In my role as a social media strategist I'm often asked to review Intel marketing campaigns that contain social elements. And I must say that there are many great examples out there. Two of my favorites are the 2006 What Would You Do for a Duo contest and Mass Animation. Both of these programs include the critical elements needed to make something social/viral: they give our human customers the opportunity to share their personal and creative passions with the world.

Yet there are also many campaigns from Intel and other corporations that claim to be "viral" or social yet don't necessarily make use of the best practices known to many in the world of social media that would contribute to greater success. Why is that? Well the problem begins with the very categorization of the program as "viral." Let me be very clear on this: YOU CAN ONLY CREATE A MARKETING PROGRAM…YOUR CUSTOMERS MAKE IT VIRAL OR NOT. As much as we'd like to believe, we cannot make a marketing campaign viral simply because we don't have budget to promote it. A program is only viral if customers find it interesting enough to share with their family, friends, and community. Therefore it is our job as savvy marketers to make interesting programs and make it as simple as possible for folks to share it with others.

Another problem with many of our viral or social media marketing programs is that our goal is often to make money or influence customer purchase decisions. In a terrific meeting yesterday with social media metrics guru Katie Paine, she reminded me of the primary metric that should be used to measure the success of a social media program: lower costs for your advertising budget. Since you cannot actually track sales generated from these campaigns, she suggests that you measure something you can track and have legitimate control over: cost.

I've listed out some other myths that can be debunked about social media/viral marketing below. Please be assured I'm not listing these here to disuade many of you marketers from using social media in your campaigns. On the contrary, I want as many as possible using the myriad tools that exist in this segment to help customers become brand and product advocates for the companies they represent. I simply want everyone to be as successful as possible in all their marketing programs. (Selfishly I also want to minimize my forced exposure to bad marketing, but I digress). We should all be focused on doing better marketing, not more of it.

Other Social Media/Viral Marketing Myths:

• Success = more clicks


• Contests are a good way to incent people to share things


• You need a microsite to do good viral/social marketing


• You should stick to an ongoing blog content schedule, even if you have nothing new or interesting to say

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