The story about the cat or a tale about how to make your owner famous and rich through social network

 

  I know Victoria Virta personally. Everyone in Russia, who is interested in promoting their company using SMM, is familiar with her name as a co-owner of the SMM studio Funaction.

  Victoria has been promoting a variety of companies on social networks for a long time, but  she became well-known thanks to her cat Nicky.

 

 

He was the very character that made her famous and wealthy. And now, with her work-shop "How to make SMM delicious and squeeze the juices from social networks", she holds work-shops allover Russia.

  When Victoria started to promote Nicky on Instagram, she noticed that, although, some subscribers have started to complain about the excess of cat photos on their timeline, in fact, all of her performances as a speaker, even during business meetings, always end up with a discussion of her cat Nicky.

        How it started.

  Victoria Virta bought Nicky at a pet store three years ago. She noticed him when he was sitting in his favorite human like position. The animal quickly settled into his new home, and besides the talent to sit like a human, and even to fall asleep in this position, he has mastered another exercise - get up on his hind paws. He has unique wealth of facial expressions. All emotions are reflected on his face, which is unusual for cats and is more common for dogs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fame.

“One day a completely crazy idea arose in my head - to create the most popular cat of the Runet (Russian Internet).  I took my cat Nicky as a prototype and made an Instagram account for him. It was just an experiment, however, competent work with the content did the job: in a week 300 people were following @FamousNiki. Suddenly we discovered that people like his pictures, they began to subscribe to Nicky's account," says Victoria.  "A year ago, British newspaper Daily Mail wrote about us , as well as Daily Mirror , Klonblog  and others. Since then, a barrage of publications began, a TV show and world fame," she added.

Creating a celebrity.

 Then we made sure we have constant support of cat's  account, he got his own secretary and different brands began to turn to him for advertising. Last year @FamousNiki advertised Microsoft products and Nespresso  on Instagram, this year he became the face of online accounting company.

 

Now @FamousNiki has 130,000 Instagram followers and 30,000 Facebook friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Cat has become a brand, and his accounts are now media assets of FunAction studio. Nicky gets payed for advertisements. Besides that Victoria makes T-shirts and sweatshirts with his image for sale.

  Viktoria's tips: Observe your pet, maybe it can do something interesting. If it can not do anything at all then we need to think what to do with it. For example, you can create comics with a cat being the main character. And, most importantly, content should invite positive emotions and make people laugh. Then you need to select a channel for the content: Instagram, Facebook, and so on.

  Each social network has its own technology of getting to the top, and  it is necessary for you to study it. For example, Nicky's goal on Instagram is to reach the audience of a million people. When you start getting a lot of followers and continue getting new ones, you can start earning money.

  In November, Victoria will launch new promo-page for Nicky and next year she plans to launch a mobile game and two books about her pet for kids and adults. "Now my goal is to make the brand of Russian cat famous all over the world ," says Viktoria.

  In her workshop Viktoria gives the example of Nikki's promotion and pays special attention   on getting to know the target audience for each specific social network.   Interesting, but I caught myself thinking how much Victoria's idea, that I heard at her last seminar, is similar to the ideas of the groundswell, into which I am gladly dipping today. As the authors of the Groundswell say,  there is no going back (75 Groundswell).   

You have to tap the groundswell and you will see that SMM works! But you need to deal with it properly.

 

PS: I have already written to Victoria and  recommended her to read Groundswell book.

Have you ever had an ideas of promoting your pets through Internet? And what do think about it?