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03.30.10 How To Use Viral Marketing Successfully  By Brian Solis In September 2008 at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, I shared something that many, to this day, believe to the contrary, "There is no such thing as viral marketing." The declaration was empathetic in its direction to those marketers who have been on the receiving end of directives instructing them to create and unleash viral content. In parallel, the statement was aimed at those decision makers who assign such projects. Content, no matter how brilliant, creative, abstract, or controversial, is not inherently viral. Yet, we're asked repeatedly to create viral videos, posts, and other social objects that will trigger an endless array of retweets, pages and profiles that immediately attract fans and followers accompanied by a deafening wall of sound propelled by word of mouth. Content doesn't make something viral; people are the primary source of powering social objects across the attention nodes that connect the human network. Despite what appears commonsensical, we're surprised when our brainchild doesn't attract the views, attention, and circulation we believe it deserves. The reality of social media is this, in the attention economy, information isn't randomly discovered and broadly disseminated. It is strategically positioned to either appear when someone searches for a related keyword or it's presented to someone manually and deliberately. As individuals, we no longer find information, it finds us. The same is true about social objects. We must create packaged content with social hooks that comprise the story we wish to tell and the action we hope to spark – whether it's through video, text, images, badges, widgets, or apps. While there is no such thing as viral marketing in and of itself, marketing inspired to catalyze word of mouth (WOMM) is a bit more thoughtful and calculated in its approach and it usually seeks options in and around Social Media. Good Ideas are Worth Sharing Ideas represent change whose time has come... At the heart of any campaign is an idea. And even though good ideas are worth sharing, in order to have any hope of going "viral," social objects require sustenance and herding. Essentially, our job is to not only create the content, but also connect the dots for those individuals who can help us spread our story across first degree relationships defining social graphs (friends) and second-degree graphs linked by friends of friends and so on. Social scientist Dan Zarrella has analyzed over the years, why ideas spread. In his research, he discovered common characteristics of contagious content, those elements prevalent in many popular memes, whether organic or proactively marketed. Seeds The first group of individuals who are exposed to the idea/social object determine the extent and reach of the meme. These "seeds" are often mistaken for built-in audiences, for example, Twitter followers, Facebook Fans, blog subscribers, email lists, etc. The true opportunity for extending the lifespan and audiences for ideas is to carefully pick influential individuals who can spark activity and response. Early involvement, prior to anything being released, is key as is the definition of the role they will play in the roll out of the content. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Brian Solis is principal at FutureWorks PR, an award-winning PR and Social Media agency founded in 1999. FW PR bridges the communications gap between companies and their customers, and between products and their specific benefits for their target markets. Solis blogs at PR2.0, http://www.briansolis.com, and regularly contributes to many industry trades. He is also frequently quoted in articles relating to technology trends and Marketing/PR strategies. |
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