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7 tricks to viral marketing

Posted by simon ashwin On Sunday 18 May 08

Viral marketing (word-of-mouth marketing) is a really cool thing. Just think about it… instead of spending an insane amount of money on newspapers ads, TV commercials or banner ads, you spent nothing - and let your fans do all the work for you.

With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own - and start to spread like a virus. Everyone want to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.

It is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.

But how?

There are a lot of tricks to viral marketing. Here are 7 important ones:

1. Make people feel something

The most important trick of all is to create a very strong emotion. You need to have an opinion, to express an idea with commitment and dedication. You want people to:

be filled with love or hate.
be very happy or insanely angry
be an idiot or a genius
be deeply compassionate or an egoistic bitch

You want people’s blood to be pumping of excitement.

Forget neutral, trying to please everyone, supporting several target groups or any of the many ways to be unbiased. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions.

2. Do something unexpected

This one explains itself. If you want people to notice you campaign, you have to do something different - something unexpected. Forget about trying to promote your products as just being great - everybody does that. Forget...

not all viral markting is good marketing

Posted by simon ashwin On Thursday 03 May 07

Which then begs the obvious question, is all viral marketing good marketing?

• Not if the cost to produce, launch, measure and/or follow up on the campaign is more expensive than the return on the investment.
• Not unless the marketer is prepared to ‘trial’ several campaigns to see what works.
• Not if the marketer expects their first message and all subsequent messages to succeed virally every time.
• Not if the campaign is a thinly disguised ‘hard sell’, or contains too many messages that confuse the recipient.
• And not if the planned campaign does not fully encompass the essence of a good viral – originality, (perhaps a little shock!) and/or humour.

People have to really, really like it, and if they don’t, your campaign will result in poor returns and a potential slur on your brand.

So is viral marketing worth the effort?

Hotmail gained over 12 million subscribers in just 18 months by simply adding Get Your Private, Free Email from Hotmail at www.hotmail.com to the bottom of every message sent using their program. A simple message, which was easy to action, and best of all, it was free – the most successful viral in online history. Definitely worth the effort.

For The Blair Witch Project movie release, hype created by the intense viral marketing through chat rooms and blogs (fictional information about the film was ‘invented’ and posted by the movies’ directors themselves) and mysterious graffiti and billboard marketing, meant that almost everyone in Western culture had an opinion as...

targeted viral marketing

Posted by simon ashwin On Sunday 29 Apr 07

Not everyone will react positively to a clever or intuitive piece of marketing designed to be viral. Therefore targeting the message is key. Savvy marketers look to aim their viral campaigns at a small but powerful segment of the population known as SNP’s (high ‘Social Networking Potential’). SNP’s are typically cutting edge in their personal tastes, responsive to marketing that is targeted to their lifestyle and tastes and highly likely to send on messages that amuse, challenge or impress them.

Crucially, they spend a lot of time on the internet and have a wide and valuable network of friends, peers and acquaintances with whom they mingle online on a regular basis. They regularly use programs like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Connectu, Furl, Reddit, Digg, etc. Marketers who target them using email, the internet, mobiles and Web 2.0 applications make it easy for SNP’s to access and then pass on their message.

If the marketing team is unable to get their message directly in front of these SNP ‘movers and shakers’ in the wider community, they should not forget the customers and clients with whom they regularly interact. According to a recent Wharton study, people socially connected to a company’s customers are three to five times more likely to take that company up on an offer than someone targeted through traditional marketing methods.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his bestselling book The Tipping Point, suggests finding ‘that friend’ who can name an acquaintance for every letter of the alphabet. We all know somebody like this, social superstars,...

infections ideas for viral marketing

Posted by simon ashwin On Wednesday 18 Apr 07

As we embrace today’s new media channels and look for more innovative ways to market across them, many organisations are investing in the creation of ‘viral’ campaigns – simple ideas that they hope will promote a brand, a product, or an event in a way that captures people’s imagination and interest, and will impel them to ‘pass the information on’ to others.

For more than a decade now, companies have deployed spectacularly successful online viral and word of mouth campaigns, most notably the Window’s Live Hotmail launch in 1996, the Blair Witch Project launch in 1999, the Burger King ‘Subservient Chicken’ campaign in 2004, and locally, the Carlton Draught ‘Big Ad’.

Two weeks before its launch on Australian television in August 2005, the Carlton Draught ‘Big Ad’ advertisement was released on the internet on its own micro site. Within 24 hours, it had been streamed 162,000 times. By the time it went live on TV, it had been viewed more than one million times by people in 132 different countries. This was, in anyone’s language, an incredible response and huge exposure for Carlton Draught, especially as it was prior to the ‘official’ launch of the advert on traditional channels!

Fundamentals of a successful viral campaign

So, can anyone create a clever, humorous, topical, or insightful piece of marketing, and then launch it to rapturous applause and seemingly hysterical viral distribution at any time? The answer is ‘perhaps’, provided some fundamentals are adhered to.

The following are crucial points for marketers to remember when thinking about...

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