they’re being hired into a social culture where happiness and camaraderie are paramount, that combination is unlikely to work. Additionally, many training programs have demonstrated success with increasing and improving skills—especially on the technical side. But these same programs are notoriously weak when it comes to creating attitudinal change. As Herb Kelleher, former Southwest Airlines CEO used to say, “we can change skill levels through training, but we can’t change attitude.”

How will the hiring landscape be different in 2012 and beyond?

Between the labor pool from China and India and the fact that there are so many workers sitting out there unemployed, we can find the skills we need. The lack of sharp wage increases in most job categories is further evidence of the abundant supply of skills. Technical proficiency, once a guarantee of lifetime employment, is a commodity in today’s job market. Attitude is what today’s companies are hiring for. And not just any attitude; companies want attitudes that perfectly match their unique culture. Google and Apple are both great companies, but their cultures are as different as night and day.

As the focus on hiring has shifted away from technical proficiency and onto attitude, it’s precipitated a lot of tactical changes in how job interviews are conducted. For example, the new kinds of interview questions being asked are providing real information about attitude instead of the vague or canned answers hiring managers used to get. Smarter companies are less likely to rely on the old standby questions like “tell me about yourself” and “what are your weaknesses?” Companies now have answer keys by which to accurately rate candidate’s answers. Interviewers can listen to candidates’ verb tense and other grammar choices and make accurate determinations about someone’s future performance potential.

Where are companies finding candidates with the right attitudes? The majority is using social networks but is that even working?

Companies are not getting high performers from the usual sources. They’re hiring in, what we call, the “Underground Job Market”. According to our latest research (outlined in Hiring for Attitude), companies are finding their best people through employee referrals and networking. They have started to realize that the high performers they already have fit the attitude they want and that these are the people they should be asking to help find more people just like them.

Given that data, it seems like candidates should be networking in every way possible—including social networking. But one thing that people misconstrue is what networking is actually about. Too many people are not networking; but rather are ‘need-working,’ as in: “I need work, or a lead, or an introduction from you”. Usually people on the receiving end of this dodge those inquiries. Job seekers need to ask themselves ‘how can I add value to this person’ and then go from there.

Attitudes change as workforce dynamics change. What happens in this case?

The attitudes for which organizations should hire are not abstract or based on a theoretical ideal, but rather are just the characteristics that separate high and low performers.

Southwest, Google, Apple, and The Four Seasons are all great companies and they all hire for attitude. Their high-performing employees live their attitudes every day and it’s a big part of what makes these organizations so successful. Low performers struggle with those attitudes are typically rejected by the culture. But those companies’ attitudes are very different from each other. They couldn’t successfully emulate each other’s attitudes. Every company has to discover the attitudes that make their organization unique and special. And even if the company’s attitudes change over the years, those attitudes will always be an organic reflection of their most successful people.

A pickle-flavored lip balm promotion is so spot-on that the end buyer adds the product to its line.

In a world of one-off product campaigns and here-today-gone-tomorrow promotions, it’s a nice surprise when a product promotion becomes a regular order on which you can rely.

Last summer, Van Holten’s, a Waterloo, Wisconsin-based pickle manufacturer whose pickles in a pouch are sold around the nation, was approached about developing a dill pickle-flavored lip balm. The company jumped at the offer and began handing out Big Papa Dill Pickle Lip Balms at tradeshows to help make people aware of the company and its products.

The product was such a hit with Van Holten’s customers that it decided to add the lip balm to its product line and sell it in stores. “It kind of evokes the same feeling as our pickles-in-a-pouch,” says Steve Byrnes, president of Van Holten’s. “It’s fun, it’s quirky and we got the same reaction from the lip balm, so we thought it was the perfect extension.”

Does dill-pickle flavored lip balm sound strange to you? “That’s the appeal,” Byrnes says. “It gets a reaction. It’s a novelty. It’s fun, and people who really like pickles are using it. And it’s a really good lip balm.”

An Australian researcher has posited a theory that suggests the success or failure of viral web videos can be determined by an algorithm that has roots in Darwin’s theory of evolution, i.e., survival of the fittest.

The algorithm is designed specifically for commercially produced viral movies that are linked to brands, says Dr. Brent Coker of his branded viral movie predictor, or BVMP, in a news release.

Coker, an internet psychologist for the University of Melbourne, claims there are four elements viral videos need to possess in order to have a chance of success. They are: congruency, emotive strength, network-involvement ratio and paired meme synergy.

Congruency is simply keeping everything aligned with a brand’s existing identity and values.

Emotive strength relates to the idea that humans process copious amounts of information in a day and that good videos evoke stronger responses than this other information. Stronger responses are brought out through emotion.

Network-involvement concerns whether or not the majority of people in a targeted group find the video relevant. A video that can only be found on YouTube, for example, can have millions of views or none, depending on whether viewers are motivated to find it.

None of these elements work, however, unless accompanied by paired meme synergy, in which certain meme combinations that have proven successful are used. Memes include nostalgia, surprise, anticipation, voyeurism and others.

Unfortunately, Coker is saving the explanation for the 14 total memes and their optimal combinations for his new book, set to come out later this year. Still, this provides a primer for designing viral campaigns until the book debuts. Or, draw inspiration now from these highly viewed YouTube videos from PPAI members.

Upload Date March 30, 2011 Views 3,107
Los Angeles-based supplier Magic Cubes (UPIC: magicube) lets distributor Bob Levitt, vice president of Tangerine Promotions, do the talking in this product testimonial.
Watch it.

Upload Date April 7, 2011 Views 30,483
Business service provider Cintas Corporation (UPIC: CINTP001), based in Mason, Ohio, explains what it does through melodically blending the sounds its employees make on the job.
Watch it.

Upload Date June 9, 2011 Views 712
Dallas, Texas-based The Odee Co. (UPIC: ODEE0001) uses stop-motion animation and energetic music to show how fun it is to wear the company’s latest t-shirt design.
Watch it.

Upload Date September 6, 2011 Views 1,009
Lafayette, Colorado-based business services provider ZOOMCatalog (UPIC: Zoom-cat) teams up with marketing guru and PPAI Expo 2012 speaker Jason Sadler of IWearYourShirt.com to explain why choosing the right promotional product is so important.