viral marketing – OLIVIA COLLETTE

My buddy (and contemporary) quoted me in his blog. He referred to something I said here only a few days ago. You rock, Deniger!

Naturally, I’m flattered. But more importantly, I’m glad we’ve started a dialogue about memes and viral marketing. There isn’t a magic, colour-by-numbers formula to these things, and it’s time people noticed.

Exhibit A: A couple of years ago, a client of mine developed a Digg-like website. The format was nearly identical, only their model was available in, like, 10 different languages. A more-of-same kind of web initiative that we saw so often in the late ’90s. They no longer exist now, of course.

Exhibit B: Recently, a friend of mine told me he’d been approached by an ad agency for a campaign that would turn bloggers into brand ambassadors. I don’t know anything about the context, so I can’t say what this campaign is really about or how strong the concept is. But I am fascinated at the ballsy move to exploit a highly democratized environment. So far, this hasn’t worked very well. On the web, more than any other medium, people know when they’re being advertised to, and when they find it off-putting, the ad gets panned publicly, and immediately. On Digg, if a user is suspected of prioritizing a corporation’s interests, they quickly get “buried,” seriously decreasing the value (and validity) of their contributions.

So really, it’s not enough to submit an article to Digg. You also have to be part of a community and contribute to it in a significant way…and even then…

It’s not enough to put your ad on YouTube. People have to find it interesting, relevant, funny, or all three…and even then…

It’s not enough to have a viral medium at your disposal. It has to be useful to the right audience, who can engage with it in a flexible manner…and even then…

It’s surprising that we’re still getting the “let’s go viral” requests when it’s clearly so difficult to control and predict a campaign’s viral trajectory. If it weren’t, everyone would have done it successfully by now. And unfortunately, focusing on a campaign’s viral value takes focus away from creating a sucessful campaign.

Quoth my buddy:

“First and foremost, anything we do needs to serve the client and their goals first, and resonate enough with the target market that they follow through on the calls to action given to them. Anything beyond that, as far as mass-appeal popularity goes, is a lucky cherry on top.”

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Complimentary P.S. Here’s an ad I first spotted on College Humor. Millions saw it. Why did an ad about toilet technology do so well? You tell me. Does the same approach work just as well for a loofah sponge or Hamburger Helper? Probably not.

When I worked in advertising, some of us were hardly left indifferent by this ad:

Then came the buzzword “viral.” And a new game began, and the leaders were Têtes à Claques, Digg, YouTube and company.

Then came the client requests. “We want a viral campaign,” or its fraternal twin, “Let’s go viral with this!”

In the advertising world, we struggled to comply, because while the kind folk at Ogilvy, who created the hugely successful Dove Evolution campaign, hoped that their ad would impact millions, the viral part of the equation was mostly an accident. The campaign was good, and that’s why people paid any attention to it. But there’s plenty of good stuff out there (I know; I send it all the time), and people don’t always respond to it. So really, it was a crapshoot, and it always is.

At the end of the day, it’s the people – we mere mortals – who decide what’s popular. And how that’s decided is based on an infinite number of variables that make it virtually impossible to predict how a campaign will fare. The other night, my sort of boss and I were at a fundraiser, and we talked about Twitter, Stumbleupon, Facebook and friends. All of them tools that can be used to spread the “virus” about a company or campaign. All of them left up to the user to exploit. My sort of boss said he liked how the Twitter people were honest about the fact that they don’t have a business model. I made the point that it’s probably smarter for them to think of a business model after someone uses Twitter in a clever way that nobody’s thought of, and subsequently makes tons of money from it. The viral potential of any site or its components hugely depends on what applications are available on a site, and how these allow people to express themselves (or simply take in information they’re interested in).

The fact is, even developers don’t fully realize the potential of their medium until a creative user does something that even the developers hadn’t factored into the experience. Take Myspace, the evolved Friendster and Facebook prototype. At this juncture, it’s become a hub for artists to gain support and market themselves, especially musicians. Yet when the music player was made available, the point was to share music you, the user, liked. By accident, musicians began to use the hub to promote themselves. Not a bad idea, once users thought of it. Then, it was only a matter of time (and not too much of it) before the Myspace guys were able to build a business model from it…and for ad agencies who create spots for iPod to select the next track for the next commercial.

Let’s use “25 Things” as another example, the chain letter that’s been widely circulated in the Facebook realm. What made this different from other similar chain letters where you answer questions that allow us to know more about you? In this particular format, users got to reveal the facts they wanted to reveal, and at the length of their choosing. No questions. Just answers. The fact that users had complete control over it made it hugely popular.

What can we glean from all this? Viral is unpredictable. But people are creatures of habit, and a conceited bunch at that. Give them the opportunity to talk in more detail about themselves, and with the least amount of effort, and you’ve got a winning formula.

Maybe.

Tag: viral marketing

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