Next weekend millions of people will be staying in. The streets will be empty, the movie theaters bare, the park vacant. Because in a couple of days the world gets it’s first glimpse of the new Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows. Well…not it’s first glimpse.

Piracy with todays technology is unstoppable. Add to that the insane like levels people will go to learn about what Harry Potter is up to in his last adventure, and it was a sure bet that this book was going to end up online before it hit stores. But what does this mean for the book? Will it hurt sales or help?

In the case of Harry Potter, it’s difficult to say how much impact it will have. One hand millions of people are pre-registered to get the book (including my son), and millions more will buy it the day it comes out. And right now the hype is pretty high for the book. But on the other hand if someone leaks the gory details of Harry’s final demise, or any other significant spoiler, it could take the wind out of the sails of people considering buying the book. Either way, in this case the sales are guaranteed to be amazing.

Obviously any product getting a lot of hype these days will be a big part of the Internet. Looking back to less than a month ago to the iPhone, you couldn’t go to just about any website without hearing about the new technology. It was to the point of backlash, even on Apple enthusiasts websites. There is no doubt that the continued hype online helped generate their amazing sales opening weekend.

Looking further back to early Web hype, The Blair Witch Project was a huge success, and owed a large amount of it to chat rooms (this was when there were things like Geocities pages instead of blogs).

This obviously makes marketers wonder, is there a way to tap that type of hype? The truth is companies do it all the time. Every Tuesday Apple gives away free music on iTunes. It would be an interesting test to see what the level of blog activity looks like before an unknown artist goes on iTunes and after. When Apple made their switch to Intel they released a commercial that was incredibly similar to a music video from The Postal Service. All legal action was dropped, and shortly after The Postal Service was a featured video artist on iTunes.

Hype is like fire. It needs a spark and then lots of oxygen to burn. In the Web 2.0 space, TechCrunch acts as an incredible spark, which spreads the flames out to plenty of other blogs. In the music space, iTunes can be a huge catalyst for artist fame. Obviously if I was a small movie distributor, I would sell my soul to my movie on the Apple.com trailer section.

A little over a year ago I started to play with YouTube. I wanted to see how difficult it would be to make a popular channel. So I did some research and found that most of the popular people were just real people maintain a video blog. I opened up a channel based on a site I owned, Riffage.com and hired 5 of the most popular video bloggers on YouTube to contribute videos to the channel. They were paid $100 to make a video for the site that could be anything they wanted as long as it was music related. After three weeks of steady videos, Riffage.com was the 5th most subscribed channel that week.

The above example shows that the catalyst to hype and popularity can be purchased, you just have to put some thought into it.

[tags]harry potter, deathly hallows, iphone, riffage, youtube, techcrunch[/tags]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 1:11 amand is filed under Business, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.