This is an old article I wrote. But it’s good for now!
One of the questions people ask me most in this business (just after “Do you really have to charge me for that?” and “Can I see something tomorrow?) is “Can you make a viral component for this?” I always cringe when I hear it. Even now, after all this time, the phrase “viral marketing” seems really cheesy. Hasn’t marketing always been based on word of mouth? Do we have to give it a disease-riddled name just because the medium has changed? My protestations aside, the term has stuck, and for better or worse, we at the Barbarian Group have done a fair amount of it. My coworkers and I always have a pretty good idea, before we even finish, whether it would fly or not. We’ve noticed a few consistent factors, and I’ve boiled them down to 5 handy rules on viral marketing:
Viral Marketing is neither e-cards, nor is it an add-on. All too often potential clients want to cover all the bases with one interactive initiative. They want to build what they think is an robust site, and then simply tack on some e-cards to it, to give it a viral component. Always remember: there has to be a compelling reason for the user to send around a link or a site: The ability for a user to spread the word does not equate with a reason for him/her to bother.
Accept that you may not be able to control your brand completely with good viral marketing. “Branding” has been so dominant in advertising theory for so long now, we often forget that it’s just one theory. A good one, to be sure, but it has its limits. Viral Marketing cannot necessarily be branded. I’ve found it’s best to be 100% up-front about this with your client, from the beginning. The last thing you want to have happen is to develop an amazingly funny, viral video and have the client insist that their logo and tagline end it. Your target market is amazingly media savvy – that’s why you’re trying to get to them with viral marketing and not a print ad, right? – and they will resenting any overt manipulation. In general, viral marketing works because it conveys the sense that a company is about more than money and branding, that it has the same sense of fun and the same worldview as its customers. This worldview is not a corporate, branded one.
Viral Marketing is especially susceptible to too many cooks in the kitchen. In retrospect, this is the single biggest stumbling block for good viral marketing. A great idea is born, and between the great idea and the public finally experiencing it, there are any number of intermediate stages of approval – an agency creative, his/her superior, the client, the client’s boss, the president of the client company and, if you’re uniquely unlucky, there’s a parent company with a whole new batch of stakeholders. When people ask us “why did such-and-such campaign get so successful?”, 9 times out of 10, it’s because no one was paying attention to us. Brand managers were on vacation, or they didn’t care about interactive. When that’s not an option, remember that the ability to massage your work unfettered through these approvals, along with the ability to secretly skip over them, is as important as a good idea when it comes to viral marketing.
Trust your instincts, but do a little market testing. If you don’t think it’s funny, no one else will either. Listen to yourself as you work on the campaign. You’ll know, deep down, if it’s going to work or not. If you have doubts, don’t ignore them. And don’t send something out in the world if you don’t genuinely think it will be effective. That being said, the echo chamber is a real risk. Find some people in the demographic, and pitch the idea to them. If the bulk of them don’t laugh right away, it might be time to head back to the drawing board.
Sometimes, even the best creative needs a little push. It’s easy to get dogmatic about viral marketing and say “if it’s good, it’ll take right off.” But the internet is a big place, and unless you really know how to work it and drive traffic immediately, it can be hard to get people to notice your endeavors. We’ve had campaigns sit on the web for months before they took off, and by then it can be too late. Consider a small banner campaign to kick things off, or, better yet, think about hiring a firm to “seed” the campaign (I know, viral seeding. Ick). A relatively small investment here can mean the difference between a lost investment or a fantastic ROI.
Another insight, from a letter to AdAge I wrote last year:
Mass marketing works consistently, viral marketing fails or works spectacularly. The allure of viral marketing is not that it works better, it’s that it might work much better, for a lot less. The downside, of course, is that viral marketing might not work at all: we, as marketers, don’t “make virals,” we make things that sometimes “go viral.”
It’s probably time that brands start thinking of viral marketing as one component of your marketing: one that might provide massive additional benefits for a small amount of money, but then again, might not. Win some, lose some. But over time, with a consistent, methodical approach to it, the extra cost will pay for itself over a broad spectrum of endeavors. Even the most cautious investor still likes to play a hot stock tip, just not with their 401k.
There’s a handful of standard goals to set when building an effective social media campaign: lower the barrier to participation; create compelling content that drives engagement; use rewards and other incentives to encourage sharing. A campaign produced by Perrier has done these 3 things and more in an unbelievably effective social campaign that has entirely reinvented viral video. They made some brilliant decisions and packaged it all into a wildly creative concept.
The Concept – Perrier produced a series of the same video that each get increasingly hot; the more the video gets viewed and shared, hotter versions of the movie clip get shown. The content of the movie gets hotter in terms of sexual appeal, but the real win is that it also gets hotter in terms of temperature, leading the characters to drink more Perrier. Let’s look closer at the campaign to see what great choices were made…
Now that creating a video is as simple as using your cell phone camera, teenagers love posting videos to YouTube documenting the pranks they’ve pulled at the drive-thru window. But recently this juvenile brand-badgering has evolved into an international YouTube trend and a crowd sourced, brand-friendly advertising campaign for McDonalds. All without McDonalds spending a single dollar…
You may have heard about the New York Times Lab’s latest creation, Cascade. More than just a drool-worthy data visualization, Cascade tells the story of how a news story is shared on Twitter. What this means for the world of digital marketing and social media strategy is profound. Rather than simply seeing metrics like how many Tweets share a common hashtag, or how many people clicked the Facebook Like button for your brand, imagine being able to track individual decisions by individual users…
Despite being a site about apathy, we’ve all had a few good laughs about groupmeh.com. Upon launching last week, the site initially received a torrent of traffic as it circulated through blogs and Twitter, but now the rate of site visits has slowed down to a trickle. Here are some final stats on the site’s traffic over the last ten days:
Watching all the overachievers I went to college with on Facebook is killing me
i ate a stick of butter in a hot dog bun yesterday to drown out my feelings of desperation
First I stopped smoking. Then I stopped drinking. Soon after that I stopped thinking, and finally I stopped dreaming. I just sit here all day on the internet, waiting for God to slap me in the face.
I need another online quasi-social interaction site that I can ignore for months on end.
My girlfriend just dumped me. She’s my boss too, so I’m probably going to get fired.
Beyond a quick laugh, groupmeh offered some great lessons on viral marketing, community management, and engagement of disaffected users. It was a lot of fun to make the site and was thrilling to watch its popularity spread. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
Is there really a new social network for the tragically apathetic? You might think so if you’ve caught wind of groupmeh.com. Groupmeh started off as a one-liner joke in an internal email thread here at The Barbarian Group on monday morning. I found the joke hysterically funny, and rather than responding with a simple “LOL” reply, instead I bought the domain name and threw up a quick splash page. A few lines of html later, and groupmeh.com was born.
We barbarians really know how to take an idea and get it to catch fire. So a handful of us starting promoting the site on Twitter, BuzzFeed, Hacker News, and other sites. Before long, the link got picked up by Laughing Squid and The Daily What, catapulting the page views into the thousands.
Once I realized there were so many hits, I added the ability for users to sign up for the site’s beta by submitting their email and reason for joining. The responses became really amusing as well, so a second page was created to publish each response.
The site is continuing to spread like wildfire over the web. Who knows, maybe by next week we’ll have an angel investor and a working product.
Playing with social media is fun, but reading about social media can be a bore! How do you remedy? More Facebook, less…real book. Or just less tech blogs. Don’t worry. My name’s Lindsey and I’m new here. I’m ready to take all that social media anxiety and pair it down into a few quick weekly links (which, warning, may or may not also include my own thoughts) that you can choose to read or not-read because I will also provide tl;dr (that’s: too long; didn’t read) summaries.
on October 14, 2010 at 11:22 AM
filed under: Viral Marketing
Don’t get me wrong, we love people in animal costumes. It’s what arguably put us on the map (remember the chicken?).
But, difficult as it may be, there actually is a way to f’up that tried and true viral strategy. Check it out…
Phillips just ran a viral campaign in Singapore. Plenty of views, even a couple of mentions in the press, and a lot of action afterwards…unfortunately it may not have been the action they were looking for.
Some f’ing agency shot a video of a guy in a bear suit rummaging through trash cans. People saw it and freaked out, calling the police and the story spirals pretty much downwards after that…with keywords like ‘public apology’, ‘police investigation’, criminal charges’, ‘Phillips fined’ showing up in a lot of online chatter (I assume words like ‘agency fired’, ‘marketing manager let go’ will quickly follow suit).
Not quite the buzz Phillips was looking for I guess.
Watched The Happening today for 20 minutes. My wife Caroline had not seen it and I had told her how absolutely terrible (and irresponsible, because of the suicides) it is and she was mildly curious. So, we caught it midway on Showtime. It started with the so-bad-it’s-funny scene where Mark Wahlberg talks to the plastic plant. Here’s a clip of it. Oops, Twentieth Century Fox pulled all uses of this clip for copyright reasons. Why? What’s wrong with these people? When will Hollywood learn that YouTube and all of its friends (like, in this case, reddit) are EXCELLENT promotional mediums for copyrighted content? No one is going to watch an entire movie for free on YouTube but people will certainly watch a bunch of scenes from a movie for free on YouTube/friends and then, more interested than before, would be more likely to watch the ENTIRE MOVIE in the theater, or on DVD, or on Showtime. Right?
When I make my movie (I am writing an excellent horror movie with Caroline) I will release almost every scene on the Internet ahead of time and then people will want to see it all put together on a glorious big screen. Done.
