The World According to Paris: Major Fail
Celebrity Websites
Paris Hilton may be rich, famous and a reality television superstar, but her web presences is down-right terrible.
Apparently, her newest stab at reality television, The World According to Paris kicked off last night on the Oxygen Network.
Here’s where things get interesting for us.
The Oxygen Network is no Fox (the home of her most popular reality series).
Fox Networks is its own public relations machine. With Clear Channel Communications dominating the radio waves, Fox Television commanding millions of viewers and News Corp owning a sizable chunk of the US newspaper market, all the brass has to do is turn on the firehose, and there’s instant and massive exposure.
Not so much with The Oxygen Network.
Oxygen Media is a privately held company and was founded in 1998 by former Nickelodeon executive Geraldine Laybourne, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and producers Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner and Caryn Mandabach (of Carsey-Werner fame). The company’s cable network Oxygen launched on February 2, 2000.
So, how did we even hear about this new reality series?
We just happened to be doing some Search Engine Optimization research and noticed that “The World According to Paris” was a trending search on Google.
Before that, we had heard literally nothing.
Without the massive backing of Fox and News Corp., even big named-celebrities like Paris Hilton need to have a credible web presence.
With the amount of time we spend online, there is no reason we should just be hearing about the premier of this show the day after it aired, so we decided to look into what, exactly, Paris’ people have been doing.
And it was pretty sad…
From the website to the Marketing channels, the entire Marketing strategy was fairly non-existent aside from a day-of blitz of tweets and other Social Media updates.
The good news is that we can learn a lot about what not to do for a Marketing campaign.
To do that, we put together these videos and we walk through each of Paris’ spots and offer a critique that hopefully will be helpful for future celebrity Internet Marketing endeavors.
The World According to Paris: Video Review Part 1
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaMpIaHTXRY
The World According to Paris: Video Review Part 2
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rfY-kirjDE
To summarize the videos:
- Start Marketing early
- Brand your website
- Have a strong call to action
- Offer exclusive content on each of your networks
What do you think of The World According to Paris web presence? Did you hear about it? Did you like the show? Are we right/wrong/something else in our assessment?
About Cody Swann
Cody Swann is an entrepreneur, developer, strategist, banged up ex-football walk-on, retired body builder and former journalist born and raised in South Florida. He currently splits his time between his hometown of Stuart, FL and Los Angeles, CA. Cody founded Gunner Technology, a highly sought after digital agency, specializing in helping companies maximize profits through custom web development, technology efficiencies, social media strategy and search engine marketing.
As a manager and developer at ESPN for nearly six years, Cody led development and vision for two of ESPN’s most popular online features: Sports Scoreboards and GameCasts. Additionally Cody oversaw all aspects of MyESPN and ESPN’s social network, ESPN Fan Profiles. Cody worked with Technology, Editorial, Sales, Marketing and relevant business stakeholders to mold ESPN’s social media strategy, develop custom applications for it and execute it. Under his direction, ESPN successfully ported large portions of its core product from a proprietary Java stack to an open source Ruby on Rails stack, capable of standing up and performing under the tremendous load world's most popular sports site delivers.
Cody began forging his technological knowledge more than 10 years ago, developing and designing websites in college. His development work has included web development, web design, content writing, digital photography and digital video production for award-winning sites like Gainesville.com, GatorSports.com and ESPN.com. He has helped set digital strategy and direction for companies in the New York Times Regional Newspaper group, ESPN, ABC and Disney.
He is a recognized expert in web development, social media strategy, search engine optimization, conversion optimization, analytics tracking and business planning. He has worked with large interactive media companies to small and medium sized businesses. Cody motivates and inspires creative teams to deliver superb, polished work under tight deadlines.